Steps (13 page)

“Sir, yes sir,” Perry said. He took one last look at the woman and moved to the lip of the ridge. His father lay atop the man’s back shoving his face into the mud. The man’s arms and legs splayed out in a way that reminded Perry of Superman flying. The hands waggled, the feet kicked, and his father leaned into the back of the man’s head and suffocated him in the mud.

Perry watched as the kicking grew weaker, but he turned away before it stopped. His ears rang and his legs and arms felt as if they might be filled with sand. Amid the ringing in his ears, he heard Arroyo scream, “Whoop! Whoop!”

Arroyo and Fletcher made their way along the ruts toward them. Fletcher held his left arm against his chest and cradled it with the other. Arroyo limped and favored his right leg, and he carried both his and Fletcher’s rifles.

Lightning flashed behind them. He heard no thunder, and Perry squinted against the flashes as a surge of warmth spread through his arms, legs, and head. He closed his eyes and rubbed them. When he opened them, he peered up at his father. His mother leaned over him, beside his father. Behind them stood Gentry, Billings, Arroyo and the others. He lay in the mud next to the lake, and the embankment he had climbed loomed above him. Looking left, he saw the sick man’s body face-down in the mud, and beyond that the wrecked truck in the water.

Darkness filled the sky where it had been light a moment before, and smoke poured off the lip of the ridge and blanketed the lake in a thick, low-lying haze. He felt his arms and legs go stiff. His teeth clenched together and his throat clamped shut as if someone had gripped it with a fist. His heart palpitated in his chest with a notable arrhythmia, almost a drumroll of a heartbeat, and his body shook as the fever coursed through him.

“You’re gonna be all right,” his father kept saying. “You’re seizing up, but you’re gonna be all right, son.” It sounded more like a prayer than a reassurance, and Perry squeezed his eyes shut and hoped he was right.

Chapter 24

The Water   
(Gentry)

I
t was the
damnest
thing Gentry had ever seen. That was what his father always said about weirdness. He would cock his head and say, “Ain’t that the
damnest
thing?”

Perry’s eyes opened. They had turned the color and texture of a peeled black grape. A few hours ago they had been white around the iris, up on the ridge before the smoke took over. Perry had been lucid, if a little tired, if a little hungry, if a whole hell of a lot scared, but his eyes had been white, white, white.

Gentry and Billings carried him down to their wreck-camp by the lake, with Fletcher and Arroyo hobbling along behind them.

They lay Perry down and none of them said much until Billings spoke up. “I don’t know what happened. He just . . .” He trailed off, mumbled something and gawked down at his metal foot. They all stared at Perry as his bloody eyes darted between the faces, hard to say if they locked on because the irises had been lost to the black. A trickle of red formed at the corner of his eye, and his mother wiped it away.

There was more to her gesture than a mother simply cleaning her child’s face, because Amalie leaned down and kissed Perry’s cheek, sealing the infection between them. It was like watching one of those flood doors on a sinking ship bang closed, hearing the lock slam home, and isn’t it the
damnest
thing if you’re on the wrong side of it.

Another set of eyes came to Gentry’s mind, and when he felt it well up inside, he heard the words,
Kelsey’s home
He recalled the unintelligible clarity of the song Moore sang to him. Gentry averted his eyes, and the others did the same. The only sound was the freight-train roar of the forest fire atop the ridge, and the splitting of trees.

Gentry sat on his heels in a catcher’s stance while Moore, Arroyo, and Fletcher hiked down the shore a few meters to a log and rested themselves on the waterlogged bark. Billings waded to the truck and dug around in the bed until he came up with a pair of rifles. Mud covered them, and he rinsed them and slung them across his chest. He moved to the cab, came up with two shotguns, and waded ashore.

He handed Edwin’s shotgun and a rifle to Gentry, who rose and followed him down the shore past Moore and the others, around a bend in the lake until everyone disappeared out of view. Gentry removed his shirt and laid it on the ground, ejected and emptied the clip from his rifle, performed a partial takedown, and placed the pieces on top of his shirt. He scraped out the mud and waded into the lake with the bolt carrier, rinsed it, sloshed back ashore and crouched next to Billings.

“Screw the pact with Sarge,” Billings said.

“Punching out, you mean?”

“To hell with it. I ain’t punching out that boy. None of us are. Still, I want you to make me a promise, Genny. I’m serious, bro. I go red, you wipe me out, same as we agreed. You copy?”

“I copy. Victor Victor.”
Vice Versa.
Gentry reassembled the rifle, tested the bolt, still gritty but the word
serviceable
came to mind. He exchanged the rifle for the pump shotgun, cycled through the slugs, wiped the casings and reloaded them, so much easier to maintain than the carbine. When he finished, he said, “We’d be doing that boy a mercy.”

“Sure. But could you do it?”

“Hell, no.”

“Me neither. We could do each other or Fletch, could damned sure do Arroyo, but the boy? The little girl? You ready to show mercy to Moore? I seen how you look at her.”

Gentry sighted the shotgun, a youth-model Remington, short-barreled and light, a brand-new weapon that he bet had not been fired more than a dozen times. The last discharge had claimed Riggs, and a few before that had claimed others. The image flitted through his mind of Moore at the other end of the weapon, and Gentry shook his head and said, “Negative. I don’t have it in me.”

“We’re men, bro,” Billings said. “We’re God’s fodder, weeds in his garden, hair on his dog, a useful nuisance. We mix up the gene pool. That’s it. We die young because we were never meant to live past the breeding years. It’s the women and children who matter. We got to protect ’em, not show ’em mercy.
We’re
supposed to die, not them. Not that boy. Damn.”

Billings sat still for a moment, and then stood and slapped Gentry on the head. “Now snap out of it. We’re soldiers, and soldiers don’t have the luxury of emotion. Emotion is for civvies and fobbits. It’s our job to keep Allah’s waiting room full, or God’s, or whoever the hell it is we’re sending these poor bastards off to. With extreme mercy, bro. Now move out.”

Gentry led the way back to their camp swatting mosquitos as he walked. The bugs had come out in a rage, now that it was nearing evening. A few hours ago the sky had been blue and noontime bright. Now it turned a murky gray that clawed at his eyes and nose and throat. He bent and rubbed mud on the back of his neck, on his cheeks, ears, chest and arms, and wiped his hands on the front pocket of his lake-soaked pants. He hoped it would keep off some of the mosquitos.

Moore had salvaged more of what was in the bed of the truck, and piled it atop a couple of ruined blankets. She stacked cans of beans, corn, peas, some dried rations of rice and pasta, next to a couple of blankets and basic cooking gear.

Someone screamed, and it took Gentry a moment to recognize the source as Perry. His mother lay beside him in a patch of flattened underbrush, her arm thrown across him as he arched his back and head at such an angle that his spine should have snapped. Edwin stood at the boy’s feet with his hands slack, watching him kick and scream beside his mother. Moore crouched behind Edwin with her arm around Shelly Lynn. Fletcher and Arroyo for their parts stacked driftwood into a fire pile, both of them working slow to compensate their injuries.

Gentry spread his shirt on the ground and laid his rifle and the shotgun on top of it. He unlaced and removed his boots, stuffed his socks inside and pulled down his pants. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, except that he could no longer stand the feel of clothing on his body. Nobody paid him attention as he slipped into the water and waded away from the shore.

Beyond the truck, the water deepened, and as the water reached his chest, Gentry rolled onto his back and kicked. When his ears rose above the water, he heard Perry’s inhuman wails.

He dipped his head beneath the water and the screams silenced. He heard nothing but the echoing thrums of submergence and his heart beating in the murky water. His feet no longer touched bottom, and he let himself sink, watching the surface drift away from him.

The bottom of the lake touched his feet. He exhaled, and his body settled onto the lakebed spread-eagled or nailed to a cross, depending on your point-of-view. His heartbeat answered the echoing thumps of submergence. His buzzing thoughts dulled, and he thought of Kelsey and how she floated in his arms, and how he would never, never feel her float there again.

Gentry closed his eyes and imagined eternity must feel this way. He surrendered and became weightless, subject to the gentle sway of the lake current. Amid the silence, he heard singing in the language Moore had sung to him in the woods, but with a smaller voice. She sang of sacrifice and sin. She sang of a forge stoked by human suffering, and of sins unforgiven and unforgotten.

Gentry lay beneath the water as she sang to him. He swam in Kelsey’s voice, and she sang the human song with her tiny mouth, and the song filled his lungs with air. When the song stopped, he shoved off the bottom and rose into the absolute darkness of night and breathed deep of it. He tasted her on his breath.

Along the shore in every direction burned a brilliant red-orange glow of the forest fire cast down from the sky. The flames rolled up the hills, spread into the mountains, blew ashes and embers over the lake like moving, living suns darting with the violence of the air currents until they doused themselves in the purity of lake water. Where the sky opened lay the nothingness of eternal and sunless space.

Toward the shore, the others huddled out of reach of their massive campfire towering well above Fletcher’s six and a half feet. The truck had been further emptied, and the supplies piled beyond the fire, and when he rose from the water and waded ashore, nobody greeted him or looked his way.

The raging fire warmed the night, and the lake water steamed off his skin in a white glow that surrounded him and stuck in place like a cloud had been pin-tacked to his body. They had opened a can of black-eyed peas and passed it around with a spoon. Each person took a bite and passed it along to the next. Perry crouched on his heels like a wild animal with flickin, wild-animal eyes, but when his mother spoon-fed him, he gagged and vomited onto his chin. She took a bite of her own and passed the can along, and nobody complained that Perry would contaminate them all. When the can came to Billings, he passed it along without taking his share, and did not offer the can to Gentry.

Gentry was not hungry anyway, and so he dressed and sat next to Moore. After a while he put his arm around her shoulders.

“You believe me, don’t you?” Moore said to him. She nestled her head into him, and he knew the rest of the question without being asked.

He thought of Kelsey’s voice in the water, heard the song Moore sang to him naked how long ago? Not long. A day? An eternity. “I believe you,” Gentry said, because he did.

“He left me, the Embodiment I mean.”

“I know who you mean.”

“He was beautiful.”

Gentry eyed Shelly Lynn and tried to see what Shelly Lynn could see, what Moore had seen. He saw a little girl sitting with her father, and nothing more.

Chapter 25

Nothing but Watch   
(Moore)

S
helly Lynn did not look at her, but Moore could not stop staring at the little girl. She seemed content next to her father. An air of unawareness surrounded her, as if her brother and mother were well, and the past few weeks had never happened. Moore admired that state of
in-the-now
in which young children immersed themselves, and which adults regret, because if you use your child-eyes you erase the bad things.

Beside Shelly Lynn existed a presence, not something Moore visualized but something she felt in the way you sense the slope of floor in an uneven room. There was a dip of reality around Shelly Lynn into which Moore felt herself drawn, but not quite able to reach or see. The Embodiment lived there, a shimmering presence both clear and vague, infinite and human, a shadow with the burning weight of the sun. He contradicted existence and defied explanation, becoming a dichotomy of dominance and love, your humble and ever-knowing king-servant. When He spoke, she heard no words, but understood His thunderous whisper.

The Embodiment left her, of course. Shelly Lynn had spoken at the cabin, and the bodies burst into flame. Moore winced at the fire, and when she opened her eyes, the Embodiment merged with the fire-flash blaze seared into her vision, and as she blinked out the fire-flash, He blinked away with it. The path Moore had followed became nothing more than dirt and leaves. Her feet and legs shivered. Cuts stung on her thighs and calves. Gentry touched her arm and said, “Come with me.” He guided her up the steps past Amalie and Edwin into the cabin.

Gentry led her into the den, to a row of rucksacks in front of the fireplace stacked one on top of the other with haphazard, military precision. Gentry dug around until he came up with a pack bearing his name, unzipped an outer pocket, and unfolded a pair of pants. “Military casual,” he said to her. “Hope you like desert brown. It may be your color.”

“It is. And almost my size.”

“What can I say? I’m comfort-sized. You want me to dig something out of Fletcher’s pack? He’s the tall, dark, and handsome dude. I bet his shirt would be a miniskirt on you. Add a belt and some heels—”

“No, these are fine.”

“That’s it,” Gentry said. He snapped his fingers.

“That’s what?”

“Darcy. You’re the doc from Mayberry. The one in the yellow suit. With the shots. I knew I knew those eyes.”

“Yeah, that was me. I slugged everyone in the arm at some point.”

“God, that was like a million years ago.” Gentry unzipped another pocket. He unfolded a pair of boxer-briefs and socks. “These are Army clean, only been worn four or five times since last wash in the creek.”

Moore slipped on the boxer-briefs, pulled on the pants and socks, and he watched her in a way both familiar and comfortable, a husband’s stare on her nudity and every part of her body.

Gentry nodded. “You really are a beautiful woman, you know that, right?”

He said it matter-of-fact, still the husband casual with his wife, absolutely certain,
You look beautiful, Honey, what do you want for dinner?
Gentry flipped his pack onto its topside and uncinched a pair of Crocs sandals tied to the bottom next to his sleeping gear. “What’s your boot size?”

“Men’s seven and a half fits.”

“These are eights and a half. Here.”

He handed her the shoes. Moore slipped them on and stood eye-level with him.

“It’s Darcy, right?” Gentry said.

“Yes. Captain Darcy Moore.”

“No, I mean your full name. What is it?”

“Darcy Marie Moore.”

His eyes squinted and he said, “That’s not your real name.”

She smiled and said, “No, it isn’t. It is but it isn’t. It’s Darcy Marie Lovett.”

“But you’re divorced.” It was not a question, and when she did not answer Gentry said, “No kids.”

“No kids.”

“College girl because you’re a captain, met him in college, thought you had it going on, didn’t, joined the Army to pay for school.” He paused. “For med school, right, but you settled for P.A.?”

“I didn’t settle for P.A. It’s what I wanted to do from the start.”

“My story’s exactly the same, only different. I have a daughter with an ex-wife and two semesters of college. Needed a change. Her name’s Kelsey. Like you said in the woods.”

She held his eyes even though she wanted to look away, and he said, “I know you. I don’t mean like I feel we’ve met before, I mean, like I
know
you. Like we’ve been married a hundred years. Don’t say it, weird, right.”

“Not at all,” Moore said, because it made sense, because she had spoken with the Embodiment of God, walked naked through the woods, and all things are possible. She felt it, too, and it was not as if she could read his memories, but rather
felt
his memories. She heard the song of his life, the tune, the words and the rhythm and the sonnets that flowed like water through her fingers.

They gave her the couch that night. When Gentry rose for his shift sometime after midnight, he came to her, offered a gentle shake on the shoulder, and said in the dark silence of the cabin, “Hey. You okay, Darcy? You need anything?”

She opened her eyes and he leaned over her, not a large man but mountainous, a man-shaped eternal presence tinted with that contradiction of the Embodiment. In her half-awake murky dream-place, she touched his cheek and drew him to her kiss. She had kissed him before, and she
knew
the kiss. He was the flowing water, and she
knew
his scent and the heat from his body.

He kissed her lips, her cheek, and pressed his mouth to her ear and whispered, “I’ll be right outside.”

Moore watched him walk out ahead of Billings, who had been at the door seeming to check his rifle while Gentry hovered over her on the couch.

Dawn must have arrived sometime after that, because when she opened her eyes, daylight filled the room. Something woke her, and she sat up and listened. She heard a gunshot, and another, and then screaming from outside the cabin amid a growing volley of rifle fire. Moore rolled off the couch, and when she opened the front door, a strange soldier met her. Blood filled his eyes, and he seemed unstartled by Moore’s sudden presence at the door. He might have been standing on the porch for long minutes, and his hands wrapped around her and yanked her to him. It required all her strength and a panicked quickness to break his grip. She slipped past him and off the porch, into the driveway where the bodies from last night smoldered in their ashes. Gentry and Billings ran along the tree line toward her. Billings dropped to a knee and raised his rifle while Gentry kept running. Billings’ rifle aimed to her right, spoke, and a glance behind showed the infected soldier folding.

Gentry shielded her as gunfire answered Billings’ from the woods. She heard the familiar and terrifying metallic
clump
of a grenade on the porch, and she ran faster. A few steps later the explosion threw her forward, but Gentry caught her stumbling, and they ran down the driveway with Billings in tow firing over his shoulder as he ran half-backward behind them.

The others piled in the truck, all of them with Edwin and his family in the cab, and Fletcher and Arroyo in the bed atop the supplies. Fletcher and Arroyo fired into the trees as Moore and her escort ran beneath the cover. Fletcher stopped firing and hefted her into the truck, and Billings and Gentry scrambled over the edge. The truck shot out of the driveway onto the mountain road, and bumped along with the cliff on one side and endless trees to the other. Arroyo shoved a rifle into her hands, and she put it to her shoulder and searched the trees.

Soldiers ran from tree to tree taking cover and waving at a crowd of nobodies behind them, screaming orders to invisible troops. They shouted oddities and obscenities and none of it made sense. A soldier on one knee fired up at the trees and screamed about jaybirds. Another soldier stood in place with his gun slack at his side, and as she watched he removed his knife from a sheath on his chest, sliced his palm, and put the cut to his mouth. Behind him another raised his rifle toward them, and gunfire sprayed the tailgate of the truck.

Moore along with the others returned fire. A man fell. She registered her first kill and tucked that memory away in its compartment and continued firing.

They made it to the main road, but then the meteors came, and the fire and the lake, and now Perry lay with his mother in the mud. Shelly Lynn retained her childish vision of the Embodiment. Moore lost it, as if being awoken from a dream, the vision of it torn away by the shards of a burning light.

Moore shook despite the warmth from the bonfire, despite Gentry’s arm around her. She coughed, stood, wandered to the edge of the lake, and Gentry followed. She wished she had a blanket to warm her, but they were all muddied and wet and no one had the energy or desire to wash them or build a drying rack. The Crocs sandals sank in the mud, and she regarded the lake and the reflected chaos of the fire raging ever higher into the mountains.

The hood of the truck had been thrown open when she and Edwin had salvaged the battery, such a stupid thing because what use was the battery. The lake water burned orange as a jack-o-lantern beneath flickering stars and a thick cloud of smoke.

Arroyo watched her for a long moment, stood, hefted his rifle and limped down the shore, past the fire, holding his leg as he balanced on a fractured tibia and a swollen ankle held from bursting by his boot alone. He disappeared into the jack-o-lantern night amid the roaring overcast of the forest fire high up the mountain.

Perry stiffened. His head threw back and his mother covered him as if she might contain the fury ravaging his brain. She proved ineffective, and when the boy slackened, he wrapped his legs around her waist, his arms around her shoulders, and buried his face in her neck. His head worked side-to-side, and Moore watched with the others in a moment of disbelief until his mother screamed. Then Fletcher flew off his seat and launched at the boy along with Billings and Gentry, while Edwin backpedaled with Shelly Lynn screaming along with her mother.

Perry arched his head and a piece of flesh launched upward. He chewed into his mother’s neck and shoulder and cheek as three full-grown men lifted both him and his mother off the ground. The boy’s grip tightened, and when they freed one arm, the other snaked into position. He seemed like a human spider. Moore corrected herself. There was nothing human in the way this
thing
tore into Amalie.

Amalie screamed through her broken jaw a sound as misshapen as the jaw itself. Billings managed to slip an arm around the boy’s neck, wrench his head away from his mother, and pry them apart. He leaned back as Gentry and Fletcher dragged Amalie the other direction.

Moore moved then, seeing her opening, and fell on Amalie while the others fought to subdue the boy. A glance showed Edwin had beat feet a good way down shore, not out of sight or earshot, but far enough that Shelly Lynn could not see her mother’s ripped throat, and her left ear clinging to the back of her neck by a lunchmeat slice of flesh.

Moore had never seen a severed carotid artery, and she was not prepared for the vision of it. The carotid is the huge artery leading up from the aortic arch, the primary blood vessel supplying the brain, one on each side of the neck and the home of highest blood pressure in the body. She understood the anatomy and the function, but she had never imagined the amount of blood rushing out of Amalie’s neck. It shot above her head the length of her body along the ground.

Moore pressed her hands into her neck and screamed at Edwin, “Get a shirt or a rag! Get me something!”

Blood erupted between her fingers at the pace of Amalie’s heart. Edwin ran toward her as he tore off his shirt, and in the three beats it took him to cover the ground, blood soaked Moore’s arms and chest and covered all of Amalie’s face and hair. She wrapped the shirt into a bundle and pressed it against Amalie’s neck.

Moore sucked in a breath,
Please God help me focus.
Shelly Lynn ran with her father. The girl knelt with her hands on her mother, sobbing as only a little girl can sob. Shelly Lynn’s unfettered emotion unnerved Moore, and she said, “I can’t do this with her. Edwin, get her out of here.” But Edwin watched in shock along with all of them. He did nothing, and Shelly Lynn cried all the more when her mother kicked and bent her back in that way of a dying creature.

Moore could do nothing but watch. She held the compress on Amalie’s neck as the blood poured out of her. The woman’s body slackened, and the blood did not trickle off or die down but stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

Moore felt the shock of the stress overtake her system. Her heart pounded from the release of hormones, her nerves shook from the strain, and her breath tore through her throat as her lungs strained to keep pace with her heart. She closed her eyes and heard silence, and when she opened them, she saw a sobbing child, but could not recall her name. Blood covered Moore’s arms and face. Behind her raged a bonfire, and beside it three men lay atop a young boy thrashing in the mud. Beyond the flames lurched another soldier, this one limping but carrying a rifle despite his handicap. He raised the rifle, trained it on the boy, screamed and waved, but the soldiers on top of the boy refused to clear the shot.

Still the soldier fired, and the largest of them leapt upon the shooter, spun him to the ground and fell atop him with a pair of huge fists. The boy bleeding from his chest leapt up and sprinted with a wraith’s speed toward the ledge leading up into the forest. He hit the bank and scaled hand-over-hand in the clumsy, confident, brute-force method of an ape. He topped the cliff and glowered down on them as if they were animals in a zoo pit.

One of the soldiers yelled at him. “Perry! Get down here on the double, Maggot!”

The boy saluted a comedy, laughed, stumbled, put his hand to his mouth and screamed, “My felt-tipped new bock been whacked! Sorry, señor!”

The boy slunk into the smoke, and for a long while they all stared up at the cliff but for the little girl, who buried her head in the dead woman’s breast.