The Pines

by Robert Dunbar

  “Something under me…hurts…” Squirming, he shivered convulsively, and his arms jerked toward her.

  “Don’t try to move.”

  But he pulled her toward him. “…get out…”

  “I’m not leaving you.”

  “’Thena, run.” His grip tightened. “Don’t you know…where we…?”

  “We’re in its…lair.” Striking another match, she spoke softly. “My leg hurts. I can’t run anymore.”

  A howl shook the walls.

  She clutched him in terror. The sounds that emerged from his throat ceased to be words.

  A weapon. Pulse throbbing in her head, she turned from him. Find a weapon. She forced herself to look beyond the ravaged bodies, the inflated faces.

  Strange objects littered the shack. Damp sticks that might once have been furniture were heaped in the corners, and things twisted and partially devoured sprawled upon them, coated with a scum that seemed faintly to glow, a clinging putrescence. Oddly shaped devices hung from the rafters, bent stiff-wire cages and rotten leathern contraptions with tufts of fur adhering. Must’ve been a trapper’s hut. There have to be guns, guns and skinning knives and things. But they’d be old, the guns, she knew—museum pieces. Useless.

  Dust laden and cobwebbed, the largest object hung just above her head, and she struggled to pull it down with one hand, thick grime coating her fingers. It weighed more than she expected, and she almost dropped it. Rust ground into her palm. What in the…?

  As she hefted the object, examining it, match light gleamed off something on the floor, something bright.

  Stooping, she brought the match low. A glistening caul of decay covered the face…but silver jewelry glittered on a bloated wrist. She recognized the design of interlocking leaves. It’s the bracelet Steve gave me, the one that belonged to his wife.

  Everything went black.

  Oh, Pamela.

  Choking, she held one hand across her nose and mouth and felt what remained of her sanity begin to splinter. A moment later, in the darkness, she realized what the heavy object in her hand must be.

  “Steve?” Another match sparked. “I’ve found a bear trap.”

  In the flickering shadows, his mouth seemed to move.

  “It’s pretty rusted,” she whispered. “Oh God, I think I hear it.”

  The thing howled again, louder, and dust rained down on her from the ceiling.

  Oh God, let this be over. She pawed frantically across the corpses, finding canteens and camping gear, but no guns or knives. I can’t fight anymore. I can’t. Then she saw it. In the corner leaned an ax. She brushed away the silken tent that cocooned it, and black spiders dropped off. She hefted the ax. The handle was rotten, the head dull and loose, but it was something.

  From outside, from just the other side of the wall, came the whispery scraping of heavy feet against the sand.

  Almost. The match dropped, because she needed both hands now. Working in the dark, she struggled with the trap, trying to figure out how it opened. I’m almost ready for you.

  Tugging and grunting, she managed to pull the ridged jaws a few inches apart, but they closed with a grind. She felt blood on her fingers. Taking hold of the ax handle, she pried the jaws open again, exerting all her strength, then worked the handle between the teeth. Holding the trap down with one foot, she levered it, slowly, all the way open. Then she put her lame foot on it and heard a click as the trap flattened.

  “’Thena, run.”

  “Ssh, Steve.” Stepping back, she felt for the matches. One left. She set fire to the pack and examined the spring plate in the center of the trap. This better work. Holding the flame gingerly, she positioned the trap by the doorway.

  She dropped the curling matchbook and watched the red fade. Then she stood out of the strike of moonlight and waited with the ax raised above her head.

  The footsteps ceased.

  It’s just standing there, on the other side of the doorway. She could hear it breathing and realized with a sinking terror that it could hear her. Its breath became a slavering growl, a guttural snarl that ground thickly on and on.

  “Thh thth ththtenahthena”

  Soft as spider’s silk.

  Then silence.

  The damp wood of the ax handle began to crumble in her grip. It…said…my…name.

  She heard a wet slithering.

  Then Matthew’s voice echoed clearly in her mind: Behind…behind inna dark…turn around…right behind…

  From where Steve lay came a giggle that choked into a sob, and she spun, swinging with all her strength.

  She heard a harsh animal shriek as the ax connected.

  She swung again, shouting with a ferocity of her own. The handle snapped. She leaped for the doorway as fingers clawed at her. Her foot struck something hard and she went down, dragging the heavy object across the floor, feeling its metal teeth dig into her leg.

  She scrambled outside and shoved at the leaning door, sent it toppling. For an instant, she glimpsed the blue-gray face above her in the moonlight, the wide, luminous eyes, the chin wet with drool. Then the door thudded, the thing disappearing beneath it.

  Moonlight struck like a wave of energy. She plunged into it, stumbling, and fought her way against that current, still clutching the steel-jaw trap. Too rusted. It hadn’t worked, hadn’t snapped shut when she’d fallen on it. Thank God. She had to reach the pines—lose herself in them. Steve, forgive me.

  At the edge of the woods stood the boy. His eyes shone white.

  “Run! Matty, get away!” The wind blew strong against her as, limping heavily, she raced toward him.

  The boy stood very still, and his gaze traveled past her.

  “Run!” Yelling as she turned, she saw the thing burst from the hut and streak forward, blurring.

  The gaping maw. The clutching hands.

  “No!” She hurled the trap, falling to her knees, arms outstretched to shield the boy.

  She heard a muffled clang, and the moonlight faded steadily, sinking the world in darkness.

  Mired in the stench of the hut, Steve heard the awful screech and knew he had to help her. He tried to rise but felt the blood pool in his bowels and then leak out around the burning coil of pain. Again, his strength ebbed, receding into darkness. Something was sticking into him, sharp and hard at his back. He tried to squirm off it.

  He couldn’t die here, not now, couldn’t abandon her when she needed him. He twisted over on his side, the pain searing him in half, his breath burning through his throat. Then his hand struck the thing he’d been lying on and fastened instantly on the familiar hardness.

  The sky seemed to boil, the clouds strange and fleet.

  She approached. It lay on the ground. A naked thing, it convulsed, shrieking and gibbering. She waited for it to die. In the dark, the feet looked horny and malformed. Cautiously, she bent closer. It breathed still but no longer growled, the worst of its death spasms over. Only as Matty drew forward did she recognize the long whitish hair that trailed about its shoulders.

  The trap had stuck the abdomen, clamping shut on its stomach.

  He’s still alive. Heavy shadow lay across the face, but she could see the twitching of the lips, like the struggles of a dying bird. I don’t want to hear.

  Stench rose from the earth.

  “…kill anybody’d try ta chase you ’way…you ’bout the only friend I ever…”

  The words grew even fainter, and she tried to hold Matty back from him.

  “…no don’ tie me up! Wanna help ya. Ernie, they comin’…come to get Lonny’s things she said you know what’s out there, boy. My own son. You and yer ma out there inna woods…”

  She watched his bowels looping out, listened to the pathetic ravings. He’s spilling his guts. She wanted to scream or laugh. It seemed incredible he still could speak, incredible he could breathe, and in the weak light the entrails seemed to unclench and writhe on the ground like serpents.

  His face. Moonlight raced, dappling over him.
I have to see. Nothing of his features remained visible for more than a fleeting second, and the sibilant gasp of his voice ebbed, growing even more chaotic. I have to know.

  “…what’d you do to my father loony you ain’t like them others what are we sort of like cousins where’s my old man I know you know where…”

  Something buzzed in her skull. In confusion, she seemed to hear his voice duplicated by an echoing whisper.

  “…come with me please just once lef’ me wi’ a kid come with me to the woods Marl please…”

  Speaking almost simultaneously, Matthew parroted every word, and when the other no longer had the strength, Matthew spoke alone.

  “…think you could take this alla this fer yer ole man shoulda blowed yer head off like I blowed hers off inna woods…”

  She put her arms around her son’s shoulders, tried to jerk him out of this communion. As though she’d touched a power line, awareness jolted through her; she drowned in unending misery as all the frightening filth of Marl’s life poured through her. Sometimes it seemed more than words, more than just a sordid, horrible ramble. It entwined her, and she caught a sense of something that churned, deep and turbulent and hot, fuming over and obscured, a molten sadness that foamed upon the cold rawness of death. She smelled things, tasted things—jumbled memories—saw gigantic Spencer edge closer, leering, too close, the pores like craters in his bristling face, his clothes open. She saw the Devil loom transparent, and the pines breathed to her, moaning of the hunt and of wetness and of love. She broke away from the boy, and it ended.

  “…if I tie you you’ll be safe here the stateys won’t hurt you only I know Marl I found you only me but it’s me they want put your whole head in ’is mouth and bite it off an’ its wings glisten in the sunlight w-when it breaks free…”

  His limbs trembled in a final convulsion, then Marl lay still.

  She felt something twinge at the back of her consciousness; something like a whitish grub stirred blindly. Like a naked hatchling, fallen from the nest, it struggled to lift its head and gaze with still-shut eyes into a sky it would never know—struggled—then lay flattened on the ground.

  “My friend! I can’t hear ’im anymore. I won’t! Chabwok! No! Not the chains!” He threw himself on Marl. “Please, not chains! Be good now! I’ll be good!”

  “Matty! No!” She couldn’t pull him off.

  He yelled and clawed at the body.

  “My God, what are you doing? No, Matty!”

  Sobbing, he bit it.

  She tried to drag him away, but he backhanded her, knocking her down. He grunted and growled.

  “Oh no, my baby. I won’t let it happen.” Soft things splashed on her, soaking the front of her shirt. “I promise you, I won’t let it happen that way to you!”

  Dried reeds rattled behind them. The boy shook her off and turned from the body, dark fluids pouring from his chin. He snarled.

  Steve lay a few yards away, arched to one side as he crawled on his belly through the weeds. Mud covered him. Blood covered him. And the gun in his hand was leveled on the boy.

  A wail tore from Athena as she hurled herself in front of her son.

  Steve jerked the revolver away at the last instant, firing into the woods, then dropped it in front of his face. Instantly, he seemed to slip out of consciousness, his head falling to the soft ground.

  An acrid stench washed over them with the hot, crushing wind. She smelled the smoke then, finally understood what was happening. The woods burned.

  Her strength came from somewhere beyond her ability to comprehend, and she moved as in a dream, somehow half-rousing Steve, somehow getting him to his feet. She dragged and carried him through the pines. “Keep going, Steve. Just a little farther. Don’t give up now. Stay with me, Matty. Don’t cry. Stay with me.”

  Soon the pines had vanished, melting into a dense, featureless gray. Yet they stumbled onward, and many times she considered leaving the injured man and saving the boy. Somehow she led them. In silence, the boy clung to her clothing, sometimes helping her to bear the man along. They knew no direction, only movement and the effort to keep breathing.

  The glow of baleful eyes filtered through the haze, though the headlights seemed to grow dimmer even as they watched.

  With a final heaving effort, they reached the automobile. She got the back door open and tried to push the man onto the seat, and the boy tried to help by getting in the other side and dragging him in by the shoulders. Steve’s eyes blinked open—he saw the boy.

  He screamed once, then went limp.

  They locked the doors, and rolled the windows tight. She clicked off the headlights and put her head down on the steering wheel. She wanted to sleep. Only the boy’s coughing roused her.

  The engine choked, then silence.

  With no panic left, she tried again, turning the key, pumping the gas pedal.

  Matty lay beside her on the seat. He was so very still. She drove through a world of blankness, eyes tearing, knowing she couldn’t go on, knowing she could never stop. Vaguely, she wondered if they were already dead.

  The car floated through an empty universe that separated into gray currents and eddies of reflected light.

  “It bit me.” Delirious, Steve gasped from the backseat. “I’m It.” Each breath an ordeal, he kept repeating the same words. “I’m It now.”

  Coughing, she drove through a tunnel of smoke, the gleam of the headlights forming a bright, enveloping cocoon.

  EPILOGUE/PROLOGUE

  Those seriously injured had been taken elsewhere.

  Filling the room, an irritating film coated their throats and burned their eyes, seeming to rise from the very clothing of the nearly two hundred refugees crowded into the high-school gymnasium. The volunteers, pot bellied men in clerical collars, matronly women and earnest teenagers from rural churches, milled about, distributing sandwiches—mean circles of cold cuts wedged into dry bread—urging their charges to try some of the soft local apples.

  Most of the people hunched on cots, dazed but eating—it was after all a free lunch. Others sprawled in exhaustion; some just wandered about.

  The boy slept with his mouth pressed into the canvas, the rough woolen blanket bunched about his feet. “Dooley…save…?” Some dark dream clotted in his face, and his voice held petulant wildness. “…find…” His hands clenched. “…come this way…come…”

  The hall echoed, raucous with murmured complaints, with whining and crying and laughter, with the shuffling of feet and the blared chatter of a television and several radios, all amplified and distorted by the high ceiling and the polished floor.

  “Old dogs are smart, baby. Dooley’s all right. You hush now.” Athena gazed down at the dreaming, rolling movement beneath his eyelids. “Just sleep.” His face still looked red and puffy. A drop of blood at one nostril smeared toward his upper lip, and she wiped it away with her sleeve.

  Finally, he seemed peaceful, and she stood up, easing a sharp twinge in her leg. After getting more coffee, she drifted toward the television set. The words and images jangled in her exhausted consciousness.

  “Thirty-nine fire companies on the line…some from as faraway as Newark…smoke inhalation…list now stands at twelve known dead and thirty-one missing…governor has declared…”

  She felt a moment’s bitter rage at the mock-serious voice, the handsome face so composed in front of the projected image of an inferno. They don’t even know we exist. Other faces flickered across the screen: sooty, dead-eyed firefighters; children impressed with the drama of their situations; broken-toothed men jubilant at being interviewed. Reeling slightly, she stared at the pulsating electron colors of the screen, trying to sort out the patterns.

  “…like the end of the world…thought I was dead…winds from the fire reached…barn just exploded like a bomb or something…couldn’t reach her because the flames just…including two firemen overcome by…and the roof blew over to the next house and started that one burning…like the end of the world.
”

  Larry and Jack. The thought brought her out of her stupor. They’re out there somewhere. They’d be on the line, ditching with pick and shovel, racing before the blaze as it topped trees and leaped defense lines. Was it really just a week ago I saw them last? They seemed like people she’d known in another lifetime.

  “…already an estimated nine thousand acres have been…”

  She wandered away. A placard at a table set up in a corner read INFORMATION. Behind it, a tight-faced man talked on a telephone. When he saw her again, he shook his head. Most Munro’s Furnace residents remained unaccounted for. A stack of papers marked with scribbled lists, names of survivors, the missing, the dead covered the table in front of him. She turned away.

  Scanning faces in the crowd, she realized with a shock that most looked to some extent familiar, so strong were the similarities. Yet she recognized no individuals.

  More people, some bent over with the weight of their possessions, shambled in through the double doors. She spotted one group and threaded through the crowd to reach them as they made their way toward a row of vacant cots along one wall. Wandering after their parents, the children hung together, silent, awed by their surroundings.

  Manny set down the stuffed sack and began to rummage through it. She caught up with him just as he uncapped the jar.

  “Where’s the little girl?” She scanned the grimy faces of the other children. “The little blind girl?” The mother seemed furtive and scared as she fumbled with a snarl on one of the hastily tied bags. Athena couldn’t tell if she was trying to open or tighten it.

  “Where is she?” She stared at the bundles. Had they gathered up every scrap of trash they could find? Had they stopped to loot a neighbor’s home?

  “Hey, Miz Monroe. We made it, see? Thought we was burned for sure.” Manny tilted his head back and let the jack run down his throat in a steady stream. “Damn shame ’bout the town.”

  “Answer me.”

  “Oh.” He looked surprised. “Molly. Wasn’t no time to get ’er. Happen so fast. Think it’s true ’bout it startin’ at the gin mill?”