I ran my tongue over my chapped lips—I was deliriously thirsty—and got a taste of the mud I was tromping through. Pure putrid, like biting into a carrot that had sat in a vegetable crisper until it turned droopy, wrinkled, brown.
At last we reached a spot with no hummocks within jumping distance. Fatigue hived in the dark half-moons under Dunk’s eyes. We steeled ourselves and then stepped into the stagnant water, stirring up a platoon of water skimmers and releasing a reek of boggy rot. We sank until the white orbs of our kneecaps shone above the water. My feet squished through cold, congealed gravy. Bubbles quivered up through the water to burst with a sulphury stink; black shrapnel that looked like cockroach exoskeletons swirled and settled back under the water.
We trudged in lurching strides, looking like a couple of Dr. Frankenstein’s monsters. The water’s surface was dotted with green blooms like baby lily pads. They detached from their moors along the edges of the hummocks, trailing thin filaments that reminded me of bean sprouts; these eddied round our legs like stingless jellyfish.
The ground under the water was solid—or at least it wasn’t getting any less solid. It felt as if I was walking on a carpet of cow intestines, the kind they sold at the butcher shop as “honeycomb tripe”—I knew because Dad had come home with a plastic bag of them one afternoon, so fresh that blood had pooled in the bag; he’d hoped Mom would fry them with onions, a dish he’d eaten as a child, but Mom said she’d just as soon eat boiled toenails.
Half-rotted sticks jabbed the soft webbing between my toes. There were phantom stirrings against my skin, like the tails of inquisitive fish—then they were gone. Worst of all, I wasn’t certain we were making headway. Moving, yeah, but to what purpose? I could see nothing ahead but dull grey edged by that maddening, elusive band of green.
My foot brushed something hard and covered in slime—a log, maybe. Or a petrified Burmese python …
… probably a log. No, definitely a log.
The afternoon wore into evening. A rock of despair settled on my chest. I couldn’t imagine being stuck in the muskeg as darkness fell, forlornly perched on a hummock like a frog on a toadstool. The insects would drive me insane. But a glint of hope emerged as the band of green thickened towards the horizon.
“There,” Dunk said, as much to himself as to me. “See? See?”
Our pace quickened; we’d grown accustomed to the cold custard underfoot. My feet got ahead of my body—I tripped over a root and pitched out full-length, splashing and sputtering. Brackish water surged past my gritted teeth and I gagged helplessly, tasting barbecue chips at the back of my throat. I was scared I’d swallowed bog water teeming with mosquito eggs. Would they hatch in my stomach and drain me from the inside out? No, I decided, settling on it as a simple article of faith. Absolutely not possible.
Dunk helped me up. We plodded on, sneakers thumping hollowly at our hips. The water got shallower: it sank to our shins, then to our ankles. Quite abruptly the land was firm. Greenness assaulted our eyes after what felt like a month of permanent grey.
We found a boulder. Dunk set his hands on it and pushed, halfway convinced it too would topple into a sinkhole. We sat and consulted over the state of our socks, which had torn off our feet—one of Dunk’s was now a sweatband around his ankle.
We dried ourselves with the rags in the backpack. Dunk wrapped one around his foot, a poor substitute for his ruined sock. We pulled our shoes on with aching slowness—they were cold and clammy, and they reminded me of pulling on still-wet swim trunks for early-morning swimming lessons—and continued into the darkening day.
Twilight transformed the landscape. Everything blended into every other thing, the ground and bushes and rocks layering over themselves. My neck tingled. I’d managed to burn myself in the bog. Usually my mom never let me go out without a slather of sunscreen, plus a stripe of zinc oxide on my nose.
The wind curled across the earth, licking at the sunburn and the wet cuffs of my jeans and chilling me to the core. I thought back to that Coke I’d drunk about a hundred years ago. My tongue ballooned in my mouth, a dry sponge covered in raspy white bumps.
A shrill peep-peep-peep came from the bottom of a tree with yellow bark. Each peep sounded like a whistle being blown, as if whatever was making those peeps was using its whole body to make them. Hunting in the grass, we found a baby bird. I almost stepped on it—head tucked, it looked like a pinky-grey rock. “Jeez!” I yanked my foot back, cringing at the thought of its nutlike body pulped under my sneaker.
“He must have fallen out of his nest,” said Dunk.
It didn’t even look like a bird, or something that might turn into one. It had no feathers. Its wings were the colour of my grandfather’s fingernails, its legs tiny thumbs. Its beak was the bright yellow of a McDonald’s straw, splitting its dark blue head in half. When it peeped, the edges of its beak fluttered like tissue paper. You could see through its skin like through a greasy fast-food bag: the dark pinbone of its spine, the weird movement of its guts. There was a milky ball of fat where its tail would pop out.
When Dunk reached to touch it I grabbed his wrist.
“You can’t. If it gets human smell on it, its mom won’t take it back. It’ll smell like us, not like a bird. Its mom’ll be scared. She won’t feed it.”
“That’s stupid.”
“It’s, like, a scientific fact.”
Dunk hunted through the backpack and found a dry rag. He slipped it over his hand and picked the bird up in the same way you’d pick up a dog turd. The creature peeped crazily before settling. Dunk rolled the rag into a little nest with the bird in the middle.
“Stupid mamma bird,” he said.
Crickets chirped in the green gloom. Through the trees, the sky was bruising towards purple. It’s scary the way night falls in the woods: more abrupt, unsoftened by headlamps or street lamps. The only light comes from stars that bloom in the velvet sky, sharpening as darkness closes around each shining pinprick. Night in the forest falls like a guillotine blade: quick and sharp, cutting you off from everything.
The woods changed. Where before there was only the sound of our footsteps and breathing, now there were sly rustlings from all angles. Yet if I were to turn and peer into those black pools linked by long shadows, I’d see nothing. Whatever stirred would pause, hold its breath, melt into the landscape until I turned away—at which point it would stalk us again. A sense of desolation settled within me: a cold, slimy stone lodged under my lungs. There was nothing happy about the woods, I thought, especially at night.
We unpacked our belongings under a sweep of elms. What had seemed like plenty that morning now looked pitiful. A chocolate bar, a dirty flannel blanket, a book of matches from a club called Pure Platinum, a nudie mag and a gun and two empty Coke cans.
We built a ring of rocks. Dunk tore pages out of the magazine. I stacked a teepee of sticks over the paper. Five matches in the matchbook. The match-heads were a dull crumbly red. The striking strip was shiny-smooth.
We huddled over the firepit to keep the wind at bay. Dunk ran a match down the strike-strip. The paper shaft bent. The match didn’t catch. He pressed the match to the strip with his thumb. It burst into flame. A fragile flame cupped in Dunk’s palm. I held my breath as he touched it to the paper.
The wind snuck between us. Whuff. Darkness. Something rustled in the tree above, followed by a deep-throated cackle that ascended through several octaves before tapering to a weird shattering sob.
“It’s a bird,” Dunk said. “A stupid little bird.”
He tore another match. “Get close,” he said, scratching it on the striking strip. The shaft tore nearly in half. He struck it again. The match-head went up in a hot spark and instantly burned out.
I hated everyone who’d had anything to do with those matches. Whoever made them, sold them or thought they were good for much at all.
Dunk handed them to me. “You try.”
I tore one out and folded the book closed. The match felt worthless:
flimsy, already damp with my sweat. It was the first time I’d ever really needed something to work. Sometimes your whole life came down to some silly little thing you never thought could matter, not in a million years. A stupid match.
I hunched so far over the firepit that I nearly nosedived into it. If I lit the match as close to the paper as possible, the wind wouldn’t get a chance to snuff it. I ran it down the strip, flicking my wrist like I’d seen men do at the Bisk on their smoke breaks.
It caught. Dunk cupped his hands around mine. Light broke between our fingers in golden spears so bright they seemed solid, as if they might snap like icicles. I touched it to the paper. Flame leapt from match to paper. Relief washed over me.
Wind curled into the pit and between my fingers, silky-cool. Whuff.
Darkness—or not quite. A half-moon burned at the paper’s edge, a fine orange band no bigger than a fingernail clipping. Then it went out.
“Fucking wind.”
“Scouts taught us how to light a one-match fire, right? We’ve still got two left.” Dunk was smiling. His teeth glowed like chips of phosphorus. It amazed me that he’d find anything funny about this.
I blew on my fingertips to dry them, then tore out the second-to-last match. It had to light. Not because the law of averages said so, or because if it didn’t we’d be stuck in the dark with that cackling thing in the tree. No, the match had to light because we were two scared kids lost in the woods. The universe owed us that much, didn’t it?
It flared on the first strike. I stretched towards the paper, fingers steady. Wind licked at the flame, blowing it sideways but not quite out. I held it to a ragged edge where the paper had been torn from the magazine, the threadlike fibres oh so flammable, please please please, and the match burned down to my fingertips as the heat intensified, becoming unbearable, please please PLEASE, and the flame took hold along that edge, timid at first but becoming greedy, devouring the paper and Dunk let out a giddy whoop as the fire burned up and up, releasing oily smoke, eating a hole through the crumpled face of a girl with a black bar over her eyes.
We built the fire into a blaze, heaping wood up and laughing until we were out of breath, dancing a crazy jig round the flames.
The burning wood fell inward with a soft, cindery sound that sent a great coil of sparks up to extinguish on the overhanging leaves. The coals brightened and dimmed in the wind. The baby bird peeped softly.
“Do you think it’s hungry?” Dunk said.
“I’m hungry.”
“Me, too.”
I found the bottle of vitamins in the backpack. Each was three times the size of the Flintstones vitamins Mom used to make me take at breakfast. They smelled like a barnyard, of hay and horses. It seemed wise to take them, like medicine.
“Do you think we can survive on vitamins?” Dunk said.
“We probably need other things, like … steaks and eggs and potatoes. Vitamins are just one thing.”
“Popeye lives on one thing. Spinach.”
“No, Popeye eats spinach to get strong so he can save Olive Oyl. He probably eats lots of other stuff—just not on camera.”
“Oh.”
I unwrapped the Three Musketeers bar, broke it in half and held the pieces out to Dunk. “You pick.” The chocolate was stale with a whitened waxy film but still, it was the best thing I’d ever eaten. Once the rush wore off I realized how hungry I still was, and thirsty, and scared.
We lay down and stared at the sky. Dunk held the bird on his chest, wrapped in the rag. A red light flashed across the sky.
Dunk said: “Plane or satellite?”
“I don’t know. Which goes faster?”
“I’ve never been in a plane,” Dunk said. “Or a satellite.”
“We took a plane to Myrtle Beach on vacation,” I said. “And to Disney World.”
“I used to ride my bike to the Point, where the river bends out before the Falls, y’know? I watched the planes come in. Some you couldn’t see until they were just about on top of you. They came out of the clouds real low, a big whooosh and there they were. Sort of like sharks, you know? A shark coming at you in the water—you can’t see it until it’s just about in front of you. The grey planes looked especially like sharks. Scary but kind of cool.”
The baby bird went up and down on his chest with each heavy inhalation. “Hey, Owe?”
“Yeah?”
“You think it’s true what Bruiser said?”
“About what?”
“Those dogs.”
“In the satellite?”
His face was still held by the sky, but I could tell this was pretty important to him. Could be he’d been sitting on it all day.
“Maybe, Dunk. I don’t know … but not for sure.”
“No?”
“How far is another planet from here? Real far from where we’re looking, but maybe not. And a satellite goes pretty fast. Maybe they just drifted through space and landed on another planet.”
“You think they could have?”
“Why not? A planet we don’t even know about. Maybe it’s sunny all the time there. Maybe the water’s red.”
“Red?”
“Or purple or gold. Anything but blue. Maybe the sun is blue. Maybe meatballs grow on trees.”
He laughed. “Meatball trees.”
“Or maybe it’s a lot like here, but a long time ago. Like back in caveman times. Or … or nobody and nothing. Just the two of them.”
“I guess they’d be scared.”
I bent my knees and wrapped my arms around them. “But they’d already travelled through space, right?” I said, resting my chin on my kneecaps. “They climbed out of that broken satellite and breathed that fresh air and I bet it was pretty great. Mahoney said they were mongrels, right? They never had someone to feed them. They could hunt and kill and drink water from streams.”
“Gold water.”
“Yeah, gold.”
“What would they hunt?”
I turned to face Dunk, resting my cheek on my knees. “I guess the same things they would hunt here. Rabbits and rats. Squirrels.”
“You think they’d have rabbits on that planet?”
“Maybe. Or maybe there the rabbits are big as cars. Maybe bears are small. Maybe you could hold a shark in your palm there.”
“So they would run away from giant rabbits.”
“And hunt tiny bears. Or maybe there are animals we’ve never seen.”
“Things with tentacle faces. Things with lots of teeth.”
“Harmless things, too. Things that look like baby chicks, only ten feet tall.”
“A ten-foot-tall baby chick?”
“No, just a yellow fuzzy thing who happens to be ten feet tall.”
“Can it talk?”
“I guess, but not in a language dogs would understand.”
I tried to think about fuzzy ten-foot baby chicks, but I kept thinking about things with tentacle faces and lots of teeth.
“Owe?”
“Yeah?”
“You think things might hunt them?”
“… I guess so. But they travelled far and they were still alive. That has to count for something, right? So yeah, things hunt them. So what? Things hunted them here, too. The dog catcher, right? They just kept on going.”
“Kept going, mmm, yeah.”
“And maybe they found someplace safe. Or I don’t know, maybe the whole planet is run by dogs. They get to be, like, kings of Dog Planet.”
“Why would they be kings? They just showed up.”
“Well, whatever. Maybe one of them gives a very inspiring speech and they make him the president.”
“Of the whole planet?”
I shrugged: why not?
“Hey, Owe?”
“Yeah?”
“Meatball trees would be awesome.”
“Totally. Eat them like apples.”
“Oh, man! Big greasy apples … We shouldn’t talk about food.”
I rolled onto my side. If I curle
d up and held my stomach, maybe it wouldn’t growl so much. Sounds came out of the darkness. Some like nails clawing into rotten wood. Others like the click-click of naked bones.
A slow, steady breathing wrapped around my shoulders then went out again, hugging the trees and sliding along the ground like the never-ending exhale of some huge creature with lungs the size of football stadiums. The heart of the woods beat through me: a soothing thack, a giant underground muscle pumping green blood through every root and into every tree, everything connected to everything else under the dirt.
I dozed and woke with Dunk settled next to me. He’d draped the blanket over us. His breath feathery on the back of my neck.
I fell into a deeper sleep and awoke with Dunk’s fingers clutching my chest.
“Something’s out there.”
The worry in his voice sent a spike of ice down my spine. The fire was dead. My feet were swollen and numb inside my sneakers, the blood pooled.
“Listen,” Dunk said urgently. “Can you hear it?”
The pressure of my held breath pressed against my eardrums, making it hard to hear anything. I forced myself to let it out in a shuddery hiss.
There were the usual clickings and rustlings that I’d almost gotten used to. But another sound, too. A soft noise atop those familiar ones, and beneath them at the same time.
“What is it?” I whispered.
Dunk blew on the coals, stirring the embers. An orange shine lit his face and gave me some confidence. He reached into the backpack. The light of a solitary star winked off the pistol’s silver barrel.
The sound approached then drifted away, switching places to come at us from a new angle.
It’s Bruiser Mahoney.
The thought snagged in my mind, a sticky black ball covered in fish hooks. Bruiser Mahoney was out there, alive but not really. He’d stalked all day and night and finally caught up. Sniffing us like a bloodhound, lumbering on all fours with his spine cracked out and shining like a half-buried centipede through the dead grey skin of his back. His dentures shoved past his sun-blistered lips and his face swollen with blood, his eyeballs two rotted grapes staring out of the piggy folds of flesh to make him look like a giant prehistoric slug. His fingernails matted with shreds of the tent he’d clawed free of. He’d followed us without stopping, blundering at first but becoming more aware, strides lengthening as he pursued us through the undergrowth. And now he was here.
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