Crawl (4 page)

5.

The first thing she felt upon waking was a piercing cold. Her arms were above her head, and her shoulders ached, as if she’d been sleeping in that position for some time. But she was upright, not stretched out on her bed, at home. A chilly wind blew against her exposed midriff and she shuddered under its touch. She looked down, finding that she still had on her blue blouse, but that it had pulled up because of her posture. She tried to reach for the fabric, to pull it back down, but realized she couldn’t feel her hands. Glancing up, she screamed.

Everything came rushing back in a tidal wave of reality. The accident. The engine in Colton’s lap. That poor teenager with a face like a kicked-in watermelon. The Mercury—

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

—and the red priest. Her asking for help. Him smiling.

After all that tragedy, someone had chained her to a post. Her hands had fallen asleep because they weren’t receiving circulation from the wrists. The cuffs were cutting off the supply of blood. They weren’t really cuffs, though, not really. More like shackles. The kind of things they used to use on witches before they burned them at the stake.

She smelled smoke.

Ten feet in front of her, a hunched figure worshipped at a campfire, his hands clasped together over the body of the teenager with the pushed-in kisser.
He’s praying for him to make it,
Juliet thought. She was well aware of how crazy that sounded.

A thick wood surrounded her, seemed to press in from all sides. To her left, a road. The boughs of the trees came together over the damp red clay, creating a corridor. At the end of that tunnel was a light so beautiful and welcoming that Juliet thought she would cry. If she weren’t already crying, that was. Deep sobs racked her body, and it was the weakness of her knees that told her she was standing. Her feet burned, though. They burned so badly it felt as if she stood over an open flame.

A witch set to burn over a bonfire
repeated in her mind, and she glanced down. Her knees were bent and in her line of sight. She couldn’t see her feet. She tried to move them to the right, then the left, but they wouldn’t do as she told them. Finally, her knees parted, and she stared down between bare, milky thighs. She’d lost her pants, but that fact barely registered. At first the nails in her feet didn’t compute as such. The pain ebbed the more she gawked at the aluminum heads, ten in all, gazing back at her. She knew how many nail heads there were because she counted. Somehow, knowing how many had been driven into her feet helped ease her agony. The respite from the burning in her feet only lasted half a minute or so, before she remembered her aching shoulders and the shackles holding her arms above her head.

So many things to focus on, so little time.

“Why…” she blubbered, but her voice was barely audible, even to herself. The second time, she shrieked, “
WHY
?”

“Shhhh…” the red priest hissed. “I’m sssspeaking with the Lord about our fallen brother.”

“
LET ME
DOWN
!” She sounded like a weak horror movie cliché, one of those useless bitches that tumble and fall on thin air with the killer right behind them. She hated the sound of that weakness. Hated herself for making it.

“You’ll be allowed to leave,” the red priest said. “Shortly.”

Juliet jerked her limp arms forward, expecting resistance but getting none, and began to tilt out over the ground below. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that she had time to think about the nails, those ten horrible nail heads and what they would do to her precious, fragile feet. She continued to drop, a scream vibrating her throat and painfully thrumming in her head. Then the nails caught. They tore, and she felt her feet coming apart, splitting, cleaving in two. The pain was transcendent. The pain was God. A fiery, torturous agony crippled every muscle in her body, and she slapped down, cheek first, onto the grassy clearing where she’d been trussed up like a biblical whore awaiting the first thrown stone. She lay there for some time, twitching and rolling feebly from side to side, bawling. Through her tears, she could see her hands out in front of her, the shackles still clasped around her wrists, the chain stretching out into the grass, a wooden peg impaling one link. Needing to take her mind off her cloven feet, she craned her neck and gazed up at the post. An empty notch, which had been drilled into the wood a foot below the top, stared down at her like some mocking cyclops. Two feet above the ground were the nails. Ten heads glistening with gore in the firelight, clumps of pink and purple flesh still clinging to the wood.

Is that a toe?

Juliet’s anguished cry exploded from her chest.

Without thought, she pushed herself to her knees then attempted to climb to her feet. Something spread beneath her, like toes with no webbing stretching too wide. A wave of white hot needles pressed into her calves, pierced her thigh muscles, and threw her screaming to the grass.

She flipped onto her back, howling her maladies to the canopy of gnarled tree branches overhead. She screeched, wailed, hollered,
erupted,
to anyone who’d listen. But, deep down, Juliet knew that the red priest was her only audience.

“That was foolish.” His voice was somber, so low that Juliet could barely hear him over her own echoing shrieks.

“
FUCK YOU!
”

“So unladylike. I’ll let this weakness go, but I doubt
He
will.”

Juliet didn’t care who
He
was, but could hear the inflection the priest put on the title, capitalized with emphasis. Her mind even highlighted the word and threw curses laced with middle fingers at it. If it were God the red priest spoke of, then God be damned. It’s not like God had helped her out. He’d let her pull that peg from the post and tear her feet all to shit. In regards to the titular
He,
God could take a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut in a field full of dandelions fertilized by baby tears for all the fucks given by her.

“I guess I’ll leave you two alone. Oh, and I suggest you crawl.”

Even over her pain-filled mumbling, Juliet heard the red priest’s soles squelching along as he left by way of the road domed by branches.

Now, it was only her. Well, her and a young man’s corpse. But he was dead, and dead men carry no conversations.

And, as the pain took over, and Juliet melted into the grass surrounding her, Colton flitted into her mind. That engine in his lap looked awfully dangerous. He might want to do something about that. She wondered if they’d ever hold another conversation.

6.

A shy young man in his last year of college, with dreams of building skyscrapers, and a young lady with a mind for teaching, converse in front of a fire at a rather banal Christmas party thrown by a mutual friend. This friend, William Beaumont, has recently moved to Mobile to attend college at Faulkner. Juliet has eyes for this young, wannabe doctor. Has eyes for his future success as well as his rumored prowess in the bedroom. Her bestie, Natalie, has been to the promised land before—twice—and was saved. So, why is it that she’s talking to this geekish boy with dirty blond hair, chubby cheeks, and a granite slab for a nose? He’s interesting. Too captivating for her to pull away from.
What is this magic
, she thinks,
twinkling in his cinnamon eyes
? What kind of dark sorcery has he cast upon her?

Across the room and through the crowd, a bright woman is approaching. This woman looks like Julie sounds like her, too. The doppelganger is happy. Maybe happier than Juliet-by-the-Fire. This twin, this reflection of her, moves through the party, ignoring the geek by the fireplace. Juliet-by-the-Fire glances back to the architect-in-training and sees that he’s no longer interested in her. He wants the Bright Julie. Because the Bright Julie doesn’t hold grudges. She looks past symptoms and delves to the heart of what-ails-ya. And the problem is her—Juliet-by-the-fire. Bright Julie can’t have the geek. He’s the property of Juliet-by-the-fire. And she’s his. But he’s already getting up. And the fire at her back is too hot. It’s burning her. Burning… burned… burnt…

7.

Juliet woke with a snap, screaming and smoking. Her feet forgotten for the moment, she rolled back and forth, trying to put out the flames. Lying on her smoldering back, she dealt with the last embers by smothering them beneath her. Other than a sensitive spot or two, she surmised she’d missed the worst of it by waking in time. Somehow, she’d gotten too close to the fire. Or she’d been pushed.

Colton always told her how soundly she slept. How she didn’t toss and turn and roll around like the women his buddies had married. She didn’t snore either, which Colton marked down as another blessing bestowed by the relationship gods. This didn’t mean, of course, that she was incapable of movement while asleep, only that Colton had never experienced it.

Colton
…

No, she couldn’t think of him right now. She had to get moving. Find a way—

(I suggest you crawl)

—out of this mess.

Biting her lip until it bled, she managed to roll over onto her knees. Her remaining toes grazed the ground, sending bolts of electricity up her hips and into her back. Moving on her knees wasn’t going to work. The action caused hamstrings to seize because she had to try and hold her feet out of the grass and clay. She dropped to her belly and army-crawled, using her forearms to progress, holding her damaged feet up by her butt. She had to round the entirety of the campfire before the domed trail came back into view. That brilliant white light still shone at the end, like a beacon meant to keep her from running ashore. The start of the tunnel was, at her best guess, thirty to forty feet away. The space between looked forever long, but the stretch of road beyond seemed longer by an eternity. How far was she from help? Would anyone be at the light when she got there? Where was she? What was the light? And, furthermore, was she headed toward more danger?

That last thought stalled her engines, and she lay there, prone on the cold clay, breathing slowly, contemplating whether or not she really wanted to go near that light. It looked like salvation, but that could all be a less-than-subtle ruse. Hadn’t the red priest wanted her to leave the safety (
maybe
) of the campfire? Hadn’t he wanted her to (
suggested she
) crawl? What other way could she go?

She glanced back over her shoulder, saw the post with the bloody, fleshy nails; the smoking campfire giving up its heat to the heavens; dark shadows, cast by the flames, flickering through the tree line, looking lithe and alive. But it was what she didn’t see that bothered her. What she didn’t see caused her heart to jam down on the accelerator, ramping its speed up until it seemed the speedometer would go full circle back to zero.

Where the holy fuck is the boy?

The teenager with the squashed-in face was tardy from class, that little shit. Maybe he got a slip home. Perhaps he had to see a nurse. After all, his face wasn’t going to put itself back together.

Reality crashed against the rocks of Juliet’s mind, and she focused even harder on those lithe shadows dancing at the tree line. Her eyes drifted down, down to the scrub, where the clearing met the woods, and the boy’s crooked sneaker as it was pulled into the bush.

There was something in the trees. And it was chewing.

No. That’s not it at all. What you’re hearing is the snap, crackle, pop of the campfire. It does sound a lot like chewing, doesn’t it? Ha! It sure does. Just like someone sloppily tearing meat from bone and gnaw-gnaw-gnawing away with their jaws jacking. How rude! To think their mothers didn’t teach them to chew with their mouths closed. Someone should say something to them…

Snap.

Crackle.

Pop.

Growl.

Now, campfires don’t
growl
, do they? They roar, they blaze, sometimes, they even fart, but they most certainly
do not
growl. Not like a hungry wolf. But it didn’t really sound like a wolf, did it? No. It sounded like a… like a… Like something you’ve never heard before. It sounds hungry, that growl does. Like, maybe, the teenager won’t satiate it. Like, perhaps, it’ll still be hungry even after it’s picked its teeth clean on that boy’s bones. Then what? Then it’s coming after you, Juliet. And—

(I suggest you crawl)

—you better dip out with your prow out. Make like a virgin on prom night, and split. Because its coming, Julie. And it’s still hungry.

Juliet shot both arms out, sank her fingers, knuckle-deep, into the soft clay, and dragged herself toward the tunnel made of branches. Toward that beautiful light. Toward salvation. Toward not being fucking
eaten
.

She pulled, ripping a clot of red earth from the ground. It crumbled away at the sides, but what was left in her palm turned into a compressed putty of sorts. She tossed it over her shoulder then grabbed for another. If the thing in the woods moved slower than a crippled snail, Juliet might get away. But at this rate, a determined sloth could have caught her.
 

Snap, crackle, pop went—

(the monster)

—the fire, and Juliet threw another arm out, intent on escaping. Not wanting to know whether or not what she heard was truly the blaze or something else.

But that sneaker… You saw that boy’s sneaker being pulled into the bush. You saw it disappear. You saw it… devoured.