The Witch of the Wood (21 page)

The man Rudy saw was a monster. The lack of aesthetics didn’t matter; in fact, they made it worse. The get-up was makeshift, childish, his black-rimmed glasses beneath the mask finalizing the low-end bargain-basement feel to this thing, and then in absolute contradiction, the eyes looking through the glasses and ragged holes had a lunatic’s certainty. Not the effect Rudy had been trying for, but he was pretty sure people would stop, watch, and listen for a second.

“Film me,” he said. “One take. Off the cuff.”

She switched places with him so the dogs would be in the shot, adjusted her view screen, and nodded.

Rudy spoke.

“Fellow citizens, there are many changes that have taken place today, grave changes, and you are certainly owed an explanation. I do have answers, but you are not necessarily going to like them. I can identify causes for you, but I admit there is no reason for you to believe me. Still, before you write off what I am to tell you as the ravings of some madman, I ask you to honestly assess what you have seen this morning. Logic and scientific rationales don’t work anymore, and I would ask you to suspend old disbeliefs for the sake of new ethics. Take a leap of faith and trust me, at least until the end of this recording.

“First, you must know that every tree in the world has been uprooted; there are no exceptions. Moreover, I am sure that after your recovery from ‘The Great Fall’ you noticed an emergence from the ground cavities. Please note that the beings coming out of the dirt are not, repeat not, monsters or aliens. They are the original inhabitants of this planet, the first of our women, punished for unjust cause and entrapped by a spell, yes a spell that held them beneath the prison-root for centuries. I am asking you, no, I am
begging
you not to harm them. The newly liberated that I speak of are shape-shifters with the ability to transform according to the preferred vision of their given beholders. It is no illusion. And please do not consider this to be any type of sorcery. It is an old reality, what was quite natural for these women back in their original time period, and we should welcome them, celebrating their emancipation.

“And to the newly liberated females flooding our properties, fields, and streets, I have a message for you as well. I am aware that you were incarcerated unlawfully . . . that what you endured was excruciating, that what you are owed in retribution for your pain is more than this modern world has in its coffers. Still, I would plead with you to abstain utterly from thoughts of revenge. Your jailers are long dead, and would be considered irrelevant in terms of any position of defense you might argue following rash actions in this time and place.

“Please know that I am ‘The Father,’ who was faced with the bitterest of choices. I could have helped engineer your wave of dark justice and destruction, but I decided to employ the alternative: your freedom for the mass acquittal of these descendants of sinners. As a result, it would harm you to look me in the face at this point, and hence I wear this cheap disguise, this mask of gauze, this dirty hood. I am not God, nor would ever claim to be. But I now believe in miracles, and I have faith that from the ashes of today’s many disasters we can start afresh from a platform of love. Is that not what all our old religions would have had us do if we broke down all their customs and rituals to their foundations? This recognition, this awareness is our miracle, and the chance to unite is upon us.

“Do not raise your hands in violence! I chose the liberation of prisoners at great expense, and you were not the only ones to lose those held dear to you. This morning, I sacrificed my own son, a half-breed, born of a cavity-dweller and filled with the golden blood burst forth from his skin like a hundred rivers, fulfilling the prophecy of freedom for his sisters entombed. Celebrate his passing by ending the bloodshed of the red. History is now, and we can author this new age together, rewriting the way all this was really meant to play out. Join me.”

He had his hands held out to the camera, and Caroline hit the stop button.

“That was beautiful,” she said. For a bald moment, Rudy thought she might have been chastising him for the melodrama, but her face told a different story. He looked at the floor.

“We should . . . ah . . . discuss it sometime.”

“Promise?”

He pulled up his head and nodded curtly. There was chemistry here, but like the first pass when she’d complimented his vocal delivery, the timing was out of joint, and maybe that was the sum-total of his personal tragedy, his destiny to surround himself with new messages of love and togetherness, yet walk through it all utterly alone. He undid the rope and removed the disguise. Even with the hat protecting his hair, the get-up had felt filthy on him and he was sweating.

“I don’t feel too pretty,” he said.

“Eye of the beholder.”

“You’re too kind.”

“Not really.” She walked up to him and took the material from him. “But you’re right, Rudy. There are times and places for everything, and right about now you owe your son a viewing. Let’s see it. For your speech to work, the warlock’s visual has to be absolutely devastating.”

Rudy got out his cell.

They replayed it, looked at it, heads together.

And Rudy wept.

For awhile Rudy didn’t speak for all but a few grunts and mutterings as he stood over Caroline’s dented red toolbox, looking for stuff. He next busied himself over at the gun cabinets, digging deep into the holster bins, cutting straps and adjusting them, repositioning buckles, crimping clasps, piercing new prong slots. When he was finished, he had a pile of leather six feet high and ten or so wide. Caroline had positioned herself on the sofa to work at splicing the two tapes together and uploading them on YouTube with multiple tags, the spaniel puppy up on her shoulder like a cat, the sheepdog watching it all warily. She had taken a number of breaks to organize the dogs in groups to go outside and do their business, and both she and Rudy had avoided conversation up until now.

“So what are you doing?” she said finally. The spaniel, named “Killian” according to his nametag, was in her lap now, flicking his long tail into his own face and acting surprised by it. Rudy stood straight.

“I’m making new holsters from the old ones,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“No.”

They shared a fresh silence. Rudy had been stunned by the visual representation of his son’s sacrifice, so much so that the dread of it still hung around him like fog. Caroline wasn’t pressing too hard, but Rudy knew he had to recover. There were things going on outside the sanctuary of this basement that needed attending, and his grief had to be put aside.

“The holsters are for the dogs,” he admitted.

“Really.”

“Yes.” He came over flexing his hands, reddened by the close work of the last hour or so. He felt he’d never be able to look a pair of pliers or a utility blade in the face ever again, and he sat next to Caroline with a tired sigh. Killian waddled over, tail going mad, ears back. He nipped playfully at his master’s earlobes, and Rudy couldn’t help but forfeit a grin.

“Geez,” he said.

“He likes you.”

“He likes everybody.” Rudy pushed him off gently. “Reality check; there are going to be a lot of people out there who will scoff at that taped speech.”

“Yes. The old ‘Have you heard the word of God today?’ on the bus syndrome. A real aisle clearer.”

He ran his palm over his scalp absently.

“And some who do see it will violently oppose.”

“No rest for the messenger.”

“Right.”

She scratched Killian behind the ears, and the dog closed his eyes in pleasure. She had her lips pursed and was making “goo-goo” sounds. Then she said in the “baby voice,” “So the holsters are for the dogs, hmm? Is the King of Canines so clever he can train them to shoot?”

Rudy laughed for the first time in what felt a long while.

“No, my dear. I’m just being practical. When I take them out for a stroll, I don’t really know what kind of a world I’m going to find out there. I have a feeling the non-believers are going to outnumber the faithful at first, and you don’t walk into a gunfight with a penknife, as they say. I figure I can only load up my body with so much reloading ammo, so it made sense to pack all the dogs with heat. With a hundred of them at two firearms apiece, I go into the outdoor arena with more than twelve hundred rounds available to me. Not too shabby, huh?”

“Indeed.” She let Killian down, and he went to the sheepdog, who curled him in and nipped motheringly at his flank. Caroline put both palms into the small of her back and stretched.

“Well, before you go for your stroll,” she said, “I need for you to give me the healing blood for my mother’s first dose.”

“Of course.”

“And we’ll go see her soon?”

“Yes, under the cover of darkness. I’m no Navy Seal, but common sense claims that if I am going to enter a building in stealth I don’t want my approach or escape to be a neighborhood show.”

She set up the needles and tubes and syringes, and when she was finished the drawing Rudy felt weak. She took the two bags of his blood and stored them in an old cooler she got from the same storage space under the stairs that the groundcloth had come from. He rested for an hour. Caroline again ran the dogs out in shifts, both to “go outside” and this time to hunt for food.

When Rudy woke from his nap, he holstered up one hundred of the biggest canines, arming them with two loaded weapons apiece. He put on his disguise. Right before going down to the tunnel ramp, Caroline told him that their video had gotten fifteen hundred hits already.

Rudy went down the ramp, to the tunnel’s opening, to the new world he’d partially created.

And didn’t quite get what he’d expected.

The going on the outside was rough at first. Rudy didn’t worry all too much about getting flagged at the entrance by some passerby, since the riverbank sat in the middle of what had been uninhabited woods five hundred yards removed from the street. There was even a nice cross-hatch of fallen wood right there at the cutout, acting like a bridge over the cold waters rushing below. But the dogs moved too quickly, packed together like a large diamond with Rudy trying to jog in the middle. Of course, the forest was a tangled mess, and he hadn’t gone ten feet into it before turning his ankle, barking his shin, skinning his knee, slipping, and getting stuck in a couple of voids. They made it to a glen of sorts, still bordered up by masses of overgrowth patchworked into a rough circle about a hundred feet in diameter, and Rudy called, “Stop!” They waited patiently, and he tried to catch his breath, hands on the knees, sweat streaming down his cheeks. The mask was off-center, and he readjusted the thing, thinking that the dirty moisture building up there under the gauze was making it cling in places. Yeah, he was a “ten” when it came to “creepy,” and a flat zero in terms of practical mobility. He thought of King Richard III and said, “My kingdom for a fucking horse.”

Something came from behind him then, pushing under his butt, sliding between his legs. He lost his footing. Dogs to both sides moved in for balance maintenance, and before he could fall backward the body beneath him completed its positioning. His feet were off the ground entirely, and he was perched on one of the wolves, huge and dark gray with black streaks going in two parallel lines up the back of its head. It had gone cold, and the wolf’s breath was misting. The side support moved off a bit, a few renegade snowflakes fell, and Rudy suddenly felt comfortable and sure. The animal bore his weight easily, and the seating was so flush and specific that Rudy was suddenly positive he wouldn’t need reins. He was sitting on a crisscross of leather, and hanging along the wolf’s flanks just behind Rudy’s heels were two of the long pocket holsters he had so meticulously jury-rigged. He reached behind for the weapon on his right. It slid out and gleamed in the cold sun, Mossberg 500 Special, and the withdrawal hadn’t skewed his balance in the least. He felt the animal adjusting beneath him moment for moment, but it was a natural thing like breathing. He sheathed the shotgun and reached back to his left, withdrawing the Bushmaster M4 Patrolman. Somehow, he was certain that he could shoot and hit a target in full stride. In fact, it didn’t seem it would be too difficult to fire both weapons simultaneously, he was sure of it. He raised the gun over his head, and called, “Ride!”

The animal beneath him burst into a dead-run, and the pack galloped along, all close, backbones working around him in bobs and thrusts, haunches pistoning across the ruined forest floor.

They made it out of the woods in about five minutes flat.

And the world was an open wound.

The first thing Rudy noticed was the lack of channels, dividers, “corridors.” The trees had acted as natural organizers, making one feel secure in the grid; and now with their leveling, the buildings looked, for lack of a better word,
sporadic.
The south edge of the woods abruptly ceased before a rather complicated highway junction at the border between Broomall and Havertown, and the Barnaby’s, the car wash, the closed-down Pathmark, and the houses curving up along the rises due south and northwest all looked like teeth in the cliché hillbilly’s maw. Isolated and crooked.

Felled trees were everywhere and traffic had come to absolute gridlock. By now, most of the cars were abandoned, many of them crushed by the mass of decorator foliage that had broken through the graded sound barriers leading to the 476 entrances, other vehicles crimped up trunk to hood from chain reaction rear-endings that wound for miles up West Chester Pike.

There was smoke threading through the air, and it made the light snow look like ash. Victims still pinned and trapped were honking horns, there were a couple blowing whistles, and someone all the way up by the Manoa shopping center was shooting green flares off into the gray sky. There were scatters of do-gooders moving in groups looking for victims, but surprisingly few in Rudy’s immediate area. And no police. Yet how could there be, really? They depended on roads for access. Moreover, there were only so many officers, and it was never made clearer than by this stark illustration that they were but tokens, placed strategically to handle the few making trouble or in the process of getting in it, based on the probability that the balance of society basically managed itself.