The Darkest Path

by Jeff Hirsch

  • • •

  I reeled through the woods, reaching from one tree to the next to hold myself up. Without Bear, the night seemed like a hand pushing me into the ground.

  I walked until I couldn’t anymore and then fell onto a mossy bank in the midst of towering oaks. Skeletal branches and black sky hung over me. I rolled onto my side, curling around a keen emptiness, a void where the heat of Bear’s body should have been. I could still feel his chest rise and fall beneath my hand and hear the little yips and barks that escaped his lips as he slept. I tried to imagine him safe and warm in the back of that car, but it was no use. How could I have let him go? How was I going to make it home without him?

  Exhausted, I felt myself dragged down and I passed in and out of fitful sleep throughout the night. When I woke for the last time, I was covered in sweat. I struggled to sit up, my body feeling like it was made out of lead. My head was pounding and my stomach churned. I planted one hand in the dirt and rolled myself up, legs shaking, half bent over. I made it twenty or thirty feet from my camp, then fell to my knees just off the highway’s shoulder.

  There was a pause like being held over the edge of a cliff and then my gut clenched and I vomited up the foul ditch water until I was breathless. The sickness came in waves, one after the other. When there was nothing left in me, I collapsed onto my side, spent and trembling.

  The wind moved through the trees all around me, but I couldn’t feel it. A fever was smoldering in my skin and I was slick with sweat. Cramps moved up and down my body, subsiding and then flaring up without warning.

  There was a grinding metallic sound and then a bright light rose up all around me. I looked down the length of the road, squinting at the intensity of the sunrise coming up between the trees. No, not the sun. Headlights. Floodlights. I scanned the roadway through bleary eyes and saw that I wasn’t alone. Bodies emerged from camps on the highway’s shoulder and from their places at the backs of pickup trucks. They all turned to stare into the ball of light down the road. I stumbled forward, drawing closer to it, shading my eyes with a quivering hand.

  One of the cars started up and began to pull away from the others, but there was a sound like a string of firecrackers going off and the car exploded into an orange ball of fire. I fell onto the roadway, watching the flames and some dark writhing thing deep inside the burning.

  I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. I watched as Path soldiers stepped from vehicles and into the headlight glare, fanning out, rifles in hand. One refugee charged forward and was shot. The others drifted together into a small grouping, trapped. I saw it then. The main body of the evacuees had passed; now it was time to deal with the stragglers. A figure stepped from a Path vehicle and positioned himself directly in front of the group.

  “My name is Beacon Radcliffe,” the man said. “And I am here to offer you all a choice.”

  Somehow I found the strength to run. The trees and the roadway blurred, shifting into patterns of black and gray with flecks of yellow from the fire behind me. But then I felt a crash and I was on my back, staring at the stars. How did I get here? I wondered, delirious, as two sets of hands reached down and grabbed me. I thrashed senselessly, trying to pull myself out of the grasp of the dark bodies that had gathered around me, but I was too weak.

  “He’s burning up,” someone said. “He’s sick.”

  My back hit the road again, this time surrounded by the glare of a truck’s headlights. There were voices all around, murmuring shadows.

  “What do we do with him?”

  “Son? Son? Can you hear me? My name is Beacon Radcliffe.”

  “Where’s James?” I moaned, barely aware of the words leaving my mouth. “Where’s Bear?”

  “Give him the Choice and move on,” said a voice far above me.

  “He’s delirious,” the beacon said. “He isn’t able to make a choice. Get a stretcher.”

  “Sir, we don’t have room for any more. We can’t—”

  “I answer to God and Nathan Hill, Sergeant, not you. Now, have one of your men get a stretcher. Once he’s better, we can give him the Choice.”

  There was a thump of boots, and the beacon was beside me again, his hand heavy on my arm. I screamed as they lifted me to get the stretcher underneath my back. Every muscle in my body was filled with gravel and glass. Somehow I bit back my screams, but tears coursed down my cheeks. They got me into a troop carrier, dropping me roughly onto the deck, and then the engines started and we pulled away.

  What I remembered after that came in a series of bursts as I crashed in and out of consciousness — the weary faces of the other captives in the back of the truck, their hands tied, bodies bent and exhausted; the nauseating lurch of the truck as it went from crawling to racing over uneven roads beneath the pounding of rocket fire; the way the green canvas cover above me lit up, almost beautifully, as bombs burst around and above us. When I closed my eyes to block it all out, there was still the constant shriek of machine-gun fire mixing with screams of pain and fright and the smell of smoke and sweat and fear-soaked urine.

  All of this was entwined with the fierce heat of the fever that had moved into every inch of my body. It seemed to grind muscles and bones as if they were in a mortar. I turned my head to vomit onto the floor. My body wasn’t my own.

  Time slipped and lurched. Along with the present, the past was there too. I could feel a lake and trees and the winds moving through the flowers of home, like a hand brushing through someone’s hair and then letting it fall. I was lying in the hammock late at night, happily sleepless, with James below me.

  Then I was nine and in school, tiny behind my big plastic desk, so much smaller than all the other kids in my class. I felt the weight of the textbooks in my hand, their glossy pages and the rough grocery store paper-bag covers. School let out and I ran out the doors and met James. We found our way down to the creek, where we would leap from boulder to boulder, the slate-gray water coursing just beneath us.

  But now it wasn’t only me and James; Bear was there too, barking happily, his tail up and wagging, hesitating at a boulder’s edge until we coaxed him to leap toward us. He would land, his sides shaking with fright at what he had done. James or I would scoop him up and tell him he was a good boy and brave, and we would carry him down the trail until he wriggled out of our arms and took off, leading us on.

  Moonlight road,

  Why don’t you light my way home…

  The future was there too, but it was so hard to tell from the past, like a circle turning back to itself. I was older, tall for the first time, and living in the same blue house at the end of the street, only now it was my house and it was me who sat in the garden and played guitar late into the night. James was somewhere close, but I wasn’t sure where. Living down the street maybe or in a nearby town. Bear was at my feet, ageless, sleeping, his stub of a tail pounding the grass in time to the guitar. As the night fell deeper and cooler, the back door opened and two women stepped out. It was my mother, beautiful with her gray hair, and Nat walking side by side. They came to join me, but when they did, my fingers fumbled on the guitar strings.

  “Where’s Dad?” I asked. “Why isn’t he here?”

  Nat looked to Mom, and Mom reached down and scratched Bear’s sides until the dog wiggled over onto his back, his legs kicking contentedly.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  Nat took my hand.

  “Mom?”

  But she just went on stroking Bear’s sides while Nat held my hand. I asked again, standing up at the edge of the garden, but no one answered me, no one even looked at me. It was like they were caught in some loop, immobile, out of time, and I was barely even there.

  “Mom?”

  “She’s not here, son.”

  My eyes ached as I opened them. Someone was dabbing my forehead with a cool cloth. I was in the present again. We had stopped and the truck was empty except for me and Beacon Radcliffe, who was sitting on one of the wooden benches that lined either side. He was l
eaning over me, the cloth in his hand, his beacon vestments stained with dirt and bulky from the body armor he wore underneath them.

  “You have to pray,” he said. “Do you know how to pray?”

  I closed my eyes again and my knees were aching from kneeling for hours with the other novices in Lighthouse with Beacon Quan. He had us repeat our prayers over and over again until we could say them without thinking. Until the words weren’t words anymore, but ritual movements of air and lips and tongue held in muscle memory.

  “If you pray hard enough,” Beacon Radcliffe said, “then God may allow you off this Path and onto another. Just pray. God makes the world. He can make yours.”

  What would I have to do? I wondered. How hard would I have to pray for God to put me on the path home, along with James and Bear and Mom and Dad? Because if he won’t do that, then I had nothing to pray for.

  I turned my head from the beacon and he finally relented and disappeared. There was a great stretch of blackness and then I was rising up into the air, free of the close stink of the truck. There were hundreds of voices all around me as well as the sounds of engines and boots and the rotors of helicopters flying low.

  Had I slipped back in time again? Was I back at Cormorant, about to start my time as a novice all over again? My heart seized. How much longer then until I sat by that lake and listened to the Choice being given to all of those people who had trusted me? How much longer until I watched Grey Solomon die? Or Alec? How much longer until I abandoned Bear?

  The sound dropped out again and I was somewhere cool and filled with only the softest rustling of feet. My clothes were torn away and what felt like steel wool dipped in freezing water was worked up and down my body. I was left alone, shivering and sweating at the same time, my skin livid. I tried to open my eyes, but they were so thick with tears and grime that all I saw was a fiery light filled with a black blur of distorted bodies.

  What did I do to deserve this? asked part of me, but another part of me knew.

  PART THREE

  21

  “Where am I?”

  A white-robed companion was sitting at the edge of my cot. There was a bowl of water and a cloth in her lap.

  “They’re calling it Kestrel.” Her voice was tentative with a light Southern accent. Her eyes were soft shadows beneath her mesh veil.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “About a week,” she said. “Your fever broke a few nights ago.”

  “What was it?”

  “Something waterborne, they think. We’ve been seeing a lot of it.”

  The companion filled a cup from a water pitcher near the bed, then slipped her hand beneath my neck to lift me up so I could drink. I was lying in a large canvas tent that was packed with cots just like mine. Companions and medics glided through the room, ministering to the sick. Outside were the familiar sounds of a Path base, helicopters, Humvee engines far off near the command center, voices giving crisp orders.

  I ran through the flashes of my memory — the truck, voices, sounds of engines and helicopters.

  “We’re at the front,” I said.

  “A few miles south of it,” she said. “Near Richmond. Everyone they take is being brought here now. Getting ready for the big fight, I guess.”

  “Have they taken Philadelphia?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “But Oregon and Nevada fell. Everyone says Philadelphia is next.”

  The companion dipped a cloth into her bowl and mopped the sweat from my forehead. Cool water ran down the side of my face, loosening knots that seemed to run through my entire body.

  “So it’s almost over,” I said, dreamy, my eyelids drooping. The companion moved on to wash my neck and my chest.

  “Mara!” the shepherd called from across the room.

  “Rest,” the companion said, laying a reassuring hand on my shoulder.

  When she was gone, a lonely stillness fell over me. Somehow the bustle of bodies moving around me only made it worse. I reached under the sheets to my pockets but my clothes had been traded for Path-issued pajamas. The jeans I had been wearing were in a neat stack by the bed. I leaned over and rifled through them, digging one hand into my pants pocket until I felt a bit of metal. I drew out Bear’s collar and held it under the sheets, both hands pressing into the tough fabric. I felt an empty place inside me, but I imagined him in that cabin sitting by a fire, safe, and the gnaw of it eased a bit. I closed my fist around the collar and held it tight, wishing he were here, thankful that he wasn’t.

  There was a gap in the tent flap across from my cot. Through it I could see a thin trail leading away from the tent and out into the camp. Bodies dressed in forest camo passed and a black helicopter streaked across the sky and disappeared. Despite the ache and the exhaustion, I could already feel a drumbeat starting up inside of me. Get up. Get dressed. Keep moving. I drew the blanket off my legs but stopped when I saw another companion standing across the aisle.

  She was watching me, ignoring the rush of medics and orderlies around her. Blurred beneath the veil, her face was visible only as shadows and worried lines. I could tell she was new just by the way she stood, her body drawn in tight like she was trying to collapse in on herself and disappear.

  The other companions were being led in prayer by their shepherd at the far end of the tent.

  “You just got here,” I said.

  The companion nodded. I waved her over and she drifted across the aisle, stopping at the foot of my cot.

  “Don’t be afraid,” I said. “Just do what they tell you and you’ll be fine.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  I sat up slightly. There was something familiar in her rasp of a voice. “What do you mean?”

  The companion checked the far end of the infirmary and then drew closer, coming up along the side of the cot.

  “Don’t,” I whispered urgently. “If they see you they’ll—”

  Her hand grasped the side of the cot and she leaned down by my ear.

  “Looks like I was wrong, Cal,” she said. “I guess this is where you really belong.”

  I peered through her veil until the lines of her face resolved into a sharp jaw and amber-colored eyes.

  “Nat?”

  I reached for her arm but she jerked it away from me. The shepherd called out to her across the infirmary.

  “I guess we both do now,” Nat said. Then she backed into the aisle, sweeping across the infirmary and melting into the white sea of her sisters.

  I sank into the cot, any scrap of energy I had gone, my head buzzing with a flat hiss of static. If they got Nat, then what chance did I have? What chance did any of us have? Beyond the tent flap, soldiers marched back and forth and engines revved. I held on to Bear’s collar and searched for the drumbeat that would urge me on, but there was nothing there. We were all lost.

  • • •

  Two days later I was put on my first work detail.

  A young corporal showed up with a pair of standard-issue novice fatigues and led me out of the infirmary to where I would be helping to dig latrines.

  I covered my eyes from the blast of sunlight that came when we stepped out of the gloom of the infirmary tent. My body was still weak, loose limbed, from days on my back. I kept my eyes on the corporal’s back and tried to keep up as he led me through the base.

  Kestrel sat in what had once been a grassy clearing before it was trampled into muddy ruts by thousands of Path boots and Humvees. It seemed to be laid out in a mirror image of Cormorant, only bigger and more hastily put together. One quick walk through it and I had picked out the novices’ and citizens’ barracks and the sequestered ops center. A canvas-walled Lighthouse towered over everything in the center of camp.

  The base was surrounded by a high fence topped with rolls of razor-sharp concertina wire. Plywood guardhouses, stacked with sandbags and bristling with heavy weapons, sat at every turn. The camp had clearly been constructed with a typical Path focus on security, but it was new and partially unfini
shed. I told myself there had to be a hole somewhere, that all I had to do was find it, but then I remembered all the years that James and I spent in Cormorant thinking the exact same thing.

  I scanned passing groups of companions, looking for Nat, but I didn’t see any trace of her. She hadn’t come back to the infirmary since the day we spoke and part of me wanted to believe I had imagined the whole thing, that she had been some kind of fever dream. The idea that Nat could have been taken, and that she would have submitted to the Choice if she had been, seemed too impossible to be real. Of course, I knew it was. The Path had swept across the whole of the country, and now controlled nearly two-thirds of it. Anyone could be taken, and once they were, no one was immune to wanting to live.

  The corporal led me up a hill at the southern edge of the camp and gave instructions to me and a group of ten or fifteen other novices. Since I still had my cast, I was on gofer duty, ferrying supplies and water, while the rest of them dug in the noonday sun. It took us till nearly sundown to finish the pit and construct the latrine housing. The group was almost ready to drop when the corporal led us to the novices’ barracks, where we were allowed a tepid shower before being shuffled off to dinner and prayers.

  The Kestrel Lighthouse was nowhere near as impressive as Cormorant’s had been — it was simply a large tent full of chairs facing a makeshift altar. Drained from the sun and the day’s work, it was actually a relief to find my place among the others and rest on the flat pew. I helped a bewildered young novice find the right page in the book of prayers and then Beacon Radcliffe emerged and began the service.

  “I am the Way and the Path…”

  The voices around me fell into a tentative unison. The beacons stalked the aisles, their eyes hardest on the newest of us. Luckily, the service was still deep in my bones and I followed along easily, making myself nearly invisible in the cadence of the prayers and the flow of kneeling and standing. The rhythm of it was so familiar that I felt myself dissolving into it.