by Barr, Nevada
Also in the bag, and no worse from its fall from the heavens, was a box of apple juice. Using Sean’s knife, Anna cut the top off, drank her half, then set the box down and held it steady while Wily drank his share. Wordlessly they agreed it was one of the finest meals they had ever had.
“Pick up the litter?” Anna asked.
Wily kept his eyes in the direction his people had gone.
“Right,” Anna said. “Priorities.”
For an hour they followed the deep tracks of the group wending its way across the burn. Without the protection of trees and underbrush, rain had carved deep gullies in the soil and the wind had filled them with debris.
The end of the devastated area appeared like a benediction. Anna and Wily breathed deeply, cleaning their noses of ash with scents of moss, pine, and downed leaves.
This initial elation lasted until the underbrush closed in, forming nearly impenetrable thickets. Half-naked tree branches spiderwebbed the sky. The dry pink sandy soil of the Fox River basin was replaced with deep loam, spongy underfoot. Damp chilled the air. Moss grew on all compass points of the trees. Lichen poked antlered heads out of moist bark.
Traces of Heath’s, Leah’s and the girls’ suffering were everywhere: scraps of torn clothing on briars, moss scraped away when Heath’s chair struck a tree, heel gouges where the chair was lifted over downed vegetation. The forest was biting pieces of the captives off, tearing at them with sharp branches, coiling around their ankles and tripping them. Heath had excellent upper-body strength and an innate determination to overcome obstacles. Leah seemed fit enough. The girls were girls; though in decent physical condition, they were not athletes. Their muscles and bones were gentled with fading childhood and oncoming fertility. Soon one or two or all of them would lose their battle with the North Woods. Their strength would give out.
In the end the dude and Reg, like slave drivers of old, would herd only those fit to walk to market.
The sun had started down the back side of the day, and the air was growing cooler, when the trail Anna and Wily followed petered out at the edge of a swamp. Beaver, Anna guessed, and old. There was no telling how wide it was, or how deep the water and mud. Drowned trees, roots long rotted away, fell over the bog, trunks and branches intertwined. Isle Royale, where Anna worked early in her career, had a number of bogs such as this. They were fine places to trap a foot or break a leg.
At the edge of standing water, Anna refilled the canteen. Mosquito larvae would add protein, she told herself. That done, she backtracked a dozen paces and saw where the group had made a right turn, heading northeast along the edge of the wetlands. The note the dude and Reg had been studying must have told them to turn right when they hit marshy ground.
Given an abundance of moisture, undergrowth grew thicker and harder to penetrate. Anna hadn’t gone half a mile before she saw Heath’s rickshaw abandoned beside a tangle of thimbleberry bushes. That there’d been no gunshot meant nothing. The dude could dispatch Heath easily—and probably with a degree of satisfaction—using his bare hands.
Anna needed to search for Heath; her friend might not yet be dead. The dude might not have finished the job. Anna had to find the corpse and sprinkle a handful of dust on it to free Heath’s soul. Anna didn’t move. She didn’t want to see Heath’s body. Without Heath, all she had done, and all she had left to do, was drained of reality. Mouth slightly ajar, she closed her eyes and sniffed small sips of air into her nostrils.
“I don’t smell anything dead, do you, Wily?”
Wily was leaning against her leg for support, his tongue lolling nearly to his knees. “You’d tell me if you smelled something, wouldn’t you?” Anna asked.
Of course he would. Wily would smell Heath’s death. He’d tell Anna. Instead, he tottered forward, taking the lead. That was good enough for Anna; she followed.
The terrain made it obvious why the rickshaw had been abandoned. Thickets were so dense Leah’s ingenious design would be useless. Every few feet the handles would catch and hold. The double wheel would jam between the jaws of fallen trees and branches.
Carrying Heath on their backs, Leah and Elizabeth wouldn’t get far. Anna thanked nature and the universe that the sun was near setting, the short day coming to a close. Without light, the dude would have to stop.
The airstrip couldn’t be much farther. Back at the Fox, the dude said six-point-seven miles. By Anna’s estimation they had traveled close to twelve, and five or six of those were in the right direction. Skirting the swamp had added to the original GPS reading. By how much, she had no way of knowing, but the pilot wouldn’t have led them on unless he thought they would make their destination.
Could a plane take off in the dark, on a rough field or an old logging road? Anna didn’t know. The clouds that had been moving in from the north obscured half the sky, bringing darkness that much closer. Maybe, while she had been dawdling, sniffing the sweet decay of the woods and trying not to catch up with the thugs by accident, they had reached the airstrip. They could be loading into the plane to be whisked away where no one could find them. Canada was only a small hop to the north. Once there, a small plane with four small women could be hidden anyplace in the vast reaches of the country.
Anna lifted Wily, holding him around the middle. His injured leg under pressure, he whined. Anna joined him as her gunshot complained for general reasons. “Sorry,” she said. “We’re in a hurry. I know it can’t be comfortable, but you know my left arm is shot to hell. I’ll carry you as long both of us can stand it.”
Desperation overtook stealth. She bulldozed through the thickets. Twigs raked blood from her cheeks and clawed the remaining sleeve of her T-shirt to shreds. Sweat poured between her breasts and grew chill on her back with the going of the day. Her arm looped around Wily’s rib cage made it hard for him to breathe. He was too polite to say anything, but Anna could hear him laboring. “Not much longer,” she promised. “My good arm is about to give out.”
Night did not so much fall as thicken imperceptibly around the trees and bushes. When Anna could no longer see to place her feet, she stopped. She had to kneel to put Wily down. There wasn’t enough strength remaining in her arm to lower him gently from a standing position. Without movement, the night chilled her. She took Jimmy’s coat from where she’d tied it around her waist and put it on. Together in the dark, she and Wily listened. For a while Anna could hear nothing but her heart pounding in her ears and her breath brushing against the sides of her throat.
Wily’s coyotelike ears caught the sound before hers did. Tramping feet in the darkness. Tuning her ears to the noise, Anna rose and began inching toward it, feeling her way with outstretched arms and the toes of her moccasins. Vague gray light filtered through the canopy, barely sufficient to keep her from walking into trees or tall bushes.
“We’re not fucking stopping!” Reg. Closer than she’d thought. Much closer than she’d thought. “I heard something. Something coming after us.”
“A deer.” Elizabeth said, panting. “Lots of deer up here.”
“Shut up,” said Reg.
Anna could see Reg’s outline. For an instant she was in full view. If the thugs had stopped a moment sooner, they would have heard her charging through the brush like a moose in rut. Fortune decreed no one was looking at her particular patch of night. She faded back a few feet, putting a tree between herself and them.
“We should make a fire.”
That was Heath. She and the others were a black huddled mass on the far side of the clearing. The far side was scarcely six feet from the near side. This was not a forest of meadows and grassy swards. Trees fought for space. Land and light were not wasted.
“Shut up,” the dude said.
“We got to be close,” Reg said. “Shit, man, we gotta be close. We can’t fucking stop.”
“Which direction would you suggest we go?” the dude asked.
“The way we been goin’, man.”
“And which way is that?”
Confusion carried on the silence that reached Anna’s ears.
“That way,” Reg finally said sullenly.
“Right. Why don’t you go ‘that way’ and let us know if you find anything.”
No crunching of a man trying to navigate the night woods followed.
They would go no farther. Relief swept through Anna, blowing away the last of the adrenaline rush that had gotten her to the hostages. Suddenly she was so tired she felt like throwing herself down on the ground and crying.
Dismissing fatigue as a luxury, she turned her back on her night-stranded fellows, took the headlamp from a coat pocket, and put it around her brow. Feeling her way, she counted off fifteen steps, then clicked it on. Wily didn’t follow. This close to Heath and Elizabeth, his nose was too full of the scent of his family to leave. Anna felt both alone and free.
Moving more quickly without her beloved burden, she made a wide circle around the thugs and headed left of the North Star.
In less than three minutes she reached the edge of the trees. Night had halted the thugs laughably close to their destination. Ahead was a clearing as wide, and half again as long, as a football field. At the far end, a hundred and fifty or so yards from where she stood, a fingernail moon and a scatter of stars picked out the shape of a two-story building, roof gone, walls slowly rotting back into the earth. Next to it was a shed in the same condition. Alongside the shed were shadows of what was probably old logging or mining equipment. Logging, she guessed. Not a mill, maybe a camp with barracks and a cookhouse.
The North Woods of Minnesota retained the ghosts of many old ventures. At one time or another much of the state’s forests had been clear-cut. Timber and iron ore were still taken, though in smaller quantities than in the glory days. Canoeing in the boundary waters, Anna had come across short railroad spurs in seemingly remote wilderness areas where nineteenth- and twentieth-century entrepreneurs had laid line to lumber camps or mines. When business went bust, rails were abandoned to be reclaimed by the land.
At the near end of this camp, no more than ten yards from the tip of her nose, was an airplane, the small high-wing. Beneath the wing was the pilot. Or so Anna assumed. All she could see was the glowing end of a cigarette.
Tobacco smoke spiced the air, the scent so familiar and mundane it snatched Anna out of the woods and plunked her down firmly in humankind. Two days of drifting through shadows with Wily had taken her into the world of spore, scent, and survival. Returning so abruptly to the reality where politicians made fools of themselves with hookers, lights turned from green to red, and the omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Internet had taken the place of the gods confused her. Part of her never again wanted to run in the human race.
Human ills hit her with the imaginative power of mind. The bullet wound, an injury her animal self accepted as a part of life, burned and ached, demanding hospitals and sterile dressings. The belly that had been grateful for the ham-and-cheese sandwich cried out for more. Glad Wily wasn’t present to see her devolution into a human, she breathed softly and deeply until the spasms of need passed.
In the far buildings there might be something of use. A weapon. Slipping back into the trees, she skirted man and plane and began making her way toward the far end of the clearing. Before she was three-quarters of the way there she was stopped by a shout.
“Hey!”
Anna dropped to the ground. This sudden descent without regard to her injured arm undid her. Seconds passed as pain receded and clarity of vision returned. She was breathing too fast and too shallowly. Audibly, she was breathing audibly. Pressing nose and mouth into the crook of her elbow, she let Jimmy’s coat stifle her noise.
“Hey!” The call came again. Anna blinked away the tears from the onslaught of nerve damage.
The cigarette man.
Clutching her wounded arm across her chest, Anna walked on her knees until she had a clear view of the black shadow that was the airplane. A flashlight beam slashed across the grass of the field, not toward her, in the direction from which she’d come. The pilot must have heard the dude or Reg yelling.
“Keep talking,” she heard him shout; then the flashlight beam bounced toward the line of trees where the hostages and the dude had been stopped by nightfall. The pilot would lead the others out of the forest. The dude and, especially, Reg would want to sleep in the comfort of four walls, regardless of how dilapidated and mice-infested those walls might be. Walls high enough to keep out the wolves, if not the ghost of Jimmy.
More determined than ever to reach the buildings, Anna rose and kept walking.
FORTY-TWO
For the last eternity Heath had ridden on the backs of her daughter and her friend, her arms wrapped around their necks, her knees clutched under their arms. Her nose had been filled with the scent of their sweat and the fading perfume of shampoo. Their breath mingled with hers; their hair blew in her eyes. Their hearts beat beneath her breastbone. Heath was the largest of them, yet the smallest, Katie, wanted to take a turn at carrying. Katie was too little, so at first Leah and E rotated the duty in fifteen-minute increments, then ten, then five.
“Slow down and she dies,” the dude told Reg. “Dump the cripple or keep up the pace. Your choice.” Furious, Reg dropped behind and drove them like mules, whipping Heath’s back and the others’ legs indiscriminately.
A peculiar change came over Heath as she was piggybacked through the trees, life and mobility dependent on the love of her daughter and Leah. One hundred twenty pounds of her crushed down on their very bones. Her hands could feel the pull of their muscles as they strained to keep up the pace, to lift their feet one more time. Yet she had stopped feeling that she was a terrible burden, their cross to bear. Hour after backbreaking hour her daughter and Leah expressed their love for her. They would not leave her behind. The marines could take lessons from these women.
Heath no longer wanted to tear herself to pieces out of guilt. What she felt was awe and honor.
What she prayed for was sundown. Soon even their staunch wills would be overcome by physical exhaustion. When they fell, and she fell with them, the dude would kill her and, probably, E. With them dead, Leah and Katie would have no reason not to keep moving.
In the dimming light Heath could see Katie swaying with the effort of keeping herself upright. Leah had stopped helping Heath when it became clear Katie could not continue without her arm to support her. Finally, Elizabeth staggered and fell to her knees, her body shaking with sobs.
Heath let go of her neck and let her weight slide to the ground. Her eyes were closed, the effort of seeing too onerous. Gravity had beaten them, beaten down their stalwart hearts.
“Don’t bother to shoot me,” she mumbled. “I’ll die of exhaustion in a minute or two. Get up, Elizabeth. Please do as I ask. I love you. Get up. Go.”
E remained on her knees. Heath didn’t know if she refused to rise or was unable to.
Wearily, Heath looked up at the dude from whence her death would come. She could barely see him. He was a mere silhouette against a dour sky.
The sun was gone. As Elizabeth had fallen, so had the night.
God is good, Heath thought. Then, considering their situation, amended it to: God is not as rotten as he could have been.
“We have to stop,” Heath said. “It’s too dark to see, or will be in a few minutes. You have to stop.”
Leah and Katie took this as permission to collapse beside Heath and Elizabeth. Reg began cursing. Reg was afraid of the dark. He had driven them hard and cruelly, but he couldn’t stop night from coming, and in the end he was stranded in the wolf- and ghost-infested dark. He used the word “fuck” so many times, interjecting it even into the middle of words, that it ceased to have meaning and fell on Heath’s ear like a verbal tic: um, er, you know, like, fuck. Maybe because she was glad the thug was as scared and tired as she, it struck her funny.
Because God was not as rotten as he could have been, she was too tired to laugh.
“Hey!” came faintly
through the darkling wall of trees.
“Over here!” Reg shouted. “We’re over here!”
Heath heard the whack of knuckles on flesh, and Reg’s grunt. “We don’t know who the hell is yelling,” said the dude.
“Who the fuck cares?” Reg snarled. “Over here. God damn! Come get us.”
“Keep talking.” The voice filtered in, a little stronger. “How were the sandwiches?”
“The pilot,” the dude said.
“Who the fuck did you think it would be in fucking middle of fucking nowhere? Over here!” Reg shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Get up,” the dude ordered the women. Heath could dimly see the shapes of Katie and Leah drift up from the ground, as incorporeal as swamp gas.
“I can’t,” E murmured so softly Heath, who was sitting nearly on top of her, could barely hear.
“Move your ass,” Reg snarled.
E stayed still and silent.
“Go ahead, sweetheart. I’ll catch up later,” Heath said.
The dude snorted his version of a laugh. “Yeah, you do that.” His dark self swarmed over the kneeling girl and she was dragged her to her feet.
“No!” E screamed. “I’ll carry her! I can carry her!”
“Dead weight,” the dude said.
Heath saw a blinding flash of fire as a clap of man-made thunder knocked her backward.
Then nothing.
FORTY-THREE
A gunshot stopped Anna in her tracks. Turning, she looked back down a hundred yards or so of not quite black night. The shot had come from near where Heath and the others were.
A single gunshot.
This close to success, the dude wouldn’t shoot Leah or Katie, his primary objectives. Elizabeth was still moving on her own and, as far as Anna knew, was still believed to be the child of a very wealthy family. That left Heath or Wily. Anna was glad it wasn’t given to her to choose which was to die. In the real world, where gunmen stalked college campuses and wars were fought over whose god was god, where human life was deemed of great value and destroyed with industrial efficiency, she would be expected to choose Heath.