Steps (17 page)

“Does it matter?” Fletcher said.

Gentry understood Fletcher’s meaning, even though none of them said it. Gentry had hunted enough times to know you could not simply follow a trail and find the game at the end of it. At some point the prints would drop away from the stream and dive into the woods, and they would lose all signs of the big guy. This was a mission of futility, devoid of hope, they all knew it and left it unspoken as if the speaking would break the spell of luck they hoped to cast over themselves, would jinx their already doomed situation.

“It’s getting on dusk,” Billings said. “And I don’t think we should move in the dark. Not when we’re trying to track. Prints will still be there in the morning. Let’s make camp before dark, or we’ll be pitching it blind.”

They found a patch of unburned trees, marched up the hill away from the stream, made the high ground and set up a simple camp. Gentry built a fire and boiled water for the noodles in their dry rations.

“Guys,” Fletcher said. He gained their attention and said nothing for a while, all of them sitting around the fire in the absolute dark of the mountains, cross-legged sipping from their bags of noodles.

Billings egged him on. “Go on. Say it.”

“What are we doing? I mean, look at us. We’re following a stream searching for a little girl while we chew through the last of our chow. We all know how futile this is. If the big guy took her again, he’s gone as last Sunday. We aren’t trackers, and even if we were trackers, I got the impression this big guy is that much more of one. He wants to lose us, we’re lost. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? Billy, you seen him. He wasn’t some dumb animal. That was a man. I mean, he wasn’t a
man
, but he was man-like. Point is he was smart, is what I’m saying. Even a coon could toss us off his trail, and he ain’t a coon.”

Gentry sipped the last of his noodles. “Well, I know he can be quiet. He snuck all through our camp without waking us. I think it’s safe to say we are out-gunned here. We could keep going up, or we could head back down. Only thing we can say for sure is that he’s attracted to Shelly Lynn for some reason.”

“He was after the kid?” Fletcher said.

“Yes and no,” Gentry said. “I don’t think it was intentional. Well, it’s like this. I seen this one cow lose her calf early on, but she had her milk, and she still had that maternal instinct. So she went to mothering one of the other calves. It got to where the calf preferred her over its own momma, and after a while, you couldn’t tell who the momma even was. When we pastured ’em, the calf followed the adopted momma and left his own mother to swagger on through the other gate. Even human mommas steal babies. It’s like that. You see what I’m saying?”

“Not even a little bit,” Fletcher said. “And it don’t answer my question. You want to keep heading up, or what?”

“You want to go back down? There’s a little girl lost up in them hills.”

“Yeah,” Fletch said. “
Up there
is big as all of Arkansas and Oklahoma combined. I don’t see much point in it, is what I mean to say.”

“Shelly Lynn is gone,” Billings said. “What else do you need, Fletch?”

Chapter 29

Edwin’s Return   
(Moore)

M
oore baked the catfish strips and split them between her and Arroyo. She checked his leg and the splint, gathered wood, and tried to feed Perry through his rages. She poured water in his throat even though he screamed. He sucked water, coughed, and for a moment seized up, and then fell limp and immune to her offerings of food and water. She wiped the blood from beneath his eyes and nose and from around his mouth, and replaced the gag and checked the gunshot wound Arroyo had delivered him earlier, in the upper left shoulder, a clean hole on both sides doused with iodine and roughly bandaged.

If the wound spared him, he would die of dehydration soon. It seemed like a long time to wait for the boy to pass, and it was, especially given the confinement of their camp and the lack of activity and the utter absence of camaraderie. Arroyo had fallen silent, sulking, and offered no company at all. She passed the afternoon pacing the shoreline calling out to Shelly Lynn, hopeless, but at least it passed the time. She scaled the ridge and considered whether to move the camp away from the lake, but she possessed neither the strength nor true motivation to make the necessary trips up and down the ridge carrying the two wounded and all their supplies. They would remain by the water’s edge until the others returned.

Moore sat by the fire picking the bones out of the catfish and nibbling at the meat. It was all she had to eat today. Perry’s moans had become a constant ebb and flow like the licks of the lake against the shore, but she noticed when they stopped. Arroyo had hobbled over to the boy and pointed his rifle at his head.

Arroyo said, “Tell me why I shouldn’t.”

These were the first words he had spoken in several hours, and she had no answer for him. The virus would tighten its grip until it killed the host. Perry slept quietly at present, and Moore thought if he had been thrashing and screaming and looking far less serene, Arroyo would have killed him where he lay. Instead, he lowered his rifle, limped back to his place on the log, and set about checking his rifle and organizing his bedding.

Moore picked at her catfish, a gift from the big guy, signed by the huge prints surrounding the stick where they found the fish drying by the fire. She had never cooked catfish, nor eaten it for that matter. Either the fish or her cooking made it slimy with a gritty under-taste of mud.

Darkness rested on the lake and all through the mountains around her. Smoke covered the sky, and perhaps it would remain there for days or years or for the rest of her life. Moore stabbed a piece of fish into her mouth and chuckled. Comparing the rest of her life to years was like poking the moon in the eye. It made no sense.

A shadow appeared around the fire, a lumbering beast red in the flames who Moore did not recognize. When her eyes and mind settled on the identification of the figure she said, “Did you find her?”

“No,” Edwin said. “At least not when I was there.”

Edwin stopped, winded, sucked too heavily of the campfire smoke and coughed. He twisted the axe in his hand and continued. “The others are going to keep heading up. I can’t, you know, walk like them. My foot’s still too twisted.”

“Sprains take a while to heal. Sometimes longer than a break.”

Edwin stood there longer than Moore liked, quiet, staring at her in an awkward silence until Arroyo from behind her said, “Hey, chico, you okay? Whatchu watching?”

Edwin did not acknowledge Arroyo, but stared at Moore with such intensity that she shifted in her place on the log and said, “Ed, stop it.”

“Nothing,” Edwin said. He shook his head as if clearing it, a cobweb shake with his hand to his forehead rubbing, and then he stomped past Moore and knelt by his son.

“You okay, chico?” Arroyo said. He had his rifle reassembled and held it in that ready way of a soldier, pointed downward, away from the target but with clear intent, with his finger pointed above the trigger guard.

Edwin touched his son’s head. Perry’s neck snapped back, and he coughed through the gag and moaned. Edwin held his hand there and said nothing.

“Chico, yo. You okay?” Arroyo pointed with his rifle at Edwin. “He okay?”

“Ed,” Moore said. She still held a slice of fish in her hand, and she considered giving it to Edwin, but hers was the leaner body and she was hungry. She hunched away from him and shoved the piece whole into her mouth. Still chewing the fish she said, “Are you okay? You feeling all right?” She swallowed, wiped her hands on her pants, and stepped off the distance between her and Edwin, stopping short of what the arc would be if the axe should rise off the ground.

“I can’t do it,” Edwin said. He faced Moore. “I have no energy. I can’t do any push-ups. I just want to sleep. Is that okay? Can I just sleep?”

“Whatchu talking about, chico?” Arroyo shuffled to his feet with the rifle still aimed at the ground, but ready. He favored his wounded leg and stood off-balance, almost on one foot, and his eyes darted between Edwin and Moore.

“I had orders,” Edwin said. “I’m too tired. I just want to sleep.”

Edwin seemed either unaware or uncaring of Arroyo’s stance, and he laid the axe on the ground between him and his son, crawled alongside Perry, and spooned him the way his mother had before the attack. Perry twitched, but confined by the bindings was unable to do anything more than knock his head against his father’s chest, beating deep thumps of skull-on-sternum, bone-on-bone. Edwin gripped the boy’s head and tried to make him stop, but he twisted free and slashed at him with his gagged mouth. Perry’s eyes and nose trickled blood, and in the time since Moore had cleaned him, new streaks had appeared on his cheeks and chin. He rubbed those into his father’s shirt, all of it so dirty it was hard to discern blood from filth.

When the boy finally calmed, Edwin cradled Perry’s head on his chest and wept. The sound was exhausting to hear, the throaty cough-sob of a grown man with rent soul. It relaxed Arroyo’s stance, and he sat, laid the rifle across his knees, and watched in silence with Moore.

When Edwin’s chest calmed and he fell quiet, Moore closed the few steps between them and touched the back of Edwin’s neck. She pressed the back of her hand into Edwin’s cheek, and then ran her fingers across his forehead and held them there.

His skin burned hot with fever.

“Edwin,” she said. He would not look up at her. She reached around his face, put pressure on the far cheek, and helped him lift his head toward her. “Edwin. Open your eyes.”

He was conscious, she could tell that much from the way he breathed, but he was not being cooperative. She wished she had a flashlight, or more light than the flicker of the fire. She pressed her forefinger into his eyebrow, her thumb into the cheek beneath his eye, and she parted the eyelid and said, “Edwin, look at me. Let me see your eyes.”

He wrenched free with a gentle twist of his head, winced, and opened his eyes.

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Tired. I just want to sleep.”

“You have a fever. You’re burning up.”

“Then let me sleep.” Edwin closed his eyes.

As she straightened, Moore dragged the axe away from Edwin and carried it with her to her place by the fire. She inspected it as she sat, and when Edwin’s breathing steadied, she rose, crept over to Arroyo, and leaned the axe against the log on which he sat. “His eyes are bloodshot,” she said.

“So he’s got the bug?”

She nodded.

“Should we tie him up or something?”

“If he will let us. You think he’ll let us?” She pointed at Arroyo’s broken leg and the splint there. “Think you could wrestle him down?”

“Do we have a choice, chica? I ain’t sleeping with no freak in camp. We had a pact with Sarge, said we would take out anyone who got the red-eyes. I done made one exception for the boy, being as he’s a boy and all and nobody else agrees with me, but I don’t think we can make no more exceptions. Took three grown men to hold him down, and he
still
got away, even after I shot him. You think me and you can hold down Eddy-boy if he gets wonky? Dude ain’t that big, but he’s chunky, bet he weighs near two-hundred, two-twenty. You can’t weigh more than a buck-ten, am I right?”

“One-fifteen.”

“Yeah, you too skinny and I’m busted up. You see the others coming back?”

They accepted the reality of their situation, and Arroyo said, “All right, listen. Get some paracord out of my pack over there. Maybe he’s out enough to at least tie his hands.”

Moore collected the cord, Arroyo cut it to length, and she formed a surgeon’s knot that would cinch closed and hold tight, especially given the thinness of the cord. She tested the knot on Arroyo, pulled it tight, loosed it, and with Arroyo behind her balancing on his one good leg, she slunk over to Edwin.

She crouched next to Edwin to make sure he was still asleep, and then began work with his exposed hand, the one thrown across Perry’s chest. She managed to wrap the cord around his wrist before his eyes came open. A patch of red had formed in his right eye, and a thin line of blood dripped out of his right nostril and down his chin.

Chapter 30

White Lights   
(Edwin)

E
dwin did not understand. A woman crouched over him, a pretty woman with a dirty face. She held his hand, wrapped a rope around it, snaking the cord from her hands to his. He tugged the rope, and her hands moved with it like a puppet’s, up and down as she refused to either let go or resist him. He tried to place her, because he recognized her, and if he only thought hard enough he could remember. He finally dug up the name
Moore
, that was her name, although he could not remember why she was here.

“What are you doing?” These were the words he thought, but they emerged as a jumble of syllables, “Who wunks mah hota?”

He did not understand it, and neither did she. He tried again. “Whoa to wah wander.”

“Edwin,” Moore said. She glanced behind her at a man pointing a rifle at him, and she spoke softly and emphasized each syllable. “Listen to me. Do you hear me?”

“Wah.”

“I need to tie this around your wrists. It will help you sleep. You need to be calm for me. Do you understand?”

He sat up, and the change in blood pressure drove a piercing whine into his ears. A light consumed Moore, the man behind her, and the night winced from pitch to burning white. Electricity shot through his arms and legs and up his spine. His neck snapped back as bile lurched into his throat.

He sensed violence, and when the light subsided, the woman had disappeared. The rifleman pounded Edwin’s chest as Edwin gripped the man’s throat, wrapped the cord around his neck, and pulled it tight. He bit into the man’s neck, clamped his teeth shut, and tore out a piece of flesh. The rope constricted the man’s screams into a squeal, and Edwin dragged him into the lake and held him beneath the water until he stopped thrashing.

He pressed the man onto the bottom of the lake, waded ashore, and stood over the boy. At the sight of the boy he felt an overwhelming sense of pride. He had made this creature, and he knelt and pulled at the ropes binding his wrists and feet. Edwin removed the gag, and the boy spit blood and curses on him.

Edwin screamed until the boy grew calm, and then he searched the grounds of the camp. He did not know what he was searching for until he found it, and then he realized the axe rested at the core of the primal urge welling inside him. He picked it up and used the edge to hack apart the ropes binding the boy.

Edwin led the boy up the cliff and into the burnt forest, running with a sense of freedom and flying. He felt no breaths or the beating of his heart, no fatigue or weakness, only wind and the movement of his feet.

They reached a paved road and traced the center stripe until headlights pressed down on them from the darkness. He and his son parted as a Jeep slowed between them, no doors, no roof, only the roll bars and a trailer-rack extension with bundled suitcases. A woman drove with her hand on the shifter next to a child in the front seat, while a man in the backseat lay bloodied beside a child. Edwin raised the axe, clipped the bar behind her head, and the Jeep’s clutch caught, popped, lurched, died.

The woman cranked key. The Jeep started, and Edwin embedded his axe in a suitcase as Perry sprung into the Jeep and tore at the wounded man with fists and teeth. The child in the passenger’s seat, either boy or girl and too young to tell, wailed even above the woman’s screams, and then the clutch popped again, and the Jeep bucked and tossed Perry onto the pavement with a sickening slap. Perry rolled to his feet and chased after the Jeep with Edwin until it topped a hill, turned, and the lights bled away into the darkness like the fading red of dusk.

Crossing a bridge, Edwin descended the bank, stepped into the stream and dunked his hand into the water. He lifted his hand to his mouth and pushed the water inside, but even though his mouth closed around the water, he could not will his throat to swallow. He burned with thirst, and he tilted his head back and tried to force it down, but it only gagged him, and he fell onto the shore coughing. The white light appeared again with the electricity and the metal-legged crabs gripping his spine, and when it subsided, he lay on his stomach at the edge of the stream.

The boy lay beside him, curled into a fetal ball with his feet touching the water of the stream. Blood squeezed from the boy’s eyes, clamped tight against the quivering of his facial muscles, and for a moment Edwin’s head cleared, and he remembered his son’s name. “Perry,” he said. Perry’s eyes did not open, and he did not stir. He remembered Amalie and Shelly Lynn. Edwin closed his eyes and tried to will up a memory of Arroyo and Moore, because this was important. When he felt his hands around Arroyo’s neck and his head beneath the lake water, he opened his eyes and stopped forcing the memory.

Edwin heard a howl-whimper near him. That was the best he could describe it, and the feeling was one of very-close, such that he could feel the breath and heat from the source. He rolled onto his side and saw the creator of huge footprints, the taker of children. The huge man hunched on his heels and stared at Edwin so large and daunting that there was no doubt even in his clouded mind that the man could crush Edwin’s tiny bones in his enormous hands.

They had labeled this creature many things, but seeing him this close and through eyes unclouded by reason and a brain driven by instinct alone, Edwin saw his true form, and he was beautiful. The animal eyes softened and almost appeared human as his massive hands reached out and grasped Edwin by the neck.