Mountain Madness

by Daniel Pyle

  Last year, Daddy had come back home for Christmas, had brought a bag full of presents and stayed the whole day. Trevor wondered if he would do the same thing again this year, or if he would have to have two Christmases at his two different houses with two trees and two Christmas dinners.

  If I make it to Christmas at all.

  He walked through the dining room, staying close to the wall so he wouldn’t accidentally bump into the table or the chairs and make a loud noise. He concentrated on Zach’s mommy’s red phone the way he did a new toy, thinking he couldn’t wait to get it open and see what it did.

  When he got to the back door, he half expected it to be locked like the bedroom, or to find bars on the windows, or for the knob to be electrified, a reverse booby trap that kept the good guys in instead of the bad guys out, but there was none of that. The knob twisted in his hand, and the door swung open.

  Trevor hurried out of the house, flipping open the phone as he moved. Once he’d made it a few long steps away and stood near the front bumper of the bad man’s truck, he stopped and squinted down at the keypad. Zach had turned off the phone before handing it over—otherwise the numbers would have been lit up, and Trevor could have seen them fine. He found the power button and held it until the phone beeped. The welcome screen flashed, and the cellular began searching for service. Trevor pulled the antenna all the way out, not knowing if it mattered.

  The screen read: Searching…

  Trevor watched and waited.

  Still Searching…

  When the screen changed and Trevor saw the first little bar in the corner, he almost cheered. But then the bar disappeared, and Trevor frowned. The searching started again.

  Trevor looked at the truck and then at the phone. Not bothering to shut it, he stuffed the cell into his shirt pocket and hopped onto the truck’s bumper. He scrambled up the windshield onto the top of the cab, pulled the phone out again, and waited.

  Searching…

  One bar.

  No bars.

  Searching…

  In another corner of the phone’s small screen, the picture of the battery went from half full to only filled a little. Trevor groaned.

  Come on, he thought, please.

  The single bar did not return.

  Trevor finally closed the phone and crawled off the truck.

  Higher ground, Zach had said. Trevor looked around the property, saw nothing but trees and shadows. Which way was higher ground? Most of the land appeared to slope down. It was the kind of yard where you wouldn’t want to play catch, where a ball could roll away for a long time if it happened to go sailing over your head.

  He supposed he could have climbed a tree, squirreled his way up to the very top and tried the phone again, but what if he fell? What if he cracked his head open and his brains fell out and he died? Or what if he was okay but he landed on his pocket and the phone snapped in half? He couldn’t risk that. Zach was counting on him. Trevor was counting on himself.

  He looked around again and decided he really only had one choice. The trees directly behind the house seemed level with where he stood now, which meant at least they weren’t downhill. Whether the ground got higher beyond the trees or not, Trevor couldn’t tell. For all he knew, there might be a cliff or a gully, a river or a lake. He might walk through the trees and end up slipping into a mudslide and zooming over the edge of a waterfall like something from an action movie. Who knew?

  Trevor shrugged his shoulders a little and started for the woods.

  He walked with the phone open and held out in front of him, watching the screen for a bar and using the itsy bit of light coming from the thing to help guide his way, pressing the Back button every once in a while to keep the light from shutting off. It was dark inside the trees, almost darker than it had been in the crawlspace above the ceiling. When things clung to his face here, he couldn’t pretend it was the yellow stuff, could only brush it out of his face and hair as quickly as possible and go on.

  He did seem to be climbing a little, though more slowly than he’d have liked. Crickets squawked, and owls hooted. Trevor listened for a howling coyote, the growl of a bear or a mountain lion, but if there were things more dangerous than crickets and owls in these woods, they stayed quiet.

  Trevor didn’t like that. If something was going to try to gobble him up, he wanted to know it was coming. Maybe, he thought, the wild animals aren’t sneaking around all quiet like, maybe there just aren’t any. Maybe they’re sleeping. He could hope.

  Trevor pushed through brush and dead thickets, got smacked in the face by a low-hanging branch and swatted at it angrily. He should have paid closer attention to where he was walking, but his eyes stayed glued to the phone’s screen.

  Searching…

  He stubbed his toe on a rock or a tree stump and hissed.

  Searching…

  He circled around another tree and found himself at the bottom of a little hill. He climbed.

  Searching…

  One bar.

  He stopped. The bar didn’t disappear. He climbed a little farther up the hill, and the bar stayed there.

  Alright!

  Holding the phone in one hand and poking at it with the other, tongue in the corner of his mouth, Trevor keyed the seven digits that had been his phone number since before he was born but that he had only recently forced himself to memorize. He hit Send and pressed the cellular to the side of his face.

  It rang. And it rang again.

  Answer, Trevor thought. Oh please.

  His mommy’s voice came on the line, and Trevor smiled, but then he recognized the words and realized he was hearing their stinking answering machine, hearing his mommy’s voice but not really his mommy while she talked about her computer job and all sorts of things he didn’t understand. He waited for the beep and said, “Mommy? Are you there?”

  No mommy. He waited a second and said, “Mommy?” one last time before pulling the phone from his face and stabbing the End button with the tip of his finger.

  Where could she be? Sleeping? Going potty? He guessed she might be doing either thing. Maybe if he waited ten minutes and tried again, she’d be there. But what if she was gone? Or what if she was watching a late movie on TV the way she and Daddy used to do, with a big bowl of popcorn on the sofa beside her and the ringer turned off so nobody could interrupt the show?

  It didn’t matter. He couldn’t wait ten minutes. Zach was still inside, and the bad man was wandering around somewhere, maybe hunting after Trevor at that very moment.

  Something moved in the bushes.

  Trevor squatted down a little, as if the something might come flying at his head. Another rustling followed, and a small and furry creature waddled out into the open. A raccoon. Trevor shook his head and straightened.

  The raccoon moved along, not looking at Trevor, not seeming to notice him at all, and Trevor returned his attention to the cell phone.

  He knew only one other number. He tried it. The phone rang again but then beeped at him. Trevor peeked at the screen. The battery icon flashed.

  Oh no. He chewed on the inside of his cheek like it was bubble gum. Please please please please, he thought, please answer please please please answer please.

  “Yes?” said a voice that sounded like a scared-little-boy version of his daddy, “Hello.”

  When Trevor talked, he did so as fast as he could. If the phone’s battery died before he gave his daddy the directions he’d memorized, he would never have another chance.

  The phone beeped mid-sentence, and Trevor somehow managed to talk a little bit faster.

  —:—:—:—

  From his place in the bushes, Hank watched the raccoon cross the bare patch of land and re-enter the undergrowth on the other side. He wanted to jump out and stomp it to the ground. A raccoon was a troublesome, dirty little thing.

  And so was the boy.

  No, wait. That wasn’t right. Davy was a good boy. Davy was a perfectly fine little boy.

  The child wo
rried over the phone and then pressed it to his ear. Upon hearing Davy’s awkward progress through the woods, Hank had originally intended to move directly to him, snatch him up and drag him back into the house, but now he thought he’d wait. He wasn’t sure how the kid had gotten loose in the first place. He knew he’d locked the door—the key was in his pocket. Davy was clever, he guessed. Davy couldn’t be chained. He wanted to see what Davy did next.

  The boy talked, and Hank extracted a new toothpick from his pocket. The tip slid between his lips and poked him in the gums, but he didn’t care.

  His plan had not been perfect, especially the part involving Georgie’s mother, but now, listening, he thought maybe things hadn’t gone as badly as he’d first thought, that his scheme might still be falling into place in an unexpected but wonderful way.

  The kid was giving directions, leading somebody here. Good directions, easily followed, though he seemed to babble like a brook. Hank would have been worried, would have thought maybe the kid was yakking to the cops, except for one word the boy had let slip, a word that was so gaspingly magnificent.

  The word was Mommy.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  LIBBY WANTED TO rip the phone from Mike’s hand, talk to her son and make sure he was okay, but Mike seemed to be listening very intently, and she didn’t want to interrupt something important, something that might save her boy.

  She stood at the end of the couch, shifting uncomfortably.

  “—with a shotgun,” Mike said. “I remember.” He sat there and listened for a long time and then said, “Yeah.”

  Libby moved closer, her ear pointed at the phone but still unable to hear more than the occasional word, things like road and tree and over, bits and pieces that were all but meaningless out of context.

  “I know where that is,” Mike said and then listened again.

  Libby watched, wouldn’t let herself blink. Trevor was alive. She wasn’t sure what was happening, how he’d gotten to a phone, but he was alive, and that was enough for now.

  Escaped, she thought. Maybe Trevor had gotten free. She didn’t want to let herself believe that, didn’t want to get her hopes up, but she couldn’t help it. Escaped.

  “Mommy’s here with me,” Mike said. He turned to face Libby, looked her in the eyes. He said, “Okay.”

  Libby mouthed, what?

  Mike ran a hand through his hair and turned away. “Just hold on, okay, bud. We both love you so…Trevor?” He turned the phone to look at it, then stuck it back against his ear. “Hello? Trev?”

  Libby waited for what felt like a very long time before saying, “What is it? What happened?”

  Mike looked at the phone’s indicator light, which was green. “I don’t…I guess his phone died.”

  “What did he say? Where is he?”

  Mike shut off the phone, tossed it onto the couch, and said, “He said he loves you. I’m supposed to tell you that.”

  Libby didn’t move, didn’t speak. Tears she didn’t remember shedding flowed down her cheeks. Mike was pulling something off the table beside the couch, a small white rectangle, but Libby’s vision was too blurred to make any sense of it. Mike retrieved the phone and dialed a number, referring back to the blurry white thing after every two or three numbers. He crossed his free arm over his chest, squeezed it into his armpit, and paced. Libby wiped at her cheeks, rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, tried to say something and only sobbed.

  “Hello,” Mike said, “Deputy Willis?”

  Still crying, Libby moved to the couch and plopped down on the edge.

  “I just got a call from my son,” Mike said, “gave me about the best directions you ever heard. I can lead you right to him.” He turned around, walked past Libby, and then turned again. “Do you have a pen?” Turn. Walk. Turn. Walk. “What do you mean?” He stopped pacing.

  Libby watched him, the tears finished now, the front of her shirt damp but not soaked.

  “Well, when will that be? My son needs help now.” Mike was getting red, the way he always did in those rare instances when his temper got the better of him. “That’s bullshit,” he said. He dropped onto the couch beside Libby, his leg not quite touching hers. Libby wondered why Mike hadn’t called 911 instead of the deputy and realized that wouldn’t have done any good. As small as the sheriff’s department up here probably was, Willis might have been the only deputy on duty anyway, and this way Mike hadn’t needed to re-explain the entire situation.

  “No, I won’t calm down,” he said. “I’ve got a fucking map to the bad guy for you and you’re telling me there’s nothing you can do?”

  He had gone beyond red. Libby heard his teeth grinding. Not knowing what was going on, she didn’t know whether to try to calm him down or join him in his fury.

  She settled for waiting.

  —:—:—:—

  In the blood-spattered kitchen of one Ms. Harriet Anne Thompson, Deputy Sheriff Lester Willis listened to the cursing and the screaming without flinching. He’d heard worse.

  “Listen,” he said during a break in Pullman’s tirade. “I can’t just leave a crime scene. I’ve got a dead body here and a partner already gone home for the night. Can you understand that?” He looked at the woman’s corpse again and shook his head. “But if you’ll give me those directions, I’ll get on the phone to the dispatcher and get every available deputy and emergency responder out to your boy as soon as possible.” He walked alongside the trail of maroon footprints, staying far enough away that he wouldn’t contaminate them. He pulled a pad of paper and a pen from his pocket and wrote, holding the cell phone to his ear with his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” he said. “A left and then a right.” He knew the general area Pullman was describing and sketched a little map beneath the written directions. He said, “Okay, then what?”

  Silence on the line.

  “Mr. Pullman?”

  Nothing.

  He glanced at his phone. It had disconnected. He flipped through the notebook, found Pullman’s number, which Deputy Grey had dutifully written down, and dialed it. The phone rang. Ten times it rang. Twelve. He ended the call and sighed. He’d have to call into dispatch, get somebody up to Pullman’s place to see what was going on. They might have to pull a couple guys out of bed, but hell, if Willis couldn’t sleep, why should any of the rest of them?

  He turned back to the body, to the puffy face and the throat slit so deep the head was almost completely disconnected from the body. The neighbor who’d called this in, a neighbor Willis would have to interview (and maybe interrogate) later, had said there was a boy, a son. Kid by the name of Zachary Thompson.

  Willis wondered what the chances were that Zachary Thompson was the same kid Pullman’s abductor had been dragging along. Probably, he guessed, the chances were pretty damn good.

  He would have to take some pictures, make a sketch of the scene. Eventually, they’d have a whole team up here, but he’d do what he could until they arrived. But first, he’d make the call into HQ. At least two kids were in some serious trouble, and now it looked like their kidnapper might be more of a murderer.

  He only hoped someone would get to them in time.

  Damn mountains. You might as well try to fight crime at the bottom of the sea.

  Willis walked out of the kitchen to make his call, away from the stench of death, thinking about upset parents and a girl without the tip of her nose, thinking about little boys taken away from their families and trying hard not to think about their corpses.

  —:—:—:—

  Mike stared open mouthed at the phone. The indicator light was dark, dead. He said, “Oh my god.”

  “What?” Libby stared at him.

  Mike let out a single, short laugh. It was dry, more of a rasp really, the kind of sound Libby thought a movie mummy might make.

  Mike said, “Now my phone’s dead.” He pressed the buttons on the handset but received no response. He might as well have held a brick.

  “I thought you plugged it in.”r />
  “I did.” He pushed the phone into the charging cradle. Nothing happened. He scooted the table away from the wall and she saw the plug on the floor beneath the outlet.

  “It must have only charged a little bit. Come unplugged when we were moving furniture,” he said and punched at the floor. “Stupid.”

  “You don’t have another phone?”

  “You know I don’t.”

  Actually, Libby hadn’t known, but it wasn’t a point to press. “Isn’t there a speaker phone on the base?”

  “Nope, nothing that fancy.”

  “Then plug it in,” she said. “It can’t take that long to charge.”

  Mike did but said, “It doesn’t matter. Even if I could call him back, there’s nothing he can do. Says he’s at a crime scene and can’t leave. He promised to send everyone he could, but there’s probably nobody else within thirty minutes of here. By the time they get to Trevor, he could be dead.”

  Libby thought about Trevor in the bathroom stall, thought about the announcement that had come too late: TREVOR PULLMAN, IF YOU CAN HEAR THIS, PLEASE COME TO SECURITY. YOUR MOTHER IS LOOKING FOR YOU. “So what do we do?”

  Mike didn’t answer. He hurried out of the living room, down the hallway, into his bedroom. Libby followed. In his closet, he rummaged through clothes and pulled out a pair of jeans and some old boots. Without looking back at Libby, he pulled off his lounge pants and replaced them with the jeans. He found some dirty socks, yanked them on (one of them inside out) and stepped into the boots.

  “Mike?”

  He turned away from the closet. “It might be hours before anyone gets to him. I can’t risk that. He needs help now.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  Mike frowned at her like she’d just asked him the stupidest question he’d ever heard. “I’m going to save him.” He opened the nightstand drawer and pulled out a set of keys and his wallet.