Free Winter Damage by Natasha Carthew

its hunger across the moor.
    She got to her feet and held the gun so tight she thought her fingers might bust through it and she pulled back the hammer and stood, trigger ready.
    She could see the glowing orb of the cairn in the distance and the smoke still idling against the night breeze and she called out and kept calling as she turned and made her approach.
    There was a part of her that wanted to shout some kind of apology but she knew this was just a deep-down habit girls were accustomed to doing through bullying and embarrassment so she called out his name and nothing more.
    When she neared the cairn she shouted a reminder that she had the gun and it was loaded twice and she tapped the metal against the stone wall.
    ‘You in there, Rabbit boy? Better be sittin on your grubby little hands, I’d say.’ Her voice was small and it wavered slightly but she continued to talk and she asked him to push her rucksack through the opening if he knew what was good for him.
    She waited to see movement in the dying firelight and listened and waited some more.
    A thought passed over her that maybe he had scampered back to the cottage and she loosened a little and thought briefly of the meat and hoped she hadn’t kicked it over in the scuffle.
    She told whoever was or wasn’t sitting in the stone hut that she was coming in and she one-stepped into the opening. The boy was still there and she stood over him and her shadow crushed him to the ground.
    Blood from his head had squiggled into a thin string line down his face and had knotted around his neck and his teeth peeped loosely from his mouth.
    ‘Rabbit?’ Ennor poked him with her boot and when he didn’t turn she kicked him hard in the hope of some movement because him not moving was bad.
    ‘Rabbit, you dead?’ She put the gun to the ground and bent to listen for breathing.
    ‘I won’t touch you,’ she shouted. ‘I won’t get into trouble for your crazies.’
    She pulled the tarp from the ground and rolled it into her rucksack and put on her gloves so she could settle the wine bottle into his lap without leaving clues and cleared all trace of herself.
    Ennor Carne’s destiny had led all roads to this. A dead carrion boy left to rot on the snow-blown moor.
    The journey would now take her deep into the night to escape the scene and she walked with the meat in one hand and the torch cranked in the other and the gun hanging prepared and ready from its strap across her chest.
    Darkness stayed with her for what seemed like for ever and the cold tightened her bones with such breaking force she was glad to be walking because if she stopped she would die.
    She walked blind but for the small puddle of light that she stepped into and into and into. The moor beyond the puddle was an evil being standing and watching, its ancient eyes fixed on her, and the fear snapping, urging her to keep going round in circles, laughing her mad.
    Ennor wished she hadn’t left home in the first place and she didn’t care if God heard and she shouted at him that if he was listening to please return her from this hell-wheel she was treading.

CHAPTER FIVE
    In the desperate morning light Ennor stopped to smoke a cigarette and she watched a family of moorland ponies sketch silhouettes on to the horizon and move gracefully like oil riding water.
    She wondered if this was a sign of hope or impending doom and as they passed she saw their bellies bloated with hunger and the bone-impaled flesh of their hindquarters. She looked down at her cigarette and fingered the lean tobacco strands in her tin and she took her time with the one she smoked and made it last down to her fingertips.
    The ponies edged a little closer and she counted them and wondered if they remembered the recent past when folks leisured out on the moor and kids fed them ice cream and caressed them like pets.
    She put away her baccy tin and surveyed her surroundings and wondered if she should change her path any which way from the one she was