by Ninie Hammon
Gabe leaps down out of the branches of the tree. He lands on the savage’s back, slamming him to the ground and knocking the knife from his grip. Gabe reaches out, picks the blade up off the ground and plunges it into the monster’s back all the way to the hilt. The man screams and Gabe pulls the knife out and stabs again and again and again, as the man makes horrible gurgling sounds in his throat.
Consumed by a wave of horrible red fury, he is only barely aware of the two Indians running toward him, tomahawks raised.
Then he is running through the trees, though he can’t feel his feet striking the forest floor. He is small and quick and he knows these woods. He will—
A blow slams into his back, as if he’d been struck between the shoulder blades with a piece of the firewood he was cutting when …
There is no pain, just the thudding pressure, the force of the blow that knocks him forward into the bushes. He tries to reach out his hands to cushion his fall, but finds that his arms no longer obey his commands to move.
And then the world goes black.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Claude Letcher gestured at the man below them and whispered to Shep, “He’s digging a grave alright, just like you said.”
“Wasn’t me said, it was Abby.”
She’d been right. Of course, Abby wasn’t never wrong, didn’t never get things confused. Never had. Shep was the absentminded one. He’d leave his car keys in the pocket of his other pants and have to go back into the house and get them. Or he’d lose them altogether and him and Abby’d spend half an hour looking for ‘em. Abby never minded, though, didn’t make fun or nothing, didn’t get upset. She’d just grin and shake her head, kinda the way you done when you found an old shoe the puppy’d tore up. One time she reached over and pulled the collar of his shirt away from his neck, and when he’d looked a question at her she’d said she was just checking to make sure his head was attached tight or he’d lose it, too.
Shep felt the warmth of the memory and must have smiled because Claude asked, “What’s so funny?”
Wasn’t no sense in explaining it, Claude wouldn’t get the point. There was something serious wrong with that man. Shep’d always knowed it, everybody had, but he’d spent the last few days with Abby’s brother and seen it up close and personal and he was here to testify that Claude Letcher was crazier’n an outhouse rat.
He ate ants. Serious. Shep seen it with his own eyes. He’d step on a trail of the red ones out in the woods, then lean over, pick one off the bottom of his boot and pop it in his mouth like it was a McDonald’s French fry. He didn’t never sleep, least Shep hadn’t never seen him do it. Maybe he was one of them people who could sleep with they eyes open, cause Shep had never seen him close them except to blink. And that was another thing. He didn’t blink often as normal people. He’d look at ya, his eyes open too wide, and just keep looking, not blinking for so long Shep wondered why his eyeballs didn’t dry out.
Claude Letcher was not a man you ever felt safe turning your back on, and the crazy light he got in his eyes when him and Shep talked about killing them people made it clear to Shep that Claude was looking forward to maybe ripping them apart with his bare hands.
“I asked you, What’s. So. Funny,” Claude snarled and Shep realized the man was suddenly so furious he was grinding his teeth. “You hadn’t ought to be laughing at me. Last man done that, I bit his nose clean off his face. Doctors never could sew the thing back on where it looked right.”
We gonna have to put Claude down, Abby said inside Shep’s head. Matter-of-fact like and in that flat not-Abby voice she used now. Soon’s we done here, we’ll kill him.
Claude was Abby’s brother but ‘parently kin didn’t mean to her what it used to. Well, it was her call. Shep just done what he was told.
“Abby told me once I’d lose my own head if it wasn’t stuck on my neck. I thought it was a funny thing to say is all.”
Claude nodded solemnly. “She told me when we was kids that I’s dumber’n a sack of doorknobs.” He paused. “I slapped her upside the head for sayin’ it but it was funny.”
Claude gestured to the man below them. The sound of his pick whunk-whunk-whunking into the ground carried to where the two of them were hidden in the undergrowth. “You sure we can’t just shoot him now?”
“It ain’t up to me. Abby says we got to wait.”
Abby and Shep was like a glove and a hand. He was the glove, Abby was the hand. She was the one done all the moving, but he was right there with her, closer than his skin. And it was closer even than he’d felt to her before the world went mad. He’d always figured him and Abby had something special, something most couples didn’t have. And they had, but since the day he started picking her voice out of the whispered voices he could hear in his dilapidated shack, the two of them was closer than he’d ever felt to her before. He wondered what it was gonna be like once they killed these folks like Abby wanted. Once Abby and them others come back from wherever it was the Jabberwock’d put them. What would it be like to have Abby outside his body, standing there in front of him, talking to him, ‘stead of in his head, thinking with him, thinking for him.
And he suddenly wasn’t looking forward to that part. Once Shep realized that to have Abby back alive meant that he had to lose the Abby in his head, he wasn’t at all sure that was what he really wanted.
“But we ain’t gonna let him bury nothing in the hole he’s digging, that right?”
Shep managed not to sigh in aggravation.
“I done said — we ain’t the ones gonna stop ‘em. They’s others gonna take care of that part. We just here to do what Abby says, to get rid of what they’s planning to put in that hole. That’s our most important job.”
“But we get to kill these folks soon’s the deed’s done — right?”
The light shone bright in Claude’s eyes.
“Just so’s they end up dead, she don’t care about the way of it.”
Claude smiled. His rotted teeth put Shep in mind of the stumps of a forest after a fire.
Malachi couldn’t see. It was dark. Then it was light … just light, nothing to see, though he tried to open his eyes. No, not his eyes. Gabe’s eyes.
The world spins crazily when Gabe opens his eyes, so he closes them again immediately. The world fades away. When next he opens his eyes, it is evening. The shadows stalk among the trees and Gabe comes around in stages of pain.
He is lying on his face in the bush he was running toward. He can barely breathe. The agony in his back is so staggering that it grays out the world with every breath.
It takes the boy a while to put it together in his head.
The Indian killed his mother.
He took the knife and killed the Indian.
And then the others came after him and …
It is quiet now. The only sound is hard for him to place for a little while, then he understands that it is the sound of fire, the crackling of flames. He smells the smoke then, knows that the Indians must have set fire to the village.
He lifts his head and the motion stabs agony into his back so he lies his face back down into the stickery bush.
He must … what?
He must help. His father …
Is dead. Was one of the bodies he caught site of when he first looked down from the tree. The elders who …
He lets the thought go, or it merely flits away on its own out of his mind and is gone.
His mother …
Is dead, too. He watched her die.
Gabe should be dead, too. An arrow … a tomahawk … something was buried in his back. Why didn’t he die?
Then he thinks about the children. Are they still safe? Surely they are. There is no way the Indians could have found them.
They are safe in the cave behind the big rock.
They are trapped in the cave behind the big rock.
It takes a long time for his slowed thoughts to process the understanding, the realization that the children cannot get out of th
e cave.
It was his job to hide them there.
And to let them out!
He tries to lift his head and the effort sends the world spinning away and darkness takes him.
He hears birds. The sound floats down to him where he is in a dark hole and he opens his eyes. There is light. It is day. The agony in his back takes the breath from his lungs so he lies still.
As he does, it all comes back to him. And he realizes what he has to do. He has to get to the cave and free the children.
He tries to move and the agony forces a grunt through his lips. Parched lips. He has been lying there long enough that he needs water to drink.
There is water in the cave.
But no food.
Gabe doesn’t even try to crawl because he knows he will not likely be able to rise up on all fours. He merely scoots on his belly, extending his hands in front of him, moving his body forward, pushing with his legs.
He passes in and out of darkness. Can no longer feel the pain in his back and that is good, very good.
He drags himself through a small stream, eagerly drinking up the water, slurping it into his parched mouth. Sticking his face down into the glorious coolness revives him and he goes on.
It grows dark. Maybe it is night. Maybe the dark is inside his own skull. He knows he cannot keep moving, that he should pray for strength to go on.
That thought gives him strength, but not from God. The strength rises with his own anger.
God didn’t protect the villagers. God just let everyone be killed. Like his father let his mother be killed.
And Gabe feels such fury at the … betrayal. He trusted God, the elders and his father. They all sat back and watched monsters savage his whole world.
He is almost angrier at them than at the Indians. If Gabe could kill them, he would. The elders. His father. God!
He would plunge knives into their backs again and again, while they screamed and made gurgling sounds in their throats.
He would kill them all. They deserve death.
But the children don’t. His little brother doesn’t. And so he crawls on.
Then he is on the pathway through the brush in front of the cave. It is light. Maybe daylight. Or maybe the last bit of brilliance from his dying soul is lighting his path.
Danny!
Danny, can you hear me? Answer me!
Silas, Ezra … Lydia.
Gabe calls out to them, but the sound is only in his head. His mouth and throat refuse to form the words.
There is no sound from inside the cave. Are the children still there? Of course they are. They are staying quiet.
Being obedient to what he told them.
As the elders were obedient, did what God told them.
As his father was obedient, did what the elders told him.
As he was obedient, did what—
But he wasn’t obedient. Gabe didn’t stay and look after the children. If he had been obedient …
Gabe makes a sound then, a shrieking roar of rage and denial and hatred. No, this was not his fault. It was his father’s fault and the elders’ fault and God’s fault.
It was Not. Gabe’s. Fault.
Noooooooo!
The overpowering wail of rage moves over his lips and falls into the dust as a whisper on a breath, without strength or sound.
All his energy is gone. Even his raging hatred cannot summon his body to obey his commands. He will die here, now. The children in the cave will die there … soon.
The raging torment rips at his soul, burns with a brilliant flame that provides no light to see, no warmth for the chill in his bones.
He would cry if he had tears. He would scream if he had breath. He would vent his fury on the universe … but he cannot. It remains there in his soul, boiling in impotence as the world fades away.
Chapter Twenty-Three
It’d all been bravado. Female macho posturing. Jolene Rutherford did not want to go into that dark hole and as soon as she’d bravely said she’d do it she regretted the words.
She was all the time doing stuff like that to herself. It amounted to daring herself to do a thing she didn’t want to do and didn’t think she could do. A way to paint herself into a corner so she couldn’t back down. What an idiot.
She took a lungful of summer air that smelled a unique kind of fresh, an aroma equal parts pine cones and cedar boughs and maybe wildflowers and damp leaves and sparkling creeks and … mountain perfume. She’d found it nowhere else on earth, a fact she’d only realized when she came back home … home. Yeah, Jolene Rutherford was home.
Grabbing one more breath, like a diver about to take a plunge, she stuck her head and shoulders through the opening into the dark interior.
It smelled old.
Old had a similar smell no matter where you encountered it. A dark attic. A dank cellar. An old storage building. She couldn’t have identified the components of the “old” smell, but the air she breathed into her lungs reeked of it. More than that, though. Infinitely more than that. It wasn’t just old. It was dead. The air she pulled into her lungs had been trapped in that enclosed space for more than a hundred years, and she remembered reading somewhere that when archeologists opened up Egyptian tombs, they set out open jars to capture the air for study.
Maybe that air smelled like this, but she didn’t think so. Those tombs were the opulent resting places of pharaohs and kings. This was the sealed crypt for a dozen, maybe two dozen people whose spirits had not rested easy since their deaths.
She felt that. Along with the cold — why was it so cold in here? And not just cold but … The hundred-year-old air was not the reason she felt it hard to breathe. It was the pressure. The oppression, the …
Her hand landed on a bone. It felt like a small tree branch and she couldn’t help jerking back from contact with it. She should have brought the flashlight in with her instead of leaving it with Cotton to shine into the chamber around her. Yeah, she needed both hands, but …
She turned, pulled back out of the hole and snatched the flashlight out of Cotton’s hands.
“Are you alright?”
“Absolutely not,” she gasped. She shined the light in front of her now, ducked her head down and crawled the rest of the way into the chamber. The pile of bones was shoved up against the back of the hole with an open space in front of them big enough for her to move around. Though the bodies buried in the cave burial chamber had surely been laid out neatly, probably in rows next to the bones of those who’d gone before, these were not whole skeletons. This was a tangled heap of bleached-white bones — femurs and tibias and jaws and hips and skulls.
She reached out a gloved hand and picked up a bone and shoved it down in the green plastic leaf bag Cotton had bought. Then she forced herself to stop thinking about what she was doing, to just reach out and load these things, and they were merely things, after all, into the sack. She hurried then, didn’t like the rattling sound the bones made when they clacked against each other in the sack.
Skulls. Leg bones, arm bones, spines and hips and fingers.
As she filled the bag with bones, she ventured farther and farther into the enclosure.
She handed the first bag out to Cotton. He took it and gave her a second empty bag. She filled it. And another. And another. On her hands and knees in the hollow place in the tree, she crawled around grabbing bones as fast as she could and jamming them into sacks for Cotton.
Then the words Rose Topple had said to Cotton rang in her ears.
“Mama knew she couldn’t miss a single one, and the finger bone of a two-year-old ain’t very big at all.”
She slowed down, clamped her jaws together and struggled to calm her racing heart. She had to be just as careful as Lily Topple had been. She had to get them all, couldn’t miss a single one. If a ten-year-old child had seined them out of the carpet of leaves/twigs/rocks and dirt on a forest floor, there was no excuse for her missing any of them laid out in front of her, glowing that eerie white in
the flashlight beam.
She didn’t fill the final bag Cotton gave her because there were only a few bones left. Once she’d slipped them into the bag, she slowly ran the flashlight beam around the darkened chamber, making sure there was not a single …
At first she thought it was a rock, one of those Lily had used to seal up the opening of the tree. Her flashlight beam passed slowly over it and then she jerked the beam back. Reaching out with hands that at some point had started to tremble violently, she picked up the little white rock, that was no rock at all but a small skull. A baby’s skull. Couldn’t have been more than six months old. She turned it over in her hand, marveling at how small it was. Then she forced herself to put it into the sack and keep looking. Starting at the back wall, she raked her fingers across the flashlight-lit floor in even, overlapping rows. Just like Lily Topple had done. She performed the operation twice before she was convinced she had covered every square inch of the interior of the hole in the tree. There were no bones left. This time, she didn’t back out of the hole, but crawled out — forward into the sunlight.
“This is the last of them,” she said, panting. Cotton took the bag and turned away.
Getting to her feet, she dusted the dirt off her knees and removed her gloves.
The hum of static was louder than when she’d gone into the cave. So was the whispering, louder and … more urgent. And the sparkling cascade of twinkling light in front of the tree was so brilliant she couldn’t look at it.
She squinted as her eyes adjusted after the darkened interior of the hole in the tree. Then she saw that Cotton had been removing the bones from the sacks and placing them in neat piles on the ground. Skulls, long bones, short bones, all arranged in kind.
“Seventeen,” he said, his voice foggy. “Seventeen skulls.”
“So the cave on the mountainside was the burial chamber for seventeen people.”
“Maybe …”
There was something he wasn’t saying. She took a couple of steps and stood beside him.