The Academy: Book 1 (4 page)

             
The Wolf Flu was non-existent.

             
People didn’t walk around wearing medical masks in the super market. There weren’t preachers and self proclaimed apostles and prophets at every street corner—“THE END IS COMING!” People didn’t sit on their poaches with shot guns resting in their hands to keep the looters away. And, most important to Asa, his mother’s bed wasn’t empty in the middle of the night.

             
Everything was good, and right, and the way it was supposed to be. The snow was beautiful, and Asa had all day to explore it. His mother allowed him to go into the backyard at any time he wanted, but she was wary of the forest that sat behind their back fence. Asa begged his mother to let him go alone out into the woods behind their house all morning, but she wouldn’t let him.

             
“No, it’s dangerous. What if you slip and fall and I can’t find you? What will happen then, Asa?”

             
“I won’t slip and fall.”

             
She continued to wipe dishes clean with her towel and didn’t respond.

             
“Well, why don’t you come with me?” Asa asked.

             
She considered. “Okay, we’ll go later.”

             
“How much later?”

             
“Two O’clock.”

             
It was a deal.

             
Time dragged on and Asa grew restless. He was allowed to go out into the backyard, but that was no fun. He had been out there thousands of times. He wanted to
explore,
and you couldn’t do so in a small, fenced in area that you spend most of your free time in.

             
At noon, his mother went and took a nap. “Wake me up at two and we’ll go,” she had told Asa.

             
She worked long hours at the LuckyStop down the road, and didn’t have much time off. She needed her sleep.

             
“We can’t go now? Please?”

             
“No, Asa. I told you, we’ll take a walk at two and then you can have all the time to play that you want. You can stay out for hours, if you like.”

             
“Mama, no. Let’s go now!”

             
She kissed him and said, “I love you,” before disappearing into the bedroom. The conversation was over.

             
Asa tried to find something to do, but everything seemed dull and lackluster with the snow-covered forest sitting out there. He guessed that there weren’t even footprints in the snow; not many went into those woods besides Asa.

             
Asa tried to lie down and sleep the hours away, but found himself squirming and even more eager to get outside than before.

             
Finally, he went to his bedroom closet, slipped on his jeans, his rain boots, his thick poofy red jacket, mittens, and a hat and walked outside.
I’m just going to play in the yard,
he told himself. As Asa opened the door and walked out into the yard, his mother did not stir in her sleep.

             
He went outside, shut the door behind him, and felt the chill on his face. He smiled as he looked at the trees beyond his back fence; the tops of the branches were frosted with white snow. It was the wilderness behind the back fence, a snowy tundra that only oke, Asa Palmer, the worlds most brave explorer, dared to step foot in.

             
Suddenly, the thought of going with his mother seemed dull to him. She wouldn’t want to run with him, or climb trees with him, or shout, “Avalanche!” and run away from an invisible mountain. No, she would stand there with her arms crossed and tell him to be careful. “That’s high enough, Asa, now start to come down!” It would be an awful reminder that he wasn’t an explorer and that he wasn’t the bravest man in the world; if his mom were there, he would feel like a boy with his mother; he would
be
a boy with his mother.

             
He decided that he would go out alone, and in an hour or so, he would come back and go to the forest again with his mom. In the first trip, it would be a wild, unexplored wild tundra, and in the second it would be the forest behind he and his mother’s home. Both were fun, and both he wanted to experience.

             
Asa trotted off through the snow in his backyard, running zigzags and circles to try to make the footprints look as random as possible. Then, when he thought that they wouldn’t just look like he had walked to the back fence and jumped over, he walked to the back fence and jumped over.

             
He gasped with the beauty of it all. His cheeks were red and his breath fogged out in front of him. It really
was
wild tundra in his mind.  On one side of the fence was civilized Dritt Texas where you could expect to see cars, and gas stations, and jack russell terriers barking from windows. But on
this side,
it was different. The trees went on forever and behind any of them it would be reasonable to find a polar bear, an artic wolf, or an iced over ocean where leviathan, ancient creatures swam in the dark beneath the surface. The wind blew, and a thin stream of ice crystals were streaming through the air, slipping in and out of the trees, making the place look enchanted.

             
Asa began to sprint, giggling with joy. He kept his knees high as he ran and had to lift his feet up over the snow with each step to avoid tripping and falling over. He was a hundred yards in when he halted, breathing hard, and he grew worried.

             
He looked back over his shoulder and saw that he had made the only tracks in the clean, smooth field of snow. It was undeniable now; she would know that he had gone into the forest behind the house without her permission.

             
He stood there, thinking of what to do. He looked at his roof, covered in snow, and thought that maybe, if he had thought about making tracks before he started running, he would have decided to stay in and wait until two. But, the damage was already done. She would be as mad at him if he went one hundred
yards
into the forbidden woods as if he went one hundred
miles
into them.

             
So he decided to shoot for the second option.

             
The sky overhead was growing gray, with thick clouds between Asa and the sun. The sunlight beamed into the clouds, and was broken up and divided millions of times, and then it came down and reflected off of the snow on every surface. It gave the feeling that the light was coming from everywhere.

             
Asa ran and ran and ran. He had always had good endurance, even as a child, and he loved the feeling of tired, absolute exhaustion that a person gets after pushing their body for miles. The snow slowed him down, but he loved the challenge. His legs burned with the effort and snow had wet the bottom of his jeans while some flew into his rain boots, making his feet cold.

             
Asa kept going.

             
He didn’t notice the crow perched on a branch high above his head. It was watching him; its black feathers ruffled up to make a coat in the freezing air. This crow was eleven years old, with a broken beak and a missing left eye. The whole left side of the crow’s face was scarred up; it had been badly injured one evening when a robin came back to her nest to find that the crow was eating her babies. It stood sentinel and quiet, watching Asa.

             
There was a tree about a mile away from his house that Asa always called
The Tower
in his mind. It was much taller than all of the others and had thick, strong branches that shot out on every side of the giant trunk. Asa had never dared to climb all the way to the top of The Tower before, although he thought that he could have. As you moved up, the branches grew smaller, but they were always thick enough to hold Asa. The top of the tree stood out thirty feet above everything else around it; Asa could only imagine the spectacular view that you could get from the top of The Tower. He imagined that he would be able to see for miles.

About a month previously, Asa made it about half way up The Tower previously. He stood there and the ground seemed to be forever away.

             
If I fall, I’ll die.

             
He looked up, and when he saw how much further he had to go, he gave up.
The view isn’t worth it,
he decided.

             
But that was a month ago, he had been so young then. And besides, today was about adventure! He was an explorer, don’t forget!

             
When Asa reached The Tower, he realized that he had forgotten just how tall it was. The trunk was about ten feet in diameter; the size was needed to support the massive wooden structure above it. Asa had been wrong, he decided. The Tower stood
forty
feet above all the others. Just looking at the top made him dizzy. His stomach dropped at the sight height of the massive thing.

             
He looked back behind him at the long length of footsteps and told himself to be brave.
No one has probably ever climbed to the top of this
, Asa thought.
An explorer goes places no one else is brave enough to.

             
He jumped, gripped the lowest branch that he could, swung his legs into the air, and pulled himself up. He sat on the lowest branch, panting, and realized that he was only six feet in the air. He looked up, and instead of seeming closer, the top of the tree seemed only further away.

             
It began snowing again, but Asa didn’t take note of it as he ascended the next branch.

             
He went up and up and up, his heart thudding in his chest each time he looked at the white ground that seemed to be miles below. His arms were tired from the climb and he thought that this was the highest he’d ever been. He looked up and saw that he still had twenty feet or so before he would be above the canopy.

             
It was really snowing at this point; the flakes were coming down white and thick. Asa looked at the path he had taken to get to The Tower and saw that his tracks were disappearing beneath new snow. For a moment, he considered going back, but then his mother’s voice played in his head, “That’s high enough, Asa. Come down.”

             
He smiled and thought about how he was an explorer, and how he wasn’t boring like his mom. He climbed even higher.

             
When he made it above the canopy, he didn’t take any time to take in the view; he would only do that once he reached the top. He looked up, saw that he still had so far to go, and refused to look down. He kept climbing.

             
At the top, the tree swayed in the wind. He looked up and saw that there was still ten feet of thin tree to climb, and decided that he had gone high enough. He hugged onto the cold bark and looked out onto Dritt. It was beautiful. The canopy stretched out forever. It was a sea with brown bark covered in snow for coral reefs. Beyond that, the town was covered in white and all was still. He heard a crow cawing. It sounded rasp and harsh, but Asa didn’t notice it. The houses and lawns, and idle cars and lawn mowers and the school, and the LuckyStop where his mom worked were all quiet and peaceful. He took it all in for another moment and then a strong gust of wind slapped into his back, bringing flakes of snow with it.

             
The tree branch swayed twenty feet either way. The wind was incredible, causing the wood to groan down the tree, and making the top sway so much that Asa was outside the parameter of the lower branches.  Asa held on for his life, whimpering. When the wind slowed, his heart was hammering and he decided to start climbing down. He had been gone for almost an hour now and he didn’t want his mother to wake up, worried.

             
The snow was falling even harder. The branches were slick with ice and Asa made his way slowly down, making sure he had a good grip on the branches before moving his feet.

             
When he was only forty feet above the earth, he looked up and couldn’t believe that he had been all the way to the top. He was staring up to the top of The Tower when the branch broke.

             
It snapped in the thickest part; later, Asa would think that it had to be porous from the work of termites or some other wood-eating animal. Asa was standing on the branch when it broke, and his grip slipped from bark that he was holding onto. He fell and his back slammed into the falling branch, and then he slid on the icy bark away from the tree until he was falling in thin, vacant air.

             
His stomach was dropping and as he looked down he saw that he had thirty feet to fall before he hit the ground. The snow would offer some padding, but not enough. His arms and legs flailed wildly, trying to grab onto something, anything, to slow down his dangerous speed.