by C.L. Bevill
Chapter 23
Stand Tough…
Amanda was the one screaming. She was the one who taught Elan basic elementary education. She also lived with him in a cabin with another middle-aged woman. I knew from my time in The Redwoods that she looked upon Elan like he was her own son. She had lost two teenage children in the change, and Elan had become as important to her as either of them. Standing in the vicinity of the fire pit, Gideon held her by the shoulders, trying to get her to calm down by speaking gently to her, but she was nonstop in her hysterical vocalization.
I looked around. It seemed like nearly everyone in the camp was present. Obviously, the guards were still at their posts. I noticed all of the new people were there with a notable exception. And there were others who were missing. Elan was gone, but I already knew that. I went to Ethan and tightly grasped his shoulder. “What happened?”
Ethan shot me a dirty look as if I was supposed to know already. (I did know, but I wanted independent details.) “Amanda thinks that Elan’s run off,” he muttered.
Gideon’s head shot up, and he stared at me. He was too far away to hear my question to Ethan, but he’d known I was there. I didn’t need to be a mind reader to know what was going through his mind. Why hadn’t we seen this coming? Poor kid (I meant Gideon), it was tough to be the leader. It was going to be tougher and soon.
“How long?” I said insistently. Could Ethan be that dumb? Did he really think that Amanda would be screaming like a B-movie Scream Queen confronting the killer if she thought that Elan had only run away?
“An hour?” Ethan said shortly. “We don’t know. Some of his stuff is gone. He told Yen he wanted to see where the pixies lived, and Yen didn’t really think he was serious.” Yen was the sixteen-year-old newcomer of Vietnamese heritage. He hadn’t seen the pixies yet, although they had seen him. And Elan was obviously Little-Man-With-Big-Eyes-And-Hurt-Smile. I should have seen that coming, too. Elan was infatuated with the firefly pixies. He called them “Tinker Bells,” as he had obviously been raised on Disney movies.
Had he followed me? Or had he followed the pixies? Either was possible. It wouldn’t have bothered the pixies. Elan didn’t want to harm them in the least.
Abruptly, I turned and started toward my cabin. Peripherally, I saw that Zach was trying to organize a search team. He didn’t realize I was leaving. As I reached the cabin, I got a lantern lit so that I could see what I was doing. I got my pack and the Japanese broadsword. I packed essentials and a large water bottle. I hung the pack over my shoulders and the broadsword across my chest. It didn’t hang exactly the way it was supposed to hang because I wasn’t a man, but it didn’t really matter. I found the daggers I had taken from the house past Crescent City and put them where they needed to be. I finished with hiking boots in my size that had serendipitously appeared several days after Zach had gone on a scavenging trip.
“Are you leaving?” the voice came, and it wasn’t the one I expected to hear. Instead, it was Lulu, curvaceous and cute, asking the curious question. Her head was tilted inquiringly, and her sky blue eyes examined me with obvious purpose.
“Yes, I’m leaving,” I said. The vision in my head had shown me Elan’s horrible fate, and I had to prevent it. It showed me where and even a little idea of when. I didn’t have time to debate with Gideon and especially not with Zach. I only had time to move out as quickly as I could. And Lulu was in my way.
“I have something to show you,” Lulu said oddly.
I turned to look at her. Up until that moment I had thought her vapid, but here was a different Lulu. Determined and ready to battle for what she wanted, she was also ready to fight dirty. It wasn’t a good look for her. Her pose held a hint of desperation. It didn’t make her look attractive at all. It made her look needy and pitiful. What passed through my mind was that Lulu didn’t seem so perky all of a sudden nor did she use cute made-up words that were supposed to be hip. She held out a photograph in the palm of her hand, presenting it to me as if it was a prize.
I glanced at it, and the lamplight in the cabin gave me a brief glimpse of what it was like to have lived in Zach’s hell. He had dreamed of me, but obviously, he had been thinking of his life before the change, as well. This was a simple wallet-size photo. Zach smiled into the camera. So did the dark-haired woman that his arm was wrapped around. She was pretty as were their matching wedding bands on their left index fingers. But what was especially gorgeous, was the tiny baby with the tuft of chestnut hair and chocolate brown eyes that matched his father’s. Zach was holding the child in his other arm, supporting the infant easily with his bent limb. The baby’s fist waved in the air, a tiny blue rattle forever silenced in the stillness of a two -dimensional image. Here was a child who would never again laugh, giggle, or cry, for whatever strange twist of fate that had changed our world forever.
Oh, I guess it really wasn’t a brief glimpse. I had to look closely to see the wedding bands, but they were there. Zach appeared younger than he was now. I couldn’t really tell how much younger. Perhaps if Lulu flipped the photo over I could see the date written on the back by an unknown woman’s hand. Had Zach’s wife written the date of the photo so that it could never be forgotten? My own frame of reference was that my mother was the official writer on the backs of photographs for posterity. Women, mothers, tended to do that. Why not Zach’s wife?
What torment must it be to lose your wife and your baby in the flicker of the mind’s eye? Had he woken up expecting to hear the cackle of his infant and only heard silence? Had he wandered the house looking for them only to find nothingness? Yes, I imagined he had. For Zach, it must have been like a knife thrust through his chest, except without the blood. When he read J’s suicide note, had Zach been thinking that he had been exactly where J had stood? Zach had asked me if I had perched on that precarious boundary. In hindsight, I should have asked him the very same question.
When my eyes came up, I saw that Lulu was looking at me with satisfaction. She thought she had ruined things for us. Coldly, I wondered if she had. Certainly, this was something I was going to have to think about. And I would have to think hard about a man who professed his affection for me only months after the disappearances of his nearest and dearest.
It was possible that I was misjudging Zach. Oh, where were those inner voices that I so desperately needed to hear? Where was the moment of rationale that gave me the right answer to soothe the ragged edges that were unraveling in my soul?
Save Elan, they said instead. Save him. He needs you.
And what did this say about Lulu? She had obviously taken this from Zach’s belongings. She had deliberately searched through his possessions for whatever selfish intention that had motivated her.
I fixed on her big blue eyes. There was satisfaction there and malice, as well. I guess she didn’t have a “red” car after all. Instead of the anger that I was supposed to feel, there was pity. She wasn’t in the position that she’d hoped to be in.
“Put it back where you found it,” I said, and my voice was like ice.
It wasn’t the reaction for which she’d aimed. Her mouth opened just a little and I added, “You better hope I don’t come back, that I can’t come back, Lulu. Because I’ll tell him what you did, especially if you haven’t. Do you understand that, Lulu? You can’t lie to him because there are those in the camp who will know exactly who is the real liar.”
Lulu said, “You can’t— ”
I stepped close to her, bumping her with the handle of the Japanese broadsword. She pulled the photograph back, and her eyes reflected the fear that I suddenly caused. It wasn’t right. A seventeen-year-old shouldn’t cause a twenty-five-year old woman to feel fear, but Lulu had brought it on herself. Furthermore, I didn’t regret the moment. She needed the wake-up call if she hoped to continue to live in The Redwoods, if she wanted to continue to be a social animal.
“I can,” I said firmly, frigidly, staring her down so that she couldn’t look away from me. “I’m going after Elan now. Because if I
don’t, the Burned Man will do things to him that will give every single person in this camp nightmares for every single day of the rest of their lives. And you, all you care about is eliminating a…romantic rival. Zach doesn’t want you, Lulu. He’ll never want you, and you’ve done something awful. You’ve betrayed his trust and the trust of the people living here. Do you think anyone will want to be with you now?”
I hitched the backpack on my shoulders and watched her lovely features crumple. Lulu hadn’t considered the consequences of her actions.
“I’ll say you took the photograph from his cabin,” she said suddenly, viciously.
Kara cleared her throat from where she stood in the doorway.
Lulu spun, gasped, and the photograph fluttered to the ground. As Kara reached to pick it up, Lulu pressed her aside and disappeared into the darkness with a haunted cry of dismay. Kara took the photo by the edge and looked at it with a little intake of breath. “Oh, dear God,” she murmured. “That poor young man.” Then her eyes came up to me with dawning awareness.
I kept my features as blank as I could, but perhaps the pain was exposed in my eyes. It felt like the same sharpened metaphorical blade that had sliced Zach in half.
“Oh, hon,” she said brokenly. “I’m sure…I’m sure it isn’t as bad as all that.”
I set my back stiffly and walked past Kara. She was silent for a moment as she watched me striding away. It took her a moment to realize that I wasn’t coming back, that I was leaving the camp. Behind me Kara was crying out for Zach and Gideon, but it didn’t take me ten seconds to vanish into the blackness of the forest. I knew exactly what trail to take. After a few minutes, I could hear them calling far behind me, but it didn’t really matter.
I don’t think ten minutes had passed before the pixies joined me. Spring was sputtering at me as she flew. “Soophee,” she sang irately. “Soophee is causing danger to herself again! Soophee could wait for Sak and the other humans!”
The Orick Trail was the one I followed. “If you ever need to go to town, that one goes to the nearest small town. You have to ford Redwood Creek, which can be tricky if the water level is up but it’s doable. It’s an escape route for you. It parallels the highway, comes close sometimes, but it’ll keep you off the main road. If you should have to go, you might have an easier time on the trail rather than the road.” Those were Gideon’s words to me. Had they been prophetic, or had Gideon been simply trying to comfort a skittish newcomer?
“Buzz off, Spring, if you’re not going to help me,” I sang fiercely, trying to regulate my breathing. I didn’t know how far ahead of they were, but I needed to be as speedy as I could.
Spring hissed at me. I gritted my teeth. I didn’t want to aggravate the pixies, but how could I get them to understand that Elan was a child, a helpless child with no one to protect him?
“You have children, right, Spring?” I sang to her, trying to make the point I had to make in the most expedient method.
“Almost all of the sisters have children,” she sang back huffily.
“Little-Man-With-Big-Eyes-And-Hurt-Smile is one of our children,” I sang to her, my tones insistent and determined.
Spring flew straight up into the air after making a strange noise. She did a pass past my nose and circled around my front. “Little-Man-With-Big-Eyes-And-Hurt-Smile is…a child? Is that why he is not as tall as you?”
“Elan hasn’t grown up yet,” I told her. “Although he seems strong enough to the sisters, he’s not, and he has to be protected. Just as you protect your children. He’s vulnerable, frightened, and someone very terrible has taken him.”
“The new human took him,” she sang warily.
I nodded with a deep breath. Perhaps the pixies hadn’t seen the danger because it hadn’t been presented to me. Perhaps there was something about the Burned Man that kept the pixies from knowing what he was doing. Perhaps the Burned Man’s abilities had blinded me, as well. I didn’t know the answers, and there was only one thing that mattered now.
The pixies lit my way, showing me the trail, making it easier for me. I would make excellent time, if I could only find the pair before they reached Eureka. It was there that I had seen something so awful I didn’t want to even think about it. I wouldn’t have known except that Zach had told me about the spiders he had seen. Briefly, I closed my eyes and forced the horrific scene of my premonition from my mind. “Can you find Elan for me?” I asked Spring.
“The sisters will try,” Spring declared, now intent on the purpose of my mission. “But Soophee needs to know that we cannot see the other human.”
Ah, an answer. “The sisters cannot see Tate, the other human,” I repeated. They meant in whatever psychic sense that guided them.
Spring let out a keening moan. “We see what happens to Soophee. Soophee is connected to the sisters.”
“And are you seeing something bad for me?” I interpreted.
Spring didn’t answer, but that was answer enough for me. As I hiked purposefully, I knew something else. The premonitions changed. As events changed in the present, long-term consequences altered in the future. There was another trail somewhere. It looked like a thousand people had once hiked there. The redwoods and other trees leaned over the trail in an arch of sea green deference. The trail was flat and curved around the bottom of a bluff. The ocean crashed against rocks nearby and bellowed out its defiance at the halt of its waves. The sun was dimly pushing through the pines and shrubs and a morning fog was trying to wind its way through the world seeking something it would never be able to find.
Elan was crying for his mother. Not Amanda, but the mother he had lost months before. He was scared and alone but for this solitary frightening man who wouldn’t answer his questions and who shoved him along when he wouldn’t walk voluntarily. This man looked at Elan funnily, and Elan was shuddering because he knew the man was going to kill him. There was more, as well, in the form of the things that seemed to be following the scary man and seemed to want to help him.
The man was Tate, the newcomer, and as they stopped to each eat a PowerBar and drink some water, he reached up to his eyes and took out the green-colored contacts that had been inserted there. His eyes were an intense blue, the color of a deep mountain lake. It was a color I had seen before. It was the same hated blue eyes that looked at me out of the Burned Man’s face. But Tate’s face wasn’t burned. His limbs were whole and unscarred. His hair was brown instead of dirty blonde. His face wasn’t ravaged by insanity.
But his words were blurred with hatred. “You’ll call them,” he hissed more to himself than to Elan. “You’ll call them when I’m ready.”
Was his hair dyed? Was this man the Burned Man? All I could see in my mind’s eye was the blackened features of the Burned Man and his blazing blue eyes. He was tall the same as Tate, and his build was similar, but he couldn’t have healed without showing some of the effects of the first night at the bonfire. His features had been burned; his hair had been half gone. Then there had been something wrong with one of his legs and one of his hands. Then I had bitten the good arm and caused a massive amount of bleeding. I had hoped that he would crawl off and die someplace to never bother us again, but Max and Thad had discovered the folly of my desire. But I was discovering it, too, for that matter.
If these were not two distinct men, then I would have never recognized the Burning Man. His hair was back, unless it was a good wig. I could buy that, but the skin couldn’t have been repaired. I glanced at the pixies flying ahead of me, muttering amongst themselves, unhappy with my actions, and knew they could have healed the Burned Man as they had healed me. But they wouldn’t have done that. They couldn’t have done it.
The vision had Tate opening his coat and his shirt to allow the sweat on his chest to dry. He flapped the shirt to help, and I saw the mark on his chest. It was a little larger than the one on my cheek, and its shape was much different, but I knew instantly what it was for. The spiders had marked him as one of theirs just as the pixies had
marked me.
I thought of the dark shape skittering into the tall grass on the side of the road near the sign I had burned to the ground. A spider thing? Something that helped the Burned Man?
I blinked to the present. I looked through the darkness to the west. There was a compass on the end of one my knives. I stopped for a moment, pulling the weapon and freeing it so I could see the handle. The compass spun lazily. The pixies curiously waited for me as I studied the tiny dial.
There were two puzzles. One was whether Tate was the Burned Man or not. The other was figuring out where the trail was that I had seen in my head. Based on the way the sun was moving, they were heading south down the coast, the same direction I was going. They were on foot most likely because Tate had no way of hauling Elan around. Additionally, it was obvious from my vision that Tate wanted Elan to call them.
Three puzzles. Who were them? Was it the group? Was it something else?
I looked at the mass of fluttering pixies waiting for me, waiting for their protector to make a decision. Elan talked about the pixies. He was infatuated with them. He wanted to see their home. He wanted the mark on his face like mine. He was able to talk to them, and the pixies didn’t mind in the least.
The Burned Man had wanted me to tell him where the pixies were located, so he could destroy them because he blamed them for his ghastly injuries at the bonfire. If Tate was the Burned Man somehow magically recovered, then was he still obsessed with the pixies? If he couldn’t get at me, then had he taken Elan thinking that the child could provide him with what he so desperately wanted?
Had the Burned Man somehow grasped that he could pretend to be normal with Blair for a few days so that he could ingratiate himself into the group?
God, the questions that whirled frantically in my mind. Ultimately, it didn’t matter if the Burned Man was Tate or not. It only mattered that he had kidnapped Elan and that he was headed toward Eureka and a destination that gave me shivers. The previous premonition had shown what Tate had intended as a conclusion for Elan, and it involved the scary spiders that Zach had told me about previously.
I needed to find a trail that went across the redwoods to the coast. That was where I would be able to find Tate and Elan and save Elan, if I could, long before they reached the place where the spiders lived.
