Breakdown

by Joseph Monninger

  Bess wanted to move. But she was terrified the moose would return.

  “Get over here!” she screamed at Simon. “Now!”

  But he didn’t move. He stayed in the middle of the road, apparently too traumatized to follow directions.

  Bess leaned forward a little from her position behind a maple tree and peered down the road. She couldn’t see the moose, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t nearby. She tried to listen and hear it — it had been tremendously loud, she remembered, like a car throwing up rocks and dirt as it approached — but no sound returned to her.

  The moose is on the loose, she thought.

  She wasn’t certain why that particular refrain went through her head, but it crawled by, worming its way into her thoughts over and over and over.

  The moose is on the loose.

  Carefully, slowly, she took a step away from the maple tree.

  Her body began to shiver, but she couldn’t determine if it was the result of some sort of dehydration or fear. Probably both, she figured. Probably a little of everything under the sun.

  The moose is on the loose.

  “Simon,” she said, forcing her voice to remain calm, “please come over here.”

  But her brother wouldn’t move. She took a few steps and went gingerly onto the road. She looked both ways. She saw the moose tracks going off the road, but otherwise the animal had left nothing behind.

  Except Maggie, she remembered.

  Maggie had been left behind.

  “Holy mother of Pete!” Quincy said from somewhere behind her. “Did you see that? Did you see that?”

  “I saw it,” Bess said.

  Bess kept her eyes on her brother and on the road.

  The moose is on the loose.

  “Is Maggie …” Quincy asked, but didn’t finish his question.

  “I don’t know,” Bess answered. “I don’t know anything.”

  “The moose was crazy,” Quincy said. “Did you see it? It looked like it was on fire or something.”

  “They’re in rut,” Preston said.

  He had suddenly appeared beside her, Bess saw. She noticed he continued to look up and down the road, checking. No one had gone over to see Maggie yet.

  “What’s rut?” Quincy asked.

  “Mating season,” Preston said. “They get aggressive in the fall. They can become dangerous.”

  “Can become dangerous?” Quincy said. “I guess that’s an understatement.”

  The moose is on the loose, Bess thought again.

  She walked over to her brother and took him in her arms. Her brother didn’t like to be hugged, she knew, but she didn’t care at the moment. He was alive. The moose had passed so close to him that she still couldn’t believe it had missed him.

  “Why didn’t you run?” she whispered into his ear. “Why didn’t you move?”

  Simon didn’t say anything. It took a full hug and a moment of stepping back before she realized what held his attention. His eyes rested on Maggie. His eyes did not leave Maggie.

  Tock finished his push-ups and then flipped onto his back for crunches. He didn’t like doing crunches as much as push-ups, because push-ups paid off in visible muscles, while crunches, no matter how many you did, usually sharpened muscles that remained under your shirt. It was important to have a fit core, of course, but it wasn’t fun to work on it. Nevertheless, he did forty crunches, finishing the last ten by pedaling his legs forward and back, forward and back, while his breath exploded in tiny little bursts.

  “Done,” he said aloud when he finished.

  No one was around. No one would have cared anyway.

  He jumped back to his feet. Then he grabbed the tire iron and slid it into his belt. The weight of the iron pulled his belt down over his hip bone, but he didn’t care. He liked feeling the heft of the tire iron close by. He liked knowing he could draw it out and defend himself. Not that he would need it with this group of wimps.

  He thought about going into the van, but it was too weird in there. Maggie moaned a lot. She was not going to make it, Tock suspected. The moose had seen to that. Maggie wasn’t going to get well anytime soon. Not today, not tomorrow, not even if rescue happened to arrive in the next five minutes.

  He thought about doing some more push-ups but then decided against it.

  He felt hungry. He always felt hungry now, and his stomach made a curling, angry sound that would have been funny if it didn’t remind him of how empty he felt.

  “Tock, can you come inside the van?” Preston asked from the van stairs after he had wheezed open the door. “We want to talk about what our plan should be.”

  “Our plan should be to get going.”

  “We’d like to talk about it. As a group. We need your help.”

  “We need to go,” Tock said, but he went in the side port of the van anyway. Preston shut the van door behind him, as if privacy in a million acres of pines was something to worry about.

  Olivia knelt on a bench seat. Someone had cleaned up the van. Or organized it anyway, Tock saw. They had jammed the bags onto a few seats in the back, then left the rows closer to the front empty. It made the environment better, but it still didn’t speak to the fact that Maggie was … mooseified. She lay on a makeshift bed as far from the door as possible. At least, he realized, she had stopped moaning.

  “Okay,” Preston said, “everyone’s here.”

  “We need to get going,” Tock said. “We can’t just wait here.”

  “Would you hold on for a second?” Olivia said. “Just wait a minute. Everyone’s going to get a chance to talk.”

  So this was the big meeting, Tock realized. They had been chasing their own tails since the van broke down, but now with Maggie injured and maybe dying, they had to come up with a plan. So be it, Tock thought. He knew what they needed to do, but he also understood they needed to play it out. He swung down onto a front-bench seat and nearly jabbed the tire iron into his ribs. He had to lift up and slide the tire iron out and rest it across his lap.

  “We don’t have enough food,” Olivia said, and held up her index finger to mark the first fact. “That’s number one. Two, we don’t know if Flash made it back to camp. Three, it’s still blazing hot, and we don’t have a dependable source of water. We can make fires, but we have counted and there are twenty-seven matches left. It usually takes a couple of matches to make a fire, so figure we can make maybe six more fires or something. It depends, but the point is we can’t make unlimited fires. And three … are we on number three?”

  No one said anything. Olivia nodded and continued. “Maybe it’s four. Whatever,” she said. “We need to get help for Maggie. She’s in bad shape. That’s the big thing.”

  “We need to send off a party,” Tock said. “I’ve been saying it all along. We’re wasting time here.”

  “Who would go in the party if we sent one off?” Quincy asked.

  “I’d go,” Tock said.

  “Simon and Bess should stay here with Maggie,” Preston said. “Quincy, too, if he wants. That leaves Olivia, Tock, and me to go for help.”

  “Let’s go,” Tock said, and started to stand.

  “Hold on,” Olivia said. “Yes, Quincy should probably stay. Three of us could travel pretty fast, I’m betting. We could be out in two or three days.”

  “You don’t know that,” Quincy said. “You shouldn’t pretend to know that. You shouldn’t depend on things you don’t know.”

  “We know the road has to lead someplace, bonehead,” Tock said. “Roads don’t just wander forever. There’s a reason we were going up this road.”

  “Unless it’s a cutoff, I mean,” Quincy said from his spot on the bus. “It might lead someplace, but it might just lead to another road, and you might have longer to go than thirty miles. I think you should head back to camp. That way you know you’ll get somewhere.”

  Tock was sick of Quincy’s mouth. Guys like Quincy bugged him. They could talk and talk and talk, but when it came to action, they never came through
. Tock knew he was the opposite: He was better at doing things than talking about them.

  “The moose went that way,” Olivia said. “Back to camp. I don’t want to run into him again.”

  “That was a freak thing,” Preston said, although his voice didn’t sound confident. “There’s no way it would happen again. That was just a freak thing.”

  No one said anything.

  “Anyway, do we all agree we should split up?” Olivia asked. “We’ll send out a party one way or the other? We won’t just stay here and wait?”

  Tock looked around. Everyone nodded.

  “Let’s leave first thing in the morning. First light,” Olivia said. “We’ll assemble our packs tonight and be ready to go. Is that the plan, then?”

  No one answered.

  “Which way?” Tock asked.

  “Away from camp,” Olivia said. “If Flash makes it his way, then fine. Going the other way doubles our chances of rescue.”

  At that instant, Maggie began moaning again. Tock stood and pushed the door lever open and jumped back onto One Hundred Mile Road. His tire iron clanged against the door frame, and the sound went off into the forest.

  Simon thought the fire was particularly big and particularly bright that night. He had trouble sitting next to it. Sometimes the flames licked toward him, and he could almost believe that they wanted to say something. You never knew. So far, from what he could tell, the campers had not used their time very well. Maggie had definitely used her time poorly, and so had Bess.

  Sometimes when the flames came close, he smelled the moose again.

  It had come right past him. He had reached to touch it, not sure why, and for an instant the moose seemed to recognize him. The moose had a head like a log. It had ticks on it, too, and it had been in the water not long before it charged, because as it went by, Simon felt moisture.

  People talked.

  Simon watched the flames.

  A little later, Tock and Olivia and Preston brought out their backpacks and began stuffing clothes into them. Simon watched. It was an excellent use of time to both watch the fire and judge their packing skills. Simon enjoyed it. Whenever his attention moved from the backpacks, the moose seemed to be ready to carry off his thoughts. Strange, Simon reflected. He wondered if the reason the moose had trampled Maggie was because he, Simon, had held his hand out to the moose. That was possible, he believed. Charging, the moose seemed to send his eyes over Simon’s body — but especially his hand — and then passed within an inch in order to crush Maggie under its hooves.

  Maggie had used her time poorly, certainly.

  He was still watching them pack their bags when Bess came and sat next to him. She put her head on his shoulder. He wanted to move it away, but he knew it was important to her. His therapist, Ms. Micklejohn, had told him that.

  “I’m sorry, Simon,” Bess whispered. “I’m sorry I left you out in the road and ran when the moose came.”

  Simon didn’t say anything. He did not know what he was supposed to say. Bess had a different version of things than he did.

  “It could have been you instead of Maggie,” she said, her voice down by his shoulder. “You could have been killed.”

  Simon wanted to tell her about the moose, and how it had looked when it charged, and how he had seen ticks on its skin and had smelled its last lake swim, but he couldn’t make the words line up.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Ms. Micklejohn had taught him you could always say yes, and often that was enough for people.

  “Were you frightened?” Bess asked.

  “Yes,” he said again.

  “I don’t blame you. Poor Maggie.”

  Then he watched Quincy drag a dead piece of pine from the side of the road and toss it onto the fire. Sparks went up and chattered in the darkness. Simon watched them, trying to connect them with imaginary lines, trying to move his eyes so that the sparks would be rejoined and become fire again.

  Quincy resented being left behind. Sort of.

  He watched Preston and Olivia and Tock lift their backpacks onto their shoulders and tried to sort out his feelings.

  Part of him wanted to go.

  Part of him was glad to stay.

  What he didn’t like was the assumption that he needed to stay. That he should stay. It made him feel wimpy. It confirmed in his mind that other people saw him as wimpy.

  And maybe he was wimpy. He didn’t like thinking about that.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said for the thousandth time.

  He said it in a Munchkin voice. It was weird.

  “The sun is cooking already,” Olivia said, adjusting the straps on her pack. “If the sun stays out, we’ll need to get in the shade by midday. And you guys need to do a scouting mission for good water.”

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said again.

  “Would you stop saying that?” Preston asked him.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said, louder.

  “We’ll be back as soon as we can be,” Olivia said. Like a mom, Quincy thought. Like a mom leaving for the night. “If someone comes, tell them we’re staying on the road. We’ll just keep walking straight.”

  Quincy nodded. So did Bess. Quincy didn’t know what Simon did, because you could never know what Simon was doing. They all stood watching the three backpackers. Olivia took a moment to adjust the straps again around her shoulders. She had jackets and a sleeping bag piled on her pack, though the pack was too small to support it. The others had sleeping bags, too. They looked like snails, Quincy thought. Like snails heading up the green leg of a plant.

  “If you need a fire, make one,” Olivia said, finally finished with her shoulder straps. “There’s plenty of fire-starter stuff.”

  “We got it,” Quincy said.

  It was annoying to be told what to do. Even by Olivia. She meant well, Quincy understood, but it was still annoying.

  “Okay, we’re out of here,” Olivia said. “If I were you guys, I really would go locate some water. Some good water, I mean.”

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said.

  “Jeez,” Preston said, and turned on his heel and began walking.

  Quincy watched them go. A little farther up the road, he knew, they would find moose tracks and blood. Bad memories.

  “I’m going to check on Maggie,” Bess said when the backpackers had walked far enough to disappear around the first bend. They hadn’t stopped and waved. Quincy didn’t know why, but it bothered him that they hadn’t done that. It felt like a bad omen.

  “I’ll collect wood,” Quincy said, coming out of his reverie. “Simon, you want to help me?”

  Simon didn’t answer. Simon never answered, Quincy knew, except on rare occasions with his sister.

  “Okay, then,” Quincy said.

  He walked down the road the other way, his eyes looking for dead branches, his skin already warming under the sun. Olivia had been right about one thing, he conceded. They needed more water. If they were going to stay for a while, they needed a good water source. Water and fire, he mused. Two opposites, each necessary in its own way.

  Preston’s feet felt sore, and they had only gone a little over a mile. They had at least thirty miles to go, maybe more, and for the first time, Preston had a keen understanding of what thirty miles felt like.

  It felt like sore feet, for one thing. And it felt like a long, long way to walk.

  He wanted to say something, to ask how the others felt, but he wouldn’t give Tock a chance to mock him. So he remained quiet. And his feet felt raw and sweaty. The pack dug into his shoulders, and he was hungry. Very hungry. What had seemed like a good idea back at the van, almost a fun adventure, now felt like a more significant undertaking.

  “How’s everyone doing?” Olivia asked.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said.

  “Thanks,” Olivia said. “How about you, Preston?”

  “I’m okay,” he said.

 
“My feet hurt on these rocks,” Olivia said. “Sneakers don’t cut it in this stuff.”

  “Mine, too,” Preston said.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said.

  “Are you trying to make this harder?” Olivia asked Tock. “I mean, do you have to work at it, or does it just come naturally?”

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” Tock said.

  Olivia shook her head. She yanked on her shoulder straps again and kept walking. Nothing had changed. The landscape didn’t really change, either, Preston observed. Trees, road, sky, trees, road, sky. Now and then, they seemed to come to a slight rise or depression in the road, but it was never substantial. The road continued like a straight shot through the green woods. Occasionally, the dirt had furrows or ribs down the center where the road had been eroded. But otherwise, it was simply a straight dirt road.

  “Does the camp own all this land?” Preston asked, mostly to make conversation.

  “I guess so,” Olivia said. “Isn’t that what Flash said?”

  “I don’t really know what Flash said. I could never understand the guy. He mumbled too much.”

  Olivia smiled.

  “He was hard to understand,” she agreed. “He always talked through his teeth or something.”

  “He should have made it to camp by now,” Preston said.

  Tock snorted.

  “What?” Preston asked.

  “He didn’t make it to camp, you dope,” Tock said. “If he had made it to camp, we would be on a bus out of here by now.”

  “Then what do you think happened to him?” Olivia asked. “If you know so much, tell us, oh wise one.”

  Tock made a sharp screeching sound with his tongue and lips and drew his thumb across his throat.

  “No way,” Olivia said.

  “Okay, wait and see,” Tock said.

  “I hope not,” Preston said. “He wasn’t a bad guy.”

  The conversation made Preston feel squirrelly in his stomach. He didn’t like imagining Flash alone in the woods. Or worse. It bugged him to hear Tock be so casual about it. Besides, they were now in the woods, too, trying to pull off exactly what Flash had tried to pull off. If something bad had happened to Flash, it could happen to them, too. He didn’t like thinking that.