Fierce Kingdom

by Gin Phillips

  The groundhog trembles in her arms, and every sound she hears seems like footsteps. She stops, listens, and decides she only hears leaves.

  Her father was the sort of boy who should have turned into a psychopath—that’s what people say, isn’t it? That when you torture animals, it means you will be a serial killer? But he turned into her father instead, and there is no meanness in him. She has seen him cry at commercials.

  She hears water up ahead, and she thinks again that there are footsteps. She creeps closer to see if she can see anything moving through the trees.

  She sees the creek, and she thinks she hears a voice, but when she stops to listen, she doesn’t hear anything else. She steps behind a tree, and she waits and watches. She stands for what feels like a long time, and then she strokes the groundhog and walks carefully until she is right at the water’s edge, and she thinks about whether she should cross the water and then—her teachers have told her that she has a problem with focusing, that she sometimes drifts off—and then she is looking up and staring at Robby.

  “Hey,” she says, like he has come up next to her at school as she’s stuffing books into her locker, like he is not standing there with his gun and what she thinks might be bullets looped over his shoulder. She is embarrassed about saying hello and thinks that it is idiotic, too, to be embarrassed, but she can’t take it back.

  And then she feels someone behind her, and when she turns around, there is another man.

  He is smaller than Robby, and if he is the same one who came into the restaurant earlier, he seemed bigger to her then. Now she looks at him and thinks that he doesn’t look any stronger than she is, the kind of boy she could beat arm wrestling, but he has a gun in each hand, a big one and a little one. He grins at her, a friendly smile that makes her mouth dry out more.

  “You been making friends?” he asks, and he is clearly talking to Robby.

  Robby doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t said a word.

  Kailynn angles herself so that she can keep an eye on both of them. She takes two steps backward, turning so she won’t fall into the creek. She is holding the groundhog too tightly, and it squirms against her. She hopes they will not hurt the groundhog. She takes a third step and a fourth, and a branch breaks under her foot and makes her jump.

  They just watch her. The trees make shadows move across their faces, and the shadows are so thick that she can’t tell anything about their expressions.

  “One for the road?” says the one she doesn’t know. At first she is relieved, because he tosses both his guns to the ground. Then he comes at her so fast that she can’t even get her hands up before he is spinning her around, her back pressed against his chest, which is hard like metal.

  “What about your big escape?” says Robby, and she keeps her eyes on him. She will not look away from him. She does not know why, but this seems important.

  “She’s even got hair like a damn squab!” says the one who is holding her. “Didn’t you ever wonder if you could break someone’s neck with just your hands? My cousin said that’s only in the movies, that we have too much muscle in our necks, but I don’t think she’s got much muscle.”

  Kailynn cannot see the one talking because of the way he is holding her. He twists his hands in her hair, grabbing up her braids, and he yanks her head back, hard, and she feels some of her extensions pull free, her scalp stinging. He keeps on pulling until her face is pointed toward the trees and her throat is bent back. She still keeps her eyes on Robby, barely.

  She wants to say something brave. She wants to spit at the man holding her or bite him or tell him that he is not strong enough to do anything to her with those toothpick arms, but she cannot talk, because he has his fingers on her throat now, pressing so that she thinks he will leave bruises.

  She looks at Robby. He still has his gun in his hand. She cannot tell anything from his face.

  “Help,” she tries to say.

  “I told you to go to the sea lions,” Robby says or she thinks he says it.

  Kailynn kicks, and she thinks she hits the small man’s shin, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

  The clouds are moving over the trees. She has both hands around the man’s wrists, nails clawing into his skin, and she has dropped the groundhog.

  She thinks of her father. She thinks of him swinging cats onto roofs. He said he swung each one like a discus, and he felt so satisfied when he let loose and it sailed through the air.

  She has skin under her fingernails. Blood on her fingers. The man grunts in her ear, and all she can feel now is this man wrapped around her. He is actually turning her head now, with both hands, and one of his fingers is digging into a soft part of her ear. She gulps for air. It hurts.

  Robby says something.

  “Nearly there,” breathes the voice next to her ear.

  Someone is yelling. She cannot hear well, and she is not sure the voice is even real, but the hands around her throat loosen. She catches herself with her hands as she falls. Leaves stick to her bloody fingers.

  When she takes a long breath, it does not sound human.

  She looks for the groundhog in the leaves, and she can’t see it. Then she looks up at Robby and he is still just standing there, and she is angrier at him than at the man who has been trying to tear her head off her body.

  Robby is looking past her, though. Kailynn turns, and her breathing is still terrible, and she sees a woman wading through the creek like some swamp monster.

  “Robby Montgomery!” is what the woman yells, just once, or maybe she has said it plenty of other times and this is the first time Kailynn’s ears have worked right.

  It is Lincoln’s mother, soaking wet. She does not have Lincoln with her, and this panics Kailynn.

  The groundhog is by her foot. She scoops it up, warm. Everyone but her is moving.

  Lincoln’s mother is climbing out of the water.

  The man who was choking Kailynn is lunging toward where he dropped his guns.

  Robby is lifting his own gun toward the woman.

  “Mrs. Powell told me to tell you—” starts Lincoln’s mother, close enough that Kailynn can hear water dripping on the leaves.

  The choker has his hand around his pistol, but he grabbed it by the wrong end, and he is shifting it in his hands as he tries to turn himself toward the woman. Robby has jerked his gun up so that it points toward the sky, but he has not loosened his grip on it. Kailynn thinks something is smashed inside her throat.

  “Mrs. Powell said that she wants to talk to you,” says the mother. “Mrs. Powell says that she wants to talk to you one more time.”

  Lincoln’s mother is trying to get in front of her, it occurs to Kailynn. The woman is slowly edging closer. Now the creek water from her hair is splattering across Kailynn’s shoes and thighs.

  Robby Montgomery is watching them both.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says, and his gun lowers toward them, and Kailynn thinks, well, it mattered a little bit, just about three seconds’ worth, and now the choker is lining up his pistol, and she thinks of her father and his cats.

  She throws the groundhog.

  Her aim is not good—she does not hit the choker or Robby. But the groundhog passes close to the choker’s face, and he jerks back so that he loses his balance and falls into the weeds. Robby Montgomery is looking down at his friend, and then Kailynn cannot see anything else because Lincoln’s mother is on top of her, heavy and wet. She is stronger than she looks. She is lifting Kailynn, dragging her, screaming in her ear, shoving her over the bank of the creek and into the water.

  Kailynn falls in face-first, swallowing water, and by then the guns are shooting.

  8:05 p.m.

  Joan hears the bullets, but she doesn’t feel them. They are spaced out, the shots, and she keeps her head low, chin skimming the water, as her hands and feet sink into mud and algae, and she wonde
rs whether Robby Montgomery and the other one can see them clearly. She can barely see her own hands cutting through the water, so surely the men cannot see any better than she can, and that explains why she is not dead yet.

  She feels a stone dig into her thigh, a burst of pain. Kailynn is gagging on water, possibly vomiting, but the girl is also crawling toward the bridge as fast as Joan can push her.

  And they are under the bridge now. Not safe but safer, for a few seconds, at least. The bullets have stopped.

  “Keep going,” she whispers to Kailynn, and already the two sets of feet are coming toward the bridge, because, of course, where else would she and Kailynn have gone but the bridge?

  She shoves the girl backward again, and then they are out from under the bridge, scuttling backward, and for a moment the wooden planks completely block her view of the men. Then she can see the vague outline of their heads, and they are not moving anymore. There is some sort of tugging going on between them—one of them trying to pull the other one in a different direction? If it is an argument, it does not last long, because soon they are both vaulting across the creek, heading into the woods on the other side.

  She finds herself wondering if Robby Montgomery ever fired his gun—he did not kill her when she was coming up out of the water, all soft and helpless—but there is no time to consider it.

  “It’s okay,” she says to Kailynn, who has stumbled and gone underwater and come up sputtering. She works an arm under the girl’s back and lifts her, swiping at the water pouring from her face, and the girl’s hair is heavy on her arm, and her neck is so fragile-feeling, but they cannot stop, so she keeps pushing the girl forward.

  They are moving again as Joan watches Robby Montgomery and the other one jog away from the creek and farther into the trees. She can’t trust that, though, because she can’t trust anything.

  Her leg is throbbing now, and she is beginning to wonder if it was something other than a rock that hurt her. She focuses on the cold of the water and the slime on her hands and on how, during his first trip to the lake, Lincoln stared at the water, suspicious, and he asked her, Do we have hippos in America? There is nothing in the world she wants like she wants the weight of him.

  She and Kailynn are a good distance past the bridge now, still belly-up in the black water. Joan can barely make out the two shooters: they have turned into only shadows. As she makes her hands and feet move faster, one of the men lifts an arm toward the creek, and then someone skips a stone across the water.

  Joan knows immediately that this cannot be right, but that is the sound—a rock hitting the water, three or four times. A half a second after the sound of the splashes, she hears four cracks in the air, one after the other. Then one of the men falls to his knees with a loud grunt.

  She understands then.

  There are bullets hitting not only the water but the ground, too, kicking up the leaves—not a firestorm of bullets, nothing like what she has seen in movies, but a series of shots, delineated. More like what she remembers from dove hunting—a crack from the gun and then her father reloading and then another crack.

  She looks toward the men, and now she can tell that it is Robby Montgomery who has fallen to his knees on the ground. She can make out the wide line of his shoulders and the flapping of his jacket. The other man is running.

  Someone is shooting at the shooters.

  There are fireflies that must have been flushed out by the gunfire. They flash through the trees. Robby Montgomery drops to his elbows, and then he is not moving at all. She cannot recognize him as a person anymore—he is a dark shape in the dirt. A pile of leaves. A log.

  The other one is still running.

  Joan turns her head to the other side of the creek and now, finally, she can see the police coming. There are two groups of them, and they move in triangles: one man in front, one behind him on each side, and it reminds her of geese, only there is one in the back, too.

  There is a third group coming through the trees, saviors coming from everywhere, only they are half-formed, clumped together so that they are a mass of raised arms and weapons, padded around the middle so that their angles are alien, and they are so silent. The bullets keep coming—she can hear them, she thinks, one by one, a whooshing sound in the air, a separate sound from the crack of gunfire—and it is only getting louder. More guns. More bullets sailing over her, landing a few feet away from her. No more have hit the water since that first burst of fire, but they are still too close.

  She sinks down as far as she can.

  The running man is yelling, but she cannot make out any words.

  The fireflies flare, rhythmic.

  She manages to coordinate her hands and feet enough to push herself backward, farther away, but her bad wrist collapses and she goes under. Now it is Kailynn who is helping her up, and there is algae tangling around her arm—no, it is the girl’s fingers circling her wrist, wrapping around the bandage that the girl made herself. Joan blows water from her nose.

  Go, go, go, she tells herself.

  They do not tell you it is like this.

  They do not tell you that you cannot tell the good guys from the bad guys, that the noise is so much that it not only deafens you but blinds you, because you cannot help but close your eyes, and that sound and movement is coming from everywhere so that you don’t know which way to go.

  She is not sure why there is so much smoke.

  One of the men—good guy?—is nearly to the creek, only a few steps away, and he seems very tall. He is the point of the triangle, and he is not quite running or walking but some combination, fast and smooth. He comes close enough that she can tell he is wearing something like earmuffs over his ears, but she cannot see his face—she would like to see his face. She does not want to jump up and startle him, because she would only be one more shape in the dark, and who knows what he would do if he is surprised?

  His gun is raised, and she actually sees a flash when he pulls the trigger. She didn’t know you could see the bullet leave the gun.

  There are no fireflies, she realizes.

  She sees the man who is not Robby Montgomery fall to the ground, but he is still shooting. He pulls himself behind a pine tree, and he is almost invisible behind it from her angle—

  Move, she reminds herself.

  There is a rush through the air in front of her. She felt a streak of heat that time, warming the air by her cheek.

  Lincoln could be wandering through the woods, she thinks, and what if he walks straight into this or into some other group of shooting men—there could be God knows how many policemen here now, descending, and apparently when they finally decided to save the day, they did not mess around—and Lincoln would have no idea what the sound of bullets might mean. He would not know anything, and they would kill him in a heartbeat. He is so small, so hard to see, surely, in this rush of smoke and bodies.

  There is another splash in the water near her feet. She is on her hands and knees now, still staying low, but picking up speed, and Kailynn is next to her. Joan tells herself that if the gunfire stops, she will call out for help and she will trust that the police will recognize a woman’s voice and that they will not shoot her. But the gunfire is not stopping. She and Kailynn settle into the movement of hands and knees, moving like paddles on a canoe—in and out—and she ignores the cold and she ignores her entire body, unsteady wrists and deadened feet and all the weak, faithless parts of it. When she looks over her shoulder, she cannot make out any human shapes. Maybe the policemen are chasing the gunman farther into the woods. Now there are only trees and the fading sound of bullets.

  They stay in the water for a short while—miles, it feels like, but she imagines it is no more than a hundred yards.

  “Let’s get out here,” she whispers to Kailynn, and for the first time it occurs to her that the girl has not said a word. “Are you okay?”

  “Where
’s Lincoln?” asks the girl as they heave themselves up the muddy bank.

  Joan loses her balance and has to catch herself.

  “I hid him under a bush. We have to get him. The bullets,” she says, and she has run out of breath.

  She gets to her feet. Her skirt is clinging, somehow still in one piece, and Kailynn is pushing herself to her feet, too. Joan helps the girl up by one arm and thinks of how she is the opposite of Lincoln, who is so dense and solid. This girl’s bones feel like china, like blown glass, like handles on teacups.

  The girl feels like all kinds of precious things. Joan does not know why she was so slow to see it. She surely couldn’t see anything at all if she couldn’t see this girl in front of her, this girl with red ribbons for hair and legs like origami, who makes fried chicken and whose father bleeds for her.

  “You hid him?” Kailynn repeats.

  “They were coming,” Joan says, and her vision blurs slightly.

  She steadies herself. She grabs her skirt in her fists and lifts it above her knees. She looks down, and there is pine straw under her feet, but she can no longer feel the difference in the foot with a shoe and the foot without one. That is good. That is helpful, the lack of feeling. She runs, and it feels good, like how she feels after nine or ten miles, bodiless, her mind disconnected. Only she keeps stumbling, catching herself on the trees. She must still be attached to her body, because it is faulty.

  “We’ll find him,” she says to Kailynn.

  “We’ll find him,” Kailynn says back to her, and the girl’s hair is lifting and falling as she runs, and Joan thinks what a terrible plan it was to run up to gunmen with no idea what to say other than Mrs. Powell’s name, like it was some talisman, some magic sword that would conquer Robby Montgomery. She is lucky that she and Kailynn aren’t both dead, but they aren’t, so maybe it was not such a flawed plan.