Jacked Up

by Erica Sage

  And she was running away to go see him. Because she thought he was still there.

  “Did you tell her he checked out?”

  “Hold on a second, Nick. This is a longer conversation than I can do right now. Give me a few.”

  He slipped back inside and sat down across from the still-sobbing girl.

  I stood there and waited.

  Natalie was going to walk twenty miles to see her brother, only to find out he wasn’t there. And she was going to be alone when she heard he was gone.

  I waited.

  Natalie was going to learn her brother was out on the street, probably doing drugs again. What would she do? Would she keep running, or walk back to camp alone?

  Would she shoot up again? Did she have something on her?

  I didn’t know what she would do, but she shouldn’t have to be alone when she heard this.

  Pastor Kyle kept looking over at me through the window, f lashing his hand, holding up fingers. Giving me a five-minute sign. A ten-minute sign. The minutes were definitely going the wrong way. “How long will you walk down waiting road?” It was Jack.

  “Someone’s going to see you!” I grabbed at him to pull him toward the wall. But my hand slipped through his jacket.

  “Nobody sees me but the madness in you.”

  “Other people might see ghosts!”

  “Ghosts.” He laughed.

  “This isn’t funny.”

  “You found the doer of wrongs. I told you so.”

  “You didn’t tell me. I figured it out.”

  “I whispered through the dark swirl of the Ouija.”

  “Seriously? You gave us a list of Christmas songs.”

  “I saved it, best—and truth—for last.”

  I went through the list in my head. “The Holly and the Ivy.” That’s what he’d said last.

  He smiled. “The end, Nicolas. Everything is settled in the end. The end is the it of it all.”

  He swayed. “Did I tell you who was at camp?”

  “Yes, Muhamm—”

  “Muhammad, Buddha, Jesu—”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “Whoop, look at that! Jesus can turn it all into wine.”

  “For God’s sake, you are now.”

  “That ol’ Indian—“

  “It’s Native Ameri— Can you just leave so the pastor doesn’t catch you?”

  “Catch you, you mean. Talking to the nothing-wind.”

  I glared at Jack, then looked through the office window at the pastor and the sobbing girl. “Just say a prayer and get on with it,” I mumbled at the glass.

  “Waiting road goes down a winding thing toward everywhere, which is nothing.”

  I was tired of his word-puzzling. “What am I supposed to do?” I snapped. “I just want him to help Natalie and he won’t open the door!”

  I expected Jack to snap back, to explode into his torrent of impatience. To call me the Great Editor and spin into nothing like he sometimes did. But his voice stayed calm. “You found the box, and the doing’s not done.” He sounded almost kind again. “I can’t do the doing for you.”

  Oh.

  He wouldn’t say it outright—he was still waiting for me to hear it and see it without him ever saying it. And most of the time, I couldn’t see or hear what I was supposed to. Not just with Jack. With people. With my family. With Diana. Most of the time, I felt surrounded by broken bridges. But I understood him then. I actually understood his word-bridge.

  He wanted me to live a little.

  He wanted me to go a little mad.

  He wanted me to break the rules.

  And so I did.

  I walked quickly back to my cabin to check the camp schedule. I needed to know how long I’d have before someone suspected me gone. There were several more hours till free time, then a service, then dinner. Nobody would be looking for me in particular at the service. We didn’t have assigned seats or anything. They might wonder at dinner, but then they might assume I was still imprisoned for stealing the PC Box, since my cabinmates still thought I had. Only the pastor and Holly knew for sure I wasn’t still being punished, but they were both preoccupied.

  I looked through my cabinmates’ cubbies and gathered any unopened snacks. Sour Patch Kids, two bags of chips, two cans of Monster. Now I was actually stealing something from them, and I didn’t care. I filled my water bottle from the bathroom sink and then went over to Dan’s bunk, knowing he’d have something slightly more sustaining. And he did—a half-filled, Costco-sized bag of trail mix.

  I’d never walked twenty miles.

  And that was just to get to zombie camp. There was also the twenty miles back. Forty miles.

  Forty miles through the desert.

  I stole three more water bottles from my fellow campers and filled them up too.

  I tossed a sweatshirt and sweatpants into my backpack. I figured I’d be spending the night, and it was bound to be cold in the desert. Well, colder than the ninety degrees it was during the day. I couldn’t take my blanket off my bed because that would be too obvious. I considered taking the pillow, but I doubted it would fit in my backpack.

  And then, to cheer Natalie when I found her—because I assumed she’d need the cheering—I shoved Sixty Scenes of Sexy into the bag too.

  I slipped my arms into the shoulder straps and opened the door.

  And that is when I heard the voice of the Lord booming from the heavens.

  Or rather, I heard the donkeys braying for their afternoon snack.

  I’d never walked twenty, or forty, miles before. And I wasn’t about to now, either.

  The donkey braying got louder as I approached the barn. I pulled an armful of hay off a bale and threw it into the shade of the barn’s overhang. They ate, and I assessed. They all looked of the same build, the same motivation, the same intelligence—which is to say, not much of any of it. But then a brown one made eye contact.

  He accidentally volunteered himself.

  “You,” I said to the brown donkey. “You’re the one from the other night. You’re coming with me.”

  The donkey shook his head and ducked down for more hay. Now, he might’ve been trying to rid his mane of f lies, but that seemed like overt defiance of my command. Stubborn ass.

  “It’ll be an adventure.”

  The donkey chewed.

  “As opposed to getting my ass chewed, my ass is doing the chewing. Get it?” The donkey did not laugh. “Fine, you eat. I’m looking for the bridle.”

  It was too much to hope for a bridle and a saddle. Did they even make that kind of stuff for donkeys, or were they assed out of the equestrian tack business?

  I put a halter over Donkey’s ears. “You look like a horse mated with a rabbit.” And he did, all ears and teeth.

  The hay was almost gone, and I was polite enough to wait for him to finish chewing his last bite. I attached the lead rope the counselors had used the first day for the Donkey Lottery, and then I walked him through the gate. It was unlocked. Apparently donkey theft wasn’t an issue. Yet.

  I looked at the hill behind the barn. It was steeper, but we had to go that route or we’d be spotted. We might still be spotted. A donkey is not exactly inconspicuous.

  I prepped my travel companion. “We gotta haul ass.”

  My donkey was humorless. Maybe he’d been the butt of too many jokes in his lifetime.

  “Actually,” I said, and closed the gate behind me. “Ass has to haul me.”

  Donkey and I made it up the hillside unnoticed. Maybe because he is a part-time ninja. But mostly because a lot of the trail runs through a crevasse where no one could see us.

  I stumbled up over the ridge, my sure-footed companion by my side. I led him down the dip into the valley and walked over to the crosses, still out of breath from climbing so quickly. I took my first sip of water and stared at my donkey.

  “Wait here, Ninja.” He didn’t argue about waiting, or about his new name. I figured there had to be some trademark issue with ca
lling him Donkey, thanks to the creators of Shrek.

  I wanted to take a peek at camp again. I lay on my stomach and crawled across the dusty ground till I could see it sprawled out before me.

  Eden Springs was an oasis in this desert. A man-made paradise of lush grass and trees that revealed the glistening underside of the leaves when the breeze blew. The pool water was crystalline, the cabin and paths and outbuildings all perfectly situated and planned. Anywhere you stood in camp, you could see the whole property. You’d always know where everyone was and what they were doing. It took effort to disappear.

  I scooted back down the decline and then stood up, looked in the direction Natalie had been headed when I’d caught her with her backpack. That’s what I had to go on—straight toward the horizon in the direction she’d pointed the day before. It was barely noon, and it was already hot. And I didn’t see a single tree. I knocked on the wood of the middle cross for good luck, then walked through the small strip of shade it offered.

  I had about eighty ounces of water. That wasn’t even enough for one full day of healthy hydration, but I knew it would be enough to survive twenty miles, which I’d cover by dark, if my calculations served me. If Charles didn’t hate me, perhaps I could’ve had him double-check my formula. It was hot, and that’s what worried me most. There was bound to be minimal shade. The land was all shrubs and sharp rock and dry earth, everything dusty yellow and sage. I knew there’d be rattlesnakes, and I anticipated maybe some coyotes, nothing too vicious.

  Without a compass, I planned to find landmarks to keep my direction. The three crosses would be in my sight for a long time, and they always had to be to my back. If I got to a point where I couldn’t see the crosses, and there was nothing else to track my location by, then I would abandon this mission and head back toward the crosses.

  I led Ninja over to a rock.

  “Don’t move.”

  He didn’t. Or if he did, I couldn’t see it because, well, he’s a ninja.

  I swung my leg over his broad back. And slipped right off. I swung again, and slipped off again. The third time, I got enough leverage to hold on. After some grunting and shifting and pulling—Ninja just standing there all the while—I got myself onto his back.

  I reconsidered naming him Job because, like the dude in the Bible who came down with the plague and his kids all died, the donkey had a shit-ton of patience.

  Unfortunately, he just kept standing there. I didn’t have a counselor to lead us.

  “Go,” I commanded.

  He didn’t.

  I rocked back and forth. “You have to walk.”

  He did not walk. Perhaps because he’s a silent assassin and just walking requires no stealth. Or perhaps because there were no shadows in this godforsaken desert. A ninja needs shadows.

  “Please?”

  A ninja need not have manners.

  So I kicked my heels into his sides and hoped he’d seen enough cowboy movies to know this is how it was done. Clearly he was a fan of John Wayne, because off we went.

  I considered renaming him The Duke.

  The sun beat down. After a while, I took my shirt off, but the heavy rays only got worse when they landed directly on my skin, so I put it back on.

  I made sure to look back often to check my direction. Only once did I think we would have to go back, when I turned around and noticed I couldn’t see the crosses, but then we came out of a dip and my landmark reappeared.

  After about an hour, I clambered off Ninja to give him some water and a break. I saw a building, maybe an old barn, way off in the distance and felt good that I had another landmark to keep our path true.

  I took hold of the lead rope, and we walked on.

  The scraping of my feet, the clank of Ninja’s hooves on shale-like rocks, and my breathing were all that I could hear. I stopped to sip water, the unzipping of my backpack a rip in the silence, my gulps intrusive.

  Everything was beige and brittle for as far as I could see. Everything silent without the drag of feet and hooves across the dust. The crosses were specks on the horizon behind me, the barn to my left just as small. The air coughed up a breeze and a light rattle of leaves on the bushes. I’d never been so alone.

  “No offense,” I said to Ninja.

  No one knew I was there. I decided I had better not think about that too long, lest I go insane.

  And then I realized something.

  What I was doing was insane. Stealing a donkey and then hiking out into the desert wilderness with little food and water, looking for a girl in a place I was not even certain was out here.

  Zombie camp. Rehab.

  I slipped my water bottle into my backpack again, and the pack back over my shoulders. I led Ninja to a rock, and it only took me two tries to get astride his back.

  I was a mad one. At least on this day.

  Diana would’ve been proud.

  The miles drifted away in the dust of Ninja’s hooves. When my butt hurt, I walked. When my feet hurt, I got back on.

  The sun was sharp in my eyes, hot on my face. My breath was louder in my head, and I was so hot. I couldn’t see the crosses behind me anymore, but I caught sight of another outbuilding a ways off. I didn’t know how far we’d walked, but it had been over three hours. I had missed lunch, which my stomach reminded me of just as much as the position of the sun did. But I wanted to keep walking.

  I started seeing f lashes of figures, small little people, bright and f lickery, in the bushes. Desert trolls, I decided to call them. I’d been walking into the sun too long. I made an effort to look off to the left for a while, to give my eyes a break from the brightness.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw two figures—two men—walking toward me.

  I turned to get a good look, but then I couldn’t see them anymore.

  I wasn’t dying. They weren’t a death mirage, but maybe, like the desert trolls, they were shadows of my vision from the sun.

  But then I saw them again. Two men. Maybe a man and woman, hard to tell. And what looked like a child. I stared straight ahead and realized there must be some hilly areas on the plateau up ahead. I kicked at Ninja’s side, but he wouldn’t go any faster, so I slipped off his back and jogged toward the figures. Maybe they knew how far I still had to go. Maybe they were from zombie camp.

  “Hello?” I called.

  Ninja’s ears perked up, startled at the break in the silence.

  I waited, but no one called back.

  My eyes were playing tricks.

  The sun was blinding me and fooling me.

  The shimmering bush creatures reappeared again. I kept walking, Ninja grumpy behind me, until I knew I’d reached where I’d seen the two people and the child, but they were nowhere.

  What was I doing here? Here in this hot desert, but more so, here at this camp, this camp for people who loved a God I could not believe in.

  I couldn’t believe in some old guy sitting in the clouds.

  I could believe in some guy in a white robe living two thousand years ago and being killed for being politically insane. But I couldn’t believe God sent him down, that he was God in a man’s body.

  There had been men before Jesus who had claimed to be the Messiah. They were similarly killed on a cross.

  How did Jesus get to be so famous?

  “You’re just the son of man,” I said out loud. “Just like me. I’m the son of man too, but I’m stuck in the desert, not hanging out in the air-conditioned sky eating grapes fed to me by virgins and angels.”

  I heard the sharp cry of a bird. Kree, it whistled, fast and hard and lonely across the sky. Like a bullet.

  And Muhammad. I’d read once that Jesus told people of the coming of a great prophet. They had been in cahoots.

  I walked a bit faster, breathing hard now. It wasn’t dark, but the loneliness of it all was eerie.

  And what about Joseph Smith? Now there was a weird dude. Finding magic plates and reading prophecy with magic rocks. In Upstate New York!


  And the Jews. Still waiting for something. Someone. Something holy.

  The bird called again. Sharp, like the wail of a saxophone.

  I stopped, looked around. Where was that stupid thing? I couldn’t see it.

  A rattling in the bushes behind me.

  “If the bush lights on fire, I’ll believe in You,” I said to all the holy men in the sky.

  Nothing. Just the heat of the sun.

  I was losing my mind in broad daylight.

  Ninja, on the other hand, being a donkey and a trained killer, was unfazed by questions of morality and mortality.

  I led him to a tree up ahead that promised a bit of shade. The tree was huge, its trunk thick, splitting at one point and breaking off into large branches and then smaller ones, pewter-green leaves f lickering in the sunlight.

  I sat against the trunk and opened my pack for some water. I poured some water in the bottle cap and held it up to Ninja’s muzzle. I offered him some Sour Patch Kids, but he demurred, probably watching his figure. I popped a few in my mouth while I fished out the bag of Tim’s Cascade potato chips. Salt. I grabbed a Monster too. Perhaps it would clear my head of the voices and visions.

  I leaned back and kept my eye out for the people I’d seen earlier, and the desert trolls. I remembered the bird and looked up into the branches. It wasn’t there.

  Chewing the plasticky candy, I remembered this news story about two old people who’d gone out in Utah to hike the Wave, a protected area where they only allowed twenty people to hike each day. Ten permits were reserved in advance, and the other ten were issued in a daily lottery. On a day in July, this sweet old married couple had been two of the ten people to win permits to hike the Wave. It’d been over a hundred degrees and they were in their seventies, a point in life when the body didn’t regulate itself properly. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and they’d won the lottery. The authorities—under heavy scrutiny—had let them go. Nobody had known what happened exactly, but they’d pieced together a sad story of a dying woman and her chivalrous husband. They’d found the man a few hundred feet away from the woman. It appeared as if he’d started off to find help after she succumbed to the heat. He’d left her in the shade of an anomalous tree, and that’s where a hiking party had found her. Still leaning up against the trunk, the shadow of the tree protecting her body, still and silent and just as dead as her husband lying on the desert ground not far away.