The Witch of the Wood

by Michael Aronovitz

  There in the back corner, three beds from the end on the left, was Caroline’s mother.

  She was bone-thin, black knit cap on her head, wide-set eyes like those of her daughter. She was lying on her stomach, head where her feet should have been, and her gown was open in the back revealing a body shriveled and shrunken off a knotted spine. She saw him and clawed at the air, clearly in pain, saliva coming off her bottom lip in a long thread. Rudy almost wept. It was easy to tell that she’d been beautiful once, sharp nose, long proud jaw. She was the type who’d probably been really regal when she was angry, pretty as all hell, now ancient and desperate.

  Rudy approached, many around him moaning in disappointment as he passed them. He got to the bed and stood there.

  “The . . . Great . . . Father,” she said, looking up with lidless eyes. “And he’s come to pay what is owed The Provider.”

  “I have,” Rudy said.

  She surrendered to a wave of nausea with a short bout of dry retching, then a rattling cough and a couple of swallows.

  “And you’ve brought the Healing Blood?” she said finally.

  Rudy patted the cooler under his arm.

  “Right here, ready to go.”

  She looked up with a grin and actually licked her lips.

  “Then give it to me.”

  Rudy put up a finger.

  “Are you aware that this is only temporary? That it is no cure, just a massive stimulant?”

  “Are you aware,” she spat back hoarsely, “that they haven’t emptied the commodes in here for a day? That the diarrhea is so bad I’m afraid to eat a piece of toast, that the shooters rip through me like barbed wire? I don’t care if it’s temporary.”

  “Caroline says it causes unexpected surges of adrenaline, spikes in bodily strength difficult to channel.”

  “I’ll work it off in the gym.”

  “Heightened emotionality.”

  “I’ll see a psychiatrist.”

  He sat on the bed next to her, careful not to weigh down the edge enough to have her roll into him. He took a deep breath and looked off to the side.

  “I’ve got good news and bad news,” he said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not.” He gazed down at her. “The good news, Marilyn Shultz, is that you’re going to get a dose of the healing blood, tonight, right now.”

  “And the bad?” she rasped.

  Rudy reached into his breast pocket and got out the implement he’d just stolen from the examination room with the organ breakdowns on the wall.

  It was an eye-dropper.

  She actually bared her teeth when she understood.

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Things rarely are.”

  “That can only dispense enough for an hour.”

  “But that hour will be your finest.” He opened the cooler and pushed stuff aside, careful not to disturb the bag of dark blood, and drew out Caroline’s iPad. “I want to show you something,” he said. “A recording you might find of interest.”

  He cued up the witch-burning scene at the cornfield. Marilyn Schultz watched it in a numbed silence, and others in the room were craning their necks for a view.

  Brian Duffey tossed another Heineken empty into the pit and let out a long belch. This sucked. Lighting them up had become a chore, and there weren’t even people cheering anymore. It was dark back here away from the fire, and since Coach Sullivan had insisted that Duffey was the man to clean up the stuff under them with a shovel, he’d been wheelbarrowing that stinky, bloody shit over to the hole all night. He had a bandana over his face, and he felt like a trash man. Wasn’t he co-leader? Why couldn’t they get Junior Shipley to do this for awhile, or Rex Cunningham, or one of the police officers over by the tent island, or the home-boys from the Air Force base, sitting behind the sandbags up front showing off their rifles? He’d been killing these monster-bitches all day, and he was tired. He wanted to grab something to eat, make a move on one of the single moms, cop a feel off Heather Doyle or Robyn Stein, right under the ass palm-up as he passed. New rules, right?

  There was a rowdy-shout off to the left. Three big dudes with buzzcuts were challenging some long-haired biker types to funnel chug. A fat kid was crushing cans on his head. Some thick guys with tattoos on their necks were throwing knives into an uprooted stump, and there was a ring of shirtless men over by the grub area starting a fight club.

  Duffey took the ancient wristwatch Sullivan had given him out of his pocket and held it every which way, trying to pick up a reflection off the fire. The orders were to burn one bitch every five minutes, and it was coming due again. Tempted for the millionth time, he gazed off far left toward the supply area by the reeds and ferns. There under the lean-to were the gas cans. Why couldn’t they just do a massive douse and blaze right now, anyway?

  “It’s symbolic,” Sullivan had said, and Duffey hadn’t understood him even a little bit.

  “We have to show we’re not scared to sacrifice them in broad daylight,” he’d then said, and Duffey had gotten that loud and clear. But back then (and it seemed like years ago now) his bad ankle hadn’t been throbbing, and his back hadn’t gone sore right down to the tailbone. He ambled over to the back side of the fire and reached for his torch rammed there in the ground, the layers of sweat socks they’d pulled over the big end almost burned down to the grains underneath. Duffy looked in the rag bucket and saw that no one had bothered tossing in any more clothing; it was getting colder outside by the minute and people were skimping, avoiding him. Duffey ground his jaws together, took off his shirt, and stuck the shank of the torch between his legs, tying it off tight up top, coming around again with the sleeves for a double knotting.

  Assholes. Someone was going to come to back here for burn-duty if it killed him, and he was going to take a well-deserved turn smoking a blunt and chilling. And he was going to switch up the goddamned tunes. Sullivan had hooked up a system that could work off an iPod, and the old heads had been hogging it, playing Golden Earring and Steppenwolf garbage.

  He stuck the torch in the fire, gave it a swivel, and stalked back to the dark swell of corn, working in between the crosses three rows deep where he’d left off. The women closest to him started talking again, begging, pleading, moaning in hot whispers, promising him things, trying to make dirty deals, and for the millionth time he was about to scream for them to shut the fuck up when he got to his fresh one.

  It was his mother hanging there in the dark.

  “Brian,” she croaked. “Don’t do this to me, please.”

  “Bitch!” he screamed, whapping the torch into her face and throwing a brilliant cascade of blue and white sparks. The witches behind got showered, and they struggled violently, pulling at their restraints, bleeding on the ropes. The witches behind reacted and it was a domino effect, all of them twisting and writhing, shrieking in desperation and pain.

  The one Duffey hit had regressed to her form as a blank slate again, but her broken nose had caught fire, spreading across her face, consuming her in a quick campaign south and lighting up the area in blue phosphorescence. All of them were thrashing there in the brightened dark now, whitecaps, wriggling vermin in a massive trash pit, and two rows down, seven girls over, Duffey saw something funny, not funny as in “ha-ha,” but funny like “wack.”

  One of the monster-bitches was doing a gymnastics trick, similar to one of those straddle-sit positions on the uneven bars. It looked so goofy Duffey almost burst out laughing despite himself. She’d gotten her feet loose, spread them wide, and was trying to get to the left wrist with one of her toes, straining with it, making her neck cords bulge.

  Not funny at all.

  She hooked it and pushed outward, making an extra millimeter of clearance, next pulling her hand through, bunching and ripping the skin.

  More movement now, but this was at the periphery of Duffey’s vision, outside the mass of cornhusks and crosses. He turned to it, staring as if from down a long corridor, squinting,
trying to focus on the disturbance out there across the short field and behind the lean-to where the forest once was. Something was flooding the landscape and advancing.

  It was one of those “zoo-rushes,” where a pack of animals did that stampede thing. He could see them loping and bobbing over the logs and fallen timber, coming right at him down the dark slope toward the west edge of their campground. Instinctively, he looked back the other way, and out through the corn he saw another pack, this one smaller and wider spread, galloping toward him from the east across the meadow from the Blue Route, catching the light of the moon.

  They were dogs, all types, some of them house dogs; he could see the name tags gleaming.

  Brian Duffey burst out of the corn and ran around the rim of the broad fire, shouting to no one in particular. He’d had an emergency whistle, but had taken it off when it picked up heat from the fire and scorched him.

  Everyone seemed to be partying in slow motion, and Duffey charged into the heart of the campground, a few heads turning in mild uninterest, a couple of guys raising their beer cans to him as if to toast what looked like one of those drunken bum-rushes dudes sometimes did for attention, showing off their happy mo-jo. The guys on watch up front were leaning back against the sandbags, sitting with their knees spread, guns butt-down, muzzles pointed skyward. They were laughing and cheering because a woman with long brown hair and a bad case of horse face was taking off her top, moving her hips. Someone had just switched the music on the iPod system, and Duffy recognized it as “Cold Hard Bitch” by Jet. He burst into the circle and grabbed someone’s rifle. There were “Hey’s!” and “What the fuck’s!” and he turned back toward the western slope, taking a knee.

  Now there were hollers of hoarse recognition all around him as the “sentries” and others around them scrambled for positions to defend against the onslaught coming upon them from both sides of the corn.

  Duffey fired his weapon. One of the dogs curled down and skidded, and the sky exploded.

  It began with a wide burst of blue and red, a flowering fountain six hundred feet across, flickers, shimmers, a flash, and then a loud boom that sent Duffey flat on his ass. People were shouting, swarming around him like driver ants looking for cover, and he willed himself not to go down to his stomach covering his ears. A couple of the slutty older girls who’d been thinking of joining the horse-faced stripper were pointing upwards with wonder and glee, and a particularly big German shepherd from the zoo-rush smashed into one of them, bringing her to the ground in a hard spray of dirt and sending the other one away screaming. The dogs were on them now, jumping, clawing, going for pant legs, ripping at arms, snapping for throats.

  There was a heavy screeching, followed by a harsh whistling like “incoming” in a World War II movie, then a blast of greens and yellows shooting across the sky sideways, a bombardment, five consecutive detonations that sparkled and crackled, then fizzled, only to give way to silver twirlers that made lassoes in the night, hearty bangs one after the other, then the exclamatory “boom” that shook the ground and rattled the camp gear. There were a series of popping sounds, glitter cascades in aqua and pink, and people were scrambling, tripping over things, pushing each other, lying on the ground wrestling dogs off them, running off to the west woods, to the Blue Route.

  The enemy was so deeply integrated it was hard to get a clear shot, and one of the biker dudes suddenly ran right past Duffey, jumping the sandbags and booking away across the pasture toward the wide rise ahead that led up to the high school. The guy was pumping his knees at crazy angles, zigzagging as if he knew someone was going to take offense to his desertion, and Duffey moved the muzzle back and forth, cursing softly.

  Suddenly, the guy’s feet came out from under him as if he’d been clotheslined, and he crumpled down to the earth in a heap. Duffey had a moment where he actually wondered if he’d pulled the trigger without knowing it, and the sky lit up in grand finale style, total saturation, a criss-cross effect of shooting rainbows and glitter-bombs. The hill leading to the high school went bright underneath, and it was flooded now with wolves and huge dogs coming on hard. Duffey lowered his rifle, mouth falling open.

  This was no zoo-rush. It was an army of ghouls riding the canines like horses; they were skeletons with spotted skin and tumors, mummies without the bandages, the living dead, many of them hairless, some toothless, all with their mouths stretched open in hideous war screams, eyes rolling in their sockets, guns blazing.

  It was hard to hear anything, but Duffey felt bullets whipping past him, hitting things, dropping people. At the back side of the swarming advance coming down the hill, there rode a figure, tall, hooded, white ghost-mask, cape whipping and flying behind him.

  The Dogman.

  Duffey fired his rifle dry, making no visible dent in the attack coming on, then dropped it and turned, looking back through the campground, hating himself a bit for not grabbing another weapon and standing his ground, but knowing deep down that he held the ultimate trump card here.

  He was going for the gas cans.

  The wave came in hard behind him, bullets kicking up dirt, people around him twisting and spinning to the ground, wolves and dogs and foxes pounding through the space, screams, skids, sounds of blunt force. The west side of the fire was an attack zone, flooded and overrun, and Duffey hustled around the long way, bullets whipping past his right ear, blasting some cooking pans hanging on a wire, hitting a guy in the back of the head and sending him sprawling, ripping into the face of a woman he knew who had worked at the Walmart, cutting one of the knife-throwers across the chest on a slant. To the left, there were women and children (and some dads Duffey wanted badly to thrash) abandoning the tent area, and running off into the darkness behind the camp ground like frightened mice.

  One of the canvas flaps was thrown open then, and Coach Sullivan came out. He was buttoning his pants, and Mary-Beth Healy, a ninth-grader, came out behind him, slinking off, pulling her shirt back on. Duffey tried to shout something to him, but from the side a skeleton-ghoul-lady riding an enormous white Arctic wolf burst into view. She was wearing a black knit skullcap, eyes wide, teeth bared in a ferocious war-cry. She aimed a semi-automatic weapon at Sullivan and hip-fired it, missing wide right. She kept coming on hard, timing her jump off the animal, and ramming her body into her enemy, snapping the tent stakes, whip-folding the canvas over them like a set of dark wings. Duffy ran past as hard as he could. Back in the corn, the witches were loose, a lot of them, at least twenty. They were untying one another, gnawing at the ropes, yanking their feet and hands through.

  Duffey cut across their bow and went for the lean-to, the thirty red gas cans lined there like soldiers. He reached down for the one closest to him and started unscrewing the cap.

  Behind him someone hissed, and there was a low growling.

  Duffey spun around, major déjà vu, just like when he’d been getting a drink of water and that faggoty-ass Wolfie Barnes had pulled a sneak and whisper on him. This time it was the kid’s father, the Dogman himself, down off his wolf, weapons in hand.

  They were pointed at the ground, and Brian Duffey knew he only had one chance here. He burst out of his crouch, sprang forward, and “rushed the quarterback,” surprised him, slammed in full speed and rolled him hard to the dirt. Barnes hit like a sack of bricks, guns flying out of his hands, spinning and flashing in the air, and Duffey scrambled on top of him. Oh yeah, this was going to be better than a mass burning, for now Duffey had the opportunity to unmask the false prophet, make him a hostage, walk him back through the rows one by one and wipe clean the field. It beat doing it with an iPad anyway. . . .

  Duffey held him down and reached for the gauze. He yanked it free and blinked stupidly.

  Rudy Barnes wondered if it wasn’t hubris, the tragic flaw the classic Greeks had most warned us about, a stubborn sort of pride that had influenced him at the last minute to lower his guns, make the scales a bit more even, a “mano-a-mano” kind of thing. Or was this the blacker
side of the binary, the animal in him, raw and primed with the unhealthy desire to surpass the impersonal nature of a bullet in the dark back here and get dirty with it, kill this heartless fucker with his bare hands . . . ?

  Duffey yanked off the gauze and blinked stupidly. Checkmate. Both his hands were occupied, one clenched around Rudy’s shirt at the collar, the other balled in a fist around the fluttering mask material. And of course, Rudy’s right hand was free to grab the scissors he had between his teeth. He snatched them by the finger holes and made to plunge upward.

  Like magic, Duffey’s throat then blew open just below the Adam’s apple, and he was hurled forward and off as if some invisible giant had rope-pulled him toward the dark western slope. Rudy pushed up on his elbows, looking back into the space Duffey had just vacated, and twenty feet away was the blank slate, down on one knee, still looking down the barrel of the Bushmaster Rudy had dropped on the ground. The skin on the back of her prop hand was hanging down in a flap, and the freed witches behind her were pressed to the ground like Hindus, hands out flat, faces in the dirt. The ones on the crosses were looking away, and the shooter rose. She avoided Rudy’s eyes, retrieved the face-gauze, and dropped it near him as she passed.

  Rudy slipped it over his head and secured it into the rope necklace. By the time he turned, the bloody, naked witch was standing over Brian Duffey, writhing down there in the dark by the lean-to. She leveled her weapon and spat on him across the muzzle.

  “You rotten, ignorant bigot,” she said. She pumped five shots into him, making his body jump in the wild grass. Discharge smoke blew off in threads, and she lowered the gun, letting it hang by her side.