by Jack Kilborn
Tom flinched, bumping into Tyrone, pressing against him. It violated all sorts of personal space, and normally would have resulted in a rough shove and a threat, but Tyrone didn’t move because he saw what Tom saw, just beyond the bushes, barely illuminated from the light of the fire.
A person.
Someone was standing in the darkness, watching them. It creeped Tyrone out so bad he finally uprooted his legs, sidestepping the campfire, backpedaling away while tugging Cindy along. Then that fool Tom came up fast, knocking into them, toppling everyone over.
The act of breaking eye contact with whatever was in the woods scared Tyrone even more, as if losing sight of the enemy meant it could suddenly be anywhere. He looked back at the bushes, seeking out the silhouette, barely noticing Cindy’s hand moving into his and gripping tight.
The dark figure was still there, features obscured by night. Tall, thin, silent.
The moment stretched to the breaking point. Even the crickets stopped chirping.
“You want some of me, mutha fucka?” Meadow was frontin’ now, sticking out his chest and slapping it with his palms. “I’ll rip you a new one.”
Tyrone watched as Meadow walked toward the figure. He knew he should be backing his boy up. Didn’t matter that they rolled with different crews when they were bangin’. Didn’t matter that Meadow was a pain in the balls sometimes. At the Center, Meadow was his brother. They were tight there, much as they were rivals on the street.
But this wasn’t the Center, and it wasn’t the street neither. This place might as well have been the planet Mars. Throwing down in a gang fight was one thing, and Tyrone wasn’t scared of that. But scrapping in the woods with some crazy cannibal—that was horror movie bullshit.
So Tyrone stayed put, squeezing Cindy’s hand, watching as his friend clenched his fists and stomped toward the darkness.
The light came on, faint and yellow, shining on the bone Sara clenched in her hand. It was long, over eighteen inches, covered on one side with clumps of dirt. The other side, the side Sara stared at, had strips of dried brown flesh clinging to it.
The smell was an assault, so overpowering and fetid that Sara dropped the bone immediately, violently turning away and retching onto the ground.
“Was that a leg?” Laneesha moved closer to Sara. The girl was clutching the Maglite she’d obviously found.
Sara wiped her mouth with her sleeve, her throat feeling raw, her tongue foul with stomach acid.
“I don’t know.”
“Looked like a dude’s leg.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why is there a dude’s leg on the ground? Where’s the rest of him?”
Laneesha played the light across the ground. Sara followed the beam as it washed over twigs, dead leaves, chunks of dirt, coming to rest on a single, brown shoe.
“Holy shit! There a foot in that shoe?”
The shoe looked old. Leather decayed and laces gone, flattened by time.
Sara summoned up a bit of strength from some inner well and forced herself to speak calmly. “The light, Laneesha.”
Laneesha didn’t move.
“Laneesha. Give me the light.”
Sara reached for it, and the girl complied. Still on her knees, she hobbled over to the shoe. Using a stick, Sara poked at the tongue, peering inside.
Empty.
“Maybe the cannibals ate the foot,” Laneesha said.
Sara spit—the foul taste in her mouth wouldn’t go away—then got to her feet. She pushed away all questions and doubts and focused on the facts, fighting not to leap to conclusions. “The shoe is old. Really old. That bone still had meat on it. They aren’t related to each other.”
“How you know the shoe is old?”
“Look at the laces.” Sara captured the shoe in the beam. “They’ve rotted away. So has some of the leather.”
“How long does that take?”
“I don’t know, Laneesha. A long time.”
“Maybe it takes a long time for meat to rot off the bone, too.”
Sara rubbed the hand that grabbed the bone onto her jeans. “No. There are birds on the island. Raccoons. The bone would have been picked clean if it was as old as that shoe.”
“So what you sayin’?”
“That probably wasn’t a human bone. Could have been from a deer. Or a pig.”
“Be a big freakin’ pig.”
Sara considered looking for the bone again, to prove Laneesha wrong. And to prove herself wrong, that she didn’t really see cloth clinging to the bone along with strips of meat. But she decided not to. Some things were better not knowing.
“Maybe the cannibals…”
“Laneesha!” Sara knew she was raising her voice, and silently cursed herself for her tone even as she continued. “There are no cannibals. Got it?”
Laneesha wasn’t so easily chided. “Martin said…”
“Martin was trying to scare us. That’s all. We’re the only people on this island right now.”
“So who grabbed Martin?”
“No one grabbed him. He was playing a prank, took it too far, and is now lost in the woods.”
“Like us,” Laneesha whispered.
Sara opened her mouth to dispute it, but stopped herself. Were they actually lost? She resisted the urge to shine the flashlight in all directions, hoping to find the path back to the campfire. But there was no path, and every direction looked exactly the same. She silently cursed Martin for his stupid tricks, and for bringing them all here.
“Camping,” Martin had said, a big grin on his face.
“You want to take a bunch of inner city kids out into the woods?”
“It’ll be good for them. We roast some hot dogs, sing some songs. I know the perfect place. I went there before, with my brother. It’s beautiful Sara. You and the kids will love it.”
“What about Jack?”
“We can bring him with. The fresh air will be good for him.”
“He’s just a baby.”
“He’s a hearty little guy, Sara. And I hardly think we’re the first parents to ever go camping with a baby.”
“You know I’m not good at night time, Martin. And in the woods, in the dark…”
Martin had patted her knee, looked at her like he used to, with love in his eyes. “You’re a psychologist. This is the perfect way to get over that fear, don’t you think? And besides, I’ll be there to protect you. What could possibly go wrong?”
So against her best instincts, Sara agreed. She did it, she knew, out of a need to appease him, make him happy. It had been a while since she’d seen Martin happy. They’d been growing distant for a long time. Sara could even remember the exact moment it began. The precipitating incident was when he lost Joe. Martin took it hard, quitting his private practice to join Sara in social work, coming up with the idea for the Center.
Together—through sheer force of will it seemed—they got the funding and made it happen.
At first, it had been a joy working with her soon-to-be husband. Martin’s loss seemed to stir a passion in him for helping others, and Sara didn’t mind his long hours, and tolerated his mood swings, because they were making a difference. A huge difference, in the lives of our country’s most important people; children.
Then came Chereese.
Chereese Graves was just another confused teenager from a broken family, thrust into their care by the courts. Troubled in the same way so many others had been, before and since. And like others, Chereese preferred to run away rather than deal with Sara and Martin’s rules and regulations.
Runaways weren’t uncommon. While the Center didn’t have the security of even a minimum security prison, it was still a form of incarceration. The windows were shatterproof and didn’t open, the doors all had heavy duty locks. But the kids always found a way. Chereese had apparently stolen a set of keys, then left after lights out.
Martin took it personally. Like he’d failed her. That was ridiculous, of course. Martin had a way of reach
ing kids, of actually being able to rehabilitate them. The recidivism stats for Center graduates were more than seventy percent lower than kids who went to juvee. They were actually helping kids turn their lives around, and part of that meant trusting them to do the right thing, to serve their time, to better themselves.
Of course, that meant greater opportunities to break the rules. While the Center had a greater success rate than any other state-run program, it also had the highest number of runaways.
Martin seemed to regard every lost child as a personal failure. And when they got word the Center had lost funding, he’d become so withdrawn he was almost like a shell of the man she’d met in school.
But Sara didn’t want to think about any of that right now. She took the Center’s closing as hard as Martin did. It had been his idea, but she’d been there from the beginning, and she felt the loss. Sara hadn’t even begun interviewing for another job. She knew she’d be able to find work, either through the state or in the private sector. But even though she’d been headhunted, practically offered other positions, she chose to remain loyal to the Center until the very day it closed.
Now, possibly lost in the woods and growing increasingly frightened, Sara wondered if she shouldn’t have detached herself much earlier.
“We’re not lost.” Sara took Jack back and regained control over her emotions, assuming the role of responsible adult. “This island is only two thousand acres. That’s about three square miles. If we walk in one direction, we’ll eventually reach the shore. We can follow the shore to the beach where we were dropped off, then follow the orange ribbons back to camp. It might take all night, but we’ll find the others.”
Laneesha seemed to relax a notch. “So which way we goin’?”
Sara wished she had a compass. Martin had been carrying it earlier, and for all she knew he still had it on him. That would make going in a straight line more difficult, but not impossible.
“You pick.”
Laneesha put her hands on her hips, craning her head to and fro, then finally pointed to her right.
“This way. I got a feeling.”
Sara nodded, walking next to the teen. “Okay. Let’s go.”
“What about Martin?
Sara cupped a stinky hand to her face and yelled, “Maaaar-tin!”
They both waited for an answer. Every muscle in Sara’s body clenched, hoping she wouldn’t hear a reply, hoping Martin had the decency to quit this stupid game.
A few seconds passed. Sara unbunched her shoulders, relaxed her jaw. She was just about ready to release the breath she’d been holding when they heard the scream.
High-pitched. Primal. Definitely not Martin. It was one of the girls, and she sounded like she was in excruciating pain. Cindy, or Georgia.
And she sounded less than twenty yards away.
One of the kids was coming toward them. A boy. He looked strong. Fit. Able to fight.
They could fight, too. And they outnumbered the boy.
They crouched down, blending into the woods, and waited.
When Meadow was a little kid, he wanted to be part of a family. He never knew his dad, and his mama did drugs and kept making him live with cousins and second cousins and neighbors and sometimes complete strangers. She didn’t want him, and neither did they. He craved love even more than his little tummy craved food, and he got very little of either.
So when he was thirteen years old, he stood in a circle of Street Disciples—a Folks Nation alliance on Detroit’s East Side—and let eight of the biggest members beat on him for twenty full seconds without fighting back.
Meadow had been scared. Of the pain, of course, even though he’d gotten beat on for most of his life. But mostly he’d been afraid of his own reaction. If he tried to defend himself, even in the slightest way, the initiation wouldn’t count, and he’d have to do it again later in order to be accepted into the gang.
So he put his hands in his pockets, closed his eyes, and let his homies have at him while he concentrated hard as he could not to follow his instinct and cover up, run away, throw a return punch.
They blooded him in good, breaking his nose and two ribs, kicking him in the kidneys so many times he pissed blood for a week afterward. But Meadow took it all, denying every impulse to save himself, staying on his feet for most of it because he knew if he went down the stomping would be even worse than the kicks and punches. And it was.
When it was over he was given a forty of malt liquor and a blunt the size of a corn cob and he lay on a sofa for ten straight hours, drunk and stoned and bleeding and happy, while his new gang family partied around him all night long.
Meadow clown-walked into the trees, strutting with a perfect gangsta limp and lean, head bobbing, fists clenched, feeling that same uncertainty he did two years ago when joining the SDs. He knew something was about to happen, and every cell in his body told him it was a bad idea confronting whatever was staring at them, that he should turn around and run away as fast as he could. But he kept denying his instinct, kept moving forward.
Ain’t no such thing as having no fear. Best a brother could do was to not project any. Then perception became reality. Act tough, and you were tough. That’s what being street was all about.
However, this wasn’t the street. And that figure he was heading for wasn’t no mark, no rival bopper. Meadow had a really bad feeling he was heading toward some crazy cannibal mutha like Martin was talking about.
But he maintained direction, pimping out his c-walk like he was bangin’ in the hood, heading straight for the silhouette. When the bushes were only fifteen feet away he heard that skank Cindy yell, “Meadow, don’t!”
But Meadow wasn’t going to back down. He hadn’t backed down since he was five years old, jumping on a cousin who stole his hot dog, a cousin who was twice as big and mean as spit. You had to fight for everything in life, and standing around waiting for things to happen to you was a sure bet things would happen to you.
Better to be the man doin’ than the man gettin’ done.
“You wanna roll with this?” he challenged the shadow, spreading out his palms in welcome. “Let’s roll.”
The figure ducked and disappeared.
Meadow braced himself, waiting for the attack. He watched for movement, listened for any sound, still feeling that skin-prickly sensation of being watched but now unsure where it was coming from.
“That how it is?” Meadow opened and closed his fists like he was squeezing tennis balls. “You ‘fraid to come out and face me, muthafucka? Then I be bringin’ it to you.”
“Meadow,” Tyrone warned.
Meadow didn’t pay his friend no mind, and stepped through the bushes, into the trees.
It got real dark, real fast. Meadow felt his resolve disappear with the campfire light. Five steps into the woods and it was blacker than it was when he closed his eyes.
He stopped, listening hard to the darkness, trying to pinpoint the location of his enemies.
Some time passed, a few seconds at most but they felt much longer, and Meadow was just about ready to turn around and head back to the fire when he heard something.
A clicking sound. Like someone snapping their teeth together.
He turned toward it, momentarily blinded by a bright flash only a few feet away.
“Who’s there, muthafucka!”
The clicking sound stopped.
“Come out here and face me!”
More seconds limped by. Meadow could hear his heart beating. This was worse than waiting to be blooded in. At least then he knew what was coming.
Then, barely above a whisper, Meadow heard the most frightening voice of his life. Breathy and somewhat squeaky, but definitely male.
“The boy should run now.”
That’s when Meadow’s nerve ran out. He did run, away from the voice, back in the direction of the camp, and then something lashed out and cracked him in the head, sending him sprawling to the ground.
Sara shook the Maglite, the sickly yel
low beam barely reaching the trees ten feet in front of her. When the light finally burned out—and it was going to very soon—Sara wasn’t sure what she’d do. Panic, probably. Even though she had to maintain composure for Laneesha, who stood so close she was practically in Sara’s pocket, Sara knew that when the darkness came, she would lose it.
Darkness and Sara were old enemies, going back almost twenty years. Sara had been nine years old, happy and well-adjusted, growing up in a nice neighborhood with loving parents and a decent extended family. In fact, she could truthfully boast that the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to her in early childhood was diaper rash.
Until that day at Aunt Alison’s.
Alison was Mom’s younger sister, and she had five kids all within a few years of Sara’s age. They lived on an apple orchard in North Carolina, and one summer Sara’s Mom and Dad took a cruise and left her in Aunt Alison’s care.
Sara didn’t mind. She liked her cousins, all girls except for a pudgy boy named Timmy who was a few years older. Being on a farm, Aunt Alison was a bit more lax in her childrearing techniques than Sara’s mom, and she let Timmy do all sorts of potentially dangerous things, like drive the riding mower and light firecrackers and play with knives.
Timmy had a bunch of knives, mostly small ones, but he had a blade in particular that frightened the heck out of Sara. It was one of those long Army knives with a jagged back. He called it a survival knife, which made no sense to Sara, because anything that got stabbed with that awful thing most certainly wouldn’t survive. She refused to go in Timmy’s room, because he kept it on his desk on a little stand and it scared her to see it.
For the first few days of Sara’s visit, everything had gone well. She had fun playing with her cousins, the food was terrific, and creepy Timmy was told not to handle any knives around Sara.
On the morning of her fourth day there, the girls were gathering wildflowers by the old barn when Timmy came over, his scary knife in his belt, and asked if they wanted to play truth or dare.
Mostly, it was just dare, without any truth. Timmy, being the oldest, tried to show off by performing unimpressive feats of heroism like climbing trees, jumping down hills, and standing on the roof of the old barn.