by R. K. Syrus
Elahaj had other stories too. Ones about warlords and tribal gangs and all the stuff he’d endured because he’d stayed put there. It all made Shay grateful to his brother and his parents. Most times Shay Bryan tried to do right and live by the gentler parts of Scripture.
Sometimes, though, the Old Testament parts suited a situation. Heck, there was even a biblical time that might have suited him even better. Suited him for the way he was, for how people looked at him.
Shetani Zeru Bryan seemed out of place in a world where dawn could be counted on. Sometimes he imagined himself more fitted to a time before light was invented, when everything was “formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep.” If that was the way it was now, then who’d be running, and who’d be chasing?
Wind blew down the hill. The old building creaked. Gusts came through gaps in the wood slats. The old place echoed with low, moaning flute noises. It was a pipe organ made out of the chapel’s dry hollow bones.
Outside, the moon got clouded over. The last silver light trickling through the cracks in the walls extinguished. This was not a night to do right. This was a time for actions that would not bear the bright light of sunshine any better than his pale albino skin.
He knelt in front of where the cross used to hang. He reached into the pit. Someone had made a fire out of the wood from the pews. Toothpick-thin bits of bones and scraggly wing feathers were in the ash. Some hobo had had a feast. Shay needed the charcoal. The zeru needed the soot to cover his face, hands, and hair. He did that. He bathed his hands and head in the remains of a dead fire.
The Moon was hidden. He’d be nearly invisible. With darkened hands, he tore loose a banister railing. Hard weathered and milled at the end to fit his grip, it was a better club than he’d find in the woods.
He followed the road over the tracks to the mine. It was the fastest way to get close to Taddy and his posse. Moving toward them took less time than running away. Cones of light jiggled this way and that. A dozen sneakers crunched gravel.
Their flashlights were Shay’s main problem. These artificial lights were also his enemy’s main weakness. They had only three.
“Tad!” Jeep said. “My batteries’re dead.”
Then they had only two. Two small lights defended the bullies from the pitch blackness that surrounded them. The darkness he would use to destroy them.
He crept closer.
“My feet hurt,” complained another. That guy must be low man in the gang. He had been put to hauling around the leg-hold trap and chain while they looked for a juicy ankle to spring it on. His juicy ankle.
“That bone-white bastard’s long gone.”
Closer than you think.
Shay gripped the timber. His legs coiled under him, ready to spring out. Taddy had the tactical Maglite. First thing to do was knock that out of the bully’s hands and break it. The other guy just had a small LED bike light. They wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything that was happening. Not with the moon gone.
Shay only had a vague plan of what to do after his tormentors were helpless. Maybe he’d trip Taddy and keep conking him on his arms and gut until he told the others to give up. Shay could make them take their pants off and walk back into town bare assed or displaying their skid-marked undies.
The group was moving away from the tree line where he was hiding. If he was going to do something, it had to be now. Shay gathered his breath and tried to think of some horrific wild-beast noise to make as he charged. One like a lion or tiger would make leaping into a herd of antelope. One that would freeze their minds and feet for the short time it would take to—
“Shut it,” Taddy said in kind of a high voice. “My dad’s texting me.”
The humongous teenager wheezed nervously as he fiddled with his phone.
“Crap, crap, crap,” he said. “My brother’sh out past his home time.”
“He can take care of hisself. Ethan’s near eight years old.”
“I ain’t where I said I’d be. Crap.”
The bully sounded fretful. Shay had never seen Taddy’s daddy. Rumor was he raised pit bulls outside the county line. Rumor of that rumor was he ran a roving dog fighting club. Further elaborations had it that if the dogs weren’t fighting hard enough, Mr. Eddington would get bust-out mad. He’d climb into the pit wearing only a metal groin guard (to keep his man parts from being chewed off) and brass knuckles with long spikes on them. With those he’d finish off both canine contestants.
Since there was no video evidence, skeptics of these stories remained. However, in Shay’s estimation, people often tried to live up to their hear-tell reputations. Mr. Eddington was probably not someone you wanted to get punished by.
Shay watched as Taddy’s hand rubbed a section of blubber poking out from his shirt. There was a weird scar on the small of his back. It looked like burns shaped like letters.
“Gotta go.”
His nemesis waddled away. He led his posse right quick down the train tracks, straight for the lights of town.
“NONE of you better say a WORD of where we was or WHAT we was doin’,” Taddy threatened easily, “or you’ll WISH you looked as good as that football jackassh when I got through tenderizing him.”
That left Shay out of sorts.
He had a fine stick and no one to beat on. He was covered in charcoal and was shivering from unspent anger and the creeping cold of night. More chill than that was the realization of what he’d done to his clothes.
How was he going to explain his state to his parents? He was no tattler, and this was not the time to start. Thing was, it wasn’t like they rolled him in tar. The gang hadn’t done this. He did this to himself. He sat down and felt as low as he would have chained to a tree with the jaws of a leg trap biting into his ankle.
It was no use trying to wash up. The last thing he’d thought about when he applied his crappy fake camo paint was ruining his clothes. They were new from Bonworthy’s department store. They cost his adoptive parents’ hard-earned money. Now they were ruined. It was not enough the Bryans had rescued him from certain death and dismemberment. Now they’d wish they just left him where they found him: where he was born.
He’d screwed everything up by running to the woods in the first place. He knew the Reidt Mine road was a dead end. He should have just ducked into the gas station until Taddy lost interest.
That would have been smartest. But he hadn’t wanted to be the white-faced weirdo lurking around the convenience store asking for help.
He threw his club in the bushes and moved warily down the gravel road. He kept low in case any of Taddy’s guys looked back.
With the moon barely a glow behind thick clouds, he could see better than when there was more light. That was another way he was the opposite of normal.
To one side of the trail was a little loop snare. Nearby was some pee. Shay could see stuff that was normally only visible when you shined black light on it. The experts who tested him were still working on how he did that. This pee didn’t seem like it was from a scared animal. It was neatly deposited, not splattered. It smelled strong, even to his completely ordinary nose. He moved along.
His ears were normal and average too. That was why it took him a few steps past the faint sound to think about what it might be. Only when it stopped, only by its absence from between the sounds of stiff leaves shivering in the wind, did he realize what he’d heard. Coming from the dark of the woods, Shay could hear a faint weeping.
Shay stopped.
Sound could be awfully tricky in the wild. You’d hear something once. Could be miles away, from inside a cabin somewhere, or just your mind playing tricks.
“Harmmm.”
Where from?
He thought about all the animal sounds he knew. It matched none. Maybe something was caught in one of the traps scattered round.
He angled his head this way and that.
“HARmmm.”
Best guess led off the trail. He went.
He saw paw
tracks. The newer ones were small. Bigger, older ones were made by a pig, maybe. The ground only got freshly disturbed when his clumsy feet in high-top runners snapped twigs and sent puffs of mossy stuff flying. Yet there was a faint heat trail.
Things warmer than their surroundings gave off infrared rays. Those he could see as indistinct blobs until they cooled to the temperature of the rest of the trail.
Moving ahead, he nearly had to crawl because of overhanging branches. He stopped himself short of a gap in the ground. It was a smooth-sided crevice, big enough to take in a wild pig. It was small enough on top so’s you could cover it over with thin branches.
The hole was chiseled into rock. It had to be an air shaft cut upward from the old mine. It had been turned into a deadfall trap. Something was caught in it.
He could hear breathing. The stone pit itself seemed to be inhaling and exhaling.
Wary of getting his face bit or clawed by a wild creature desperate to escape, he peered over the edge. What was in there was not thrashing. It looked all busted up and bloody. Bones poked white and sharp though a nylon jacket and junior-sized cargo pants.
About six feet down in the slimy pit lay Taddy’s little brother, Ethan Eddington.
• • •
Ethan moaned. The younger boy opened his eyes weakly from inside the pit. He looked like he was going to have a fear fit, which would send any blood remaining in him squirting out like a stepped-on packet of ketchup.
“Gwawwww!”
Shay suddenly realized what he must look like peering over the rim of the deadfall trap. Shay’s first challenge was assuring Ethan that, brimstone-soot-covered face and glowing red eyes notwithstanding, he was no demon from Hades come to claim Ethan’s soul for all the mischief he’d done in his eight sin-filled years on earth.
“Hang on, kid. Don’t do nothing,” Shay said. The sound of his non-demonic voice seemed to settle Ethan down. “I gotta figure this.”
The airshaft went down several feet. At about six feet, it was covered securely by canvas and wood. This was a depth most wild things could not escape, but it was in easy reach of a hunting spear.
Shay was torn between trying to do what he could right there or calling for somebody to come. There was one evasive signal bar on his phone.
The alternative way would mean trusting that the trap platform would hold their combined weight. There was no way the kid could climb up. Not with injuries too gruesome to look at closely.
Would Ethan Eddington even live until recue came? What if he left to search for a better signal and the poor little fellow died, alone, in a gross slimy pit? Shay hadn’t a clue what the right thing to do was.
Then Ethan jumped to his feet.
“Hey!” Shay said. “Be still. Your arms and legs is all busted up.”
“No they ain’t!” Ethan retorted.
He shook critter bones off his clothes. He bounded on the canvas, oblivious to the fact it was the nation’s most dangerous trampoline.
“I just hit my nose tryin’ to get out,” Ethan explained. “Would you help me, sir?”
Shay could not ever recall being called sir. It was kinda cool.
Ethan was on a much healthier diet than his sibling. Lifting him out was easy. After checking him over and finding only a few scrapes, they started back to town.
“How’d you get in that hole?”
“I dunno.”
“What was you doing out here?”
“Following after Taddy.” Ethan looked at him. “Why are you all sooty?”
“Escapin’ from Taddy.”
“Yeah,” the smaller boy said sagely, “I knows all about that.”
In front of the Eddingtons’ house, a local deputy slouched on the hood of a cop car, so Shay led Ethan up the back way. He didn’t want any fuss.
Shay stayed to watch as the kid crept around the veranda and prepared to surprise everyone by being alive and completely free of bites from bears or rattlesnakes. While walking, they had formulated and rehearsed the small boy’s story. Ethan would pretend to have forgotten the time and fallen asleep in some hidey hole. That was the plan.
That strategy got squished by a humongous ass crack pushing open the back screen door.
“What the…?”
Either because of fear of his father’s wrath or because he felt genuinely guilty for his brother going missing while he was supposed to be watching him, Taddy was plainly mortified and in personal agony. He reacted predictably.
“You bleached-out sumbitch. You kidnapped him!” he hissed and reached to grab rusty garden shears next to the trash bin.
Before Taddy could start pruning albino body parts, Ethan and Shay talked reason into the mutated potato head of the rotund maniac. After some hushed discussion, it was decided Ethan would go in the house while the older boys collaborated on a story.
That joint effort began with Shetani Zeru Bryan’s fist hitting Taddy on the good side of his face. The sound was like a rolling pin hitting a tough steak. Besides finding Ethan and getting him out of that hole, it was the most satisfying thing about that evening.
“I don’t know why God made me this way,” Shay said, leaning over the beached whale with a bloody nose. “But I do know why He gave these here fists. And they gots as many sermons in ’em as you need to learn some respect and decency into your thick skull.”
Cries of joy and general adult hubbub came from the house.
“Now get up and just nod when I say something.”
“But… my mnose…”
“Do I have to think of everything?” Shay said, surprising himself with his alibi-making abilities. “You got hit by a branch goin’ to check the tree fort you thought Ethan might be in. Right?”
Taddy’s nostril dribbled blood on his T-shirt. It was from the local Dumpty Burger and commemorated his proudest achievement:
1,000 GOBBLED
All-Star Burger Eater
Taddy nodded.
“Then you’ll do just like that when I say you and I met on the road. Then I remembered the other place I’d seen Ethan sometimes. After that, I went to check it out for you because that’s what neighbors in this town do.”
That plan went pretty much as advertised. There was no real evidence to send the minds of the sheriff or any of the adults in any other direction. Ethan could not recall exactly how he got into the deadfall trap hole.
For a spell, there was pitchfork-and-torches talk about rounding up vagrants living in the woods. That died down when it was pointed out that had the air shaft not been slung with scavenged canvas, the drop would have been hundreds of feet. They resolved to write a stern letter about the matter to the Reidt Mining Company, which had an address in Delaware.
A few days after the story was in the local paper, the Bryans got a call from the Army. A real, live Green Beret colonel wanted to give Shay an award for resourcefulness and bravery.
That happened at the JROTC meeting hall the following month. He’d never thought of the military as any kind of career option. It just seemed too normal.
“As long as you pass the physical, we’re happy to have you,” the colonel assured him. The Army officer was older but still looked like he could headbutt his way through a brick wall. “I’ll have the JROTC exec drop by your house with all the information.”
They shook hands. The Army officer checked him over.
“Son, they tell me you can see in the dark, like night vision that never runs out of batteries. No foolin’?”
He confirmed the absence of hogwash.
“Well. Ain’t that somethin’?”
The colonel looked impressed. With him.
• • •
Years later, Bryan reached up to hang a stack of clothes on a bar in the hallway. He winced. Fresh stitches closed a cut on his arm. The uniforms and shirts he’d just brought in from the dry cleaner nearly slid to the floor.
It would be a shame to tear these stitches, he thought. They were really neat, artistic almost. The new hotshot Army
surgeon assured him he would have no scarring. Nagging frustration would be the only memento of his latest attempt to break the Army post’s obstacle course record.
Before he had time to take off his shoes, he was dispatched again into the wet falling snow on an urgent mission.
“We set a place for her,” his mom said through the lusciously scented steam billowing from the kitchen door. “So no one’s eating until she’s here.”
Private Bryan, E-1, considered the parameters of his assignment. Most importantly, if there was any leeway in the directive that no one eat Christmas dinner until Cousin Glantzer was at table. Maybe just getting her into the guest bathroom (or if she was really crusty, into the garage) would be sufficient. Letting her clean up enough to actually be decent to sit at the table might take longer than fetching her.
He decided to let Kitchen Command worry about details. His main concern was not sliding off the road. It had been decked out with Fayetteville’s small annual ration of snow, which had all come down at once.
He drove past his old high school. The buildings were quiet and frosted white. Dang place looked a lot smaller than he remembered it.
Little dripping icicles hung from the sign:
CAPE FEAR
HIGH SCHOOL
WELCOMES YOU.
WE’RE THE HOME OF THE COLTS!
At the end of a dirt road, he slid the truck to a stop. After taking a rough bearing, he trudged out.
A few hundred yards in, he came across a bait-stick snare. Near the contraption, a dollop of yellow pee had been carefully poured in the snow. It reminded Bryan of something.
It took the whole walk to Glantzer’s hootch to figure out what it was. A few threads of past memories he hadn’t really noticed before now seemed loose. He tugged on them mentally. Things he hadn’t wondered about in years fell into place. They assumed a more devious shape.
“You were there,” he told the lady hermit.
Behind Glantzer, a pot boiled, and steam was coming out from her canvas tent. The smell was anything but appetizing and made Bryan gag a little.
