Backwoods

by sara12356

  “As I was saying, sir.” Dani’s comment was directed to Prendick but she glared at Andrew in unspoken imperative: Shut up. You’re not helping. “All of this land was held in federal reserve before this facility was built, which means they could’ve been out here for years, decades even, without being detected. Which also means, sir,” she added pointedly. “They could be growing or manufacturing illegal substances on federal land. That would put it in our jurisdiction to investigate, wouldn’t it, sir?”

  Prendick studied her for a long, stern moment. “Et tu, Santoro?” he said. Then with a sigh and another scowl in Andrew’s general direction, he grumbled, “Get your squad together and meet me in the courtyard in thirty minutes. Mister Braddock, you go to your room, shower off and change your clothes—because you’re right, you do stink—then rendezvous with us in the yard, as well. Can you find the spot where you claim this body was hanging again?”

  Andrew nodded. “I marked it on one of the maps in my backpack. I know how to find my way back there.”

  “Fair enough,” Prendick replied. “Here’s your chance to prove it.”

  ****

  Even though Andrew guided them along the trail, he stayed closely surrounded on all sides by armed members of Dani’s squad. Each of the soldiers carried live M16A assault rifles and despite the light, jovial conversation that they’d exchanged in the courtyard, once in the woods, they got down to business. Walking cautiously, keeping careful watch all around them, they ventured among the trees with the same sort of wary attentiveness they might have awarded a deceptively vacant street in some Afghani or Iraqi village.

  “So Santoro says some guys were following you through the woods,” one of them, Spaulding, said in a low voice to Andrew.

  Andrew didn’t feel like enduring the indignity of trying to explain that he didn’t think they had been guys at all. When he simply nodded in reply, the soldier, Spaulding, pressed, “How many, you figure?”

  “At least four,” Andrew said. “Maybe more. It was kind of hard to tell.”

  “What’d they look like?” Spaulding asked.

  “I don’t know.” Andrew shook his head. “I never saw their faces.”

  “What were they wearing?”

  Andrew shook his head again. “I didn’t really get a good look.”

  “You know, I’ve heard there’s a Bigfoot out here in these woods,” Hartford murmured from Andrew’s right.

  “Hey, fuck you, Hartford, what do you know?” another, Reigler, growled. “Shut up, you dipshit.”

  “Fuck you, Reigler,” Hartford grumbled back. “I know plenty. I read books and shit. Last fall, some guy out this way, he got pictures of one of them Bigfoots in his garden, eating his green beans.”

  “Me, I’m more worried about drug dealers out here growing pot than any Bigfoot,” Boston remarked.

  To Andrew’s consternation, the poke berry ink he’d used to mark the trail map had smeared on the page. He’d folded it too quickly and it hadn’t fully dried, and now streaked the map in splotches, with no discernable point of origin. This cost him brownie points with the soldiers, as several of them exchanged exasperated eye rolls when they found out.

  “I can still find my way back on my own,” Andrew insisted, but even Dani looked somewhat dubious. “I know the general area. That’s still marked.”

  ****

  The area may have been marked, but Andrew quickly recalled a quote he’d heard once from legendary woodsman, Daniel Boone: I can’t say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.

  Bewildered, Andrew thought, frowning. That’s a word for it. Along with fucked.

  They’d left the rutted foot path some time ago, beating their own trail through the woods for a good twenty minutes or so. The silence this time had been broken not by the occasional rustle of footsteps in the leaves, but the sound of rain drops plopping heavily through the treetops, a light drizzle that quickly worked its way into something more steady. To his credit—and Andrew’s surprise—Prendick hadn’t said anything, and on those fleeting occasions when Andrew would steal a sheepish glance in the older man’s direction, he found the Major seeming unbothered by neither the rain nor their circumstances.

  The trees had all started to look alike to Andrew, because when he’d been chased through them, he hadn’t thought to admire the view for long, or at least try to find some visual landmarks by which he might reorient himself later.

  “Damn it,” he muttered.

  “It’s alright,” Dani told him, quiet and close enough so no one else heard.

  “I thought it was right around here,” he said, turning in a circle, looking every which way.

  “We’ll find it,” she murmured in reassurance. But she didn’t believe that, and he knew it.

  Because she doesn’t believe me. She’s my friend and she doesn’t want to hurt my feelings, but there you go. She thinks I’m as full of shit as Prendick does. They all do now.

  “Major Prendick, over here,” called one of the soldiers, Maggitti, who had ventured ahead of the group a modest distance, surveying on point for the team. “I’ve found something.”

  Andrew darted in the direction of his cry, with Dani and the rest of the squad right in step. Whatever momentary excitement and vindication Andrew might have felt quickly withered, however, when he caught sight of a deer carcass dangling by the neck from a tree limb. It had been stripped of its skin, its limbs hacked off, its entrails removed along with most of the viable meat. What remained was putrid, ripe with the dim, sleepy buzz of flies.

  “Looks like poachers again,” Maggitti said to Prendick.

  “Aw, man,” Hartford remarked. “I bet they got some good eating off that one.”

  “You want me to cut it down, sir?” Maggitti asked.

  Prendick shook his head. “Leave it. The coyotes and cougars will find it soon enough.”

  “This isn’t what I saw earlier,” Andrew said, and when Prendick turned to him, any semblance of courteous tolerance was gone. He looked doubtful and aggravated.

  “Mister Braddock, it’s getting late,” he said. “The sun will be setting soon.”

  “I’m telling you, this isn’t what I saw,” Andrew insisted.

  “You’ve done a lot of that since your arrival, Mister Braddock,” Prendick said, his voice growing sharp, his eyes cold and brittle. “Telling, I mean. It seems to me that in a few short days, you’ve seen all kinds of things in these woods, more than the rest of us have in months. At least, according to you.”

  Andrew bristled. “I’m not lying. Or imagining things.”

  “Be that as it may…” Prendick’s voice trailed off and he offered a condescending shrug. “It’s raining and cold and if we stay out here much longer, at least half of us will have hypothermia by the time we get back to the barracks. Besides that, I’m hungry and tired and don’t feel like humoring you anymore. If you want to stay out here and walk in circles a while longer, by all means, be my guest.” He held his hand up in the air, fingers folded into a fist, a signal to the soldiers. “As for the rest of us, let’s head back in.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Upon their return to the compound, Andrew beat a hasty retreat to his room for the rest of the night, humiliated and frustrated, ignoring even Dani’s attempts to make sympathetic eye contact with him. Flopping onto his bed, he propped himself up with pillows, kicked off his boots and tried to watch some of the video he’d borrowed the night before.

  As the opening credits for Universal Soldier rolled, he closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. A headache had been brewing there even before they’d found the putrid deer hanging from the tree, and he could feel it pulsing now behind his eyes, the steady, rhythmic cadence of a midget banging a bass drum deep inside his skull.

  I didn’t see a dead goddamn deer, he thought. His head hurt. He was exhausted, his mind foggy, his emotions scraped raw with fatigue. I wasn’t imagining things. It was a soldier in the tree. A dead soldier. I saw him. I
know I did.

  But in that moment, with nothing but the music from the TV overlapping with faint buzz of the overhead fluorescents and the whispered rush of the building’s central air-conditioning to surround him, he found himself no longer so certain.

  He’d known other foresters who’d panicked while out in the field. Without a compass or GPS readily in hand for orientation, it was all too easy to feel disoriented and confused. Even small animals could make noises that made them seem larger, more menacing in a carpeting of dried leaves, and one’s imagination could certainly play tricks, filling in the blanks, conjuring up mental images of all kinds of unseen horrors crashing and lumbering through the underbrush.

  Maybe that’s it, he thought, forcing his pride aside, the part of him that insisted he’d been a trained field professional long enough to know the difference between fact and fantasy, that he’d delved into deeper, thicker, denser woods than these a hundred times, if not a thousand, and made it out again with only his wits and an occasional glimpse of the sun overhead to guide his way. Massaging his aching temples, Andrew struggled to push this part of him away, to muffle it. Because the only answer that makes any sense is that I imagined it all. I got scared, got lost, got caught in a trap and saw a dead deer hanging from a tree. Anything else was all in my mind.

  “All in my mind,” he whispered, and man, he wished he could believe that. It would have made things a hell of a lot easier.

  ****

  He heard a knock at the door and his eyelids fluttered open. He hadn’t meant to doze off, didn’t even realize that he had until he tried to sit up in bed and winced to feel the tight strain of a crick that had formed in his neck as he’d napped.

  With a groan, he swung his legs around, his feet to the floor. Shoving his disheveled hair back from his brow, he glanced at the clock and realized he’d lost almost an hour.

  “Alice?” he asked, blinking stupidly to find her on his threshold.

  The little girl looked up at him. “There was smoke everywhere.”

  Bewildered, he shook his head. “What?”

  “When the fire started, there was smoke everywhere,” Alice said again. “I couldn’t see. Martha couldn’t either and she got lost.”

  It took him a second of fending off the last residual, groggy cobwebs from his mind before he realized what she was talking about. The night her house was firebombed.

  “They found her after they’d put the fire out,” Alice said. “She was all burned up in a corner of the kitchen.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, moved with sudden pity for her. Folding his legs, he squatted down to her eye level.

  “She was seven steps from the back door,” Alice said. “And in the smoke, she didn’t even know it.”

  “Is that why you always count your steps?” he asked and she nodded once, reluctantly.

  “So I always know how to get out,” she whispered. “So I don’t end up like Martha.”

  Andrew cupped his hand against the back of her hair and drew her to his shoulder, offering her a hug. If she drew comfort from his touch, it didn’t reflect in her posture. She stood rigidly against him, as stiff as a plank of lumber, and made no move to return the embrace. Feeling awkward, Andrew drew back. “Sorry,” he said, but she only blinked at him impassively. “You want to come in?”

  She didn’t answer, but brushed past him, her bare feet whispering on the tile floor. He closed the door behind her, then ducked ahead into the bedroom area, switching on the bedside lamp to counter the growing shadows. There was a particularly loud and violent montage underway on the TV screen, full of people screaming and things exploding in enormous fireballs and Andrew darted forward, shutting it off.

  “Where’s Suzette?”

  “Fixing supper. She’s making salmon croquettes tonight. And creamed peas to go with them.”

  “Yuck.” Andrew wrinkled his nose, grateful all at once to not be bartering sexual favors in exchange for his supper.

  “I know.” Alice nodded solemnly. “Where were you today? I didn’t see you out in the courtyard.”

  Oddly touched that she would have been distracted enough from her habitual counting to notice his absence, he said, “I went for a hike in the woods.”

  A strange look came over her at this. Her eyes grew momentarily wide, and her bottom lip drew in beneath the shelf of her upper teeth almost anxiously. “You shouldn’t do that.”

  “What? Go into the woods?” he asked and when she nodded, he asked, “Why not?”

  She looked up at him, all round, dark eyes. “The screamers live there,” she said in a voice so soft and faint, he couldn’t be sure at first he’d heard her.

  “The what?” Folding his legs beneath him, he squatted in front of her. “What did you say, Alice?”

  Still, she stared at him, locking her gaze with his own. “You’ve heard them,” she whispered. “The screamers in the night.”

  He nodded, a chill shivering through him, prickling the hairs along the nape of his neck. “What are they?” he whispered back. “Do you know?”

  She shook her head. “But I’ve seen them in the trees. You have, too, haven’t you?”

  Andrew nodded again. I think I saw them today.

  ****

  He got Alice a snack from the vending machines in the downstairs rec room. She’d lapsed into silence in his room, saying no more about the things in the woods she’d called the “screamers.” He’d meant to leave her for only a few minutes, then try and broach the subject with her again, but it took longer than he’d intended because he hadn’t paid much attention to the contents of the machine until that moment. As he looked inside, he realized there wasn’t much except for junk food to choose from.

  I can’t feed her soda and a Snickers bar for supper, he thought, frowning. He knew he needed to get her back to the apartment. Even if Suzette had been too preoccupied fixing supper to notice Alice slipping out the door, she’d have noticed her absence by now. If she hadn’t then Moore sure as hell would whenever he returned shortly from the lab for his dinner.

  It’s their special time, Suzette had told him of Moore and Alice dining together at night. Or some such bullshit.

  He finally settled on a package of peanut butter crackers. He had no idea what kinds of food Alice liked, outside of Cheerio’s, which she apparently ate every morning for breakfast. Every kid likes peanut butter, though, he thought, punching the button and watching the thin metal coil slowly rotate, dropping the crackers with a heavy plop into the dispensing trough at the bottom of the machine. Don’t they?

  Digging through the measly remains of his spare change, he also put together enough to get a can of 7-Up. It’s caffeine free, I think, he told himself with a studious frown. He wished Dani was there to ask. She has kids. She’d know these things.

  “Have you seen Alice?”

  The rec room had been empty upon his arrival, the jukebox dark and quiet, the pool tables vacant and the voice from behind startled him. He turned in surprise and found Suzette at the threshold, a somewhat frantic sort of look on her face.

  “Alice,” she said again, because he must have blinked at her stupidly for too long for her liking, and she frowned, planting her hands on her hips. “She’s gotten out of the apartment somehow and run off. Have you seen her?”

  He glanced guiltily at the soda and crackers then shook his head. “No. Sorry.”

  “Well, if you do, please come find me, okay?” she asked. “Edward’s panicking. He’s over at the lab building right now, probably tearing it up from end to end looking for her. He said something about her getting in there, figuring out the access code somehow.”

  “Uh, sure.” He shrugged. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

  She was too distracted to offer anything sarcastic or snide in reply, turning instead on her heel and walking briskly into the hall again.

  Hurrying, he carried the soda and crackers back to his room, only to find Alice asleep on his bed. Curled on her side, her knees drawn to her chest,
her hands draped delicately by her face, she didn’t stir when he came through the door. Caught off guard, somewhat charmed, he nonetheless realized he was pretty much officially fucked.

  “Alice.” Setting aside the snacks, he knelt beside the bed. “Alice? It’s time to get up.”

  She didn’t stir and he stroked her hair back from her face. “Honey, you can’t sleep here. Your daddy’s looking for you. He has a gun and he’s already tried to kill me once with it.”

  As he tucked loose tendrils of her dark hair behind her ear, he felt something coarse and out of place, hidden beneath her scalp. Curious, he leaned forward, pushing her hair further aside. She had a thick crown, enough so that when combed just right, it had hidden from view a narrow strip of scalp that that been shaved bald and exposed. It wasn’t until he parted her hair with his hands that he saw it clearly, a line of stitches closing a wound approximately two inches in length. It was still fresh enough to have blood crusted along the seam.

  North of this, along the outermost edge of the shaved margin of scalp, he noticed a slight indentation in her flesh, a place where the hair had started to regrow, but had been likewise sheared at some point, because the new hair was only a few centimeters long. With a frown, Andrew brushed his fingertips against this peculiar depression. A thin red line bisected it, a scar from a now-healed incision.

  What the hell? For a moment, he leaned away from the bed, reaching for the lamp on his nightstand. Hooking the lip of the shade with his hand, he flipped it enough to redirect the light in a broad pool against his bed, bathing Alice. Now he studied her head again with bewildered fascination, finding two more sets of the curious dimples and scars near the crown of her skull, another closer to her hairline and at least three near the cap of her pate.

  It’s like the skull’s gone soft there or something, he thought. Or like it’s gone altogether.

  “It’s where the medicine goes,” Alice said and he drew back, surprised to find her blinking dazedly at him.

  “I…I’m sorry,” he stammered, awkward and abashed. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”