The Last Child (7 page)

Blue jeans. Boots. Thick arms. Johnny saw all of that as the older kids circled to the front of the truck. He’d seen them around. They were high school kids. Seventeen, eighteen years old. Grown men, or close to it. One had a pint of bourbon in his hand. All three were smoking cigarettes. They stood on a lip of earth where the bank fell away to the water. They looked down on Johnny, and one of them, a tall blond kid with a raspberry birthmark on his neck, nudged the driver. “Look at this,” he said. “Couple of junior high faggots.”

The driver’s face showed no emotion. The guy with the bourbon took a pull on the bottle. Jack said, “Fuck off, Wayne.”

Birthmark stopped laughing.

“That’s right,” Jack said. “I know who you are.”

The driver thumped the back of his hand on Birthmark’s chest. He was tall and well built, handsome in a postcard way. He regarded Wayne coolly, then pointed at Jack. “That’s Gerald Cross’s brother, so show him a little respect.”

Wayne made a face. “That little dipshit? I don’t believe it.” He took a step, leaned over the bank and raised his voice. “Your brother should have signed with Carolina,” he said. “You tell him Clemson is for pussies.”

“Is that where you’ll be going?” Johnny asked.

The driver laughed. So did the kid holding the bourbon. Wayne’s face darkened, but the driver stepped forward, cut him off. “I know you, too,” he said to Johnny, then paused and took a drag on his cigarette. “I’m sorry about your sister.”

“Wait a minute,” Wayne said, and pointed. “That’s this guy?”

“Yes, it is.”

The words came without visible emotion, and the blood fell out of Johnny’s face. “I don’t know you,” Johnny said.

Jack touched Johnny’s arm. “That’s Hunt’s son. The cop’s son. His name is Allen. He’s a senior.”

Johnny looked up and saw the resemblance. Different hair, but the same build. The same soft eyes. “This is our place,” Johnny said. “We were here first.”

Hunt’s son leaned out over the bank, but was clearly not disturbed by the confrontational tone. He spoke to Jack. “Haven’t seen you around in a while.”

“Why would you?” Jack said. “We’ve got nothing to say to each other. Gerald either, for that matter.”

Johnny looked at Jack. “He knows your brother?”

“Once upon a time.”

Allen straightened. “Once upon a time,” he said, and there was no emotion in the words. “We’ll find another place.” He turned around, stopped, and spoke to Jack. “Tell your brother I said hi.”

“Tell him yourself.”

Allen paused, then offered an empty smile. He gestured to his friends, then got in the truck and started the engine. They backed up the dirt track, disappeared; then it was just the river, the wind.

“That’s Hunt’s son?” Johnny asked.

“Yeah.” Jack spit in the dirt.

“What’s the problem with him and your brother?”

“A girl,” Jack said, then looked out over the river. “Water under the bridge.”

The mood soured after that. They caught a garter snake and let it go, shaved driftwood with their knives, but it was no good. Johnny was talked out and Jack sensed it, so when a distant whistle announced the southbound freight, Jack pulled on his shoes and packed up. “I’m going to split,” he said.

“You sure?”

“Unless you want to pedal me back to town on your handlebars.” Johnny followed Jack up the bank. “You want to hook up later?” Jack asked. “Catch a movie? Play some videogames?”

The whistle called again, closer. “You’d better roll,” Johnny said.

“Just call me later.”

Johnny waited until he was gone, then unwrapped the pinfeather from his shirt and slipped the string over his neck. Dipping his hands in the river, he dabbed water on his face, then smoothed the feather on his bike. The water made it gleam, and it slid between his fingertips, crisp and cool and perfect.

Johnny skimmed some more stones, then went back to the rock and lay down. The sun was warm, the air a blanket, and at some point, he dozed. When he woke, it was with a start. The day had slid to late afternoon: five o’clock, maybe five thirty. Dark clouds piled up on the far horizon. A breeze carried the smell of distant rain.

Johnny hopped off the rock and went to find his shoes. He had them in his hand when he heard the whine of a small engine. It approached from the north, fast. The whine climbed to a scream, a motorcycle, pushing hard. It was almost to the bridge when Johnny heard another engine. This one was big and running wide open. Johnny craned his neck, saw the concrete abutment that ran along the bridge and beyond that a slice of green leaves and sky gone the color of ash. The bridge began to shake, and Johnny knew that he’d never heard anything hit it so fast.

They were halfway across when metal hit metal. Johnny saw a shower of sparks, the top of a car, and a motorcycle that cartwheeled once before the body came over the rail. One of the legs bent impossibly, the arms churned, and Johnny knew that it was a mistake, a pinwheel that screamed with a man’s voice.

It landed at Johnny’s feet with a wet thump and the double snap of breaking bones. It was a man in a muddy shirt and brown pants. One arm twisted under his back, angle all wrong, and his chest looked caved in. His eyes were open, and they were the most amazing blue.

Brakes squealed on the road. Johnny stepped closer to the injured man, saw skin torn from one side of his face, right eye starting to go bloody. His good eye locked on Johnny as if the boy could save him.

Up on the road, the big engine gunned. Tires barked in reverse. Johnny felt the vibration when the car rolled back onto the bridge.

The injured man’s jaw worked. “He’s coming back.”

“It’s okay,” Johnny said. “We’ll help you.” He knelt in the dirt. The man held out his hand and Johnny took it. “It’s going to be okay.”

But the man ignored Johnny’s words. With a surprising strength, he pulled the boy closer. “I found her.”

Johnny focused on the man’s lips. “You found who?”

“The girl that was taken.”

Johnny felt cold shock. The man’s body seized, and blood shot from his mouth onto Johnny’s shirt. Johnny barely noticed. “Who?” he said again, then louder. “Who?”

“I found her…”

Above them, the big engine idled. The injured man rolled his eyes up, his fear obvious. He pulled Johnny so close that he smelled blood and crushed organs. The man’s eyes crinkled at the edges, and Johnny heard a single word. A whisper.

“Run…”

“What?”

The man’s grip tightened. Johnny heard how the big engine rumbled and spat, then something like steel on concrete. The man’s hand clenched so hard that nails cut Johnny’s skin.

“For God’s sake—”

The body seized again, spine locked tight, broken arm twisting.

“Run…”

Johnny looked down, saw a boot heel push dirt, and something clicked in his mind.

This was not an accident.

Johnny looked at the bridge and saw a hump of movement: a head and a shoulder, a man moving around the front of the car. It was a shadow man, a cutout. Johnny felt the blood on his hands, sticky wet and going cold.

Not an accident.

The man’s body seized, head slamming dirt, boot heel drumming. Johnny tried to pull his hand free, had to jerk with all he had. Noise on the bridge. Movement. Fear was a knife that went in low and touched some deep place in him. Johnny had never been so scared in all of his life, not the day he woke up to find his father gone, not the times his mom winked out and Ken got that gleam in his eye.

Johnny was terrified.

Frozen.

Then he turned and ran, along the river, down the trail. He ran until his throat closed, until his heart tried to claw free from his chest. He ran fast and he ran afraid. He ran until the giant black monster stepped from the shadows and grabbed him up.

Then Johnny screamed.

Levi Freemantle carried a precious thing on his shoulder. It was a heavy box, wrapped twice in black plastic and closed up with silver tape. Few men could carry it as far as Levi had, but Levi was not like other men. He ignored the hurt of it, the sense of it. He kept his feet on the path and moved his lips when words rose up in his mind. He listened to God’s voice in his head and followed the river like his momma taught him when he was a boy. The river was the river, never-changing, and Levi had walked the river trail a hundred times, maybe. Not that he counted that good.

But a hundred was a lot.

He’d walked it a lot.

Levi saw the white boy before he heard him. He was coming straight at him, tearing down the trail like the devil was at his heels and hungry for white boys. His head rode low on skinny shoulders, face gone purple red, feet skipping over rocks and holes as branches snapped at his face and missed. The boy never looked back, not once, and it was like watching a hunted animal run.

Levi wanted to let the boy pass, but there was no way to hide. There was river and there was trees, but Levi stood six foot five and weighed three hundred pounds. People with guns were looking for him. Cops with bright metal on their belts, guards with clubs and nasty smiles. So Levi asked God what to do, and God told him to grab the boy up. Don’t hurt him, God said. Just pick him up.

“Truly?” Levi whispered, but God did not answer; so Levi shrugged, then stepped from behind the tree and grabbed the boy up with one thick arm. The boy screamed, but Levi held him, gentle as he could. He was surprised, when God told him what to tell the boy.

“God says—,” he began.

But Levi did not speak fast enough. The boy got one of Levi’s fingers in his mouth and clamped down until the skin popped like a grape. His teeth went all the way to the bone, and blood pumped hard. It hurt, really hurt, and Levi flung the boy down into the dirt. He felt bad when he did it, like maybe he’d let God down.

But it hurt.

The boy rolled to his feet and took off like a rabbit, but Levi didn’t think once about chasing him. He couldn’t run with the heavy box on his shoulder, and he couldn’t leave the box, not even for a minute. So he held his bloody finger and wished it would stop hurting like it did. The pain made him think of his wife, and that was a worse kind of hurt, so he kept one hand around the bloody finger and listened for the voice of God. When he finally spoke to Levi, he said it might be nice to know what the boy was running from.

Levi shrugged his giant shoulders.

“God talks and Levi walks.”

That was a funny.

It took twenty minutes to get to the bridge. The blood on the rocks looked black and wrong, and Levi listened hard before laying his package on the ground and stepping out from under the willow tree. He wanted somebody to tell him what to do, but God had gone still. A finger of hot wind laid itself across his cheek and lightning flashed off in the west. The air was heavy with a dry, powdery smell that rose from the dust under the bridge and felt charged with static.

Levi thought he heard a voice in the river. He tilted his head, and listened for a full minute before deciding it was only water moving. Or a snake in the grass. Or a carp in the reeds at the river’s edge.

But not God.

When God spoke, Levi felt cool air pile up above him; he felt peaceful, even when he remembered the bad he’d done.

So this wasn’t God.

He stood over the body and his head wasn’t working right. It wasn’t that he was scared—although he did feel small, sharp nails on the back of his neck—Levi felt sad for the crooked man. Busted up and leaking red was wrong. So was the stillness, the open, flat-looking eyes.

Levi rocked from one foot to the other. He rubbed at the scars on his face, the right side where the skin looked melted. He didn’t know what to do, so he sat down to wait for God to tell him.

God would know.

God was good like that.

Johnny came onto his own street just as the sun set and the light faded to purple. Night sounds rose in the woods. He limped, in pain, but his mind was flush with hope. It burned with it.

I found her.

You found who?

The girl that was taken.

Johnny replayed the words over and over, looking for some reason to doubt the emotion that pushed him through the pain that radiated up from his feet. Eight miles, most of it running, all of it without shoes. His feet were torn and cut, but his right foot was the worst, gashed by a broken bottle two miles after the hobgoblin with the black box grabbed him. Johnny could still taste the man’s blood, the dirt on his skin. He tried not to think about it too much. Instead, he thought about his sister, his mother.

Johnny crested the second-to-last hill and a damp wind pressed against him. He saw lights strung out on the roadside. Windows. Houses. They looked small under the purple sky, crowded where the dark forest pushed them against the thin black road. Another mile, he told himself. One more hill.

His mother needed to hear what he’d heard.

He started down, and did not hear the car that rose on the crest behind him. He imagined what the news might do for his mother. Get her out of bed. Get her off the pills. It could be a whole new beginning. The two of them, and then Alyssa.

His father would come back.

They could get their old house.

The headlights found him and Johnny moved off the road. His shadow flowed left, then flickered out when the car pulled even and stopped. Johnny felt a spike of fear, then recognized Ken’s car. It was a Cadillac, big and white, with sharp edges and gold letters that said, Escalade. Ken’s window came down. His skin was almost tan enough to hide the bags under his eyes. “Where the hell have you been?” Johnny shook his head, winded. “Get in the car, Johnny. Right now.”

Johnny bent at the waist. “I don’t—” He shoved a fist into his side.

Ken jammed the transmission into park and threw open his door. “Don’t talk back to me, kid. Just get in the car. Your mother’s falling apart over this. The whole town is in an uproar.” Ken climbed out. He was tall and heavy, shapeless in the way that Johnny thought only middle-aged men could be. He had a gold watch, thin hair, and laugh lines that made no sense to Johnny.