Circles in the Dust

by Matthew Harrop

  “Okay.” David feared the look she might be aiming at his back, so he dared not turn around.

  They went on like this for a few minutes. David asked if she remembered at all where the camps were out here, or what path she had taken to get through, but she couldn’t, and thus he opted for the quickest route through the trees, sometimes deviating from his straight line east to walk around a tangle of bushes or avoid climbing over a steep hill or a jumble of boulders. They zigzagged through the wood toward the Base, and David grew ever more tense as they did. He would be safe enough from those wandering around, he would be just another Outlier, but he feared for Elizabeth if they were caught out here. If she worked with the mayor, perhaps the Outliers would know who she was, and if they recognized her hanging around their territory, David shuddered to think what these destitute campers would do to ensure their own survival. His thoughts flashed back to the shack he had found the morning before.

  The woods thickened as they continued, growing denser and denser. In other circumstances, David would have been very pleased to see the earth flourishing as heat began to once again penetrate the atmosphere but in his current frenzied state, he was only perturbed by the escalating darkness through which they stumbled. He was unsure exactly where they were headed; he had only had a vague idea in the first place, but his sense of urgency had propelled him to take the lead, and he wasn’t about to slow down and follow Elizabeth now. She would probably want to stop again to make sure her hair was in perfect order, and they had no time for that. He ventured forward, pausing for only a moment at the brink of a menacing copse before plunging in headfirst. The void swallowed them up, and David could hear Elizabeth saying something, but her voice was dim and far away when it reached his ears; he was in a manic state her soft voice could not penetrate.

  Just as disorientation began to sink in and David considered allowing Elizabeth to resume the lead, a dim glow became visible ahead and David’s heart leaped. He wanted out of this place. He wanted to find the Base so that he could get Elizabeth out of harm’s way; every moment she was out here and in danger with him was agonizing. He emerged from the thicket first and stopped abruptly as the sky opened up before him and he saw a large valley, surrounded on all sides by gently sloping hills and sentinel trees. He stood on a rocky outcropping where the forest cut off, the air dead and limp around him.

  The moon had dipped below the horizon by now and David could see no more than silhouettes but there was no mistaking what lay ahead. A large building stood starkly out from the brightening sky, surrounded by a crude palisade wall. There were a handful of small buildings surrounding the larger farmhouse, all a deep brown, walls and roofs, constructed by inexperienced hands from the dead wood that was readily available. In the morning gloom, they looked little more than piles of timber. Scraggly grass ran from the line where the trees ended right up to the walls around the compound. Two men stood behind the fence, raised up to see over the ten-foot walls, each holding what David guessed were old hunting rifles. Another pair of men watched over each side of the wall, a compass rose of soldiers.

  They had reached the Base.

  David stood and gazed it at, relief and awe mixing in his brain. They had made it; the worst was over, at least for now. It was bigger than he expected; the farmhouse dwarfed his personal dwelling. The roof was steep and the paint was chipping on all sides. The wall extended around a long patch of what seemed like tilled ground, though it seemed like more than enough area to support everyone out here.

  Elizabeth came crashing out of the woods behind him, apparently knocking trees out of her way rather than walking around them. Her breath came out in labored huffs and David had to put out a hand to stop her from taking a spill off the rock. She gasped as she looked up from the clump of needles she was absorbedly extricating from inside her coat and saw the opening up of the world in front of her. The profanity on her tongue was cut short and her eyes widened, hands going limp. David looked over at her to see a wide grin spreading across her face.

  “Good to be home?” he asked.

  “You have no idea.” Blood rushed to her cheeks as she gazed lovingly down at her home. She grabbed David’s hand and pulled him to the side of the rock and down the hill. She was running now and, as he saw the invigoration on her face and gave it a place in his own heart and mind, he dashed alongside her, no longer pulled but still firmly grasped by her warm hand. He felt something broiling in his core. Running to the Base, what he hoped to be his new home, away from the worries of life alone in the wild, joined to the beautiful stranger who had found him dying and alone in the woods and saved him from himself and the harsh world around him, crisp morning air nipping at his cheeks. Joy rushed from his lips in the form of a hearty laugh, one he could not contain nor fully explain. Elizabeth looked over at him and joined in, adding her mysterious giggle to his unabashed merriment.

  He tripped mid-chortle, and went careening down the hill, pulling her down with him. They rolled into a jumbled heap at the bottom of the slope, chuckling still. David pushed the girl’s leg off his forehead and sat up, looking down at her face, still racked by jovial tremors. Their eyes met for a fleeting moment, his reflection a ghost of an image in her jade eyes. He stood and helped her off the ground, once more savoring the touch of his skin and hers, and they resumed their escapade at a more leisurely pace toward the front gate.

  The guard at the left side of the gate had been watching them since they’d emerged into the no-man’s land between the woods and the Base. His face became visible as David and Elizabeth came closer to the walls, and his look of trepidation was plain even at a distance. He held his rifle up to his shoulder, ready to fire upon these intruders. David kept a sharp eye on the man as he and Elizabeth closed the gap between them, and wondered where the other man had gone; he had been there at first glance but was now nowhere to be seen. It sounded like there were voices shouting something behind the wall, but David couldn’t be sure.

  When they were a stone’s throw from the base of the wall, the man poking out over the palisade hefted his rifle to a battle-ready position. David slowed his steps but Elizabeth continued at an uninterrupted pace and dragged him ahead, up to the man with the gun. A bead of sweat rolled down his temple, disappearing in the waves of his beard. They took a few more steps and Elizabeth looked behind them to the woods they had emerged from. David stopped dead in his tracks, an anchor that held Elizabeth in place. The jerk of her arm as he planted his roots made her turn her head back around, where she looked up to see the gate open, the man who had been standing guard now advancing down the worn path leading from the Base.

  Her face brightened even as David’s paled. She released her hold on David’s hand and walked forward, waving at the man and greeting him in a congenial tone. David couldn’t hear what she was saying over the pounding of blood in his ears. The man above had his left eye closed, right eye focused down the sights to his chest. The other man had reappeared and was walking toward them, ignoring Elizabeth, a pistol drawn and hovering at the man’s hip, trained on David’s midsection. Something was wrong.

  Elizabeth had reached the man now. He kept his eyes on David but used his free hand to grab Elizabeth by the arm, growling something from the corner of his mouth. He pulled her behind him, his face contorted in a hateful grimace. She turned her head as she was forced behind him, the joy gone from her face, saying something, her brows puckering together, a placating gesture pointed at David. The man ignored her and gave her a shove backward as he kept up his march toward David, who was still standing in the place where he had stopped, too paralyzed by the shifting of the world to move.

  Elizabeth’s arms came out from behind the lumbering guard, over the shoulders of his tattered, navy-blue pea coat. She tried to pull him back, to turn him around; David could see that, his eyes functioning where his ears had malfunctioned. She was yelling now, her mouth opened wide, baring ivory teeth, the red hues of her throat the only point of color in the pre-dawn gray. David was
underwater; sound was lost to him, he couldn’t move, and everything seemed to happen so slowly. He had time to put his arms out in front of him when the man came within a few feet of him.

  “No! I told you, he’s with me! He helped me! I need to take him to the mayor, it’s important! What are you—“ Elizabeth’s voice came piercing through the fog as the man raised his pistol above his head. David cringed and lifted his arms higher but it was too late. Now that he knew what was happening it could not be stopped. This was it; he had made it, but he would go no further. The guard’s arm came crashing down on the crown of David’s head and the world went black.

  CHAPTER 19

  David knew his eyes were open but he saw only black.

  He blinked a few times, though that did not help. He noticed as he did that the skin of his forehead was tight. He couldn’t remember where he was or why he was there. His attempts at retrieving the past were met with a nominal force, just enough to push his tendrils of thought back to the dark room, which left him with nothing. He tried to raise his hand to his face but couldn’t. It was restrained he discovered as he wiggled it around, some very coarse rope binding his wrists around a thick pole or beam. He lifted his head, which initiated a tremendous pounding, and let it fall back against the pole, flinching at the impact.

  His legs were unbound, though that meant little. He slid his hands down to feel the ground, which was gritty and dirty, but solid underneath that; he guessed he was in a building that had fallen into disrepair, like everything else, or that wasn’t used much perhaps. There were no windows or lights, not even a crack in a wall or a glow underneath a door, so perhaps he was in a cellar or basement. Hopefully it was a cellar or basement; for all he knew, he could be in a tomb. His heart sank as the possibility of that entered his mind; he pushed it away, scoffing at the idea with a false confidence.

  What was the last thing that had happened to him, leading to his being bound in a basement? He struggled to eke out the details of the last remembered moments of his life and came up with a dark morning in a field. The sun was just beginning to illuminate the clouds on the eastern horizon, and the grass was catching a little yellow light. He remembered walking, laughing, maybe? But why would he be laughing? This wasn’t funny. He seriously doubted this was some kind of joke. But that morning, that morning must have something to do with it, something to do with the awful electrifying pain in his head that kept him from thinking any more than this. He curled up, as much as he could in his current state, and settled in to wait out the waves of pain that radiated from the top of his head.

  He sat there for a while, thinking nothing, feeling nothing but pain, until a noise permeated his wretched mind. A slight boom. A footstep? A door closing? There was only one at first, then a quiet scuffling, footsteps on dirt? This distraction was enough for him to forget his agony temporarily and wander outside his own mind. The shuffling steps grew louder and louder, coming closer and closer, until they stopped abruptly, replaced by the jingling of keys and the scrape of an old metal lock sliding open.

  David opened his eyes in anticipation but shut them as a door slid open and the low light of a lantern spilled into the room. He squinted, trying to see who had entered, but only a silhouette stood in front of him. A round man, in front of whoever held the lantern. The shadowy figure took three steps forward so they were just outside the reach of David’s unbound, naked feet. He crouched down, his face so close David could feel his moist breath.

  “Hello.”

  His voice was deep and the word ripped through David, tearing away any hope of this man helping him out of the dark.

  “Where am I?” David asked.

  “Where are you?” the man repeated in his throaty rumble, slowly enough to taste the words as they slipped past his tongue. “Where do you think you are?”

  “I—” David started, though he knew he could not finish. Now that he was able to ignore his aching head, he took a moment to search the depths of his memory, until the image of that early morning came to him complete, and he saw the Base, and everything after came rushing back to him. “This is the Base,” he whispered. “I’m in the Base, I came to help you. Why am I tied up?”

  The man laughed at the question, a sound that reminded David of a thunderstorm.

  “Why did you come here?” the man responded, ignoring David’s question.

  “I came to help you!” David yelled, frustrated already by the dark stranger. “I came to help you with the Outliers, and you beat me and tied me up! What—”

  “Why did you come here?” the man roared back, just as David was beginning an outraged rant.

  David recoiled from the power in that voice. Looking up into the depthless face of his questioner, cold fear settled in as he realized this was not going to be anything like convincing Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth!

  “Where is Elizabeth? Is she all right? Can I talk to her?” The words came spilling out of David’s mouth before he had even a moment to think about what he was saying.

  “You will not speak her name!” the shadowy man spat in his face. “Where did you find her? Why did you—” His line of questioning was interrupted by a hand on his shoulder, the hand of the lantern-bearer standing behind him. He stopped mid-sentence and his head drooped. He stood there for a minute, his breathing hard and shallow at first, slowly deepening and lengthening. David cringed at the man’s outburst and pressed himself up against the post, legs folded against his body, saying nothing.

  “You will not see her again,” the man said calmly, his voice directed at the floor. “I don’t know what your real intentions are for coming here but I, yes, I will find out.”

  With that, the man turned and exited the room. David caught a glimpse of the young girl holding the lantern, eyes wide, adrift somewhere in early adolescence. She gave David a wary look, like one might give an unfriendly dog on a leash, and followed the man out of the room, closing the door behind her. David was submerged once more in utter darkness, the throbbing in his head returning with a vengeance. He tried to sleep, but managed only a shallow unconsciousness, though even that did not come soon.

  There was a scraping of dirt on the floor outside the door, just as there had been when the angry round man approached. This slight sound was more than enough to wake David from his restless slumber. He heard the footsteps come to a stop, presumably at the door, and slumped back against the pole as another interrogation approached.

  There was a voice, a man’s voice coming from the outside the door, sounding distant, hushed. A low whisper responded, too low for David to make out. The man’s voice got louder and closer as they exchanged words back and forth. The masculine voice sounded angry, the feminine almost pleading. There was a rattle of a doorknob and a bitter exclamation from the man. They were yelling in whispers, the sound of their voices fading as the scraping of their feet announced to David they were leaving. Relieved, though only slightly, he hung his head once more and slipped into unconsciousness.

  There was no telling how long he had been stuck in this prison, but it was long enough that David was beginning to feel the sharp pains of hunger. He guessed it had been at least a full day, though it was hard to tell with no light and only fitful episodes of what could hardly even be called sleep.

  His mind began to wander, the only part of him that could. He thought at first, out of habit formed in the last few days, about his plan to save the Base. A bitter laugh resonated in his head as he realized what he was doing, thinking of saving the people that had imprisoned him in a dark, dank pit. That goal was swiftly descending his list of priorities as he discovered a promising plot to escape this place and return to his home in the woods.

  He spent more time trying to figure out how he was bound, and how he could escape. The rope was thick and his wrists were all but immobile, so he turned his thoughts to what he would do when he escaped, which gave him more pleasure. The first thing he decided was that he would find the man who had come to talk to him, make sure he knew
that David knew the truth of his intentions to come and save the Base and make a life for himself there, and then kill him. Then he would find the guard that had smitten him down outside the Base and tie him up in this basement, gagged, so that he would know what he had condemned David to. He would raze every building, steal as much food as he could carry, and retreat to the camps of the Outliers in the forest. That would save them, at least; they could take over what was left of the Base and make it their own. And they would probably be a little more hospitable. They had better be, for their own sake.

  He was toying with an image of flames rising around the buildings of the Base as he had seen it for the first time when he was standing on the boulder when there was a clang just as before and he could hear someone approaching his cell. David had to suppress a chuckle as he hoped it was the man who had first come to speak with him. Maybe this time he would get to see his face, so he could form a more accurate depiction of him gasping for air as David’s hands tightened around his throat. A man can dream.

  The door opened and David’s wish came true; the man was alone this time, holding a candle in his left hand. His face was old; that was the first thing David noticed, plus the prickly white whiskers were clumsily trimmed, something David had not seen in his time in the forest. Beards were long and unkempt. Men had more important things to worry about.

  As the man entered with his candle, David got a look at what was contained in the room. There were large, wooden crates all around him, a few old farm tools, rusted and broken. The walls were concrete and the floor the same, though hidden in most places under a layer of dirt. Altogether, it was a drab room, as any good prison should be.

  The man rummaged around the crates, finally pulling a smaller one over to where David sat on the floor. He lowered himself onto this seat, which let out a groan in protest. He let his beady eyes bore into David for a full minute before saying anything. David was not about to start things off; there was no lantern-bearer to keep the man’s temper in check this time.