“Then he’s still a man with a gun,” she said. “We can’t go back and check. I’ll go and see who’s down there.”
“No,” he said, but she’d already started, and he had to run to catch up with her. They kept on the grass beside the sidewalk, and toward the bottom of the hill they stood inside a shadow-box fence.
There was a cluster of voices at the bottom of the hill. Eddie thought of the kids crashing through the Mathiases’ yard. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but could tell that they were men.
“We can cut through ahead of the entrance,” he said. “They won’t see us. There are too many trees.” Even leafless, the trees in the park amounted to a dark wall hemming in the street.
“Wait,” Laura said. “What are they doing?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“They’re looking at something. Wait.”
Eddie held her arm.
Beneath them was a dark line of shoulders and heads. When they stepped aside, he could see a glint of white, like they were circling a piece of marble.
“She’s got her pants down,” Laura said.
“What?”
Then he saw. It was the pale glow of skin.
“Let’s keep going,” he said.
“They must be drinking something. Or else they wouldn’t be able to do it to her.”
“There are a bunch of them.”
“If they get me,” she said, “you can run. I’ll be a diversion.”
“We have the jug,” he pleaded. “That’s enough.”
“It’s not enough. Not if you want to make it to my parents’.”
“I want to make it together.”
“Give me the raincoat,” she said.
“What are you going to do?”
“I need to cover this up.” She was wearing a yellow T-shirt. The raincoat was purple and black. When she put it on, she faded, even as close as she was.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“You’re fine. I can barely see you.”
He bent down and dug at the earth with his fingers, tearing up the grass and scooping handfuls of powdery soil. He wiped it on his face and arms, but it was too dry to stick.
He turned to tell her to be quiet, but she was already moving toward them, lifting the hood on the raincoat. Eddie didn’t dare call out her name. She’d taken only a few steps, and he had to squint just to see her in the shadows.
When she came back, it was as if she were appearing from thin air. It sent a spiral of dizziness through his body.
“This is crazy,” he whispered.
“I saw what they have. I’ll show you.”
“Let’s keep going,” he said.
“I was still far away. They couldn’t see me.”
“No.” He grabbed both of her wrists and held on tightly.
“If we don’t make it all the way,” she said, “we won’t make it at all. This is it. This is our last chance.”
They crept beside the aluminum guardrail where the runoff had carved an empty rivulet next to the street. A thick dust covered their shoes. Eddie could feel it brushing up onto his calves.
When they were on line with the group of them, they crouched behind the guardrail. One of them was saying, “Come on, come on,” but his heart wasn’t in it. It was like he was taking tickets. The others had conversations in low, mumbled voices. They’d closed back up around whoever it was in the middle of them. As they moved, the dark outline of their shoulders jostled like water in a tank.
Laura pointed to a plastic grocery bag on the ground. It stood stiffly with whatever was inside.
Eddie pressed his mouth close to her ear. “It could be anything,” he said.
When the circle broke apart, Eddie saw a naked shoulder, a screen of hair. A hand pulled back the bangs, and there emerged the flatness of a cheek, a dent of shadow resting there. A face. Her eyes were open, but drained of any light.
“I can get it,” Laura said. “Whatever’s in there, I can get for us.”
Eddie watched her stare fiercely at the bag.
“We have enough,” he said.
She flinched as if he’d raised his hand to strike her. “You don’t know what enough is,” she said.
The bag was several feet behind the group, maybe fifteen feet. Laura stepped out into the street and Eddie didn’t stop her. He couldn’t move. If he moved, they would see. She was almost invisible on her own. The air around him tightened like a rope being pulled. A shout was rising in his chest and made a pressure in his throat he could barely keep within.
In a few steps, she’d vanished; he watched the bag instead. He watched the stiffness of the handles. Finally, they were blotted out by the darkness of her sleeve. The bag lifted. Eddie’s fingers clawed the earth without his knowing. It made his eyes hurt, to keep the pressure building up inside him from escaping. He followed the bag until it was right in front of him.
“I got it,” she said.
She stood there like a miracle, floating in the night. Maybe she would save them.
“Look,” she said. Inside the bag was a long plastic bottle. She shook it and it sloshed.
“Drink,” she said.
“How do you know?”
“I tried some already.”
He unscrewed the cap and put it to his lips and let it sit and coat the back of his throat. It tasted heavy—thick as paint—and he gagged before he swallowed.
“We need to go,” she said. “They’ll see it’s gone.”
She took the milk jug off the ground, and Eddie saw how light it was. There was almost nothing left. “Come on,” she said.
The metal railing curved, leading to the opening of the trailhead. The woods were like a fresh and blacker night to step inside. The group of voices softened behind them. There were words, but they had no edges.
Then a scream split the words apart. A woman’s voice, but pitched as high a girl’s. The air drew toward it.
Laura stopped in front of him.
“Keep going,” Eddie said.
“We have to try,” she whispered.
“We are trying.”
“We have to try to stop them.” Her voice was breaking. “You don’t know, Eddie. You haven’t done what I’ve done.”
Eddie reached for her, but she was gone, running back toward the scream. He could see the jug bobbing at her side like a lantern growing dimmer.
He ran after her, the backpack beating against his back. He’d lost the outlines of her body, but then he found them again. She was racing for the group, and then she disappeared, inside of it. Eddie ran harder, searching for her among the bodies.
He could see her hair being tossed around—her head loose and wild. He could feel it in his stomach; he could feel the sweat of their sex and bodies as he pushed his way through them. A pair of naked legs hung down from a chair, but whoever it was was facing the wrong direction, slumped forward against the back of it. Eddie reached further into the throng, and grabbed a hold of something plastic. It was the wheel of the chair. Arms and legs beat against him, not knowing who he was, and he followed their flex and spasm to where they’d taken hold of Laura. He grabbed for her as they pulled her back and forth.
“Close your eyes!” he yelled above their voices. He reached into the pack for the other can of wasp spray, and leaning back, he circled around her, spraying. There were shouts and the hands broke away. Bodies stumbled backward.
He took her hand and they ran hard to the entrance of the park. He couldn’t see the trail but heard branches breaking all around them from the weight of the other bodies in the dark. A hand grabbed the back of his shirt, but he pulled away.
“Go!” he yelled, and stayed behind her, tripping through the underbrush. Something was wrapping around his legs—a tangle of branches—and Laura had gotten ahead of him. He yelled her name and wrenched his legs until they freed. Ahead, he saw the jug. It swung from her hand, and Eddie trained his eyes on it. The others were running all around him.
The
jug stopped moving and trembled where it was. Laura was thrashing back and forth.
Someone had a hold of her.
Eddie plunged against her back, wrapping his arms around both Laura and her assailant, taking them to the ground. His feet tangled with theirs and he pushed her head aside and threw his fists into the head beneath. He felt a chin and teeth, and his hand was slick with blood. The jug had fallen next to them and Laura rolled away and picked it up.
“Go,” he said. “Go.”
She pulled him up and they ran like that, together. There were puffs of voices—everything thumping. Then everything was clear. They’d found the trail again.
“We have to get off,” Laura said. “They’ll be here.”
At the spillway, they stopped. The trail went down and crossed Route 29 and then spread out into a meadow. They could see it all from where they stood; the openness of it, like a puddle of wax. They’d have no cover there. Below them, a drop twenty feet down. It was a bowl of space from where the stream had pooled, silent and empty, full of shadow. The trees were nubs at the edge of the cliff. Eddie could see the shocked-out bottom of white sand, but the edges were blurry with ash where it had all come rolling down.
“If you don’t hear my voice, keep running,” he said.
He pushed off from the ledge and fell, the wind filling up his ears. When he hit, the ash went up to his waist, and as he breathed in the plume he’d made, he coughed and then tried to quiet his coughing.
“Jump!” he called out sharply.
A dull breath of air, and Laura penciled down. She landed closer to the base of the cliff wall.
He grabbed his left thigh and pulled it forward. Then his right, wading through the ash like it was thick, deep water.
“No, no, no!” she was yelling, and Eddie could see the cloud of ash as she shoveled it back up into her face with both her arms. “No!” she shrieked.
“Laura!” he pressed his voice out into a whisper. “Shh …” he hissed. “Quiet.”
“I killed you!”
He saw a flutter of white. She was beating the jug against the air. The ash got deeper and he dragged himself to reach her.
“Eddie …”
He wrapped his arms around her.
“Eddie!”
“Quiet. Quiet.” He held his fingers over her mouth, but she bit down, and when he pulled them back, she wailed. He got his arms around her head and pulled her face into his chest.
“Shh … Be calm. Be quiet.”
She slumped down his side, and he had to push her face into the ash to muffle her.
“I killed you, I killed you,” he could hear her say.
“It’s okay now. Shhh … hush, now.”
She was shaking, but she wasn’t shouting anymore. She lifted her face and wiped the ash from out of her eyes.
“It’s all I can do,” she said. “You were dead and I knew it. Because of me. You were dead as soon as I told you yes.”
“Just stop it now. Come on, Laur. Stop talking …”
The silence of the woods opened like a theater to their voices.
She held up the plastic jug.
Eddie looked, and she shook her head. It was dented in and topless from where she’d landed on it. There was nothing left. Her face was pinched in ferocious sorrow.
“Shh …” he said. “Be quiet, now.”
There were voices above them on the ledge. “Down there,” he heard.
Eddie whispered, “Freeze.”
The footsteps above them were soundless in the ash. It could have been two sets or all of them. “Down the hill,” one of them said. “I saw them.”
“The girl.”
“This way.”
When the voices came again, they were only noise—the words too far down the trail.
Eddie scooped the ash back with his hands. He was digging a hole for her, but the ash kept falling in.
“Come here,” he said. “Get in here.”
She sat in the hole and he covered her up so that only her shoulders and head were out.
“We have to stay like this. We’ll get out of here in the morning.”
“Where’s the other bottle, Eddie?”
“Forget it,” he said.
“Tell me. Tell me or I’ll scream.”
“I must have dropped it back there. It’s my fault.”
Laura collapsed back into the ash and put her face in her hands. Eddie leaned his back against the wall of the cliff. There was dirt there, roots—too steep to hold the ash. He put his hand on Laura’s back. The sky was a trail of unmolested stars.
“We’ll change our plans,” he said. His head was aching again, and he had trouble keeping his eyes open. The knuckles on his right hand throbbed. When he touched his face, there was blood there, too.
“There’s no plan now,” she said.
“We’ll make one,” he said, letting his eyes close.
“Would you have agreed to ever meet me,” she asked, “if you’d known that this was coming?”
“No one knew this was coming.”
“I knew. I knew when I was fifteen.”
“You didn’t know.”
“Everything dies for me. I loved you, Eddie. That’s how selfish I am. I loved you but I let us be together.”
“I’m glad of it.”
“I let us go through with it, even though I knew that this would happen.”
“You didn’t know.”
“When I lost her, I knew. You can’t understand. I could see the rest of my life. Some people are good at it. Some people just make things die.”
“I wouldn’t be alive without you. What would I be living for?”
“You should have just lived for yourself.”
After a while, she asked about the boy.
“Don’t think about him,” Eddie said. “He’s at rest.”
“Not Mike Jr.,” she said. “The other one. The one who was all burned up. Remember? He was gray.”
Eddie stared into the clarity of the sky as he would into a lake, looking for its bottom.
“He was at our house,” Laura said. “Remember? He was standing right out front of our house at the beginning.”
“I looked for him,” Eddie said.
“But then what?”
“I don’t know.”
“What happened to him, Eddie? Tell me.”
“He found his way back home.”
The night had made her voice extremely soft. “I don’t believe you,” she said.
The truth was like a breath he’d been holding in.
“He was gone,” he said finally. “I tried to find him, but I couldn’t.”
“You let him go.”
“He was gone already.”
“You can’t just let a child go,” she said. “Don’t you know that?”
Eddie listened to her breath. It came in fits.
“At least we’re okay,” he said, and then was quiet while Laura made retching noises. His memories were smoky as they surrounded him. He could see the weeds in Laura’s daughter’s teeth.
No. It was the wet pieces of spinach stuck in his goddaughter’s. Sleep was coming, unbidden. Eddie was saying, “You’ll be the strongest girl in school,” and he could see the fat thumbprints in the burgers on the grill, the corn on the cob. Her laughter, like water, filling the vessel of the world around them.
But he didn’t let the dream come fully on. He made himself keep talking. “In the morning,” he said, “we’ll go to a bunch of houses. If there are people in them, then they’re drinking something. We’ll knock on doors. Someone will help us. We’re right here in the middle of all these houses.” He looked, for a moment, up beyond the bowl of the spillway. Where Route 29 passed, it was dim. On the other side of the road were more communities like their own.
“Why would anyone help us?” Laura said.
When he looked again, there was no sky, just the grassy spot in his dream. At the edge of the grass, the woods started and the land dropped off beyond th
em. It was a steep grade, and he could hear a stream down there.
“If they want to live,” Laura continued, “they won’t help us. Oh, please don’t let them. I can’t do it to anyone else.”
The earth in his dream was soft. They were driving home from Jason’s, having left Eddie’s goddaughter laughing on the lawn. Eddie couldn’t stop smiling. He said to Laura, “What a cutie,” but Laura was silent. She sat rocking in the passenger’s seat, looking ill. “Are you carsick?” he asked. “Do you want me to pull over?”
In his dream, he stood on the slope behind the pull-off and took a step, sliding, pressing his palm into the dead leaves on the ground to brace himself.
“Come on!” he called to her.
“What are you doing?”
She stood above him, looking into the sky beyond his shoulder.
“It’s not that steep,” he said, holding out his hand to her.
She took a step and slid, and soon she was down on top of him, hugging his neck.
They could see the water—silvery gold—and his mouth filled with the taste of it, how sweet it would be.
At the bottom was a gravel bed, and Eddie tried skipping a stone, but it hit the water and sank. He was out of practice, and the water was shallow. He found a few muddy ones and rinsed them off. He tried again, but the water only gulped as the stones disappeared.
Laura sat on the bank behind him, running her hand over the moss growing there. There were big roots where the soil had eroded from around the base of a tree.
“Look how it grows here,” she said, stroking the moss between the roots. “It’s perfect. Doesn’t that drive you crazy? How everything is perfect?”
“What do you mean?” he asked. “It’s just nature. You don’t have to think about it.”
“Everything is set up to fit inside everything else. It’s just makes me so sad, sometimes, to see it.”
Eddie looked at her.
“Come feel it,” she said, petting the moss again. “It just grows here on its own. Nobody asked it to.”
“I’m not going to feel it.”
“It’s perfect and it doesn’t even try. Nothing else has to try.”
In the breeze overhead, dark birds swirled like rags above the tree line.
Eddie woke when the sun was still behind the world, but the sky was almost gray.
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