Backwoods (17 page)

“As I was saying, sir.” Dani’s comment was
directed to Prendick but she glared at Andrew in unspoken
imperative:
Shut up. You’re not helping.
“All of this land
was held in federal reserve before this facility was built, which
means they could’ve been out here for years, decades even, without
being detected. Which also means, sir,” she added pointedly. “They
could be growing or manufacturing illegal substances on federal
land. That would put it in our jurisdiction to investigate,
wouldn’t it, sir?”

Prendick studied her for a long, stern
moment.
“Et tu,
Santoro?” he said. Then with a sigh and
another scowl in Andrew’s general direction, he grumbled, “Get your
squad together and meet me in the courtyard in thirty minutes.
Mister Braddock, you go to your room, shower off and change your
clothes—because you’re right, you
do
stink—then rendezvous
with us in the yard, as well. Can you find the spot where you claim
this body was hanging again?”

Andrew nodded. “I marked it on one of the
maps in my backpack. I know how to find my way back there.”

“Fair enough,” Prendick replied. “Here’s your
chance to prove it.”

****

Even though Andrew guided them along the
trail, he stayed closely surrounded on all sides by armed members
of Dani’s squad. Each of the soldiers carried live M16A assault
rifles and despite the light, jovial conversation that they’d
exchanged in the courtyard, once in the woods, they got down to
business. Walking cautiously, keeping careful watch all around
them, they ventured among the trees with the same sort of wary
attentiveness they might have awarded a deceptively vacant street
in some Afghani or Iraqi village.

“So Santoro says some guys were following you
through the woods,” one of them, Spaulding, said in a low voice to
Andrew.

Andrew didn’t feel like enduring the
indignity of trying to explain that he didn’t think they had been
guys
at all. When he simply nodded in reply, the soldier,
Spaulding, pressed, “How many, you figure?”

“At least four,” Andrew said. “Maybe more. It
was kind of hard to tell.”

“What’d they look like?” Spaulding asked.

“I don’t know.” Andrew shook his head. “I
never saw their faces.”

“What were they wearing?”

Andrew shook his head again. “I didn’t really
get a good look.”

“You know, I’ve heard there’s a Bigfoot out
here in these woods,” Hartford murmured from Andrew’s right.

“Hey, fuck you, Hartford, what do you know?”
another, Reigler, growled. “Shut up, you dipshit.”

“Fuck you, Reigler,” Hartford grumbled back.
“I know plenty. I read books and shit. Last fall, some guy out this
way, he got pictures of one of them Bigfoots in his garden, eating
his green beans.”

“Me, I’m more worried about drug dealers out
here growing pot than any Bigfoot,” Boston remarked.

To Andrew’s consternation, the poke berry ink
he’d used to mark the trail map had smeared on the page. He’d
folded it too quickly and it hadn’t fully dried, and now streaked
the map in splotches, with no discernable point of origin. This
cost him brownie points with the soldiers, as several of them
exchanged exasperated eye rolls when they found out.

“I can still find my way back on my own,”
Andrew insisted, but even Dani looked somewhat dubious. “I know the
general area. That’s still marked.”

****

The area may have been marked, but Andrew
quickly recalled a quote he’d heard once from legendary woodsman,
Daniel Boone:
I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered
once for three days.

Bewildered,
Andrew thought, frowning.
That’s a word for it. Along with
fucked.

They’d left the rutted foot path some time
ago, beating their own trail through the woods for a good twenty
minutes or so. The silence this time had been broken not by the
occasional rustle of footsteps in the leaves, but the sound of rain
drops plopping heavily through the treetops, a light drizzle that
quickly worked its way into something more steady. To his
credit—and Andrew’s surprise—Prendick hadn’t said anything, and on
those fleeting occasions when Andrew would steal a sheepish glance
in the older man’s direction, he found the Major seeming unbothered
by neither the rain nor their circumstances.

The trees had all started to look alike to
Andrew, because when he’d been chased through them, he hadn’t
thought to admire the view for long, or at least try to find some
visual landmarks by which he might reorient himself later.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

“It’s alright,” Dani told him, quiet and
close enough so no one else heard.

“I thought it was right around here,” he
said, turning in a circle, looking every which way.

“We’ll find it,” she murmured in reassurance.
But she didn’t believe that, and he knew it.

Because she doesn’t believe
me.
She’s my friend and she doesn’t want to hurt my
feelings, but there you go. She thinks I’m as full of shit as
Prendick does. They all do now.

“Major Prendick, over here,” called one of
the soldiers, Maggitti, who had ventured ahead of the group a
modest distance, surveying on point for the team. “I’ve found
something.”

Andrew darted in the direction of his cry,
with Dani and the rest of the squad right in step. Whatever
momentary excitement and vindication Andrew might have felt quickly
withered, however, when he caught sight of a deer carcass dangling
by the neck from a tree limb. It had been stripped of its skin, its
limbs hacked off, its entrails removed along with most of the
viable meat. What remained was putrid, ripe with the dim, sleepy
buzz of flies.

“Looks like poachers again,” Maggitti said to
Prendick.

“Aw, man,” Hartford remarked. “I bet they got
some good eating off that one.”

“You want me to cut it down, sir?” Maggitti
asked.

Prendick shook his head. “Leave it. The
coyotes and cougars will find it soon enough.”

“This isn’t what I saw earlier,” Andrew said,
and when Prendick turned to him, any semblance of courteous
tolerance was gone. He looked doubtful and aggravated.

“Mister Braddock, it’s getting late,” he
said. “The sun will be setting soon.”

“I’m telling you, this isn’t what I saw,”
Andrew insisted.

“You’ve done a lot of that since your
arrival, Mister Braddock,” Prendick said, his voice growing sharp,
his eyes cold and brittle.
“Telling,
I mean. It seems to me
that in a few short days, you’ve seen all kinds of things in these
woods, more than the rest of us have in months. At least, according
to you.”

Andrew bristled. “I’m not lying. Or imagining
things.”

“Be that as it may…” Prendick’s voice trailed
off and he offered a condescending shrug. “It’s raining and cold
and if we stay out here much longer, at least half of us will have
hypothermia by the time we get back to the barracks. Besides that,
I’m hungry and tired and don’t feel like humoring you anymore. If
you want to stay out here and walk in circles a while longer, by
all means, be my guest.” He held his hand up in the air, fingers
folded into a fist, a signal to the soldiers. “As for the rest of
us, let’s head back in.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Upon their return to the compound, Andrew
beat a hasty retreat to his room for the rest of the night,
humiliated and frustrated, ignoring even Dani’s attempts to make
sympathetic eye contact with him. Flopping onto his bed, he propped
himself up with pillows, kicked off his boots and tried to watch
some of the video he’d borrowed the night before.

As the opening credits for
Universal
Soldier
rolled, he closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his
nose. A headache had been brewing there even before they’d found
the putrid deer hanging from the tree, and he could feel it pulsing
now behind his eyes, the steady, rhythmic cadence of a midget
banging a bass drum deep inside his skull.

I didn’t see a dead goddamn deer,
he
thought. His head hurt. He was exhausted, his mind foggy, his
emotions scraped raw with fatigue.
I wasn’t imagining things. It
was a soldier in the tree. A dead soldier. I saw him. I know I
did.

But in that moment, with nothing but the
music from the TV overlapping with faint buzz of the overhead
fluorescents and the whispered rush of the building’s central
air-conditioning to surround him, he found himself no longer so
certain.

He’d known other foresters who’d panicked
while out in the field. Without a compass or GPS readily in hand
for orientation, it was all too easy to feel disoriented and
confused. Even small animals could make noises that made them seem
larger, more menacing in a carpeting of dried leaves, and one’s
imagination could certainly play tricks, filling in the blanks,
conjuring up mental images of all kinds of unseen horrors crashing
and lumbering through the underbrush.

Maybe that’s it,
he thought, forcing
his pride aside, the part of him that insisted he’d been a trained
field professional long enough to know the difference between fact
and fantasy, that he’d delved into deeper, thicker, denser woods
than these a hundred times, if not a thousand, and made it out
again with only his wits and an occasional glimpse of the sun
overhead to guide his way. Massaging his aching temples, Andrew
struggled to push this part of him away, to muffle it.
Because
the only answer that makes any sense is that I imagined it all. I
got scared, got lost, got caught in a trap and saw a dead deer
hanging from a tree. Anything else was all in my mind.

“All in my mind,” he whispered, and man, he
wished he could believe that. It would have made things a hell of a
lot easier.

****

He heard a knock at the door and his eyelids
fluttered open. He hadn’t meant to doze off, didn’t even realize
that he had until he tried to sit up in bed and winced to feel the
tight strain of a crick that had formed in his neck as he’d
napped.

With a groan, he swung his legs around, his
feet to the floor. Shoving his disheveled hair back from his brow,
he glanced at the clock and realized he’d lost almost an hour.

“Alice?” he asked, blinking stupidly to find
her on his threshold.

The little girl looked up at him. “There was
smoke everywhere.”

Bewildered, he shook his head. “What?”

“When the fire started, there was smoke
everywhere,” Alice said again. “I couldn’t see. Martha couldn’t
either and she got lost.”

It took him a second of fending off the last
residual, groggy cobwebs from his mind before he realized what she
was talking about.
The night her house was firebombed.

“They found her after they’d put the fire
out,” Alice said. “She was all burned up in a corner of the
kitchen.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, moved with sudden pity
for her. Folding his legs, he squatted down to her eye level.

“She was seven steps from the back door,”
Alice said. “And in the smoke, she didn’t even know it.”

“Is that why you always count your steps?” he
asked and she nodded once, reluctantly.

“So I always know how to get out,” she
whispered. “So I don’t end up like Martha.”

Andrew cupped his hand against the back of
her hair and drew her to his shoulder, offering her a hug. If she
drew comfort from his touch, it didn’t reflect in her posture. She
stood rigidly against him, as stiff as a plank of lumber, and made
no move to return the embrace. Feeling awkward, Andrew drew back.
“Sorry,” he said, but she only blinked at him impassively. “You
want to come in?”

She didn’t answer, but brushed past him, her
bare feet whispering on the tile floor. He closed the door behind
her, then ducked ahead into the bedroom area, switching on the
bedside lamp to counter the growing shadows. There was a
particularly loud and violent montage underway on the TV screen,
full of people screaming and things exploding in enormous fireballs
and Andrew darted forward, shutting it off.

“Where’s Suzette?”

“Fixing supper. She’s making salmon
croquettes tonight. And creamed peas to go with them.”

“Yuck.” Andrew wrinkled his nose, grateful
all at once to not be bartering sexual favors in exchange for his
supper.

“I know.” Alice nodded solemnly. “Where were
you today? I didn’t see you out in the courtyard.”

Oddly touched that she would have been
distracted enough from her habitual counting to notice his absence,
he said, “I went for a hike in the woods.”

A strange look came over her at this. Her
eyes grew momentarily wide, and her bottom lip drew in beneath the
shelf of her upper teeth almost anxiously. “You shouldn’t do
that.”

“What? Go into the woods?” he asked and when
she nodded, he asked, “Why not?”

She looked up at him, all round, dark eyes.
“The screamers live there,” she said in a voice so soft and faint,
he couldn’t be sure at first he’d heard her.

“The what?” Folding his legs beneath him, he
squatted in front of her. “What did you say, Alice?”

Still, she stared at him, locking her gaze
with his own. “You’ve heard them,” she whispered. “The screamers in
the night.”

He nodded, a chill shivering through him,
prickling the hairs along the nape of his neck. “What are they?” he
whispered back. “Do you know?”

She shook her head. “But I’ve seen them in
the trees. You have, too, haven’t you?”

Andrew nodded again.
I think I saw them
today.

****

He got Alice a snack from the vending
machines in the downstairs rec room. She’d lapsed into silence in
his room, saying no more about the things in the woods she’d called
the “screamers.” He’d meant to leave her for only a few minutes,
then try and broach the subject with her again, but it took longer
than he’d intended because he hadn’t paid much attention to the
contents of the machine until that moment. As he looked inside, he
realized there wasn’t much except for junk food to choose from.