The Answers Are In The Forest

by Katie Kaleski

  “Your mom?” Rusck asked, raising his eyebrows. Wincing, he rubbed his temple with his hand.

  “You’re not okay, are you?”

  “Not really,” he said. “I’m pretty sure that’s the least of our concerns. What about your mom?”

  “She’s the one.”

  “The one?”

  I gave Rusck a very quick rundown of everything.

  “Holy crap, we have to get out of here,” Rusck said.

  I started for the front door, and Rusck held out his arm to stop me.

  “Last time you went first, you got hit in the head with a baseball bat. It’s my turn to chance it,” I said, pushing his arm down. He didn’t argue, and I opened the door a crack and peered outside. I didn’t see much, just some trees, the small clearing in front of the shack, and the back of my mom’s car, but no Mom.

  I glanced back at Rusck and Olive. “I don’t see my mom. She’s got to be here somewhere, but I think if I’m really quick, I can hotwire the car, and maybe we can get away?”

  “You sound unsure,” Olive said. “What if we made a run for it?”

  “We’ll try that after the car thing, okay?”

  “Okay,” Olive said softly.

  I opened the door, and the three of us cautiously stepped out of the shack. I ran over to the car and tried the handle. Of course, she locked it, so I pulled out my pick set, and then someone tapped me on the shoulder. Assuming it was Rusck or Olive, I turned. I wasn’t met by a friendly face. Instead, my mom screaming and a sharp pain in the chest greeted me. My mom stood near with a smirk on her face, her eyes gleaming with excitement.

  I looked down at my chest where some sort of garden tool protruded, a three-pronged rake of some sort. I started to fall to my knees, but she caught me under the armpits and stood me up. She leaned me back against the car, holding me in place with one of her hands, pressing the garden tool further into my chest. I tried to grab at her hand, while pain shot through me. “Why?” I croaked out. It was getting hard to breathe.

  Instead of answering me, she looked over at Rusck and Olive, who froze in terror. “If you move,” she told them, “I will make her death very painful and then do the same to the two of you.”

  “Answer your daughter,” Rusck said. “Why? Why do you have to harm her? Why did you try to kill my brother, and why do you have to kill Olive?”

  “Oh, my boy,” my mom laughed, “you know so little, that idiot brother of yours. He should’ve stayed dead. He’s next on my list.”

  “Why so many at once?”

  “It’s been building for a long time. When my I saw my dad kill that girl back in seventy-eight, there was so much blood. I wasn’t supposed to be in the basement. I slipped in the blood. Got it all over my hands and legs, and my dad locked me in the bedroom closet.”

  “You drew those pictures,” I said in a weak voice.

  “I loved the blood dripping from my hands, and when that blood dried up, I used my own,” she said, pressing on the garden tool in my chest. “But I had to wait. He thought I forgot, but twenty years later, the urge to kill crawled and waited inside me, so I asked him if I could help, and now I don’t have my father telling me I can’t. That he wanted me to be a good girl.”

  “Mom,” I squeaked, “why did your dad kill your mom?”

  “She somehow knew, said my dad was sick, that he needed help, so he burned the house down while she was asleep. He made sure I was safe, though. Threw some body from the graveyard in the house or something, so everybody thought I was dead when I was really just living across town with my dad. He never let me leave the house until high school, where I had a cover story. My dad was so stuck in his routine—tradition, he called it—but I’m making my own now.”

  “What kind of tradition is murdering children?” Rusck asked, slowly inching forward.

  My mom seemed too wrapped up in her story to notice his incremental movements. “I’m showing him, the world, that I can be just as good as him, better. And that thrill I got when I killed him, I knew I needed more.”

  I coughed, and tears rolled down my face. Dear god, my mom was a monster. She turned toward me, taking her focus off Rusck and Olive, and out the corner of my eye I saw Rusck motioning to Olive with his head. She picked up on it and slowly started for the trees.

  “Is my story too sad for you?” she asked with a smile across her face. “All those poor, dead children. At first, when I moved you here, it was just going to be someone local. I tried to warn you, but now I’ll have more fun.”

  “You. Tried. To. Frame. Rusck,” I said between breaths.

  “I had to throw you off my trail somehow.”

  Rusck ran toward my mom, but she was prepared and quick. She reached up on the car roof and pulled down an axe. With one hand still on me, she turned in Rusck’s direction and threw the axe. It flipped and flew through the air, landing in the middle of Rusck’s left thigh. He let out a cry and fell to the ground.

  “You kids just don’t listen,” my mom said while watching Rusck wriggle and writhe on the ground, holding onto his thigh.

  I gasped for air. She was going to kill every single one of us and enjoy it. And before long, we’d become known as the three missing teens.

  “What about you, Olive?” my mom asked, looking around, trying to see where she went. I rolled my head to the left and saw somebody coming in the distance, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t Olive. My mom also caught sight of whomever it was that now ran toward us, and she let go of the gardening tool in my chest. My body wanted to collapse, but I couldn’t let it go without trying to take down my mom. I kicked out my right leg and got her in the knee, but I didn’t have too much oomph behind it.

  She refocused her attention on me. She reached out and put one hand on my chest and the other on the gardening tool. With a couple of hard yanks, she pulled it out, and the trickle of blood that came out of my chest turned into small streams, making three large, dark red circles on my shirt.

  “What the…?” she said under her breath, letting go of me.

  I dropped to my knees and looked at the scene before us. Olive was gone. She probably ran for help. Rusck was on his hands and knees, trying to crawl to me with his injured leg dragging behind him. And then, running full speed at us, while screaming, was Creed.

  I had to squeeze my eyes shut and open them again, convinced I was hallucinating, but after a second look, it certainly was him wearing a beanie and his glasses and a snarl on his face, and he ran in our direction. After that, it was like everything happened in slow motion.

  I saw my mom bend down over me, still holding the gardening tool, and she swung her arm back and plunged the tool right into my stomach, ripped it out, and plunged it in again. She sneered at me then took long, slow strides toward Creed.

  I fell forward and watched the rest from the ground on my stomach, gasping for air. Rusck almost made his way to me, a pained grimace on his face. And then Creed, barely slowing down, picking up the axe Rusck pulled from his thigh and discarded to the side. With the axe raised high, Creed rushed toward my mom, and she rushed toward him holding her gun.

  And somebody else came running up. My brother with his sandy hair and freckled face. My mom made this awful screeching sound, and she lifted her shotgun and aimed it right at Creed. A shot rang out, but it didn’t come from her. My brother Gerald held a smoking gun. My mom dropped to the ground.

  Gerald took the axe from Creed, and the two of them ran over to us.

  Rusck was already by my side. He put his hand on my cheek. “Don’t leave me,” he whispered. He propped himself up on an elbow and stared into the woods. I turned my head to see what he looked at. Standing off in the trees were Donna, Liesel, Jacob, Sophie, Timothy, Rebecca, and Kevin. We all stared at each other for a moment. A few of them held slight smiles. Kevin held out his hand, and Donna ran up and took it while holding her doll in her other hand. Kevin waved goodbye, and they all turned and walked off into the forest. Gerald stood there with his mouth hangi
ng wide open.

  “Bye, Jacob,” Creed whispered.

  A boy about thirteen with dark brown skin and a crown of curls stopped as the others walked off. He waved at Creed, turned, and ran into the woods.

  Since they were all saying goodbye, I had a feeling I wasn’t going where they were going, because otherwise, I would’ve been out there with them, so I felt it was safe for me to close my eyes and drift off.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “You kids be good,” Gerald said, giving me a kiss on the forehead.

  “Kids?” I said. “You’re only three years older than me.”

  “But you’re still teenagers, kids, whereas I’m twenty, an adult. And I have to go to work, so as I said, be good.”

  “Bye,” Rusck and I both said.

  As soon as my brother left and I started snuggling into Rusck’s side, someone knocked at the front door. I got up to get it. “Hi, Olive. Hi, Sarah,” I said, letting them in.

  “Are we ordering pizza? I think I need some pizza,” Olive said with a smile. “Hey, you guys. Hi, Creed.”

  “Hi,” Creed said softly from the corner of the couch. He sat up straight and had his hands clasped tightly together in his lap. As he told us, it would still be a long while before he felt comfortable going anywhere. But at least he would sometimes come over with Rusck, which was pretty huge for him.

  “It’s good to see you,” Olive said, giving Creed a smile.

  “Pizza’s on the way.”

  Olive threw herself into the armchair near the couch, and Sarah wriggled in next to her. She pointed a finger between Rusck and me. I scratched the side of my nose and sat up. The two of us became pretty inseparable, but we had yet to say out loud that we were going out or anything, just the occasional touch or cuddle

  “How you doing, Rusck?” Olive asked, tossing the pillow back at me. “How’s the leg?”

  “Doing all right, I guess,” Rusck said with a shrug then tossed out a smile.

  After having an axe thrown into his thigh, he suffered some significant muscle damage. He finally was able to get rid of his leg brace, but he had a pretty serious limp going on.

  As for myself, I came out of the whole ordeal with some unglamorous digestion issues from some good old severed intestines, that whole garden tool to the gut thing, and when I got rushed to the hospital, I also had a collapsed lung from the tool piercing it. I had a lot of internal bleeding, but luckily, she just missed my heart. We all came so close to dying.

  And it was while I was in the hospital that I asked my brother how he and Creed found us, and why he was even there. He explained that he got released early from prison, on account of good behavior and overcrowding. He had a friend drive him to our house because he wanted to surprise me. Well, he was the one who ended up getting the surprise. There were cops everywhere, a body in the driveway, and reports on a search for the suspects that included a mother and daughter.

  Since he was just released from prison, he didn’t feel too secure in sticking around, so he was going to have his friend take him up to our mom’s work. It was on the way there when they drove past the almost invisible forest road my mom took us down. Gerald had his friend stop because he saw two teenage boys standing by the side of the road. The younger one began walking into the woods, and the older one told him to hurry. They needed help.

  Gerald had his friend wait for him, and he went with Creed, the older of the two boys, and along the way into the forest, they ran across Olive. While Creed went in ahead, Gerald ran back to the truck to grab his friend’s gun from the glove box and had his friend stay with the car and call for help.

  “So you and Gerald are really staying in town?” Olive asked me.

  “Yep,” I said. Gerald and I went back and forth on it for a while. I could have easily said we should leave and forget the whole thing ever happened, but I didn’t want to forget because then I’d forget about Rusck, Olive, Creed, Kevin, Donna, and all the other kids. I told Gerald we could stay in town until I at least finished high school, and then we could go from there. It wasn’t always the most comfortable being out in public, or at school, but hell, I’d had to deal with way worse things.

  “Oh, do you guys want to go outside? I almost forgot, in a bit, there’s supposed to be a meteor shower,” Olive said with a smile. It was nice seeing her smile. Rusck and Creed too. We all had a bumpy road to get to where we were, sitting there, together in my front room, but we were all going to be okay.

  What helped me along was that, in the end, Donna, Jacob, Liesel, Sophie, Timothy, Rebecca, and Kevin were all able to move on. The bodies of the children were recovered and given proper resting places. The body of Maximus Friedman was also found. The police found him buried not too far behind the house my mom and I lived in. The house that now sat empty and probably would until somebody tore it down. I wouldn’t even go anywhere near it. I had this strange feeling my mom’s spirit still resided there.

  I got up off the couch and walked to the patio doors, pulling the curtains aside and looking up at the moon. The sky was beautifully clear. Perfect for a meteor shower. Grass stretched out to the horizon beyond our patio. The apartment complex Gerald and I lived in backed up to a few empty acres of land that used to be a farm.

  I saw an animal coming across the grass toward me. I couldn’t tell what kind of animal it was at first, but as it got closer, I saw it was a deer, and there was something seriously wrong with its gait.

  “Um, you know what?” I said, dropping the curtain. “Let’s just stay in and watch movies and eat pizza.” I joined Rusck and Creed back on the couch. Creed tilted his head and looked at me, and I shook my head in response. Turning on the TV, I pretended I didn’t see the deer, but I knew it would be back the next evening.

  Acknowledgements

  First, I want to thank my family for all of their support. You guys are the best.

  Thanks to Limitless Publishing for taking on my little book. I’m so happy it found a home there.

  Thank you to my writing squad. I’m sure eventually you all will get tired of my many questions about commas.

  To my Twitter #booklove2019 pals. So maybe my hashtag didn’t take off, but I’m still fond of our itty-bitty group.

  And thanks to John who has to put up with listening to my two-hour phone conversations with his wife.

  About the Author

  Katie Kaleski has started down many career paths and held many jobs—indie craft store clerk, pizza maker, photo developer, shoe salesperson and cashier, dental assistant in the army, daycare teacher, student teacher—but her favorite one by far is being a writer.

  She’s originally from Chicago, so she says things like pop, gym shoes, and front room. Her favorite food group is sugar, and she loves writing young adult novels.

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  Website:

  https://katiekaleski.com/

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