Unstoppable Moses

by Author Tyler James Smith

  “Think, you fucking asshole.”

  Nothing but the faraway voices and the hum of the light spinning around. Faraway voices and green light. Nothing else. Nothing but green light bouncing off the snow and faraway voices looking for Lump, who wandered off to save a hurt and scared baby deer named Harriet Tubman.

  I went to dig my fingers into my palms again but stopped.

  “No fucking way,” I said, digging the code sheet out of my pocket. “You fucking idiot, no way.” I pulled her last scribble out, the one that said “Up down equal. How many X.” It wasn’t a note. I read the first code. The first number in the sequence told you whether to count up, down, or stay equal—zero to four meant down, five meant equal, six to nine meant up. The second number was how many, whether up or down. The last was where to start. It was just a stupid roundabout number to letter cypher.

  112 518 447 9826 55 3119 421

  A R C H E R Y

  I read the next one, the one we’d found at the archery range:

  6225 59 7315 56 2211 11318 91226 32226

  A I R F I E L D

  Under each of the coded numbers on the FOUND poster, I wrote the corresponding letter.

  B

  I

  G

  N

  E

  S

  T

  I stood up fast enough to make my head swim and ran back into the guardhouse, skittering to a crouching stop in front of the hole. Off in the distance, sitting at the top of the tree line, there was a huge brown-and-black nest.

  Below it, halfway between me and the trees, there was a strange puddle of light. I blinked and the box was behind me; I blinked and I was at the strange puddle of light that wasn’t light at all but a dirty, discarded LOST poster.

  A hundred yards away there was an orange square stuck to a low pine branch, just visible in the fading light.

  As I ran, so did the nighttime wind; it picked up and numbed my hands and face. I shoved the FOUND poster in my pocket and looked for the next one.

  I yelled her name and I swear, for just a second, the world listened. The wind went quiet and I could almost see the words swelling and pushing through the forest, demanding to be heard and felt but, more than that, demanding color into the bleak expanse.

  The next one was sticking out of a log, lower than the rest. I followed its trajectory.

  “Lump!” I said.

  “Lump!” I said.

  “Lump!

  “Where are you?

  “Please.

  “Please, Lump, where are you?”

  I looked and I looked and I looked and I was afraid to move too far in any direction because moving meant risking the already thin and fading cosmic radio signal. Moving meant risking the footing in the avalanche; the grip on the orange ring while the ship plummets under the cold water.

  I closed my eyes and turned my head to the side and I focused on hearing everything in the world because she had to be in that everything somewhere.

  The wind rattling the trees; my breath coming out hot and sharp; my heart; the dead leaves under my feet; crying.

  A whimper; soft and young and a million miles away, but a living whimper.

  “Lump?”

  The sound ignited my feet and I ran into the wind, following the noise.

  “Lump!”

  The wind answered and I shook my head like it would shut the world up. I listened. And I listened. And I heard it.

  I moved.

  The slice of color stuck in the low branches of the tree made it seem like part of the sunset had caught itself on the tree’s outstretched fingers. The neon-pink piece of paper with the drawing of the deer flapped against the breeze. This one was FOUND.

  “Lump! Where are you? Lump! It’s okay, I’m here!”

  I grabbed the flyer and the adrenaline turned my eyes into radar, into sonar, into infrared, X-ray. I demanded the color flyers into my vision. I told the stars that were hiding themselves away behind the pinks and reds and golds that I needed the color here. Here. Not there.

  Twenty yards away, half in the dirty snow and torn up, was the next one. One of the original LOST flyers.

  It was covered in mud but the orange color on it blasted defiantly out from the ground. The crying was louder, closer, and it sounded sick.

  “Lump!”

  And I knew.

  I knew where she was.

  Thirty feet away I could see an incline that went up six or seven feet and was covered by a felled spruce that made for a makeshift shelter and I knew she was in it because there was no other cover for a hundred yards and I could hear her. I dodged around the crater left by the ripped-up base of the tree and slid down.

  She was curled up atop the spiral center of a muddy galaxy of bruise-colored LOST and FOUND flyers. I locked my eyes on hers. I couldn’t see her coat anywhere and her ears were whitish blue because her hat was somewhere else altogether.

  “Lump,” I said, edging in under the branches. “Where’s your coat?” Her right hand was wrapped snug around her body mid-hug, but the other one was stretched palm-out. Her Amelia Earhart shirt was muddy and torn but you could still see the image of the famous pilot waving to an unseen crowd.

  Her eyes didn’t follow mine as I inched closer.

  “Lump? Lump?” My coat kept snagging on the branches of the tree. Every time I tried to reach in and grab her hand, my coat would catch and I’d be pulled back. “Fuck—I mean—sorry—come on,” I said pulling my jacket off. “It’s okay, Lump, I’m here. I’m right here.”

  I started talking under my breath so she couldn’t hear me:

  “Please, fucking goddammit, please be okay.

  “I’m coming, Lump. Hey, listen: say something, okay?”

  I couldn’t get my stupid goddamn coat off because my hands didn’t want to work the way I needed them to. When I finally had ripped my coat off to the waist, I heard the crying again.

  It was the single sweetest sound I have ever heard.

  I threw myself into the tangle of sharp branches, wedging through the ones thin enough to wedge through and trailing my coat behind me.

  Her color was off—blue in all the places you expect someone to be blue when they’re supposed to be pink—but the crying was there, just past the veil of green pine.

  She cried again and I was made of light and air and hope; I was the white knight, the survivor climbing from the wreck to save the other passengers.

  But her lips were wrong.

  The cry lingered, tapering off into an almost buzzing sound, and her lips didn’t move to the sound. Like her audio was off.

  “Lump?” I said.

  I broke through and as she filled my vision I saw her coat. It was next to her, not on her shoulders or her arms or on her back, but next to her wrapped around the crying deer with a twisted, bloody leg. The deer made a braying noise and nuzzled closer to the girl, licking at the Band-Aids on her cheek and ear.

  “Lump? You didn’t give your—”

  Her eyes were glass.

  Her lips were purple blue.

  “No. No. Fucking no—what were you thinking?” I said, pulling her toward me and throwing my coat over her. Her shoulders were sharp even under my puffy coat, but I rubbed my hands up and down and up and down like I was trying to start a fire.

  I felt for a pulse.

  “Lump: listen to me: come on now.”

  I pulled my coat back and laid my hands across her chest, pumping them up and down. I listened for breath.

  Chest compressions.

  Listening.

  Chest compressions.

  Listening.

  I pinched her nose and tilted her head back to open her airway and breathed my air into her lungs to keep oxygenated blood flowing into her brain and vital organs. I compressed her chest less than two inches because of her age and at a rate of one hundred compressions per minute.

  Again.

  And again.

  You repeat.

  You repeat.

&nb
sp; Then you start yelling. Yelling for someone to please for Christ’s sake please help because you found her.

  And you don’t think anyone hears you.

  And the baby deer bleats against her because you’re screaming for help.

  And you sit back because if you keep pressing her chest plate down you know you’ll crush it.

  And you stare at her.

  You don’t cry.

  You don’t notice the rip in your shirt and scrapes beneath it.

  You don’t feel anything because everything is mute. You try to say something but the only thing you hear is the clicking in your mouth that has run out of saliva.

  Someone behind you is yelling that they found you. That they’re here.

  And, save for the single-tone whistle of wind through the trees, everything goes very quiet.

  FORTY-SIX: CHARLIE

  BUDDHA EXPANDS, AND BURSTS, and the officer fires a round into Charlie’s head and I watch the black-red dot appear above his eye and because I’m just a little bit behind him I feel pieces that belong inside of him land on me and I wipe my face with one hand because it’s a reflex but even as I’m doing it I think, Please don’t shoot me too I just need to clear my eyes. And then Charlie’s turning but it’s only because time feels like it’s gone slow and really he’s just falling but for a second he’s framed by the fire and the lights and I think he’s going to say something to me that makes everything make sense like it’s all just an elaborate Charlie joke and the police officer is in on it and the people at the bowling alley are in on it and everybody in the world except me is in on it but then the officer starts breaking down because even he knows that what just happened was the last thing in the world that was supposed to happen but he manages to radio in for backup before screaming at me to get back down with a voice that is all cracks and rubble and I don’t know what to do or what to say because already Charlie’s blood is starting to get cold on my face like it’s going to freeze in place like a mask like a shroud like a scarlet reminder like half my face is going to be a sheet of blood for the rest of my many many many years because I know I’m going to have a long life starting in this exact moment like I’m watching the violent birth of my new life as someone who was there when his cousin and best friend got shot in the brain and I’m always going to be that person and there’s no way I could ever not be that person because how can you possibly hope to change after something like that something where everything changes something where everything you know is just gone and you were directly involved and you know that you are going to have to look his parents in the eyes and tell them what happened and how they might tell you that they forgive you but the fact is that from that moment on and for every moment to come this is you forever and ever and it will follow you and it will drag you down and you will see it in all of your corners until you are old and gone.

  FORTY-SEVEN: WAVES

  WHEN SHE DIDN’T WAKE UP, I walked away.

  I walked toward her cabin because my feet took me in that direction and it seemed as good a place to go as any.

  I knocked on the cabin door even though I knew there was no one inside, and then I knocked again. There was no one: no Matty waiting in the cabin, no straggler campers hiding in the shadows. No one was going to answer the door—especially not Lump—so I opened it myself.

  There were no games planned, no itinerary that involved running through the fields and learning about ecosystems or making hand-dipped candles or learning archery. The students, all but one, would eat and go home. I didn’t go all the way in. I didn’t need to. Instead, I edged in just far enough to feel the warmth of the cabin.

  “Thank you, Lump,” I said.34

  Because I was thankful. In a stupid, sad way I was so thankful to her because somehow she’d reset my scales. Because somehow, even though she was just a little kid who hadn’t been afraid of the things she should have been afraid of, she helped me remember that my heart is a muscle and not a machine since machines don’t hurt the way mine did.

  Machines are numb, and this was the furthest thing from numb.

  I nodded to her ghost that I knew would follow me until I died and went to close the door but stopped because her shoes were still by the door. They were the shoes she had worn during the inside activities, not the boots she’d worn when she’d run off into the woods to save Harriet Tubman. They were in a small, straight line with the right shoe resting atop the left.

  And I was thankful. But when I saw her shoes resting like they were waiting for her feet, resting like lonely frozen waves, my knees folded and I squatted and cried into my hands.

  FORTY-EIGHT: ANIMALS

  SOMEONE SPRINTED PAST THE cabin.

  Then someone else.

  I looked up because why the fuck were people running? What was there to be that energetic about when a kid was dead? I dragged my hands along my cheeks and poked my head out of the door, ready to grab the next sprinty fucker I saw and yell in their face.

  And I went to; I saw the perfectly coiffed tour guide running toward me and I went to grab him but he grabbed my sleeve and started pulling me with him, and he said, “She woke up.”

  And I started crying again.

  FORTY-NINE: FUCK THAT …

  THE EMT WAS LOADING her into the ambulance and even though it was cold his sleeves were rolled up and he was sweating. I overheard somebody say that she’d been dead for three minutes.

  The side of her face was purple and red from where she’d laid her head down and her one eye looked like glass, but her chest had resumed its rise and fall. For three minutes and maybe a little longer, I knew what it was like to be Charlie. I knew how he felt.

  And for the first time in a long time, Charlie made a little sense to me.

  FIFTY: … AND THIS TOO

  AS THINGS STARTED TO SETTLE down, as Test talked to the people who needed to be talked to, I dream-walked toward the back of the silently flashing ambulance. They’d bandaged my hands when she’d stabilized, when everything in the world felt like it was stabilizing.

  Allison, who everyone called Lump because she was clumsy and who was trying to take her name back, was less than ten feet away from me, breathing in air that allowed her brain to fire off magnificent signals to her heart which pumped blood and kept pumping blood and kept her living and being Allison or Lump or whatever name she could ever want.

  She was sedated and she was hurting, but she was stabilizing.

  She had wandered into the cold and found her deer, and when she couldn’t find her way home, I’d found her.

  Fuck anyone who said otherwise.

  Fuck the people who’d insisted that Charlie and I were hateful or lost.

  She was alive and I was part of that.

  I tried to figure out which song would fit. Which song would start playing in the movie as I walked toward the back of the vehicle.

  And of course it was always going to be “Sweet Child o’ Mine.” The EMTs were talking with the police and talking over a clipboard a thousand miles away and I could hear Guns ’n’ Roses’s opening chords ripping into the sky as I reached out with bandaged hands, grabbed the vertical handle next to the ambulance doors, and hoisted myself up.

  Lump was somewhere in a fog of semiconsciousness, wrapped up to her shoulders in a big blue blanket. The kind of blanket that all ambulances and hospitals seem to have an infinite number of; the kind of blanket my family was all too familiar with.

  She was pale and an entire side of her face was thick with gauze and her hair was slicked back, but goddammit she was alive. The tubes running out of her arm, the beeping machines, they were all proof.

  And she turned her head.

  And her eye started to clear.

  And she saw that it was me.

  And her face crumpled. Even through the thick ambulance door, I could hear her crying and struggling against the machinery.

  “Lump?” I said stupidly, because at first I thought she was just happy to see me, but the more she struggled an
d cried the more it became crystal fucking clear that she was a lot of things, none of which were happy.

  It was a dawning, rolling anger that bloomed out from every inch of her.

  My stomach dropped to my feet as I stood there on the bumper looking at her thrashing and crying, then screaming when the IV tore loose from her arm.

  The EMTs didn’t say anything as they pulled me backward off the vehicle, causing me to spin out and land on my ass. In the moment that the doors were opened and the EMTs were clambering in, I heard the nuance in her sobs and it was only six slurred and hard-fought syllables:

  “… supposed to be my friend…” over and over and more and more distant as one of the EMTs administered a sedative.

  And I thought of the messages I missed. The clues she’d left that I hadn’t figured out. The long, miserable hours she’d spent thinking she was going to die. And I realized she blamed me; I was the friend who wasn’t there when she needed me to be.

  Then the door was closed.

  And I saw one of them climb into the driver’s seat.

  And then they left.

  FIFTY-ONE: FALLOUT

  “CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

  I think Test set a cup of coffee in front of me. He must have, because we were sitting in his office and there was a cup of coffee in front of me.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said: are you all right?”

  Nothing felt real. Everything in the world was beautiful and right and everything in the world was teeth and claws. I picked up the cup of coffee with hands covered in bandages.

  The TV in the room was on but it was silent, playing a tape off an old VCR. Even though the volume was turned all the way down we could hear the sound of the tape making a quiet hissing noise. Boris Karloff was in a silent, flaming windmill and the townspeople were waving their torches and pitchforks at him. The flames would take him in a few minutes and everyone in the town was unified in their hunt for the terrible monster. Just like Charlie wanted.