Blackfly Country

Chapter 1: The Floatplane

The Cessna 185 smelled like old fuel and fish guts.

Jamie Bricknell pressed his forehead against the window and watched the world below shrink into something unrecognizable. At first there had been highways, farm fields squared off in green and brown, the glint of small-town church steeples catching afternoon sun. Then the farms gave way to forest. Then the forest swallowed everything.

Now there was nothing below but trees. Millions of them. Spruce and jack pine and birch crowding together so tight the canopy looked like a rumpled green carpet thrown across the earth. Lakes appeared in the gaps—dark water, still as glass, shaped like spilled ink. No roads. No houses. No cell towers. Just wilderness rolling out to the horizon in every direction, endless and indifferent.

Jamie hated it already.

"You doing okay back there?" his uncle called over the engine noise.

Rick Dunaway sat in the pilot's seat with the easy confidence of a man who'd been flying bush planes since before Jamie was born. He was forty-six, broad-shouldered, with a ruddy face permanently creased from squinting into northern skies. He wore a faded denim shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows and a baseball cap from some fishing lodge Jamie had never heard of.

"Fine," Jamie said, which meant the opposite.

Rick glanced back through the gap between the seats. His eyes—the same pale gray as Jamie's mother's, because Rick was her older brother—held that careful, measuring look adults used when they were trying to gauge how much trouble a kid was about to cause.

"We'll be there in about ninety minutes. Maybe less if this tailwind holds."

"Great."

"Your dad's really looking forward to seeing you."

Jamie said nothing. He turned back to the window and watched another nameless lake slide beneath the floats. The pontoons cast twin shadows on the water, rippling and distorted, like dark fish swimming alongside the plane.

His father. Kurt Bricknell. The man who had walked out of their house in Barrie two years ago with a duffel bag and a mumbled apology, who had moved three times since then—Sudbury, then Kapuskasing, now some fishing camp so far north it didn't have a proper address. Just GPS coordinates and a name: Osprey Point Lodge. His mother, Lisa, had stood at the kitchen door that night and watched Kurt's truck pull away, and she hadn't cried, not once, not where Jamie could see. She'd just closed the door and locked it and said, "It's going to be okay, bug," using the nickname Jamie had outgrown years before.

It had not been okay.

The divorce had been ugly in the quiet way divorces could be ugly—no screaming matches, no thrown plates, just lawyers' letters and tight-lipped phone calls and Jamie's life divided neatly into two unequal halves. His mother got the house, the dog, the school routine, the Tuesday-night lasagnas. His father got every other weekend, which quickly became every other month, which became phone calls that arrived late and apologetic, and then cards on birthdays with checks inside them, as if money could fill the space where a father used to stand.

Now this. A summer visit to the fishing camp. Lisa had arranged it with Rick—"Your uncle will fly you up, it'll be an adventure"—and Jamie had agreed only because the alternative was another summer of mowing lawns and watching his mother pretend she wasn't lonely.

Some adventure. He was trapped in a tin can above a million acres of nothing, heading toward a man he wasn't sure he wanted to see.

The engine droned. The forest scrolled beneath them. Jamie pulled his phone from his pocket, checked the screen, and confirmed what he already knew: no signal. He'd lost the last bar somewhere over Cochrane, two hours ago. He put the phone away and leaned back against the seat, arms folded.

Rick was humming something—an old country song, off-key. He had a thermos of coffee wedged between his thighs and a folded aviation chart on his lap. Every few minutes he'd glance at the instruments, adjust the trim, take a sip of coffee. He made it look easy, the way people did when they'd done something a thousand times.

"You know," Rick said, raising his voice over the engine, "I did this same flight when I was about your age. Your grandpa took me up to fish for walleye on the Kapiskau. Flew a Beaver—big yellow thing, loud as hell. I thought it was the greatest day of my life."

"Cool," Jamie said flatly.

Rick tried again. "There's good fishing at Osprey Point. Pike, walleye, some brookies in the feeder streams. Your dad says the pike are running heavy this year. Some real monsters."

"I don't really fish."

"Well, maybe you'll learn. Nothing to it, really. Patience and a good cast."

Jamie didn't answer. He was thinking about his room back in Barrie—the posters on the walls, the Xbox controller sitting on his desk, the stack of graphic novels on his nightstand. Real things. Comfortable things. Not this.

The plane hit a pocket of turbulence and dropped. Jamie's stomach lurched. He grabbed the edge of his seat.

"Just thermals," Rick said calmly. "Warm air rising off the bogs. Nothing to worry about."

The plane steadied. Jamie let go of the seat but kept his hands in his lap, fingers laced tight. He was not afraid of flying—or at least, he hadn't been until now. But something about the scale of the emptiness below was getting to him. If you went down out here, who would find you? There were no landmarks, no roads, nothing but an ocean of trees broken by water. You could walk for days and never see another person.

He pushed the thought away.

"Uncle Rick?"

"Yeah?"

"How does Dad even get supplies out here? Like, groceries and stuff?"

"Float plane, mostly. There's a supply run every two weeks from Hearst. Some of the guides bring stuff in by canoe when the rivers are high enough. It's pretty self-sufficient, though. They've got a generator, a smokehouse, a root cellar. Your dad's gotten good at living lean."

Living lean. Jamie's mother had a different phrase for it. Running away.

"Does he like it?" Jamie asked, and was surprised by the genuine curiosity in his own voice.

Rick considered this. "I think he does. He's different up here. Calmer. More himself, maybe. I don't know how to explain it."

"You don't have to."

Rick looked at him again through the gap, and this time there was something softer in his expression. Something like sympathy. "Jamie, I know this isn't easy. The stuff between your parents—that's grown-up mess, and none of it's your fault. But your dad loves you. That's real, whatever else happened."

Jamie's jaw tightened. He wanted to say something sharp—something about how love was supposed to show up, not just get declared from five hundred miles away—but the words knotted in his throat and he swallowed them down.

"Okay," he said.

They flew in silence for a while. The sun was angling west, throwing long shadows across the canopy. The light turned the lakes from steel gray to copper. It was beautiful, Jamie supposed, if you were the kind of person who found beauty in emptiness.

He was not that kind of person. He was thirteen, and he wanted Wi-Fi.

Rick reached for his thermos again, and Jamie noticed something. A slight tremor in his uncle's hand. The coffee sloshed against the thermos walls as Rick unscrewed the cap. His face, when Jamie looked at it in profile, was sheened with sweat despite the cool air flowing through the vents.

"You okay?" Jamie asked.

"Fine. Just a little warm." Rick took a sip and set the thermos down. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. "Might be coming down with something. Your aunt warned me—she said the whole office had a bug going around."

"Maybe you should drink some water instead of coffee."

Rick laughed. "Listen to you. Sounding like your mother."

That stung, though Rick hadn't meant it to. Jamie looked away.

Another ten minutes passed. The engine hummed its monotone song. The forest below was changing subtly—the trees thinning in places, giving way to wide expanses of brown-green muskeg dotted with stunted tamaracks. Bogs. Jamie could see standing water glinting between the hummocks of sphagnum moss, and here and there a beaver dam creating a dark pond fringed with dead timber.

Rick shifted in his seat. He put a hand on his chest, just below the collarbone, and pressed. The gesture was casual, almost absent, like he was scratching an itch. But Jamie saw his uncle's face change. The ruddy color drained out of it, replaced by something gray and waxy.

"Uncle Rick?"

Rick didn't answer. His left hand was on the yoke, his right still pressed against his chest. His breathing had changed—shorter, shallower, with a ragged edge to it.

"Uncle Rick, what's wrong?"

Rick turned his head. His eyes were wide, pupils dilated, and there was a look in them Jamie had never seen before—not fear exactly, but a terrible, focused urgency, like a man trying to solve a problem he knew he couldn't solve.

"Jamie," Rick said. His voice was tight, squeezed through clenched teeth. "Jamie, I need you to listen to me."

"What's happening? Are you—"

"Listen." Rick's right hand came off his chest and gripped the edge of the instrument panel. His knuckles were white. "I'm having some trouble. My chest. I need you to—" He broke off, gasping. A sound came out of him that Jamie would remember for the rest of his life: a low, guttural groan, animal and involuntary, the sound of a body betraying itself.

The plane dipped. The nose dropped five degrees, then ten. The engine note changed as the angle steepened.

"Uncle Rick!" Jamie lunged forward between the seats. The forest was tilting in the windshield, the horizon sliding sideways. "Uncle Rick, pull up!"

Rick's left hand was still on the yoke but there was no strength in it. His eyes were half-closed. His lips were moving but no words came out. Then his hand slipped off the yoke entirely and fell into his lap, and his chin dropped to his chest.

The Cessna dove.

Jamie screamed. The sound was swallowed by the engine roar and the shriek of wind as the plane accelerated downward. Trees filled the windshield—not a green carpet anymore but individual shapes, rushing up at him, branches and trunks resolving with sickening clarity.

He grabbed the back of the pilot's seat and hauled himself forward. The yoke was right there, shaking with the force of the airstream. He didn't know how to fly a plane. He had never touched the controls of any aircraft. But he knew that pulling back meant going up, and going up meant not hitting the trees, and that was the only thought his panicked brain could hold.

He reached past his uncle's slumped body and grabbed the yoke with both hands and pulled.

The nose came up. Not much—the plane was heavy and fast and the ground was close—but enough. The dive flattened into a steep glide. The stall warning horn blared, a piercing electronic scream that competed with the engine.

Jamie pulled harder. The plane shuddered. Through the windshield he could see the treetops rushing past, impossibly close, a blur of green. Then there was a sound like a giant's fist punching through cardboard—a crack, a shearing, a violent lurch that threw Jamie sideways. The left float had caught the top of a spruce. The plane yawed hard, spinning, and the world became a kaleidoscope of sky and trees and brown water.

The impact came from everywhere at once. Jamie felt it in his teeth, his spine, his hands. The windshield starred and buckled. Metal screamed. Something hit him in the side of the head—the edge of a seat, a strut, he never knew—and the world went white, then red, then black.

Then nothing.

Then sound. Water. Gurgling, rushing, insistent. The hiss of steam. A bird, somewhere far away, calling a single note over and over.

Jamie opened his eyes.

He was on his side, wedged between the back seat and the fuselage wall. The cabin was canted at a steep angle, tilted forward and to the left. Through the cracked windshield he could see brown water lapping against the cowling. The engine was silent. Smoke or steam—he couldn't tell which—curled from somewhere beneath the nose.

His head hurt. He touched his temple and his fingers came away bloody. Not a lot of blood. A cut, maybe. He moved his arms, his legs, his neck. Everything worked. Everything hurt, but everything worked.

"Uncle Rick."

Rick was still in the pilot's seat, held in place by his harness. His head was tilted back, mouth open. Blood ran from a gash above his right eye, tracking down his cheek and dripping onto his shirt. His left leg was bent at an angle that made Jamie's stomach clench—not broken at the knee but lower, the shin, where the bone pressed against the skin in a way that was clearly, horribly wrong.

But his chest was moving. Shallow, uneven breaths. He was alive.

"Uncle Rick, wake up. Please wake up."

No response.

Jamie unbuckled himself—when had he buckled in? He couldn't remember—and crawled forward. The cabin floor was wet. Water was seeping in through a crack in the fuselage, a slow but steady trickle that was pooling around the rudder pedals. The plane was sinking. Not fast, but sinking. The bog was claiming it.

He had to get Rick out.

Jamie's hands were shaking so badly he could barely work the harness buckle. He pressed the release and Rick slumped forward, deadweight, two hundred pounds of unconscious man falling against the yoke. Jamie caught him—tried to catch him—and was immediately pinned.

"Come on," he gasped. "Come on, come on."

He braced his feet against the seat rail and pushed. Rick shifted. Jamie grabbed him under the arms and pulled, backing toward the cargo door on the right side of the fuselage. The door was jammed. He kicked it. Kicked it again. On the third kick it popped open and swung wide, letting in a rush of air that smelled like peat and wet wood and something metallic—fuel, maybe, leaking from a ruptured line.

The ground outside the door was not really ground. It was muskeg—spongy, waterlogged moss over a soup of black water and decomposed plant matter. Jamie's feet sank to his ankles when he stepped out. But twenty feet away, past a fringe of stunted tamaracks, he could see a low rise of solid earth topped with blueberry bushes and a few scraggly spruce.

He went back for Rick.

Dragging a grown man through a bog was the hardest thing Jamie had ever done. Rick was limp, heavy, his broken leg trailing at that awful angle. Jamie hooked his arms under Rick's armpits and pulled, walking backward, his sneakers squelching and sucking in the muck. Twice he fell. Twice he got up. The twenty feet to solid ground took what felt like an hour but was probably five minutes.

He laid Rick on the moss-covered rise and collapsed beside him, chest heaving, arms burning. The sky above was pale blue, streaked with cirrus clouds. A raven circled overhead, black against the white, watching.

Jamie sat up and looked at the plane. The Cessna was listing badly now, the left float submerged, the right float barely above the waterline. The tail section was crumpled where it had struck something—a rock, a stump. The left wing was sheared off at the midpoint, the torn edge bright with exposed aluminum.

The emergency locator beacon. Rick had mentioned it once during the pre-flight check, pointing to a small orange box mounted behind the rear seat. It was supposed to activate automatically on impact, broadcasting a distress signal that satellites could pick up.

Jamie waded back to the plane. The water was up to his knees inside the cabin now. He found the orange box—or what was left of it. The impact had driven a section of the instrument panel backward, crushing the beacon against the bulkhead. The casing was cracked open, the circuit board inside snapped in half. The antenna was gone.

He stared at it. The reality of what that meant settled over him like a physical weight.

No one was coming.

He stood in the flooding cabin of the wrecked floatplane, water rising around his shins, blood drying on his temple, and he was thirteen years old and he was alone.

The raven called again. Jamie closed his eyes, breathed, and started looking for anything he could salvage.