The Pines (12 page)

The stench had returned, stronger than before.

Catching the heavy scent, the owl screeched its terror and rushed off on flailing wings. The forgotten mouse, already stiff with death, landed on the sand with an almost imperceptible plop.

The woods grew hushed. Soon there remained only small noises, tiny clicks made by the insects that spent their lives foraging on the bleak forest floor. They had moved in toward the campers, toward this unexpected source of food, but now even the crickets ceased. Small black beetles sang out with rattles and dry rasps. Yet, one by one, those too dropped off, leaving only the muffled thump of clumsy feet against the sand.

…mad shouts…screams of pain…

Conscious only of the others running in different directions, Casey blinked awake. He hopped up, cocooned in his sleeping bag, then pitched forward on his face. Despairing howls and wild activity surrounded him as he struggled with his bound legs. The zipper stuck. He fumbled with it, and someone tripped over him, crying out. Kicking free, he stood, the bag still tangled around one leg.

A snarl ripped the night.

He was slammed against with fury—something slicing through the flesh of his arm—and thrown, rolling in the black sand. As he groped about him, agony raged, throbbing in his arm, and his hand struck something that rolled.

He grabbed the flashlight, switched it on, swung it wildly about the clearing. His eyes took in too much, too many awful images for his brain to sort: the liquid spilling from his lacerated arm, the wreckage of the campsite, the rent and mangled corpse in the sand. His eyes fixed idiotically on the dark-soaked remnants of a double sleeping bag—the blood appeared crimson only in the bright center of the beam.

The throb of the crickets. Everywhere. The throb of blood rushing in his ears. Deafening. The mistiness was not his vision—thin fog curled through the clearing. He realized someone had been shrieking the same thing over and over, but he couldn’t make out the words. There was movement. “Jenny, where are you?” Swinging the tiny arc of light, he stumbled bleeding into the pines, and they closed around him. Crickets rose to a dense pitch. He could hear running. Cries came from all around him. But, near fainting with shock and pain, he could see no one, the flashlight providing only fleeting, distorted glimpses.

Now he heard something else, a growling, a thrashing. The child’s white face, blank with fear, flashed at him, then vanished, lost in the blackness.

“Amelia!” Sickened with dread, he held the flashlight out in front of him. The beam thrust forward, the shaft of light striking…

…a visage out of a nightmare.

All thought of fighting, of trying to help the others fled his mind. Casey screamed once, an ugly chopped-off sound; then he dropped the flashlight and plunged into the night.

They all ran, scattered, screaming. They blundered onto trails and off again, losing them where the pines grew thickest. “Alan, where are you?” They ran in winding circles. “Help me! Please, Alan! It’s near me, oh God!”

Casey wore only jockey shorts, and branches whipped his legs. Long grasses stung hotly. Behind him, Sandy’s screams became gurgles. As his mind whirled in nausea and panic, the pines sped past him, sometimes striking him hard. His heart thundered, and blood pumped from the ruptured flesh of his arm.

He crashed into a tree, and front teeth broke with a sharp crunch. Pain hammered in his brain, and he staggered back, whimpering, then stumbled heavily onward. Darkness came in denser waves, shadows more solid than the night, black pulsations he suspected were internal. He knew he had to get farther away before he lost consciousness, and he clutched at his arm, tried to squeeze off the bleeding, feeling the thick, slow warmth ooze over his fingers.

He sucked burning gouts of air into his lungs. The pines spun, and they made noise, but the noises lay behind him, and he plowed through bushes that clawed the flesh of his chest and legs. Where they fell on dried leaves, beads of blood made a rapid pattering, but when they dropped on parched sand or pine needles, they were silent as soft rain. Mists spiraled across the face of the moon. In the pale light, invisible birds skittered from tree to tree.

Behind him, the haze broke, and from the deep shadows something glowed, cold and green with phosphorescence. The flashlight? Had he run in a circle?

As the ground dropped away beneath him, he shouted wordlessly, clawing at air.

Moonlight glinted off the black surface of the water.

Splashing, choking, he thrashed in panic, then found the soft bottom. The water was chest deep, and he plowed through it, mouth filled. Dead reeds snapped under his clutching hands as he fell across a submerged sandbar.

In a swirl of fog, he fought his way, gasping, through mats of water plants, thoughts of poisonous snakes slithering through his mind. Gases bubbled up around him, and mosquitoes clouded in a suffocating swarm—they covered his bare chest and back. Sinking, he tried to run, but his legs barely moved through the mire, pushing through rushes. Blood clouded the water behind him, coiling and swirling.

Something rose ahead, where whitish vapor tangled through long reeds, something black as the withered pines surrounding it. Dark and squat. A shed of some sort. Shelter. Nearing the end of the marsh, he staggered through deep foulness. All around him, talons of stunted trees clawed into the slippery ground. He fell on his face, plowing a furrow in the fetid muck with his chin. Struggling to his feet, he fell again, knees sinking. As he yanked himself loose, something clicked agonizingly in his ankle. He slid, crawled, slithered. When he tried to listen for the sounds of pursuit, he could hear only the sucking mire and his choking breath.

The hut stood windowless and abandoned in the moonlight. At last, stumbling across hardened mud, he cried out and beat at the walls with black-caked arms. Limping painfully, he pressed between the crowding pines and groped along the walls for the door.

It stuck. Weak and dizzy, he put his shoulder to it, heaved, and the door gave slightly with a moldering crunch. With a grinding, the door, ancient hinges rusted through, tottered, showering him with dirt. It struck him on the head—dull agony—and he tasted fresh blood once more, as the door lodged, leaning against the bending pines, revealing an angled opening of less than a foot in width, a passage into absolute darkness.

With his shoulder and chest halfway through the crack, he nearly recoiled—a sour stench emanated from the hot interior. Pulling himself in, he scraped his legs on the doorframe. With a squelch, his foot went through something on the floor, and instantly the smell rose. He gagged on vomit. Rankness choked the air from his lungs. Dark forms swelled in his brain. Beyond knowing or caring what he shared the hut with, he clung, sobbing, to the walls, their roughness slick with mold.

The moon sank into the pines.

Waves of blackness swept over him, but he didn’t fall: he was back in his sleeping bag, and then he was home in bed, but there was something, something squishing, and why did his arm hurt so much? Foulness. Squishing?

A wet slithering moved along the outside wall.

He opened his eyes.

He was peering through the door opening when it came under the wall behind him. Powerful arms went around him, gripping.

Hot and dripping at his back, it drooled on his cheek, pressing him. His own screams seemed to draw inward and penetrate his guts as his ears were torn away, and the smooth flesh at the back of his neck was assaulted by sharp teeth and rough tongue.

Tuesday, July 28

“We should keep the lights like this all the time.” Raising his voice above the siren shriek, Larry fumbled about in the half-light. “It seems to have a real good calming effect.”

“On you, maybe,” Athena said as she gazed down at a blood-streaked face. The child had finally stopped gulping and sobbing, had lapsed into a terrible, staring quiet. She checked the pulse. Very faint. When she let go of the wrist, a film of liquid remained on her fingertips. Slowly, she resumed helping Larry to bind the seeping redness.

Outside, the light failed, and inside the rig, one of the fluorescent tubes flickered.

“Did you see those tracks?” He wound bandages around the girl’s arm. “Boy, there must’ve been maybe eight, nine dogs, at least. You see the way her dog’s body was tore up? What probably happened was the wild ones went after her mutt, and the kid tried to save it and got in the middle. Was that about what happened, sweetheart?” The girl just stared up at him, and by the time her mouth began to move, he had already turned away. “You think that sounds right, ’Thena?”

She shrugged, dropping a roll of bandages.

Everything she did today was off the beat, he noticed, watching her grope around on the floor. He supposed it had something to do with the injured child, though he sure wouldn’t have figured her for that type.

She stood up, looking pale and sweaty. “The wounds aren’t too bad,” she muttered. “She’ll need stitches.” One arm was chewed, though not deeply, but the torn flap of the cheek would probably leave a scar. She found herself staring at the velvet blood that spotted the floor around the litter. “There’s worse things than scars.”

“How’s it going back there?”

“Just a second, Doris.” Setting down the bandages, she met Larry’s eyes. “Can you do the rest of this yourself?” Her voice sounded unsteady, but the sympathy in his face only irritated her. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me today.”

“’Thena-honey?”

Siren faltering, the rig moved down the highway at a good clip.

“I said, just a second.”

“You know, if you wanted to, Mrs. Sims,” Doris suggested, “you could go back and sit with your daughter now.” Slumped in the seat beside her, the woman looked up, wordlessly pathetic as Athena approached. She stood, absently smoothing her shapeless and wrinkled dress, then wobbled with tiny steps toward the rear.

“She’s a prize.”

“You don’t know the half of it, kid. Least she’s quiet now.” Doris spoke softly. “You heard all that screaming a while back? Halfway to the highway, the stupid bitch wants me to turn around.”

“Some people shouldn’t be allowed to have kids.” With an angry sigh, Athena plopped down into the seat. Behind them, the woman’s weepy mumbles drowned out Larry’s low-voiced reassurances.

“You look tired.”

“I’m fine.” She peered through the window into the gathering darkness.

Doris raised an eyebrow. So something had finally gotten to her, she thought. It didn’t take much to figure out what—the kid had to be about the right age. “So how’s Matty doing?”

Her voice was ice. “Matthew’s as well as can be expected.”

Shaking her head, Doris returned her full attention to the road.

“I’m sorry,” Athena said after a long moment. “I didn’t mean to snap at you.”

“I understand, honey.” She nodded toward the rear. “This woman—what makes it almost comical is I had her in here once before. She has another kid that got hurt a couple months ago. She carried on just the same as now. Take him to the hospital. Don’t take him to the hospital.”

“People don’t learn from the past. They live in it.” Her eyes never wavered from the window. “Doris, would you do me a favor? Are you going to the diner to night? If you see Barry, would you tell him I had to go home?”

“Sure thing. Listen, honey, why don’t you take it easy for a couple days? I’ll cover for you. The leg bothering you? I’m telling you, the way you been pushing yourself…”

Athena clenched both hands into tight fists and held them in her lap.

Despairing of ever learning to keep her mouth shut, Doris turned down the high beams and drove quietly a moment. Then something occurred to her. “Matty was bit by a dog once, wasn’t he?”

Finally alone, Athena drove like a madwoman.
What’s wrong with me?
Everyone had noticed, she felt sure. She wondered why she’d become so agitated, couldn’t even understand her own decision not to meet Barry. She hadn’t been home this early in months.
Too early to go right to bed.

Through the dark blue lens of the sky, the stars looked enormous. No traffic to night. Ahead, a few red taillights, small and faraway, kept distant company, smugly hurrying home.
Back to
the city, probably. Home from the shore.
For one aching moment, she longed to be going with them.
They don’t even know I’m
here.
Her headlights flashed off a discarded beer can.
They drive
through the wilderness and don’t realize it.
It seemed she’d almost spoken aloud, and her mother’s face rose in her mind.
Me, my
whole life, I don’t exist for them.
She gripped the wheel tighter—it grew slippery with sweat.

She reached her turnoff. At the mouth of the dirt road, the night seemed to thicken. Tree shapes flowed on either side, and she imagined herself to be piloting a one-woman submarine. Headlights sank only a little ways, twin bars of cold white, swirling across thick bracken.

Her house stood solid, an ugly thing in the night, but bright points leaked through a hundred chinks in the lower story.
Pamela’s still here.
Quickly, she suppressed the wave of gratitude.