In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  The bottle was indeed in the glove box, just as Bobby had said. It was resting on the folded scarf Allie always wore to school.

  8

  What happened to Marshall next was not unlike what had happened to his daughter along the slope leading to the rocks—everything happened too fast. When questioned by Jake later, Marshall could only remember bits and pieces: rushing back inside; screaming as he waved the scarf in Bobby’s face; the feel of his knuckles meeting Bobby’s gaunt cheeks and chin; Bobby crying out, begging Marshall to stop.

  Marshall did only after throwing Bobby through the front window of his auto shop and being tackled by a group of passersby. It was rage of loss and utter failure over not being there when Allie most needed him—not being there to protect her.

  That was a feeling Zach would have understood well. He coughed into his sleeve. The sound was deep and hard and echoed off the rocks.

  “Any food left?” he asked.

  Allie shook her head. “It’s all gone. You just drank the last of the water too.”

  “We need fire,” he said. “Sun’s warmed these rocks some, even if it ain’t warmed nothing else. Won’t last, though. We don’t do something, we’ll freeze to death tonight.”

  “You wanna go out there?” Allie asked him. “What if He’s still out there?”

  “You said you ain’t heard nothing. We gotta try.”

  “Not we, Zach. You can’t move.”

  “I can move enough.”

  He sat up again slower this time, easily avoiding their new ceiling. His heartbeat centered just above his right eye. The throbbing felt like an ax to his brain. Zach collected the parts of his bow drill and some of the tinder Allie had taken out.

  “Wanna come, Sam?” he asked.

  Sam’s answer was to lie on the ground. Zach eased forward into what little daylight was left, saw nothing beyond but evening, and crawled out. Allie followed.

  “You keep watch,” he said. “Make sure ain’t nothing coming.”

  Allie bobbed her head. The buzzing in her ears matched the shaking of her limbs. It felt as though her whole body was nodding, telling Zach Whatever you say, boss.

  Zach set up his equipment just beyond the cave’s opening. Allie collected what wood she could find. Most of the area around the rocks was barren, dotted only by a few scraggly pines. She saw nothing else but Sam, who had emerged from the cave torn between making sure Allie didn’t wander off and making sure he kept himself safe.

  The woods were quiet, waiting for night. The screeching of Zach’s bow was the only noise, and plenty enough to sprout a new crop of fears in both him and Allie. It was an impossible situation—they needed fire to live, they needed the bow to make the fire, and yet the bow may as well have been a bullhorn with all the scratching it made. Allie kept watch as well as she could, using her eyes more than her ears (which were now almost as useful as her feet) as she walked to the edge of the hill. She saw nothing in the trees below. More, she felt nothing. Aside from the voice inside her that had gone quiet, feeling was the sense she was coming most to trust.

  She circled around, past Zach to the opposite slope, and looked down the sheer drop. Nothing there either. The sky was cloudy, gray. Zach’s arm picked up steam. A finger of smoke rose from the fireboard. Sam stared as if beholding a miracle. Allie thought maybe it was.

  “Almost got it,” he wheezed. “Just a little more, then it’ll fall in the tinder pile.”

  The smoke would have turned to coal had Zach not coughed. Allie saw the grimace on his face first. His lips curled as though he’d just eaten something sour, then he fell over with only a little more control than he’d managed earlier. He landed on his hands and knees, made stiff by the hacks from his chest. Allie ran to him and held his shoulders so he wouldn’t fall. The fragrance of burning cedar filled the air. Zach let out a final explosion from his lungs and sprayed the ground with a thick, yellow mist.

  “Help me, Allie,” he said. “I think I busted something.”

  She couldn’t. The sight of Zach’s mouth had frozen her just as the pain in his chest had frozen him. Her mind screamed, No! even if her mouth would not. He said it again—“Help me, Allie,” the words coming out slurred, almost foreign. And Allie thought they should be, because Zach had never asked her for help with anything, not even homework.

  It wasn’t the fear and despair in his voice that got her moving, it was the voice that spoke above the buzzing in Allie’s ears, telling her to hurry. She helped Zach up and guided him back inside the cave, sat him up against her backpack. She dabbed away the blood on his lips with part of her scarf and fed him the bits of willow bark from her pocket. There was nothing more Allie could do other than sit beside him. And that’s exactly what she did.

  “I can try it,” she said. “I seen how you do that fire maker. Bet I can get one going.”

  Zach shook his head. “You gotta know what you’re doing. You ain’t strong enough.” He wheezed again. “Maybe I ain’t either. I can’t move no more. My chest won’t let me, and your feet won’t let you. I got the fever I think, Allie. And It’s out there somewhere. I can feel It. We’re stuck here.”

  “Maybe He’s gone now,” she said. “Maybe He just got hungry and now He’s full.”

  He shook his head. “It didn’t eat.”

  “What?”

  “It didn’t eat the doe, Allie. All the meat was still there, far as I could tell. It was just all scattered about. That’s what I couldn’t understand. Like It weren’t hungry at all, It just wanted to kill something. Show us what It can do and what It’s gonna do when It finds us. And It will, Allie. We can’t run away. Not with me being sick and your feet being shot. We can maybe hide so long as we stay here, but there’s no more food and water. We’re done. It’s no hope.”

  Allie laid her head against Zach’s shoulder, wanting to say something that would prove him wrong. Nothing came to mind. It was always Zach who did the encouraging. Even after everything ended and the only moments they stole together were at school, all Allie had to do was merely think of him. That alone would be enough to make her smile. And yet now the responsibility for offering hope was hers. Allie was the one who had to think of a reason to get them up and going again. But what she found in her heart didn’t feel like wisdom. There was no rah-rah and no gung ho that would lead them out of that cave and go charging into the night. What she spoke instead was merely the truth of what she carried.

  “My momma’s out here somewhere and I believe she sent word. She’s waitin’ for us where the trees are red, and then this’ll all go away. There’s gotta be hope, Zach. I’ve gone so long without it since everything ended. I didn’t think I wanted it because it got to be the thing that killed me. But you know what I found out? A body can’t live like that. You can’t live without hope. All you can do is survive. There’s a difference.”

  “We won’t do neither.”

  “Yes we will,” she said. (No you won’t, said Voice.) “I believe it.”

  “You can’t believe, Allie. You’re fallen away.”

  “People who get fallen away can still believe. You’re a prayin’ man, though. It’s hard for you to understand.”

  “I tried prayin’. It didn’t hold.”

  Allie said, “You can try again if you want.”

  “Won’t do no good. God’s got sharp edges. Angel told me that.”

  “I don’t know what that means, Zach.”

  “Me neither. I wanted to ask, but I didn’t think he’d answer.”

  “He wouldn’t’ve,” Allie said. “Angels ain’t ever plain. You get to be old as me, you’ll learn not to go asking questions of the heavenly things. Even if you get an answer, it likely won’t be the one you want.”

  “You ain’t no older than me.”

  “Maybe not on the outside. But I am on my insides, Zach. On my insides, I’m elderly.”

  Zach was quiet for a long while. When he spoke again, the words were so hushed that they barely reached Allie’s ears.
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  “Maybe that’s what it means,” he said. “Maybe the angel said God had sharp edges because He’s so hard to understand sometimes. Maybe God’s sharp and we’re just soft, and no matter how brave or smart we think we are, we just can’t figure Him.”

  The cold set in deeper as the sun sank low. Sam’s eyes drooped. He curled into his ball, resigned to another night away from the comfort of his master’s bed. Allie heard him shudder against the cold. Zach remained in his position, mostly sitting up and partly lying down. His eyes stared ahead at nothing. Allie had been right in saying even she could still believe in something. She may have fallen away (though not completely and not nearly as far as Bobby Barnes, who at that moment was being bandaged up by Doc March in the Mattingly jail and too busy pleading his innocence to Jake and Marshall to ponder his immortal soul), but Allie knew for a fact now that God had an edge. Everything did—every dream, every love, every person. They all had a slippery place, and if you got too close all you’d get for your trouble was a long fall.

  “I think even the world’s got an edge,” she said. “That ain’t science, but it don’t matter no more. It’s an edge, Zach, and I think maybe we’ve slid right off it. Do you think so?”

  She looked at him when he didn’t answer. Zach’s eyes lay half open, staring at the front of the cave. Allie’s first thought was that he loved her so much that he’d gone on to heaven first, too, just to make sure the lights were on and the gates would be open when she got there. It would have been a terrible notion were it not so lovely, and all the fear and grief Allie knew she should feel gave way to a calm resignation.

  This really was it, then: where their noble journey finished and everything ended. Zach’s life would go no further. Nor would Allie’s. Nor even, she thought, their lives together. She had never thought of Zach in that way—having a future with him. Getting through school and getting married, maybe even having children. Struggling through the hard times that made the good times better. That was the good kind of love. The real kind. It was the sort of love Allie thought of now, watching as Zach slipped off the edge of one world to fly toward the next.

  She was too cold and too tired to feel the tears gathering behind her eyes, but she knew they must be there and wiped them anyway. Her hand brushed against the side of Zach’s jeans. His arm moved. He grunted once and closed his eyes, settling into sleep. The wet whistle of his lungs soaked the cave.

  Fallen away or not, Allie looked through the opening of the cave and said, “Don’t You take him away. I don’t have a compass no more, you see. Zach’d have no way to send word.”

  She leaned over and covered him with her arms, hoping that would keep him warm.

  The night fell hard.

  9

  Rest came easy for Zach and Sam. Not so for Allie. She vowed to fight her heavy eyes and slowing breaths, believing that surrendering to either would seal their fates. Let them sleep, she’d thought. I’ll keep watch. They had done for her in the past days (even Sam, who may not have understood the need to help her pull Zach up the hill but who had put himself between the crashing trees and Allie), and now she would do for them. She would stand the watch. She would keep the bad things away.

  Her head was still on Zach’s chest, arms still tight around him. It made for a good vantage point to the cave’s entrance not eight feet beyond. Allie had watched the opening there go from the golden beams of evening to a night the color of oil. A paleness followed not long after—the clouds parting, she thought. The moon would be out.

  Every so often her right hand slipped between the snaps of Zach’s jacket and under his shirt. His chest was cold and clammy, but Allie wasn’t interested in his fever. It was his heart. So long as Allie’s fingers could feel that soft undulation just beneath his skin, she thought he would be okay. There was no real reason to do this—she could hear the whistles from his lungs just fine with her head there; his insides sounded like a rusty machine grinding down after running too long. But the heartbeat somehow meant more.

  Allie may have tamed her mind (or so she thought), but she was no longer in control of the rest of her body. The itch in her feet had been replaced by a burning sensation sometime since they’d arrived at the cave. Now there were only prickles where the tops of her Chucks pressed into the skin. The buzzing sound was still in her ears. She had almost grown used to that while walking around outside. Trapped in the cave, it dulled and spread into a numbness that flowed over the rest of her. She thought that must be how it felt, freezing to death. She touched Zach’s chest again and raised her head when she felt nothing. Blinked, trying to clear her mind. Where was Zach’s heart? On the left or the right? Was it up high, near his breastbone? Or lower, near his stomach? Shouldn’t she know that?

  Her hands moved across him, pressing down. Zach whistled from his mouth. His arm twitched from the dream he’d been trapped inside—something was chasing him through the woods, something huge and hungry, and when he turned he saw nothing but claws and eyes and a black cowboy hat on Its head—as Allie panicked, smacking that twitching arm away and telling Zach to quit his blessed whistling because couldn’t he see she was trying to find his heart? Couldn’t he stop breathing long enough for Allie to tell if he was dead?

  She tried her own chest next. The heartbeat there wasn’t difficult to find. By then, it thundered so loud that Allie could feel it everywhere. Her left hand settled in a spot just to the side of one of her bumps. She held her hand there and moved her right hand to the same place on Zach’s chest. The beat was there. Barely, but there. Allie looked down, moving the hand on her chest away as the sad dawning of what she’d just been doing fell over her.

  It was the cold. The cold and the hunger and the fear. All of them, working together to cut her mind away from its moorings just as the God of the moon and the forest had cut away the moorings of her life.

  A hungry growl from her stomach mixed with Zach’s tooting chest, forming a kind of death song in Allie’s ears. She imagined another cold day some winters on and a hunter stumbling upon a rise in the woods capped by some of the biggest rocks he’d ever seen, thinking there must be something up there worth shooting. She saw him climb up slow and quiet, not wanting to scare anything off, and then standing at the top and looking down over that sharp drop on the other side. He would find a hole in the rocks and think that’s just where a critter would make its home, but when he crawled inside all he’d find was bodies—one boy, one girl, and one dog. All the bones would be near each other. The girl’s and the boy’s would even be mixed up, maybe, because they’d died in a hug. The hunter would cry because it all looked so sad. He’d find his way back to town and go to Sheriff Jake first, and Jake would call Marshall. That’s how they would find their lost children, and that’s when Allie realized they weren’t merely in another shelter, they were in their own grave. That alone was what stirred her. She had to keep moving, keep busy. Had to guard the boy.

  Her feet moved well enough, though Allie found she had to concentrate to make them work. She opened her backpack, careful not to snag the zipper on the scarf, and removed one of the pads inside. She curled it in her hand and zipped up the pack, then ran a shaking hand down the back of the dog curled and sleeping beside them. Allie could not remember the dog’s name, though she did recall that it was a him rather than a her and that she loved him even if she wasn’t supposed to.

  She stumbled out of the cave into that pale light. In one final act of defiance, Allie vowed she would not look at the moon. A voice called from somewhere above. Allie followed it, climbing the rocks above the cave as if in a trance. Her body was no longer hers. Her mind listed like a ship being pulled to the depths.

  The voice—and it was a voice, Allie was sure of that in the sense it wasn’t the buzz in her ears or the wind upon the rocks—stopped her in place and died away. Allie lifted her jacket and unbuttoned her jeans. She wobbled and caught herself by lowering into the Crouch of Shame. That’s when she saw.

  Nearly a day had passed
without Allie sneaking away to take care of her woman problem. The pad stuck to the inside of her underwear had gotten too used up (Just like us, she thought), and with nowhere left for the blood to go, it had made a blotch on her jeans. The spot wasn’t big, no more than the size of a dime, and yet to Allie’s fraying mind it appeared as a sea covering the entire lower half of her body. She let out the sort of whimper Sam would understand. It was one last indignity—Allie’s final step to her own slippery edge.

  Dizziness enveloped her. She stood and looked down at the forest and the hard ground far below, bathed shadows cast by the faint ruddiness in the air. Beyond lay the expanse of the deep woods, countless miles of slopes and hollows that rose and fell from a land where time became slanted and all hope went to die. There were no red trees. A knowing dawned in Allie at that sight, one that said Mary Granderson could never survive in such a place. There were no red trees. So much time had passed since the tornado snatched her on that Carnival Day. Too much time to wander alone, lost and frightened among the bad things in the woods, her only light a distant sun that rarely shone, a cold moon that offered no comfort, and a glow like now that seemed a mix of the two.

  The steep drop in front of her. One more step was all it would take. One lift of a shoe, a single lean forward. Not even that, really—half a step might even do the job, given how wobbly she felt. She could pretend she was flying and spread her arms wide. Feel the wind through her pigtails. It wouldn’t hurt when she landed. Zach said he never felt anything when he fell along the slope. All the feeling had come when he woke up, and Allie wouldn’t have to worry about that because she wouldn’t wake up at all, at least not in this world. Where she would wake up was a question she couldn’t answer. Would she really even want to be up in heaven, spending all eternity so near those sharp edges?

  That meant hell, then. That’s where Allie would wake up if she jumped. Not because hell was where you went when you killed yourself, but because she had spent her every hour since everything ended falling away and wanting nothing more to do with God. If He obliged her that right in life, wouldn’t He do the same in death? She thought so. God never sent anyone to hell; it’s more they sent themselves.