Steps (19 page)

Chapter 33

On the Shore   
(Moore)

M
oore woke, sat up and searched for what had awoken her. Exhaustion draped her head, and she did not trust her feet to stand. She flipped onto her knees, knelt, and listened. The lake lapped the shore. The fire crackled, dead but for a glowing red among the ashes. The air smelled of smoldering wood and mud, scents so ingrained that she had to concentrate to smell them at all.

She pressed two fingers to the side of her neck, counted the heartbeats, swiped her nose for blood, and touched her forehead. “You’re good,” she said. “That’s not what woke you.”

Perry lay a few feet away in silence. His sleeping position had not changed since the last time she checked him. “Not that. What was it?”

Paranoia raked the inside of her head. She shook it away, jabbed the rifle into the gravel to steady her, and lifted to her feet to gain a better vantage point. The world wobbled, and she leaned on the rifle. “Easy, girl.”

The landscape huddled beneath a moonless, starless night, all of it cloaked in a thick black, with only the patter of gravel underfoot to break the silence. “Shit,” she said. Several faces emerged beyond the fire, bodiless until the leader stumbled into the embers. He kicked up a glowing red light, which coalesced the other bodies into existence.

Moore inched into the water, leaving Perry alone on the shore. “I’ll be back, little man,” she said, and she splashed the water to retain the attention of the men on the shore.

Flame licked up the leader’s leg. Blood and soot streaked his face, and he mumbled in garbled Spanish as the flame crept up his thigh, consuming an Army uniform that had already been half-charred from other fires. Burnt skin clung to his hands, and he held the remains of his fingers in the growing fire as if to warm them.

Three other soldiers stepped around him, illuminated by the candlelight flicker of the burning man. One of them paced back-and-forth as Moore waded deeper into the lake, toward the wrecked truck. He knelt, slapped the water, pressed his hand to his mouth as if to drink, coughed, vomited a black mixture of flesh and blood, and backed away from the water’s edge.

Something plunked into the water beside her. At first she thought a fish had jumped, but then another plunked, and a rock struck her in the shoulder. Other soldiers appeared. They threw rocks as the burning man sat in the fire cross-legged, letting the oxygen slip away until his chest shuddered and his head slumped forward.

Moore sucked a breath, dunked her and the rifle, and swam underwater until she reached the truck. A hailstorm of rocks rained down on her, cracked and bounced off the windshield, drummed off the hood and roof. One soldier paced the shore as if seeking a point of entry, something that did not involve getting wet, while the others slung rocks and gravel at her.

A rock struck her in the head, and for a dazed moment she thought she might sink underwater, unconscious, unbreathing. She clung to the ringing in her head, pried open the door, and slid into the cab. When her eyes cleared, she leaned out with the rifle and cleared the clip on the soldiers. Two of them fell and did not move.

The others spread out and tore through the camp. They scattered supplies, kicked the dead man in the fire, and none of them paid attention to the soldiers she had shot, nor to Perry on the blanket. They tore through the camp until a morning haze fell over the lake. They ripped through the rucksacks, the canned food, the dried rations, and water. When they found the extra rifles and shotguns, they passed them around like cannibals would a fresh skull, with reverent understanding.

Moore took cover on the far side of the truck as they unleashed upon her. She kept her head low, ducking beneath the water to keep the engine block between her and the gunfire, her eyes angled away such that the shrapnel, shards of glass and metal, would scrape the back of her head and not her eyes. The shots intensified, grew in volume and quantity, ricocheted off the water, shattered the glass and glanced off the hood of the truck. Then they slowed, and all of them stopped but the popping of a single rifle, someone taking aim, and then silence.

Moore did not risk sticking her head around the truck’s cab. She waited in the water clutching her rifle and using her senses, focusing on her hearing. They exchanged words, meaningless, and tossed the guns to the shore in a clatter.

Again, it rained rocks until one of them shrieked. They plodded down the shore, giving up the fight after perhaps three hours of effort, backs to her, forgotten as those who had fallen behind them.

She waited, and then she waited longer. Perry lay on the shore untouched and unmoving, as fine with her in the water as he would be with her crouching over him. She had no way to judge, but she guessed she waited an hour, and then waded ashore.

They had defecated on the rifles and fouled them with sand. In any case, they had separated the clips and probably tossed them into the lake, and that alone made them useless for anything more than a single-shot hunting tool. The shotguns were missing, some of the larger
plunks
she had heard, perhaps.

She knelt next to Perry and pressed a hand to his forehead. No fever. She squeezed his cheeks, counted to five, released, and noted a fading redness. She peeled back an eye, still red but less red, and she swiveled her head and checked the shore, nothing there and nothing on the ridge.

She began to sing. The words came out before she thought them in that strange manner she had grown accustomed to these past days. She spoke the words, heard the words, and then in the end understood the words, backward from what it should be. She recognized this song, because she had sung it several times already for Perry. She thought she should remember the words, but with each singing she forgot not only the words but the tune, and retained only their arcane meaning.

When she finished, Moore checked behind her on the shore. She would have to move. They would come back or more would come. She needed to find Gentry, who she believed was up on the mountain. She sensed him the way a mother senses a child growing inside her belly, a seed inside her recently planted, taking root to grow into something inconceivable if judged by its size alone.

She dragged Perry down the path she had cut for him along the shore, and into the water knee-deep. She kissed his forehead, pinched his nose, and clamped a palm over his mouth. She dunked him, held as the song came to her, a short song of healing, a powerful pitch of jagged notes that in the end left her sobbing. With the last of her strength, she pulled him ashore, propped his head on her leg, and willed him to heal as the sobs pulsed through her like angry spasms.

Chapter 34

My Name Is   
(Billings)

B
illings’ head swam through dark waters, oil aflame with itself, a red-black haze that in the mornings bled into a bright white. Throughout the day they blazed red, and in the evening they doused themselves into the ever-dark of complete, utter, terrifying black, and he swam through anyway,
Damn the black!
These were his thoughts in the dark, and he batted them away, if he could only remember his name.

By God in Heaven and by all things Holy I will remember my name!

Billings fell not to his stomach but to his hands in front of him. His legs and one leg not a leg but something metal shot out behind him. A glance down. The missing leg was still missing, even though he could feel it enough to wiggle his toes, and the ground rose up to kiss him, pushed away, kissed him, pushed away. He screamed, not speaking or whispering but a ragged, deafening scream, his vocal cords working of their own accord through three syllables.

“One! More! Mile! One! More! Mile!”

Black arms the color of peanut butter, Peanut Butter because that’s what the others called him, those blacker than him and the whites among them and the Mexicans and the Asians and all of them, even the coach and the teachers,
My name is not Peanut Butter!
He dropped and yelled his syllables, and
By God I will remember my name!

Henry!

“One! More! Mile!” he screamed.

Others around him screamed the three words, white-gray in the light, the color of Grams because she smoked so much. Not so much white as gray like Grams, especially in the coffin, but with too much makeup. He placed an M&M in her hand because that’s what she always gave the grandkids. He gave one to her in the afterlife, and she took it with her, and
My name is not Butter!

My name is Henry!

“One! More! Mile!”

They screamed with him, the white ones, the huge one and the small one, and they ran through their push-ups with him, and he screamed, “My name is not Peanut Butter!”

“Billings!” the small one said.

“Hank!” the large one said.

They stood amid a flash of light, and his hands were bloody not from the blood of his blood, but the blood of another. There were three of them, and he cut their throats, and tossed them into river. These were good things to do, good ones to kill. A head snapped beside him. An explosion took his leg, his face, his arm, took the man next to him, not a man but a woman, a driver, a woman for,
God help me not a woman. So pretty, and we were talking when the world blew up and blew me apart, blew her apart, and she’s gone and my leg is gone, and how can I forget my leg when I cannot remember her name?

Shelly Lynn. Not her name. Another’s name. Her name is not here anymore, and then the large man shook him and poured water over his head, and when he breathed again he screamed. “One! More! Mile!”

Billings batted it away like flies, and like flies the thoughts reformed and buzzed. He batted and fought them with more push-ups. The ground pushed away from him, kissed him, pushed away. Night came, and he stared up at the smoke-blackened sky from his back. Rocks pressed hard into his spine, like bones from the earth, ribs from Adam biting into him, and the giant man not the large man but the giant man, the one with slitted eyes and saber-teeth and lips that could peel flesh from bone.

The big-guy grasped his head like a man would a softball, powerful, lifting him, his breath no longer coming through his mouth into his lungs, and he said to the giant, “One more mile.”

He spoke it slow, the way a man would take steps after a stormy sail, careful lest he fall, and the giant stared at him. He waited for the twist, the shake, the snap deep enough he would never feel it, but the big-guy placed his feet on the ground. Billings remembered the name
Fletcher.
He turned to his large friend, not the giant, on his side beside him in the dark beside the smallest of them. The small one was kicker, the one on the football team who never played but for the kicks and scored points, and once made a tackle that knocked out the punt-receiver. His name was not Peanut Butter, and he never called him Peanut Butter, he called him Billings, and his name was Billings!

Hank Billings! Henry Billings!
After the baseball player, after his father’s father, after all of them, Hank not Henry but Hank, and not Peanut Butter.

“Hey Hot Stuff,” she had said, the driver, the soldier so pretty she became comical in her Kevlar and blackened cheeks. Then she blew apart, and his leg disappeared, and what the hell was her name?

Jessica.

The big-guy lifted the smaller one, Gentry, the kicker, and he lifted the largest of them, Fletcher, and they all stood gawking at the giant. The giant spoke in a long, single note, not a howl but a word, and the word was God.

His thoughts buzzed. Billings swatted them, and they parted like a matted bush, wet and thick. He saw beyond them, and behind the man stood the woman, naked with ruined breasts, beautiful such that he could not stare at her for longer than a moment, beyond comprehension, and how had he not noticed before how beautiful she was?

The stream gurgled beside him. His throat burned from thirst. He knelt, pressed his mouth into the stream. He sucked in a gasp of water, not a drink but a breath, and when it touched his throat he felt the seizure begin. He batted it away, bugs, bugs, bugs, nothing but bugs, and he forced the water through his throat, and
My name is Hank Billings.

Gentry knelt beside him, hand on his shoulder. The man had followed him and would follow him forever. Then the large man, not the giant, Fletcher, knelt, too, and the three of them drank from the river.

When they raised their heads, they spoke the word of the Giant, and the word was God.

Chapter 35

Baby Bird   
(Gentry)

G
entry knelt in the water and drank. Sweat covered him and his body shook, but his thoughts cleared as he splashed water into his mouth and over his face. The big guy stood beside his woman as she sang of mercy, chance, and how mercy did not always chance upon those who most needed it. She cradled a girl to her shoulder, Shelly Lynn, blonde hair splayed down her back. The woman’s fingers twirled through the strands like the plucking of a harp.

Fletcher appeared on the other side of Billings, and Gentry had not seen them before, only the giant man, the woman, and Shelly Lynn. This was a corner-of-the-eye sensation, an almost-image that when he looked full upon it, he saw the shapes of the two men where before there had been nothing but rage and impulse. Gentry shook his head, doused it with water, drank until it ran smooth against the rocks of his throat, and stood.

He called each by their name, and they repeated his, re-introducing themselves after a long hiatus from sanity, reinforcing their own perceptions of themselves. They clapped shoulders in a three-man circle and placed their foreheads together.

Billings said, “There’s our mile, boys. You done good, boys, you done good, and my steel toe ain’t got no ass to dig.”

He spoke like Sarge, confident and clear, but his eyes were the unshifting red of the damned. The thought occurred to Gentry that he might be hallucinating this, that his mind played tricks of clarity, and he, Fletcher, and Billings were at present feasting on a young girl. Then a shivering pleasure overtook him, because the damned are forever deluded by their own ignorance. They flail and revel in their suffering, never aware of their damnation. He knew full well his own suffering, and with that knowledge must come absolution and sanity.

“Are we good?” Gentry said.

“Alive is good,” Billings said. Blood trickled from his nose and the corners of his eyes.

Gentry let go, fell into the river, and drank. Fletcher and Billings waded in beside him, lowered their heads and rubbed water across their faces, smearing the blood into a pinkish glaze. Gentry gripped each of their shoulders and squeezed. He wanted to cement the reality of the moment, as if with a constant pinching he would confirm his consciousness and sanity. “We made it through the red hell.”

“But for how many days?” Billing asked. “How long were we under?”

“Too many,” Fletcher said.

“But we’re done now, boys,” Billings said. “We made it, and ain’t nothing can stop us. Easy sailing here on out.”

“Sure,” Gentry said. “With torn sails and rocky shores.”

“And a hole in the hull,” Fletcher said. “Nothing to eat but rotten apples filled with rotten worms.”

“Yep,” Billings said. “Not even toilet paper. Even then, it’s easy sailing. Well there you go.” Billings pointed ashore at Shelly Lynn in the woman’s arms.

The woman swayed her as Shelly Lynn seized up. Her body stiffened. Her arms locked and her hands splayed. Gentry had not noticed it before, none of them had, but Shelly Lynn was as infected as the rest of them, and when her face spun toward them, Gentry saw it covered in that familiar red smear.

The woman cradled Shelly Lynn’s head against her chest. Her breasts were a crisscross of scars, what Gentry imagined a mastectomy must look like. She pressed Shelly Lynn into the ruins as if to nurse, and she sang a lullaby and kissed her forehead.

Gentry waded ashore with the others, and he stood beside the woman as the seizure relaxed its grip on Shelly Lynn. The girl’s arms dropped and her head rested against the woman’s breast in what appeared to be a deep and well-needed rest. He allowed his thoughts to drift toward Kelsey, and they swirled down a hole into which he almost found himself swallowed and consumed.
Was that how she looked?
He pondered this as he gazed at Shelly Lynn, and then he pivoted with the others and strode into the woods behind the giant man.

There was no question as to their purpose, only the breaking of limbs and the dragging of them back to camp for a fire, a shelter, a small bed for Shelly Lynn and the woman. The man waded into the river and returned with fish in his hands, tossed them ashore, waded in and returned with more. It seemed like a bear on a trout run, the quiet spinning of nature’s wheels as life cycled through life.

“Is that what this is?” Gentry said. Night was beginning to fall, and Fletcher had been roasting the fish while he and Billings sat ashore and observed the man’s fluid motions in the stream. He spoke to Billings quietly, and Billings only shrugged.

Gentry said. “I mean, this whole thing. All this. Is it just nature’s wheels? Are we those fish, now?”

“Are we on the spit, or are they?” Billings thumbed over his shoulder at Fletcher. “Because if we’re not over the fire, I’m guessing we’re not the fish. You see what I mean?”

“I feel like we’re over the fire, though. Slow-cooking, maybe, but still over the fire. We can’t go home. And we can’t stay here.”

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Either one. Why not go home? Why not stay here?”

“Home’s gone. And we do what, if we stay here?”

“You know how I made it through the Marines? How I survived the loss of my leg and Jessy? Hell, you know how I got through
high school
? I live in the moment. I don’t mean I observe the moment, I mean I live in it. I live here. Right now. I worry about the future, sure, we all do. You need a plan, and a backup plan, and a fallback plan, but at some point you need to stop planning and start moving. I said I’d pull you all through this, didn’t I? You’re here. I’m here. Fletch is here. Somehow we beat our red hell. Somehow we found Shelly Lynn. Man, things just work out, or they don’t. You have to learn to take them both ways and move along.
FIDO
, bro. Fuck it, drive on.”

After dark, they shared the fish by the fire, and the woman stalked off into the woods and returned with a handful of leaves. Gentry couldn’t say what they were, but when she spread them on the fire, the smoke turned sweet and soothing to his throat. He and the others had only been able to eat a little of the fish, so peeled were their throats, but after a few minutes with his head above the fumes, he picked apart the rest of his fish, and at the urging of the woman, even ate the skin and the crisped remains of the tail and fins.

They slept while the man paced the camp, and Gentry could not remember a time when he felt more secure. Perhaps when he was a child, when his father seemed a giant, when the thump of his boots shook the house like the hooves of a bull. This wild man seeped raw power, perfect, and Gentry slept easily, knowing nothing in this forest could harm them.

He woke to the smell of fresh leaves on the fire. Dawn had begun to peek through the trees. The fire had been recently tended, but he could see no sign of the man or the woman. He rolled onto his elbow so he could see inside the shelter, and found Shelly Lynn on her pallet. Beside her head was a stack of blackberries on a bed of what looked like the same leaves the woman had thrown on the fire. Gentry nudged the others awake, and they spent the morning caring for Shelly Lynn as best they could, eating the berries, and waiting.

Billings took to humming when Shelly Lynn dropped into her spasms. “What’s the daddy call her?” he asked. “The nickname. Tweety Bird or something.”

“Baby Bird.” Gentry and Fletcher said it at the same time.

“There you go,” Billings said. He hovered over the girl and whispered, “One more mile, Baby Bird, one more mile.” Then he hummed. To Gentry it sounded like a poor rendition of the lullaby the woman had sung.

Around midday, they agreed the man and woman would not return, or if they did, they would have no trouble finding out where Shelly Lynn had gone.

“Let’s go while our bellies are full and our heads are clear,” Billings said. “Keep to the stream, and we can’t be more than what, a day’s hike at best?”

“About that,” Gentry said. It was hard to tell how far they were from Moore and their base camp, but a day’s hike would not be a bad guess. “We can hike at night if we need to. Just keep to the stream.”

Billings hefted the girl, whispered his words, and said, “We’ll get you back to your daddy, Baby Bird. Everything’ll be all right.” As they marched, he hummed his likeness of the woman’s song.