Steps (7 page)

“Yeah,” Edwin answered. Then he stopped because the Tahoe was gone. An emptiness hung over the driveway where it had been parked, the gravel beneath it protected from the rains, a shadow of the vehicle cut into the dirt around where the tires had parted the runoff. It seemed unnatural, as if the cabin itself had hopped up and moved down the hill a ways. Despite the nonsensical nature of the gesture, Edwin peered into the cabin and strained his ears, disbelieving that Amalie and the children could not be inside or on the porch, or maybe out back at the water faucet. He heard nothing, not even engine noise from the Tahoe.

A sudden burst of acceptance spread through him, and Edwin sprinted down the hill. He ran past Dale’s ashes, ignored the charred skulls, and wheeled down the driveway toward Dale’s truck, scanning the ground for Amalie’s tracks.

“Amalie!” Edwin screamed. The soldiers, his new buddies, clomped behind him in unquestioning unison. He led them past Dale’s truck and around the barricade he had set up in the driveway. “She drove right through it.” He stopped in the road and put one hand to his mouth. “Amalie!”

“That your wife?” Sarge asked.

“Yeah. Shit. She’s gone.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean she’s gone. She took the Tahoe and she’s gone.”

“Four-wheel drive?”

“No. With street tires.”

“She won’t make it.”

“I know.”

Chapter 13

Down the Mountain   
(Perry)

P
erry rode in the backseat with his sister while his mother drove. He sat on the passenger’s side, facing the cliff no more than an arm’s length away from him. One twist of the wheel and they would crash down a steep face of rock and underbrush and scraggly trees.

He didn’t remember it being this steep when they drove up the mountain. Maybe it was because his father had held the Tahoe farther away from the edge. Maybe it was because he had faced the other side, staring up the mountain rather than down. In any case, there had not been ruts before, nor had there been rocks and debris tossed into the road as if to herd them toward the edge.

His mother hunched over the wheel like an old sailor at the helm. Beside him in the middle seat, Shelly Lynn sat with her hands folded in her lap, staring forward. Her face flushed red where she had been crying. She had only stopped crying when their mother promised their father was not far behind. Every few minutes, Shelly Lynn glanced behind them and faced forward again.

“Mommy,” Shelly Lynn said.

“Shh, Baby, I’m driving.”

“I scared.”

“Don’t be. We’ll be safe soon, okay.”

“When is Daddy coming?”

“He’s right behind us, Baby. Let me concentrate.”

His mother had turned on the radio at first, searched through the stations, FM, AM, satellite, and found each station as silent and empty as a clear blue sky. For those first few minutes, they sat in front of the cabin with the engine idling. Then she said, “Buckle up,” and played songs stored in the radio’s memory, quietly, the words hardly audible, as she backed through the pile of ashes and swung toward the road.

They edged past Dale’s truck and spent the next few seconds in the harrowing task of a controlled skid as they angled out of the driveway and onto the road. After that, the Tahoe drifted at a steady, controlled downward slide. It reminded Perry of someone snow skiing as they cut back-and-forth with little twists of the front tires.

“How will Daddy follow us?” Shelly Lynn asked.

“He has that other truck, Baby. Or we’ll send someone back for him.”

They bounced along at the pace of a slow stroll. The shocks creaked in betrayal, and the undercarriage scraped along with such force that Perry expected pieces of the vehicle would be visible in the road behind them.

With each glance backward, he saw Jake Lincoln’s head as it snapped and exploded. He peered into to the woods as they drove, quietly searching for the boy who had run. He found nothing but trees, mud, rocks, and the occasional flit of a bird or squirrel in the limbs.

“Do you think they’re right, Mom?” Perry asked.

“Who?”

“The man. The Lincolns. About it being not good down there.”

“It’s fine.”

“Aren’t we at war?”

“It’s not war, Perry. It’s martial law. That’s different.”

“He said there would be roadblocks with soldiers.”

“I hope so. We can get help and send back for your father. Aren’t you hungry?”

The slope of the mountain on this side stretched nearly straight-down, a scraggly mix of rocks and underbrush. “Yeah. I’m pretty hungry.”

“I hungry, too, Momma,” Shelly Lynn said. “When can we stop and eat?”

“I don’t know. Now you two hush up and let me drive.”

The road curved, and Perry’s mother cranked the wheel as she cut through the bend. For a moment the Tahoe stopped and the tires spun. His mother put the vehicle in reverse, forward, and managed to rock it loose with a whining of the rear tires and a clanking of gears.

“See,” she said, when they were going again. “Not so bad. We can make it.”

“What about that other boy, Mom?” Perry said.

“None of that should have happened. Your father should have listened to me and let you come in the house rather than stand on the porch during a shootout. But he never listens to me, and look where we are.”

“We didn’t know it was a shootout.”

“I don’t like guns, Perry. Now you see why.”

“They would have killed us if we didn’t have guns, Mom.”

“That’s enough. I said no guns, your father didn’t listen, and we sure are in a fine mess, aren’t we. Now let me concentrate.”

Perry glimpsed something large racing through the woods. It glided over the uneven terrain with a light-footed grace that denied the bulk of it. At first he registered a bear, but it stood upright, and bears run on all-fours.

“Mom, what’s that?” he said.

“What’s what?”

“That. There’s something in the woods.”

His mother glanced up and gasped. Her foot slid off the brake. Her hands followed her eyes to the left as the front tire caught in a rut, nose-first, and ground them to a sharp halt. The rear of the Tahoe spun around until they were cock-eyed in the road. Perry’s mother cranked at the steering wheel against the rut. She stood in her seat and pressed the brake, but the road was slick and wet and steep, and all her efforts were against the force of gravity and the Tahoe’s downward momentum. The tire behind Perry slipped over the edge, and the front of the Tahoe lifted up. The items in the dash console fell from the front seat to the back. The slapping of limbs and underbrush came next, followed by the rending of shocks. The edge of the road sped away from them. The rear slammed into a tree, spun the Tahoe sideways, and the sky changed to mud and pounded the roof.

Airbags exploded out of the dash and steering wheel. Metal screamed so loud that any human sounds were muffled. Glass shattered, and Perry’s head banged into something hard and metallic. He saw red. It struck again, and red bled to black.

When he opened his eyes, the world had stopped and inverted itself. The seatbelt held him cinched in place, upside-down beside his sister. From the more protected middle seat, she screamed and fought against the seatbelt. His mother dangled in the front seat unconscious, bound by her seatbelt, her face and the airbag bloodied.

The Tahoe shook as something thumped against it. The door on Shelly Lynn’s side pried open and ripped off the hinges. A face appeared with thin Asian eyes, light-brown skin, a wide flat nose, heavily bearded with blond hair pulled into a tight braid, a collage of humanity, impossible to classify into a single race. He reached into the Tahoe and ripped Shelly Lynn’s car seat free from its anchors as easily as a man would pluck a weed.

Chapter 14

Mountain Daughter   
(Man)

W
oman did not glance up as Man jogged into camp. She must have heard the child crying in his arms, but she remained with her back to him and diverted her eyes as he neared. She bent to her task, a piece of hide she was stitching together for winter.

He placed the child in her seat near the fire and set about unbuckling her. His fingers were too large for the small buttons. He fumbled at them for a while, grew frustrated, gently tore the straps in two, and lifted the child to his full height.

The child sobbed in his arms. He said her name, “
Shelly Lynn
” but she did not understand the language because his tongue was older than all the generations before this child. He spoke her name again, trying to form the syllables until she seemed to understand. Her sobs diminished into halting snorts as she stared at him.

Satisfied that he had found the right words, Man said, “
Shelly Lynn,
” over and over, and he rocked her as he would an infant. She felt tiny in his arms, and he recalled others with a deep sense of longing that forced him to his knees. He adjusted the child and cradled her as he sat, and after a while she said, “Sully,” and touched his beard.

Man said her name and touched her forehead. He slid a finger through her hair and above her ear. She possessed Woman’s round eyes and smooth skin, her soft mouth, flat teeth, and delicate fingers.

He had been so absorbed that he did not hear Woman until she lowered herself beside him and slid a piece of dried meat toward the child.

“Shelly Lynn,” Woman said. The words formed easily in her mouth, so like the child’s, fragile, unlike his own. The child reached for the meat, smelled it, and handed it back.

She began crying again and Woman stood, spun away from them and said, “This is more than I can bear. I cannot watch as my children are taken from me. Why did you do this?”

“Would you have me leave her?”

Woman fell quiet, and it was not until the child stopped crying that she said, “No.”

“Then what would you have me do? Say, and it will be so.”

“I do not know.”

Woman wandered away from him, into the woods toward the stream. Man waited for so long and in such quiet that the child fell asleep in his arms. She twitched as she dreamed.

Woman emerged from the trees carrying two river stones, one black, one white, each the size of Man’s fist, a considerable weight for Woman’s tiny hands. She placed the stones on the ground in front of Man, sat, and whispered, “Let the child decide. For the light she shall drink of me. For the dark she shall perish. For either she returns, because she cannot remain here.”

They waited with the absolute and unwavering patience of things eternal. When the child woke, the day had dimmed to dusk, and the sky burned orange and brilliant.

“Shelly Lynn,” Woman said. They had no other words for her, and Woman pointed at the two river stones, one and the other, and motioned between them.

The child stared at Man without shame. She twisted toward Woman and bore into her, and her muscles relaxed when Woman’s mouth drew into a small smile.

Woman motioned again, and Shelly Lynn showed favor to the white stone by rubbing it.

“So it is. Let her come to me.” Woman held her hands toward the child and waited until Shelly Lynn moved from Man’s lap to hers.

“You are hurt,” Woman said. She touched Shelly Lynn’s lip where it bled. Though the child’s teeth were cut, Woman exposed a breast and motioned for her to suckle.

The child’s brow creased, and she rubbed her eyes as she tried to comprehend what Woman meant. “Take of me, child, and know the Light.”

Woman cradled Shelly Lynn and held her to her breast. After a moment she drank. The sky surrendered to night as they were joined, and when she finished, Shelly Lynn stood, wiped her mouth, and worked her jaw back-and-forth.

“You are well,” Woman said. “The darkness has left you.”

Woman stood, covered herself, and said, “Return her and bring no more to me. I cannot bear it. It is not enough to save the one if I cannot save the many. Go.”

Lifting Shelly Lynn, Man ran through the trees until he found the wrecked vehicle, empty, and he bounded up the slope to the road. A voice rose from the trees, a man calling “Shelly Lynn,” between long aches of silence.

He heard others in the distance, but this one was close. He placed Shelly Lynn on the ground, knelt, and stroked the back of his knuckles against her cheek. Fear had not left her with the darkness, and her cheeks glistened from a never-ending flow of tears.

Man threw his head back and roared. The note tore through the silence of the mountain, and Shelly Lynn wailed at his feet and curled herself into a protective ball. He breathed, roared a second time, and as the men ran hollering toward them, Man glided into the darkness and left the child to her screams.

Chapter 15

Perry’s CMFO   
(Gentry)

T
he hairs on his neck prickled. Gentry held his breath, squatted, and scanned the trees. There was no movement, only the girl in the road, curled into a ball and sobbing, still unaware of him. He held his rifle in the ready-down position, stepped into the road on bent knees beneath a bent back, crouching from something he could neither see nor explain.

As he neared the girl, he knelt and touched a massive footprint beside his and many other boots. Gentry raised his head and inspected the skid-marks leading over the edge of the road. He could not see it now, but down there a ways lay the wreckage of the Tahoe. He could smell the remnants of gas, upturned soil, and burnt brakes.

The mud was pressed flat where they had all scrambled to climb down the slope They had spent long minutes prying Edwin’s wife and son out of the vehicle, careful not to dislodge it and send it skidding farther down the mountainside. It had wedged between a pair of conjoined pines emerging like wooden fingers split into a victory-sign
V.

The wife had been unconscious, but the boy yammered on about a Bigfoot that had taken his sister. Nobody laughed, but nobody believed him until Edwin showed them the imprinted proof of that hillbilly myth, that by God in Heaven and Hail the Almighty, yes there is something roaming about in these here woods.
Just look at that footprint if you don’t believe me.

For lack of a better term, and as a slight jest, they had nicknamed it Bigfoot, and although at the time it sounded comical and trite, touching the huge print, alone with the girl crying, awakened something primal and ancient within him. It was the difference between standing in a petrified dinosaur footprint, and standing in one freshly pressed into the mud, the beast’s scent lingering in the air with the echo of its wild call. The little voice within him, the doubter, the disbeliever, the heckler, fell silent.

A hand on his shoulder startled him. Gentry straightened and internally reprimanded himself for taking too much of his attention from the girl and his surroundings. They called it Situational Awareness, and he had fallen into a trance as he knelt.

“She okay?” Billings said.

“Dunno.” He had almost forgotten about the girl, and how could that happen? She was the whole point of this search.
But look at that print.
He sucked a breath to clear his head, and then hitched his rifle to his chest. He swept his eyes across the woods, and when he found the same nothing as before, he scooted next to her, put a hand on her back and said, “Hey, girl, you okay? Shelly Lynn, right?”

She mumbled, still curled with her hands to her mouth. He checked for injuries and said, “Looks all right to me.”

Gentry unslung his rifle and handed it to Billings. He lifted the girl and carried her at a slight trot up the hill. She was just about as light as the rifle, and he made the same time as Billings with his artificial leg. Riggs and Arroyo met them as they neared the cabin, and the men fanned out around Gentry in a protective ring.

The man, Edwin, had been down the mountainside circling the wrecked vehicle in a wide, spiraling radius. Gentry heard Edwin long before he saw him, and then he emerged from the trees winded, drenched in sweat, unshaven and unbathed for what must have been weeks, now. Edwin laid the shotgun across his knees as he caught his breath. He offered a thumbs-up to Gentry, smiled, and said, “Thank you,” over and over between long slugs of air.

They strode with Edwin in tow, and when he found enough strength, he touched Gentry’s arm, said, “Thank you,” and reached for Shelly Lynn. Gentry exchanged the girl for Edwin’s shotgun, and then fell into the rear with Billings.

Fletcher stood in front of the cabin, and he waved at them and said, “You find her?”

“Naw, chico, you’re dreaming,” Arroyo said. “Go back to sleep.”

Fletcher flipped him off and kissed his middle finger, and then ushered them up the porch. Edwin stepped inside, but Gentry stopped with the others to listen to Fletcher. “Goetsch is out back taking a lap.” Fletcher thumbed the cabin. “And—”

“Where’s Sarge?” Arroyo asked.

“I’m getting to it, Señor Patience. Sarge went down the hill, said he wanted to kill two birds with one stone. He’s searching for the girl, but I think really he wants to recon Mayberry. Said he might not be back until morning.”

Gentry followed Fletcher through the door and into the living area. The mother, Amalie, tried to stand, but the left half of her body had been compromised by the crash. She fell to the couch, put a hand to her mouth and quietly sobbed as Edwin sat beside her with Shelly Lynn. She did not speak, but stared at the girl as if she had dropped from the sky. Gentry figured in some way, she had.

“Hey, Baby Bird,” Edwin said. “Are you hungry?”

Shelly Lynn lifted her head. “No, Daddy. I not hungry.”

Billings hit Gentry on the shoulder and said, “Come on, boys. Give ’em some room.”

Billings and Gentry moved through the kitchen to the back door while the others exited through the front and fanned out around the cabin. They had agreed on a two-man post, and for the next two hours it belonged to Fletcher and Goetsch.

Gentry gripped the porch railing and listened. The same evening song played here as back home, full of crickets, katydids, quiet chirps and whistles and the rustling of leaves, even though the air seemed as still as a glass of water.

“Whatchu doing out here?” Billings said.

Gentry spun and was startled to see the boy, Perry, sitting in a rocking chair with his knees pulled up to his chin. He had not noticed the boy’s absence in the cabin. None of them had.

“Hey,” Billings said. He poked Perry. “You okay, bro?”

When it became clear the boy did not want to speak, Billings said, “Okay, then. Mind if we join you?”

He motioned to the chairs flanking the boy, and Gentry dropped into one while Billings lowered into the other and leaned forward on his leg.

They sat in silence and watched Goetsch pace along the edge of the trees. The woods beyond the cabin were pitch black, and but for Billings’ night scope attachment, none of them had eyes for it. Gentry rocked as they sat, and after a while the boy said, “You killed those people?”

“The ones up the hill?” Billings said.

“Yeah.”

Billings eyed Gentry, but all Gentry could do was shrug and nod to Billings to continue, which he did. “That’s affirmative, my brother. They bugged out. You want to hear what happened?”

Perry’s head nodded between his pulled-up knees, and he said, “Yeah. I think I need to know. Dad says I need to be ready.”

“How old are you?”

“Almost thirteen.”

“Well, I guess that’s old enough,” Billings said. “Okay. Not much to it. When we got near the cabin, one of ’em, a middle-aged male, he come out with a shotgun and starts shooting. He didn’t ask or nothing, just went to shucking and bucking, and we returned fire. He stood up for a while, but after a wallop to the head he went down like a empty sack. There were some others, too.”

Billings was quiet after that, and the boy said, “Dad mentioned a woman in the woods up there.”

“Yeah,” Billings said.

“What about her?”

“She went down, too.”

“Did she shoot at you?”

“No.”

“Did she have a gun, or a knife or something?”

“No. What’d she have, Genny?”

“A stick,” Gentry said. At first, she’d also been carrying the remains of a head, the front of her almost naked and smeared with blood. She spewed gibberish and charged through their ranks in a herky-jerky manner, as if every few seconds something lit up her nervous system. She swung the stick at them, and for a moment none of them fired because you could see how pretty she used to be, and there was something awe-inspiring about a beautiful, red-streaked, half-naked girl carrying a human head. Arroyo had been the one who knocked her down and kicked away the head. She swung the stick at him and must have gained enough sense to retreat, because when she found her feet, she bolted down the hill. For a few seconds they did nothing but watch, and then Sarge pointed at her and made a circle in the air.

Perry raised his eyes and stared at Gentry.

Gentry’s face began to burn, and even though it did nothing for clarity, because how could you fully explain what happened, he added, “It was a stick like you might use for hiking. Or a cane maybe. About as big as your wrist.” He made an
O
with his thumb and index finger.

After a few seconds, Perry’s bottom lip puckered out, and his head nodded in what seemed like an understanding, or an approval or disapproval. In any case, the boy passed some sort of judgment, and Gentry felt the weight of the verdict reach into his stomach and spread its fingers. “Were there others?” Perry asked.

“Yeah,” Gentry said. “There was a boy about your age in the yard. Two more adults upstairs. But all them were already dead.”

“How were they dead? Were they sick?”

“Maybe. I dunno.” Gentry shot a glance at Billings, but Billings only shrugged and gave him a give-a-shit face. The girl had been carrying the rest of the boy’s head. “We believe the girl and man killed ’em.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Don’t know,” Gentry said, “That bug makes people crazy. You understand what delusional is? Psychotic? Paranoid schitzo? It’s when you think you see things that aren’t there, like a nightmare. Them people are dangerous not just because they caught the bug, but because their head is gone, too. You see what I’m saying?”

“Yeah,” Perry said. “My dad tell you I shot a boy?”

In the far chair, Billings’ face softened, and he rubbed the knee brace of his aluminum leg. Perry stared outward, and Gentry searched the woods with him, all three of them waiting in the silence of the confession. It was like watching leaves settle after a gust of wind.

“One boy got away,” Perry said.

“How old was he?” Billings asked. He tinked his knuckles against his leg.

“About my age.”

“White boy? Kinda redneck-looking?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn,” Billings said.

That last curse snapped an understanding in Gentry, but not before he said, “I don’t think he made it very far.”

“What do you mean?” Perry asked.

Billings swept a hand at Gentry, motioning him that he had already messed up and might as well kill off any speculation. Gentry should have kept his mouth shut, but he was exhausted and somewhat in shock himself. He thought about what to share and what to bury, but in the end he decided to tell it all.

“We have a BC near the main road, Mayberry. We’re in Arkansas, right?”

“You don’t know where you are?” Perry asked.

“We’re enlisted. All our intel is
DSS
That’s Diddly Squat Shit.”

“Yeah, you’re in Arkansas. What’s a
BC
?”

“Burial Camp. Base Camp, actually, but it was more of a Burial Camp. A few weeks ago, they crammed us into buses with painted windows and a tarp blocking the front cabin. Probably thought it would be too demoralizing for us to see outside. But you could hear the rain pounding the roof, guns going off from time to time, and every once in a while you could tell the driver was threading his way through something real slow. It was a complete blackout for about twelve hours. Didn’t even let us out when they refueled, except to extract certain people and bring on new ones. Hitting bases along the way, I suppose, picking up the ones they didn’t want on the front lines, dropping off the ones they did. We were pissing in our canteens, and this one guy crapped his pants and had some other guy haul it off the bus with him. When they finally put it in park and pulled away that tarp, we started erecting tents and digging holes. It was muddy work, but we dug through the water, poured bodies into the hole, and filled it up again. When the rain stopped, the smell was downright physical. It was enough to knock you down. But like all things, you get used to it, and for a while it was near routine.

“Then this boy broke into our camp. Into our tent, to be exact. Could have been the same one as yours, I dunno. Doesn’t matter, because once you’re exposed, even airborne, they put you in quarantine. Either it’s your home or a Q-zone. For us it would have been, where, Billings, Leavenworth?”

“Probably,” Billings said. “The
DB
’s a good guess, but who the hell knows. May have thrown us in the pit with the rest of ’em.”

“So we ran. Good or bad, we split.”

There was that silence again while Gentry watched the boy’s wheels spin, and then Perry said, “So it’s my fault you got kicked out of your camp.”

“What? No,” Gentry said. Billings echoed the words on the other side of the boy.

“If I had shot him—”

“Stop it,” Billings said. He stood and lifted the pants on his left leg and pointed to the metal prosthetic. “Stop it right there, little man. If I had been in another Humvee, I’d still have my dancing shoes. If if if. Shut up about ifs. Ifs are deep dark and dirty water, and they’ll drown you good.”

Billings laid his rifle on the deck, knelt in front of Perry, gripped the boy by the chin, and forced him to face him. “Look at me. Look at my face. Don’t mess around with the What-If Monster. He’ll eat you alive and burp you up screaming and gobble you back down for all eternity. Stop it.”

Perry’s cheeks had glistened, and Billings said, “Don’t you cry about it, neither. Your old man’s right about something. You got to be ready. Cry for your losses, but don’t you cry about those ifs. You did your best in a bad situation, and right or wrong, you acted. Am I right? You didn’t freeze up, and you didn’t panic and run. You acted. That’s more than most folks can say, because most folks are bunnies who freeze at the first sign of trouble. Bunnies get ate. And you ain’t no bunny, my brother. No regrets. Say it.”

After a moment, Perry said, “No regrets.”

“No regrets,” Billings said. “You copy?”

“Yeah.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Billings said. “You address me like that. I just became your
CMFO
. You know what that is?”

“No.”

“Sir, no, sir. Say it like that.”

“Sir, no, sir.”