The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  “Yeah.”

  “I broke the law,” he said. “I broke all kinds of laws. You get that, right?”

  “I sure do,” I said fervently.

  “Now it’s time to go on the run.” His grin broadened. “The cops are going to be coming for me.”

  He was looking at me without blinking, his eyes as warm and inviting as a swimming hole in summer. I felt myself smiling in an involuntary echo.

  “You trust me, don’t you?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s time for magic, Cora,” he said. “Let’s leave this place behind.”

  He brushed the hair out of my face. He tapped my nose.

  “But . . .” I began hesitantly. “What about Darlene and Jane?”

  His countenance darkened. Every new emotion seemed to consume him entirely, remaking his posture, requiring its own facial expression and set of gestures.

  “No,” he said. “Darlene can’t see the big picture. She’s caught up in the machine. She’s lost.” He paused, frowning, then said, “I never wanted to leave y’all. You know that, right?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “You’re my family, Cora,” he said. “I love you more than life.”

  “You do?”

  “This isn’t real.” He thumped his good hand on the arm of the couch, maybe indicating the trailer, maybe the whole of Mercy. “Not the real world. This is mundane human nonsense. I can’t stay here. I can’t exist in this place.”

  He reached toward me, cupping my chin once more.

  “It’s time to get to work,” he said. “There’s so much to do. Let’s go right now. You and me together.”

  I experienced a shiver of déjà vu. It seemed that I had dreamed this or heard about it once in a story—Tucker’s hopeful face, his question hanging in the air between us, the stillness of the room, the possibility of transformation. I felt as though I already knew my answer, as though I had made up my mind a long time ago.

  9

  Tucker found an old blue knapsack of Darlene’s, bigger than my school bag. Together we filled it with my teddy bear, my lucky red shirt, my favorite picture book, my rocket ship pajamas, the locket Darlene had given me, and my toothbrush. On Tucker’s recommendation, I detached a few snapshots of Darlene and Jane from the fridge and tucked them in the front pocket.

  “You don’t want to forget what they look like,” he said sagely.

  For his part, he grabbed a framed photo of Mama off the countertop—Mama astride a horse, laughing at the camera. Tucker gazed at the picture with a mournful smile, then shoved it into the backpack too and told me to get the lead out. I did as he instructed, gathering up pants and shorts, folding my tank tops and sweatshirts, and locating my heaviest coat. I stuffed a pair of rain boots into a side pocket. I rolled my socks into tight balls to cram them into the leftover spaces. I brought as many pairs of panties as I could fit.

  “Good thing your clothes are tiny,” Tucker said.

  When I was done, the backpack was too heavy for me to lift, but my brother swung it onto his shoulder with ease. He was using a branch as a makeshift cane, which allowed him to move more comfortably. It freed me up, too, from having to serve as his default limb. At the front door, I paused to take one last look around No. 43. Tucker was already outside, whistling between his teeth. I stared in turn at the kitchen table, the TV, and the couch. I tried to sear every particle of the place into my memory.

  I did not have a clear sense of what was going to happen next. In a way, I did not care. In that moment, I trusted Tucker the way a child trusts a parent—absolutely, unquestioningly, joyfully. His time away from home had not broken my faith in him. If anything, I felt as though our connection was stronger than ever. I had never bothered to consider the way I loved my sisters; our mutual affection was as unremarked as oxygen. But Tucker was something else. His love for me, and mine for him, was intoxicating, sweetening the very air I breathed.

  There was relief, too, in my submission to his will. Darlene had raised me, but she never pretended to guide me with the confidence of a mother, as much as I sometimes wanted her to. She was just doing the best she could in tough circumstances, trying to get Jane and me through high school, looking after us in her exhausted, well-intentioned way. For years, I had yearned for the safety that other children seemed to feel around their parents. They were tended like flowers in a garden, watered, weeded, and protected from harm. I had longed for that sense of security all my life and had never once experienced it. Other children always seemed weightless to me. The burden of their lives was borne in somebody else’s hands.

  But Tucker was here to change all that. He had a plan. No one ever had a plan for me before. He wanted to lead as much as I wanted to be led.

  “The car is this way,” he said, pointing down the lane.

  The afternoon was uncommonly cool. Heavy clouds roiled along the horizon, promising rain. The air was murky enough that Tucker and I cast no shadows. Even with the aid of his walking stick, he had to stride with care. He was able to put his weight only on the toes of his injured leg, not the heel. The backpack on his shoulder threw off his center of gravity. With each step, his bandaged hand swiveled awkwardly in space.

  The more we walked, the more he bled. Movement reopened all his cuts. His pant leg was soon stained maroon. His flip-flops slapped and squished beneath him, one dry, the other slick. In a perfect world, his gashes ought to have been sewn shut by a surgeon in a hospital. Instead, he would have to make do with the contents of a first aid kit. He was expecting to have scars.

  “I had to park pretty far away,” he said. “I couldn’t leave the car in Shady Acres. Somebody would’ve noticed it.”

  In the distance, there was a rumble of thunder. I could smell rain, though the sky above us was still a clean, cottony white. The storm lurked near the horizon, where they always did.

  At the main road, we turned west, staying on the shoulder, watching semis and pickup trucks pass, blinded by the explosion of dust cast off from each vehicle, sharing sips of water, Tucker in front, me behind. The temperature dropped with each gust of wind. The thunder came with increasing frequency, making the tree branches judder overhead. Shards of lightning illuminated inconsistencies in the thickness of the cloud layer. The storm was not yet close enough to reveal the causality between the flash and the sound; the lightning pulsed and the thunder moaned, but they did not relate to one another in any perceptible pattern. The clouds darkened like wet charcoal. An occasional droplet marked the pavement. Tucker was no longer bleeding quite as freely. His injured leg was a brown, sticky column now, the pant leg attached to his skin by lashes of dried blood, his flip-flop glued to his foot.

  At last, we reached the dirt lane. I knew the place by sight, though I had never actually turned and followed the narrow path among the trees. The forest was an old one, the trunks wide and swaddled with vines. A single house stood off to the side, ramshackle and unclean. The lawn was decorated by rusted cars in various stages of disuse. Grass grew inside one engine block. The building had window screens so thick with dirt that you could not see through them. Perhaps this was just as well.

  Tucker limped onward, now gasping with each step, and I trotted beside him. Rain began to fall. The canopy of branches rustled and shook overhead, the leaves dancing. The drizzle was chilly on my skin, blackening the ground. Tucker tipped his head back to feel the rain on his face.

  The car was well hidden—a tawny station wagon camouflaged against the tawny underbrush. I could easily have walked past the spot without noticing anything. As I pushed through the branches to the passenger’s side, twigs snagged in my hair and scraped my skin. Tucker collapsed into the driver’s seat, pale and clammy. For a while we sat like that, rain falling on the roof. The windshield was a mosaic of water and light, dead bugs and bird droppings. I glanced around the interior of the car and saw evidence that my brother had been living there. A tumble of dirty clothes was stuffed beneat
h the back windshield. There was a grocery bag filled with granola bars and potato chips. There was a pillow on the backseat.

  Tucker groaned. He stuck the key in the ignition.

  “Are you sure—” I began.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Maybe you should wait until you catch your breath.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, starting the engine.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. This question had been ricocheting around my brain for a while. It felt good to let it out.

  “A safe place,” Tucker said.

  “Okay,” I said.

  He backed the car out of the thicket with a screech of twigs on metal. I flinched at the sound. He swung the wheel, steered up the bumpy lane, and flipped on the windshield wipers, which functioned imperfectly, smearing and blurring more than they cleaned. Tucker hit the gas. The station wagon was old enough that it whistled and roared at high speeds, the wind wailing through chinks in the casing.

  “Where are we going?” I asked again.

  “Home,” Tucker said.

  We drove toward downtown Mercy. I saw Shady Acres, smaller at this distance, gone in the blink of an eye. We passed the movie theater, the high school, and the public library. The clouds hung low, shimmering with lightning. Tucker switched on the radio and smiled at the pop song that played.

  There was a crash of thunder, the sky shattering right above our heads. All along the block, the lights went out. The warm glow of the restaurant on the corner vanished. The streetlamps, which had come on automatically in response to the darkness of the storm, fizzled into gray. Power outages were common in bad weather, but just now it seemed like a sign, though I wasn’t sure what it might mean.

  We left the grid of central Mercy behind and entered the winding roads and spacious sprawl of the outskirts. There was no one in sight; the rain had forced everyone indoors. With each mile, the neighborhood grew shabbier. The houses were farther apart and seemed less and less cared for. Acres of grass relinquished to weeds. Wooden fences with gaps like missing teeth. The street a quarry of potholes.

  I knew where we were going now. I had not been there in a long time—three years, to be precise. I saw broken windows that had been replaced by cardboard and porch steps crumbling into mossy ruin. Even if the power had not gone out across Mercy, I doubted whether the electricity worked in this neighborhood anymore.

  Then we turned a corner, and the last vestiges of civilization fell away. I could see the path the finger of God had gouged across the world. The trees were splintered into forked fragments. Telephone poles lay down instead of standing up. The houses were not houses anymore. Some had holes ripped in their walls, showing empty rooms where vines had begun to grow. Others had been wrenched sideways on their frames, leaning perilously, tethered to the earth by struts of wood, wire, and plumbing. And a few were gone altogether. Only the concrete shapes of their foundations remained.

  I realized that the chaos was somewhat contained. It did not look the way I remembered it—right after the tornado. The cleanup crews had done what they could, bulldozing everything into piles, clearing the street, and heaping fallen trees into bristling forts, now probably inhabited by animals. Here and there in the unkempt prairie were scars of bare dirt. Presumably these were the places where the pools of toxic waste from Jolly Cosmetics had rendered the earth barren. Not even our hardy Oklahoma grass could overcome the noxious sting of those chemicals. A few chain-link fences still marked the delineation between acres of property that no one owned anymore.

  It made me think of Jane and her Legos. She had been obsessed with them once; she would build elaborate castles that no one was ever allowed to touch. Her work would stand on the kitchen table for days like a sculpture on display at a museum. Then she would destroy the structure as meticulously as she had crafted it, separating each tiny block from every other, reducing it to the smallest possible parts.

  The tornado had done something similar here. The houses had been deconstructed into bricks and wood and dented appliances and unattached doors and fat, candy-colored wads of insulation. Then the jumbled contents were heaped into hillocks and towers. It was no longer a residential area—it was the plastic tub where Jane kept her Legos piled carelessly when they were not in use.

  Home, Tucker had said.

  He swung the wheel, and the station wagon skidded off the road into the grass, the axels screeching in protest. I climbed out of the car, looking up at the hazy sky, inhaling the smell of mud. The rain had all but stopped.

  Tucker spent a few minutes hiding the vehicle from sight, pausing every few seconds to breathe deeply and glower with his eyes shut. I stood out of harm’s way as he dragged a section of roofing tar paper from a nearby heap and laid it over the engine block. He leaned a square of plywood against the side window, then limped out into the empty street to examine his work, verifying that the car would not be noticeable from this vantage point.

  “Good enough,” he said, and led me into the wreckage.

  We passed a smashed dishwasher and a pile, taller than I was, of what appeared to be crushed furniture. We stepped into the yard that once belonged to our family. I could see what was left of the barn—a single wall, sagging to the side and tinged with a mottled blush, the weather-beaten remains of the cheerful red paint I remembered. I could see a few shards of fencing still standing sadly where the cows lived long ago. There was a gleam of black in the grass, maybe the husk of a fifty-five-gallon drum.

  “Is this safe?” I asked. “With the . . . the toxins?”

  “Come on,” Tucker said.

  A staircase led down into a basement that was filled with scrap and chaff, coils of wire and masonry, muddy at the bottom, carpeted by dead leaves. I picked my way down the steps. The boards were spongy beneath my weight. The basement floor was uneven, glistening with puddles. I thought I heard the scurry of a mouse, or maybe a scorpion. Amid the fallen beams and chunks of concrete, it took me a moment to locate the door of the tornado shelter.

  “The police are looking for us,” Tucker said. “They’ll expect us to run, but we won’t. We’ll wait it out right here. Do you see?”

  I bit my lip.

  “This is no-man’s-land,” he said. “The perfect hideout. We’ll drink bottled water, okay? It won’t kill us to live here for just a little while.”

  The rain had dwindled into mist, floating on the air, collecting against my skin like cheesecloth. I was damp, glimmering, breathless. Tucker reached the bunker door and laid his injured palm reverently against it.

  “They’ll drop a net over the whole state,” he said. “Roadblocks and checkpoints, a full-on manhunt. But we’ll be hiding right under their noses. Eventually they’ll have to take their focus off Mercy and look elsewhere. Then we can make our move.”

  He tugged the door open with a groan of hinges. The shelter was cramped and dim, smaller than I remembered. The shelves were stocked with the same canned goods, gallon jugs of water, and batteries our father prepared so many years ago. Nothing had been used or touched or taken. My family abandoned the bunker as soon as the storm passed, and no one had set foot inside since. Tucker lifted a pack of matches from a shelf and lit a candle, shielding the flame inside the bandaged curl of his palm. I stepped deeper into the musty cave. He shut the door, sealing out the light.

  And just like that, I was gone.

  JUNE

  10

  The thunderstorm began in the afternoon, not long after the animals entered the supermarket. Darlene was working the cash register. Everything was grating on her nerves: the fluorescent lights, the saccharine pop music on the overhead speakers, even the smell of rain gusting through the open door. Her migraine was duller now, diminished but not gone. She rubbed her aching temples.

  There was only one customer in the store. Old Mrs. Rodriguez had been wandering the aisles for at least an hour, shuffling behind a shopping cart with a squeaky wheel. Every so often she would consult a list i
n her pocket with an expression of profound confusion. She stared for so long at the selection of peanut butter jars that Darlene wondered whether the old woman might be suffering a stroke. Even by the standards of a small town, it was a quiet day. Darlene sanitized the conveyer belt. She sorted and resorted the cash in the register. She was considering whether she ought to call Cora at home and check in when a scream rang out.

  Baylor crashed out of the storeroom, pale beneath his red hair. He nearly collided with Mrs. Rodriguez as he dashed down the aisle. Baylor was the stock boy. An adult man with the mental range of a schoolchild, he was well into his forties but had always been the stock boy.

  “Something got in,” he hollered.

  “Beg pardon?” Darlene said, startled.

  He pelted up to her, out of breath. “I was taking out the trash, and there was an animal in the alley. I don’t know what kind. It ran inside. Right by me.”

  There were three white rats among the shelves. The storeroom was small but contained plenty of places for a rodent to hide—boxes that had not yet been unloaded, stacks of unused grocery bags, shadows in corners. Darlene alternated between chasing the rats with a broom, assuring Mrs. Rodriguez that this was an anomaly rather than an infestation, and calming Baylor down. He was no help. The rats were no help either. Stupefied by panic, they seemed unable to find the back door, though Darlene propped it open and kept shooing them in that direction. They squealed desperately. They dashed the wrong way every time.

  The rats were, at least, incapable of camouflage: snow colored and pink eyed. They had clearly been the subject of some kind of experimentation. Each was shaved in a different configuration—one with bare back legs, another with a raw, scarred belly, the third scraped and stubbled all down its spine.

  Darlene wondered whether there was someone in particular she ought to call. The rats were obviously runaways from the cosmetics plant. The news had said to keep an eye out for them, but no one had specified what to do next. Jolly Cosmetics was still shut down. She couldn’t dial 911 about a few rodents.