In the Heart of the Dark Wood

by Billy Coffey

  He paused every dozen or so steps to turn his head farther around from the breeze, making sure Allie was still there. Little more than her shadow could be seen in the waning evening. Zach slowed his already sluggish gait, letting her catch up. She never did. She remained behind, choosing to be alone. It was for the best. Finding them real food and discovering the truth of their situation had buoyed Zach’s spirits, but not enough for him to forget peeing himself. As for Allie, she had nothing to concentrate on but her swelling feet and ankle, which guided her body in tiny, almost shuffling steps.

  Allie had decided in the last mile that the farther she kept from Zach, the safer he would be. She whispered as she tried to walk, telling Sam to hang on and please stay with her. The dog felt heavy in her arms. Because I’m so tired, she thought. The voice in her spoke again, saying Sam felt so heavy because he had so little life left in him.

  Ahead the riverbank narrowed again into a sprawl of larger rocks. The darkwood rose in a steep slope to a ridge to their right. Farther up, black outlines of trees reached across the bank to the water’s edge. Their limbs bent out and down to the water, as though thirsty. Zach lowered his head and walked on, stopping at what he judged was a safe distance from the trees. The river would protect them to their left, the ridge to their right. It was a good place—as good as they could expect. Besides, he could walk no more.

  He turned and called, “We’ll camp here,” waiting for Allie’s reply. She stopped and spoke something, but the wind swallowed it. Her body tilted to the left as she drew near. There were many things Zach would have to do to keep them alive that night. He added fixing Allie’s brace to the list.

  She arrived and sat on the rocks, so thankful to finally rest her feet that she paid no mind to their screams and protests on the way down. Zach set about gathering the largest rocks he could and stacked them in a semicircle against the wind. That cover would have to do. It didn’t matter to Zach if the demon would leave them alone or not; he wasn’t about to venture into the darkwood for shelter. He heaved the rocks into place one by one, trying to use his legs and not his back, trying to gather himself with deep breaths. He managed to find only a small amount of air. The rest he coughed out in thick, loud gasps.

  Allie stroked Sam’s head and kept whispering. She reminded him of home and her bed and how warm the covers would be when they got back, how she’d gotten him a new tennis ball for Christmas, anything to keep him in the world. The scarf around him had gone from orange and blue to a sticky red. Allie put her hand beneath, careful to stay clear of the wound. She felt Sam’s chest just as she’d felt Zach’s back in the cave.

  Zach layered another rock and asked, “He okay?”

  “He’s breathing,” Allie said. “There’s so much blood, Zach.”

  “I know. Keep the scarf on’m. He’ll be okay, Allie.”

  But Sam didn’t look okay, not with those eyes that had almost gone shut and the pink tongue lolling from his mouth. His breaths came shallow, barely moving the scarf against her chest, and his tongue came alive just enough to lick the space below her neck. She shrugged off her backpack. Zach finished the windbreak (which wasn’t much of a break at all, what with all the gaps between the stones) and crouched down, coughing more.

  He said, “I need the bow drill from your pack. We’ll need fire tonight, Allie. I don’t get this to work, the cold’ll take us. I’m still freezin’ from the river. We ain’t got no cave or hut, and I won’t dare that darkwood.”

  She nodded, barely registering that Zach was unzipping her backpack and reaching inside. He pushed aside the two remaining fish and brought out the bow, then brushed his fingers against the packages inside as he groped for the clumps of tinder. He placed the parts in the middle of the semicircle and then strayed far enough from the camp to scavenge what wood he could find. When Zach returned minutes later, he carried only an armful. Allie began rocking Sam in her arms just as her momma had once rocked her, humming a tune she did not know. She watched Zach set the pieces in place. He drew out his remaining shoelace and tied it around the bow, wrapping the spindle inside. He placed his foot on the fireboard and rested the handhold against his shin. Then came the familiar music of wood scraping wood as he drew the bow back and forth.

  “Zach?”

  He coughed again.

  “What did you mean when you said we were being herded?”

  “Mr. Scary don’t want us leaving, Allie.” Looking at the bow and not her, trying to push the handhold down just enough so the spindle sparked the hole in the board. “It wants to keep us here, wear us down.” And as tendrils of sweet-smelling smoke began to lift from the bowels of all that screeching wood, he thought, Because if you scare it good before you kill it, the meat tastes better. “It gets us wore out; It knows we won’t fight.”

  “Sam fought.” Allie nuzzled him closer. The dog didn’t move. Sleeping, she thought. Sleeping was all. “He was brave.”

  Zach bore down harder. His shoulders and back began to burn and his breaths came faster, threatening to choke him. “It won’t come. Back. Not so long as we go the wrong. Way. We’re lost now, Allie. For sure. Hafta stay strong.”

  Two more minutes, he thought. Maybe less than that. Then the wood would spark. Then they could be safe for the night.

  “I ain’t strong,” Allie said. “God’s gonna get me, Zach. I’m marked. He got Sam because Sam got marked too. You’re gonna be next. I can’t stop it.”

  It was not what she’d said but how she’d said it—low and soft and full of longing—that pulled Zach’s eyes from the bow. His hands stopped long enough to lower the smoke. He looked down and cursed himself, then drew the bow faster.

  He wheezed, “That ain’t true,” but Allie didn’t hear. The wind had taken those words away just as it had taken Mary, leaving Allie to mourn the fact that so much of life seemed a bargaining of one thing for another. Of watching one thing fall from the vine so something less beautiful could grow.

  “So long as I stayed sad, everybody’d be okay. They’d be safe. That’s why I shoulda stayed sad, Zach. But I believed instead, and now we’re lost.”

  On that particular point, Zach couldn’t argue. Nothing helped a person so much as faith, but nothing could cause so much harm as that faith being placed anywhere other than where it rightly belonged. He didn’t bother telling Allie this and wouldn’t have, even if his total attention weren’t centered upon the smoke rising from his bow drill. Thick smoke, with a color as black as the night around them. And at the bottom of the spindle, a single frail ember.

  “Get ready,” he said.

  Allie leaned forward just as Zach did the same. Yet while she shifted Sam to her left hand and waved the smoke away with her right, Zach had no hands left. The smoke enveloped his head, seizing his nose and throat and flinging him into coughs Allie had never heard before, barks so deep and violent it was as if Zach had gone possessed. Reflex overtook his mind as his hands let go of the bow and spindle to cover his face. He wheeled away as his body convulsed, expelling warm liquid from his mouth. Allie skirted the smoldering wood and crawled to him on two knees and one hand. She rubbed his back, asking Zach if he was okay. She mourned the love she felt for him.

  Zach looked at the dying remains of the fire and shut his eyes, not bearing the sight. One last cough erupted from the furthest place in him, leaving a coppery taste in his mouth. Allie lifted his head. Even in the night, Zach could see on her face an expression that stopped him, one worse than fear or worry. It was a look of hopelessness.

  Two of her fingers grazed his lips. Allie drew them away and rubbed what was there with her thumb, telling herself it wasn’t that at all in much the same way as she’d told herself Sam was only sleeping. She held them up to Zach.

  “Is that blood?” he asked.

  A nod was all.

  Zach’s voice bent under the sight of those few drops, followed by his courage and the last of his heart. His eyes cracked last, healing themselves with the tears that flooded there. />
  “I coughed up blood?” Asking, begging Allie to say no, it wasn’t blood, it was just mud maybe or a little frost turned red by a trick of light. They’d endured so much in the past days. They’d fought the cold and the hunger and the thirst and the loneliness, even the demon that followed them. But Zach knew he couldn’t endure this. And as the first tear spilled from the corner of his swollen left eye, he knew the only person in the world who could make it better wasn’t Allie or God, it was his momma.

  That tear frightened Allie even more than the blood on Zach’s mouth. She shifted Sam’s body to her left hand again and held out her right, wanting to wrap it around Zach’s neck. He jerked away instead and got to his feet, telling her no. He had to cry, had to empty himself of his pain, but he was still too proud to do it in front of Allie. He walked away as she called, pleading for him to come back. Zach shook his head and cursed his weakness as Marshall cursed his own miles away on the back porch, weeping on his hands and knees as he lapped up the alcohol he’d poured out.

  And just as in that moment Allie loved Zach more than her heart could bear, so Grace Howard held Marshall tight and believed she held her own father. Her tears rushed out, mingling with Marshall’s own, two hearts wrung dry by the hard turns of life. She had loved Mary Granderson like a sister. Mary had been there after Hank Howard died, had listened to Grace as she mourned not only that loss but what she felt was her part in it. Now there, in the darkness of that backyard and the crumbling of Marshall’s own self, Grace understood for the first time that she loved this man who had buried what had been found of her best friend after The Storm. It was a love far deeper than Allie or Grace ever believed they could feel, one kindled not by the ugly sight of Zach and Marshall being brought down, but by the beauty of what they would become if they found the courage to rise up again.

  Zach could not dry his face. Fresh tears fell in the places where he wiped the old tears away. They mixed with the blood seeping from his mouth, making his cheeks slick and sticky. Allie still called. Her voice faded in the wind as Zach walked on, stopping only when the great trees that grew onto the bank would let him go no farther. There he slumped and shut his eyes. He cried out to both heaven and home, hoping someone would hear.

  When Zach opened his eyes again, two lights shone among the branches not ten feet away. Hovering there, unmoved by the wind and creaking trees. One red, one white. Beholding him. Zach reached out, believing those lights could be taken in his hand like two swollen lightning bugs. They disappeared at his movement, only for an instant, then emerged again. And with them came a grunt.

  Zach’s arm went lifeless. It slapped the front of his jeans, scaring him. He took two steps back as his tears continued to flow and wiped his mouth again, feeling the blood.

  The blood.

  A new horror now, one larger than even the eyes staring back at him. The demon was here, yes—and It smelled Zach’s blood.

  The eyes shifted again, this time rising instead of blinking out. Climbing into the limbs of the trees, up and up, so high that Zach had to stretch his neck to see them. And then it was as if the trees themselves gave birth to a moving trunk that began to push its way out onto the riverbank, a breathing mass larger than anything Zach had ever seen, grunting and growling and coming toward him.

  The scream that flooded the riverbank was nearly inhuman in its pitch and carry, and Zach didn’t even cough when he was done. He only yelled, “Run,” yelled it long and loud behind him as that shadow advanced, and then he ran himself. Not back to Allie, but toward the rise on his right. Into the darkwood.

  15

  Allie had been watching all this time, though from that distance all she saw was the patch of night into which Zach had disappeared. Yet the night could not swallow the scream that came from downriver. Allie’s every sense came alive at the terror behind that wailing, and of the boy who’d made it. She stood. Her arms squeezed Sam so tight that he woke long enough to give a tired yelp.

  She screamed into the darkness, “Zach?” but no sound returned. There was only the wind and the current rushing past. “Zach. Are you okay?”

  Allie took a step forward. The toes of her Chucks met the widest part of Zach’s windbreak. Sam drifted back to unconsciousness. He hung limp and heavy in Allie’s arms.

  “Zach can you hear me what happened?”

  She had to go to him, if for no other reason than Allie knew Zach would have gone to her. She should go toward that scream. Brave the dark. And yet her feet wouldn’t move at all.

  She called once more—“Zach?” Praying he would answer. Praying, even, for the moon. Not even the trees farther on could be seen. The clouds overhead lay like a blanket over the stars, holding the night close. Allie took a step back and to the right, feeling for the edge of the stone wall. Telling herself she had to save Zach. Her eyes strained forward, trying to peel away the gloom, then widened in wonder.

  Two lights shone ahead. One red, one white. Tiny, glowing holes that swayed from left to right in a slow rhythm that bewitched her. Allie smiled as joy flowed over her. They were beautiful, those lights. They were the most beautiful things she’d ever seen.

  “Zach? Is that you?”

  Closer now. Zach must have found them. They were not lost at all. Zach had meant to lead them to town but they had found the light instead—the one from the pond; the light she’d seen from the rocks. A kind of magic maybe, like her compass. Her momma sending word once more.

  That’s not magic, said Voice. At least, none you’ve ever imagined.

  But it was, had to be. And yet as those lights moved toward her, Allie remembered what she had seen at the pond and upon the rocks was not two lights but one. Maybe Zach had managed to spark a fire and what he carried was not one ember but two, a red one from the fire inside and a white one because that was the color of the hottest fire and that was science, and now they would be warm and not die. Allie waited for her Voice to speak up again. It didn’t have to. She looked away long enough to see Zach’s fire bow at her feet, along with the spindle and board and wood.

  Closer.

  No longer pinpricks but firefly glows. Bending in the night as though pulled by their own breeze. Here Allie’s grin faded. Surely Zach was far enough along the bank to be able to see her, or at least the solid outline of the rocks she stood behind. Yet he did not call out, telling Allie to look at what he’d found. Sam squirmed in her arms. It was as if a part of him had awakened just then, perhaps a voice speaking up like the voice that had spoken up in her.

  She called into the wind, “Zach?”

  The voice that returned was not Zach’s, nor was it human at all. It was instead a roar that made Sam squirm again despite being nearly dead, that made the hair on Allie’s arms and neck uncurl. She stumbled forward as the lights grew nearer and ducked behind the pile of stones. Sam struggled and fell silent again. Along the riverbank, rocks scattered and rolled as God crept closer. Allie clenched her eyes and bit her tongue nearly in half, trying to swallow a scream. Had He seen her? She felt sure He had. God could see anything, as could eyes that glowed in the dark. And even if the night had rendered Him just as blind as it had rendered her, Allie knew her screams had carried. They had carried far.

  She eased her head up and over the lip of the wall. The eyes were larger, heading straight on. There was no time. Even there, all alone on the riverbank except for a dying dog and a hungry God, Allie understood the irony of that. They had wandered through a place where time held as much meaning as the rocks beneath their feet, and yet she had run out of it. There was only enough to understand she must save Sam and Zach because she loved them both, and that’s what people who loved did.

  She laid Sam against the rocks and kissed him, fighting the sting in her eyes as she told him to lie still and quiet. The rocks beyond the windbreak scattered and rolled. Not far, Allie thought. Now or never. She leaped over the wall and ran, wailing as she forced her feet and ankle to move even as she had no idea where to go. Ahead was no option—t
he eyes had stopped moving, as had the hulking shadow behind them, but running ahead would mean running right into Him. Nor would running upriver help, as that would lead Him right past where Sam lay. The river flowed to Allie’s left. That meant only the darkwood remained. She moved there, hopping on her one good ankle. Screaming for God to follow.

  The eyes swung her way. Allie cleared the riverbank in ten short hops and vaulted herself into the brush. She began climbing the slope, straining her every muscle against what roots and branches she would find to boost herself up. Yelling for Zach to come, to help. Bushes shook, limbs snapped. Behind, to her left. Allie turned to see if she had put any distance between them. Roars turned to grunts and then growls. The eyes were nearly at her heels.

  Allie screamed again and felt a tear in her lungs. Her Chucks slipped in the slope’s mud. Something swung out and slapped at her heels, nearly knocking her off balance. Allie reached up, searching for something to pull her onward, and grasped only air. Her shoes dug in as she stood, convinced her only escape was to run, but the dying feet that Allie had willed forward for four days finally failed her. Gravity flung her backward. Her head lolled back as she fell free of the earth and tumbled. In her mind, Allie saw herself flying away with Sam and Zach beside her and a green hill not far ahead.

  That image remained until she struck the rocks and trees below. A pain like being run through with a hot poker jolted her neck. The world spun as she fell end over end down the thirty feet of the slope she’d scaled. She hit the riverbank on her shoulders and rolled twice, coming up on her feet only long enough for them to pitch her toward the sound of hissing water. There was darkness and a final, pleading scream. Then came a drowning cold that stole Allie’s breath.

  16

  The current gripped her like the hands of a hungry giant, towing her from the shallows. What she felt wasn’t the frigid water nor even those hands pressing down upon her lungs, but the soft tingling of her body shutting itself down one cell at a time.