Click. “THE BATTERIES ON THIS THING ARE ONLY GOOD FOR TWENTY-FOUR HOURS,” Arthur says through his speaker system. “I NEED TO RECHARGE. I HOPE WE FIND SOMETHING SOON.”
His Eminence would call Arthur a weak choice. I disagree. He’s a Grizzlies fan. He has a great sense of humor—I can tell because he laughs at all my jokes. He’ll make up for what he lacks in the confidence department once he starts his own pain and fear reservoir. I’m certain I can turn Arthur into a badass friend.
We’re looking at these trees all wrong. We need to get up on top of them, way up there, and then we’ll be able to check out the scene for miles.
People climb trees all the time—in old movies, dads built kids little playrooms up in the treetops in the backyards. (Not my father. The most His Eminence ever did for me was commission his IT staff to assemble a security camera in my room.) But how do they climb them? Out here in the sticks, there are probably millions of feral monkey-kids who can scale a tree in seconds, but I’m wicked stumped. I try, but most of the branches I can reach are so freaking brittle they break off in my palms. This one big branch hangs low enough for me to reach, but the most I can do is strain against it until it scrapes my forearms and I tumble back, flushed and sweaty.
I coax Arthur into giving it a go. He loops a long arm over the same branch, lassoing it. Then he plants a Nike on the trunk and walks up it, throws a leg across the limb, and swings himself around it until he’s riding it like a horse. He works his way up the tree, stretching out his long, skinny frame until it looks like it might snap, then grabbing a limb, wrestling up to his chin, and pulling himself up.
I order him along. “That’s it. No, that branch is too skinny, Arthur. Cool. Now . . .”
Soon I lose him in the white Xs of limbs. The tree shivers. I can hear his bullhorn scraping the branches.
I give him a few minutes and then ask what he sees. I’m hoping the PA system will announce that he’s spotted Route 81 or whatever highway I limoed in on, or at least that he sees a hint of macadam a couple clicks away that we can walk toward.
the old oak
The old oak had seen when the French trappers had been killed along the river, had watched the houses being built three miles from the trees and the man who burned his car. When the tree had been a sapling, it, too, would have clawed at boys the way the other trees clawed at them, but now it was too old and had grown too large and no longer shivered when breezes swept past it like the wild younger trees. Its branches were too large and too high to be of much use for clawing.
Now it groaned and shook as an animal grabbed its branches and scraped against it. What’s happening to me? it wondered.
It was the first time a mammal of this size had ever dared come this close. Fish and birds and lizards made sense to it, but mammals perplexed the wise old tree. It did not understand why they feared death, why they clung to life the way the oak clung to the soil.
But the tree understood the message: boys were enemies.
So when the boy reached a branch that was too small to support his weight, the tree allowed that branch to snap.
arthur takes a tumble
I hear a cracking sound. The tree sways, and the air is still for a second. Then something thuds against the growth on the opposite side.
It’s Arthur. I guess he landed on his right Nike because when he tries to stand, his leg buckles, and he lies on his back clutching his ankle. All that extra height and tree-climbing ability can’t help him stand upright any more. His face looks funny, but he must not have his PA system turned on because I can’t hear him. I guess he’s crying, even though it’s getting hard to see him now.
After he strips off the Nike and sock, his ankle swells up like a throw pillow. He rolls around and holds onto it for maybe five minutes, his face all contorted. Then he lies flat, and his little blue eyes look up into the branches like he just smoked a blunt.
I ask him if he thinks he can climb up there again, but that seems to annoy him. I coax him to try standing, but when he tries out his swollen ankle, his face screws up and he falls over and rolls around.
I sit and try to remember what they taught us in health class. Mr. Volmer said you’re supposed to apply pressure to a wound. That makes sense; maybe the goo blistering Arthur’s ankle might go back where it came from if I squeeze it like a tube of toothpaste.
But squeezing it only makes his eyes widen and his face tighten into a scream that can’t be heard, and he thrashes around and shoves me until I quit. His ankle looks bigger now.
Volmer also taught us about tourniquets, which involve tying bandages really tightly around the wound. So I sling his discarded sock around his ankle, but when he sees what I’m doing he pushes me away.
I ask if he remembers passing any plants or berries that could be used as an herbal remedy. He clicks on his PA system and says, Click. “PLEASE, WINTHROP, DON’T HELP. JUST LET ME LIE HERE A MINUTE, OKAY?”
Well, that chafes me. I’m just trying to help. After all, Arthur wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for me. He’d still be fending off the abuse of the jocks at camp. But the kid is probably in pain and forgetting who his real friends are.
So I sit next to him.
“Okay,” I say. “I think I’m safe in saying that this blows big time. But chill. It’s 2,711.26 miles to San Francisco. If we hitch, and with a little bit of luck, we can make it in two or three days. I know this sounds FUBAR, Arthur, but we’ll be perfectly safe. You rest that ankle, and we’ll be on our way. The highways of the United States are well-equipped for safety. There are police call boxes at nearly every mile marker. There are rest areas and sources of food. As long as we remain vigilant, we needn’t worry about traveling with someone unscrupulous. You see, Arthur, it’s not so risky. Granted, there are risks, but remember what Fang said: It’s a bold adventure you’re going on.”
Arthur still has the mute button pressed. I continue: “We need to get clear of these woods. We’ll pass a road by tomorrow and hitch our way out to the main highway. This is Pennsylvania, for crying out loud, not the Serengeti. It’s their only American stop on the tour. It’ll all be worth it, Arthur, you’ll see.”
Arthur continues with the silent treatment. It occurs to me that I haven’t seen a TV set in three days. No phone, no Netflix, no HBO Go.
“It’s Tuesday, Arthur. Did you know that?”
Click. “SNIPER DUDE X!”
“That’s right! Sniper Dude X!” It’s my favorite show. It’s about this badass who’s a surfer by day and a government assassin by night who actually offs baddies with the blade of his board. “They’re starting the whole series over again from the first one, when he gets the samurai board from Tibet. You know, maybe you should turn that thing off, Arthur. I don’t want to alarm you, but who knows who or what is out in these woods at this hour.”
I peer at the stars through the trees. A bank of clouds has crept into view, so only half the sky looks back at me. “I love that show. God, I’d miss that show terribly if anything ever happened. Wouldn’t you? Of course, we’d also miss Sargent Storm . . .”
I tire of doing all the talking, so I stretch out on the rocks and go over all the episodes of Sniper Dude X I’ve memorized until I fall asleep.
I have this screwed-up dream I only sort of remember when I wake up. Arthur and I were in my chemistry classroom. Steel bars covered the door. The cool kid from camp was in there with us, mussing my hair and swinging Arthur around by his bullhorn. Outside this guard kept walking past and looking in at us. I couldn’t see his face, but whenever he yelled in through the bars, the voice sounded an awful lot like His Eminence’s.
There was this TV set on a heavy metal cart in the front of the room. Most of the kids in the classroom with us just stared at it and didn’t move. Suddenly Arthur jumped up and ran at the TV set and tried to push it out of the way. The cool kid was yelling at him, and outside the guard was fumbling with the door. I helped Arthur push the cart out of the way, and underneath it, bored int
o the floor, was a deep pit. Arthur jumped into it. I followed him. The walls were rushing past my head as the ground below was getting closer and closer and closer . . .
I don’t know how long I’m out, but it’s pitch-black and raining when I wake up. Arthur is snoring. I listen to the forest noises and the pattering of the rain on the boughs overhead. The moss, the tree bark, the leaves, the animals, and the junk people leave behind combine to form a powerful odor that feels like somebody is poking my sinuses with a dirty stick. Then the rain really opens up and turns into a roar overhead, and lightning pops. The breeze blowing off the river makes me shake like a mofo.
I think about my mother. Not my father. The second I allow His Eminence to materialize as an image in the old temporal lobe is when I come down with another case of Wimp Winthrop real quick. When His Eminence says anything, it’s like somebody ripping off my Halloween mask and spoiling the whole show.
But the Moms . . . well, frankly what bothers me is the fact that I can’t quite picture her. I mean, I see her every day. She’s always nagging, pestering, and slobbering all over me like I’m three years old or something, and yet I can’t quite remember the exact color of her hair, the precise shade of her eyes, or the strict layout of her face.
What I can remember, for some reason is her forearms: the squashy, pale, hairless part of them that the sun doesn’t reach, with red pucker marks smack in the middle of this part—two rectangular reddish boxes, one on each drumstick, like she’s been leaning on them and her weight left a welt behind. I mostly noticed them when she tucked me into bed at night, which she just a year ago gave up on insisting.
Thoughts like this make the woods seem extra cold and dark, so I shake them off. After all, this whole thing is going to slap her pretty hard. Good, I tell myself. They blindsided me with this summer camp trip. They gave it to me as a birthday present during a party where they’d refused to invite my friends—His Eminence saddled my clique with the name “Paste Eaters” because we all looked like righteous psychos: pale white and always wearing black—and instead invited only His Eminence’s clan: bronze men in various stages of gray flanked by women in various stages of plastic surgery regimens.
Godspeed Summer Camp, the flier said. Come and share His Life and His Word with Us. They told me it was a canoe trip with a bunch of other kids down the Allwyn River for ten days. His Eminence, they explained, had worked very hard to secure me a place in the camp, which is run by some of his government cronies.
I was expecting concert tickets.
The Red Grizzlies were coming that same week. Music Freak magazine had just given them a cover story about how their show in Germany sent shockwaves echoing down the Rhine, and all of Europe was in an uproar for this “must-see-do-not-miss-under-penalty-of-lameness show.” Do not miss! I’d explained to them my need to go to the show, that I’d missed them when they played at the Spectrum the year before, that my grades were up at school, and that they’d promised—especially if I stopped asking them repeatedly. Burton Trotsky’s folks had gotten him tickets, after all, and his dad was only a minor undersecretary for the Defense Department—not even one of the Primrose School’s most elite.
But this camp, the Moms explained, was for my own good. They didn’t need another summer of their first and only mooning about desolately inside the compound watching George Lucas movies on the plasma screen.
Trotsky had chided me mercilessly. So I told him he’d see me there. Front row center. “Count on it,” I’d said.
I look at Arthur’s ankle in the dark. I was hoping the swelling might have gone down a little and that he’d be able to try the tree again. But it’s more swollen than ever.
What if he broke something? I definitely can’t fix that. Maybe the ankle is even getting worse just lying here. In sports, when somebody breaks something, they stop everything and send out the doctors, strap on a cast, and haul the player off in an ambulance. Maybe Arthur needs a doctor right away. Maybe if I wait until morning, he’ll never walk again.
Then I’d really get it.
It’ll be all over the news: Mortimer Brubaker’s son ran away, crippled an already disabled boy, and left him for dead in the woods. His Eminence has a whole staff of interns whose only job it is to scour the headlines, surf the Web, and watch TV to find any mention of his name in the media. When it’s good news, he’s on top of the world, marching through the house humming “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” chatting with the help or instructing them on some sort of housekeeping business in his authoritarian, leader-of-men voice. But when the media gives him a black eye, he sulks, insists upon my joining one Young Republicans organization or another, or worse yet, tries talking to me.
And this time, when his personal e-mail floods with incoming bad news that can’t wait, the bad news will include my name, his son’s name, listed as the culprit . . .
I peer into the blue-black crisscrossing lines of branches and weeds. Maybe I can find a house somewhere with a phone, call an ambulance anonymously, tell them roughly where Arthur is, and then run away into the night before anybody knows my identity. But I’m only like 75 percent sure I’ll be able to find Arthur again or be able to tell an ambulance crew how to locate him, so I’ll probably have to wait with him. Then they’ll summon our parents, and I’ll have to answer to His Eminence anyway.
I wander back in what I thought was the direction we’d come from. I don’t get far before I’m wishing I’d waited until morning.
Walking through a black, rain-soaked woods blows. It’s not just a football field with trees sticking up; it’s hills, boulders, rocks, roots, and broken tree limbs. It’s old radial tires full of water, rusted metal, old boxes, and sheets of cardboard. Branches loaded with briars rip you open, and you slip and tear the hell out of your elbows and knees.
I stumble around for about an hour before I realize I’ve twisted and turned around so much I no longer know where I am. I thought I’d eventually reach the river and the canoe because I figured Arthur and I had walked in a straight line, but maybe we’ve been going in circles. I don’t know where the river is, and I don’t know how to get back to Arthur.
I sit on a rock, soaked and bleeding and scared worse than anything. I made things worse. Trotsky’ll tease me. Yeah, front row center, he’ll say. You couldn’t even make it out of the woods. We’ll spend a night in the rain and then find help in the daylight.
But what if we don’t?
Mortimer Brubaker today mourns the loss of his son, who was eaten by wolves after getting lost in the woods during a camping expedition in central PA . . .
The whole thing, I realize, is my fault. If not for me, Arthur and I would be back at camp, and maybe the Moms would have been right: it would have been for my own, stupid good.
The retaining walls of my pain and fear reservoir fail. The rain sounds like footsteps everywhere: cracks and moans and pops all over the place, and each one makes me bug out worse.
the mountain lion
Trees weren’t the only things following the boy.
Hunger had driven the mountain lion from the hills. It was summer, and she had been surviving on mice, which were easy prey.
But she wanted to kill the boy for revenge. She had lost mates and companions to starvation, homelessness, and bullets. She had long wanted to kill one of the creatures responsible, one of the hairless dogs that walk like birds. And now, here was a young one, sitting alone and defenseless.
She waited in the dark, tail swishing back and forth. She waited to see if the boy would stay or move on.
Now she was sure. He’d been sitting on the rock not moving for a long time.
She lifted her haunches and prepared for what she’d been made for: the great rush forward at blinding speeds, every muscle in perfect harmony, every tooth and claw synchronized perfectly to knock her prey over and sever his spinal cord.
Then she saw the light.
Out away from the boy, a man was walking—and glowing. Light meant men. Men meant weapon
s.
She held her ground.
the blue light
Ahead of me, swaying slowly back and forth, is this pale light. It’s dim, but it’s moving right to left, pausing, and then left to right.
I go toward it, careful not to lose it when a stump or a ridge throws me to the ground. As I get closer, it becomes a bluish flicker, which is mad spooky—maybe it’s a ghost, or worse. In Zombie Cannibals, the decaying orbit of the satellite that caused the dead to rise from the grave produced this blue light that glowed out of the graves right before the zombies poked their heads up. So I try stealth: I hide behind trees. I crawl on hand and knee. Now I can see this dude pacing with the blue light, and I hear a voice muttering through the rain.
The light snaps off, but I can still barely make out the dude. His long hair is silver and white. It pokes straight up like an afro and then cascades down the back.
It isn’t hair—it’s a headdress.
An Indian headdress.
He turns toward me, arms at his sides, legs spread slightly. His lips form a hard, stoic line. His eyes glow in the dark.
I stare into them.
They stare back at me.
CHAPTER TWO
we hitch
My video game training says the situation calls for a little left trigger, with the A and X buttons tapped twice in unison.
I ninjitsu out of the trees, helicoptering, no feeling but drizzle and wind until his jawbone turns to crumbling Cheetos beneath the toe of my Timberlands.
Then: X, Y, X, Y, twice in succession. Fist punches bloody the midsection, sending baddy back into the brush.
Select button.
Arsenal menu.
Chainsaw.
The Activision sound card blasts a killer bee storm as I lower it and Cuisinart baddy into monster tree food.
He is an Indian—blinged up like one, anyhow. He wears a leather headband with white and silver feathers that crest down his back. He has finger-painted a circle with lines poking out of it on his chest the way a kid would draw the sun. Old school yellow leather pants with fringe cover his bottom half, and he wears what looks like His Eminence’s bedroom slippers. His tats are badass, people. Swoops and swirls swish around his arms rockstarlike.
We Are All Crew Page 2