Feral (33 page)

They flung the gate open and ran unsteadily down the slope.

“Let's go!” Winter shouted, and Gordon opened his door.

Winter and his officers flanked Gordon, Shannon, and Charity, covering them as they sprinted up the hill.
 
Seconds later they were sitting in the back seat of Winter's cruiser.
 
Before shutting the door, Winter leaned in and gently touched Charity's shoulder.

“Sweetheart.”
 
It was the voice of a different man, a man who would forever sleep with the lights on.

Charity lifted her gaze from her lap and Shannon saw something spark between the girl and the crusty old police Sergeant.

“Was he the one who kidnapped you?”

Charity nodded, then looked back at her hands, folded primly in her lap.

“We'll get him,” he said to her.
  
“I promise.”

Then they were moving slowly away from Feral Park and toward town.
 
Charity looked up from her lap again, gasped, and Shannon followed her gaze out the window.
 
For a second she saw the girl from the park, standing alone along the edge of the road, glaring up at them.
 
Then she was gone.

S
everal hours under police protection, or guard, which was more like how it felt, and nothing happened.
 
It was down time.

Dead time.

Sergeant Winter was not among their keepers; he was out with what remained of his dilapidated force searching the park area.
 
Gordon wondered how many of them would be coming back.
 
Their protection that early morning consisted of two off duty police, watching late night television and drinking endless pots of coffee, and a state trooper making endless circuits around the hotel.

By midnight the fearful anticipation they felt had melted into exhaustion.
 
They simply lay on the motel room bed, the long separated father and daughter, and Shannon.
 
Sometimes they stared wordlessly at each other, sometimes at the television, though none could concentrate on what it had to offer.
 
Sometimes they stared through the walls at nothing, living and reliving their private horrors of the past few days and projecting those horrors into an unforeseeable future, a bleak one.

By one o'clock in the morning nothing had happened.
 
As their bodies and brains began to shut down only an intangible dread remained, and that dread followed them all into sleep, a sleep that each secretly believed they may never wake from.

At three o'clock the next morning, Gordon did awake, still tired and scared, but feeling more like himself than he had in days.

One of the off duty cops slept, sitting upright in the stiff-back hotel chair while the other watched the TV, giving Gordon only a cursory glance as he rose.

Shannon looked peaceful, beautiful, perhaps dreaming of better days, or maybe nothing at all.

Charity looked pale, sickly, somehow diminished in a way that not even the stress of her terror could explain.
 
She tossed and turned violently on the bed, whimpered and moaned in her sleep.

Shannon awoke a few minutes later, but Charity did not.
 
Her sleep had become more restful, but she looked worse than before.
 
Not just gaunt, but transparent.

When they tried to wake her, shaking her gently by the shoulders, she only groaned softly.
 
She rolled like a rag doll in their shaking hands, all loose joints wrapped with a thin, pale skin.
 
Gordon began to fear that something had happened to her down there in the place of the wild ones, something that might take her away from him again before the Bogey Man had the chance to.

S
ometimes, Charity remembered, if she thought about a person or a place hard enough before sleeping, she could go there in her dreams.
 
She had always thought this was something the Bogey Man did to tease her, but the Bogey Man wasn't here with her, and she was out of his control.
 
She was surprised to find herself standing inside the rusted iron bar walls of the playground.
 
No sooner had she awakened to her surroundings, or at least become aware of them, than Toni appeared, a handsome but gangly teenage gunslinger in a heavy metal shirt.

“Welcome home.
 
I thought you might come back,” he said.
 
He looked mad, but also relieved.
 
“Jenny wants to see you.
 
She's pretty pissed.”
 
He didn't give Charity a chance to respond.
 
Hefting his torch, he led the way through the path to the real Feral Park.
 
He was silent, his demeanor serious, grim.

The long walk felt more like a prisoner's march than a homecoming.

He doesn't understand
, she thought.
 
He thinks I'm really here
.

I am here, though, or part of me is
.
 
My body is somewhere else but I'm still here
.
 
I'm here the same way Jenny is
.
 
I just hope part of me is enough
.

As she thought about what she needed to do, there was an unexpected spark of understanding, and she had to fight to keep her consciousness.
 
She felt her hold on this place slip.
 
Her senses seemed momentarily doubled.
 
She felt the sensory nothing of the air around her, the strange but implacable ground underfoot, but she also felt the stiff hotel bed mattress under her back, a loose button poking her shoulder uncomfortably, and she felt hands on her shoulders trying to shake her awake.

Her father's voice reached her as if through a bad phone line, his words garbled, panicky, without meaning.
 
She heard Shannon too, though her voice came through weaker.
 
Perhaps because there were no blood ties between her and Shannon.
 
Given her revelation, this made sense.
 
It was all in the blood.

The Bogey Man didn't want her; he wanted what was in her blood, her talent; the thing that made her
special
.

He wanted to keep her until she was older, so he could marry her and have kids with her, kids with her blood and her talent.
 
Kids who could send not just their shadows, but their very self to the farthest of places with a thought.
 
Kids who could go places and do things he could not.

“Quiet, they're all sleeping.”
 
He stopped and turned toward her.
 
“I'm happy you came back,” he said.
 
“I would have missed you.”

“I had to come back.”

“I know.
 
I'm still glad.”

She stopped beside him, and when he grabbed her hand, she fought hard not to acknowledge the sudden spark between them, or the quickening of her heart.
 
She supposed this was what they called a crush, her first crush.
 
She never had a chance to have one before, and it felt good.
 
The good feeling was soured with an unhappy sense of regret.
 
It was unfair that it had to happen in this time, this place where she knew it could lead to nothing else.
 
But the spark they shared drove away the strange doubling she felt in her body and head, and she was able to draw some courage from it.

Holding her hand, Toni led her through the veil and into that strange land of ghosts and maniac kids.

It was the same night all over again.
 
Kids slept in the same spots they had before, in the same positions.
 
She overheard the same mumbled conversation in the background.
 
She felt the strange magic at work, the things that stole thought and memory, slowed time, and kept them forever young.
 
The only thing different this time was her.

Toni led her to her seat beside Jenny's, the queen's, throne.
 
Jenny, like before, was nowhere around.

“Sit,” Toni said.
 
“She'll be back.”

Charity sat and watched Toni as he took his seat on the other side.
 
Before her, burning like a physical incarnation of her very spirit, was her torch.
 
It was her tie to a place, an anchor.
 
She picked it up, felt its energy, her energy, surging back into her.

“Goodbye, Toni,” she said, then closed her eyes and thought of her dad and Shannon, waiting for her on the other side.

She heard startled gasps, alarmed cries echoing through the cavern, Toni's the loudest, but it was faint.
 
Their echoes faded quickly, and when she opened her eyes again she was in the hotel room, staring up at her dad and Shannon.
 
For a second she could still feel the hardness of the torch in her hand, then that too was gone, and the fire was back inside
her
, where it belonged.

She was free.

Now she had to keep her freedom, and something occurred to her, a hint of an idea and the memory of something Toni had said to her the night they had met.

Motherfucker doesn't have a clue
, he had said.

We have the power in there
.

S
hannon watched the sleeping girl, her fear turning to amazement as the sallow face and strangely diminished body seemed to fill up.
 
It was like watching a cup fill with water, except she was filling up with life.
 
Charity, a picture of death only moments before, was all color and energy, a force so strong it was coming from her skin like a radiant heat.

She opened her eyes, smiled at them.

Beside her, a nearly hysterical Gordon had fallen silent.
 
One of the off-duty cops gasped and crossed himself.
 
“Grant, hold up for a second.
 
I think she's better now.”

The other cop held a two-way radio, was about to call for an ambulance.
 
He set it on the lamp stand next to his chair and approached the bed.
 
“I'll be damned,” he said, and then a smile of intense relief spread across his homely face.
 
“Young lady, you had us scared half to death.”
 
He gave Charity's shoulder a brief, gentle squeeze before returning to his watch.

The cop who had crossed himself gave her another uneasy look before following his partner to the window.

“Charity, what was that?”
 
Gordon spoke quietly, like someone asking a secret.
 
“Where did you go?”

Charity pushed herself up and leaned in close to her father.
 
She gave him a look that was at once adorable and frightening, a strangely adult look.
 
“I'm sorry,” she said.
 
“I had to go back for something.”
 
Then she moved closer still, grabbed them both by the arms, and brought them down to her level.
 
More secrets to share.

“I know why he wants me.”
 
Her strange adult-like composure seemed to shimmer, but she kept control.
 
She did not cry.

Shannon listened with growing revulsion as she told them.

G
ordon found himself remembering, almost reliving, the dream he had on this very bed only a few days before.
 
Charity had been in it, not just his image of her but her very essence.
 
She had been there as sure as she was here now, and he recognized the locket she wore, the one with a picture of Shannon's family inside, as the one she had worn in the nightmare.
 
The Bogey Man had also been there, and he had made his intentions clear to Gordon.
 
He remembered the vision of his little girl's swollen belly, completely out of proportion with the rest of her.
 
She had been pregnant.
 
His fear was suddenly overshadowed by a rage for Charity's monster the likes of which he had never known.
 
Rage for what the monster was planning to do.

The rage exhausted itself quickly though, and the fear returned in growing waves.

They might last days or weeks against her monster, months or even years if they were strong and smart, but they could not last forever.
 
Eventually
he
would get to them, and he would get her back.

Eventually they would lose, because in the end, the Bogey Man always won.

T
he two-way radio squawked repeatedly, mostly startling bits of static and short bursts of communication between the field and dispatch.
 
An hour after Charity's strange awakening it squawked again, and Officer Grant took it outside while his partner stayed behind to baby-sit.
 
A few minutes later he returned.
 
Gordon and Shannon met him anxiously at the door.