by Ryan Notch
* * *
The next day Smiling Jack came after Spencer enforce. Before it had been like an impersonal inspection of the property, now it was a full blown manhunt. Jack clearly wanted Spencer dead or alive. He even enlisted the aid of the other Perfects, fanning them out to search the grounds.
Worse yet his ankle was hurt from the leap from Julie’s roof the night before. A night of running that had turned a twinge of pain into a steady burn. He winced with each step and his limping was getting worse. He wasn’t sure he could outrun the slowest of them at this point. After seeing what Mr. Buttons was capable of the night before, he wasn’t sure he could outrun the slowest of them even at his best. He’d spent the day in a deadly game of hide and seek, moving from one spot to another in an attempt to out-maneuver them.
At last, around mid-day, they’d seemed to back off. He climbed on top of one of the toy shops and through his telescope he saw that they had formed themselves into a line, working their way south across the length of the town. Beating the bushes, as his father had said once on a hunting trip. There was no way around them, he didn’t have any choice. He had to go into the woods.
By starting at the north end of town, they had ironically given him access back into Perfect Girl Julie’s house down in the south end. He stopped there to pick up food and whatever else he could find that would be of use. Though he had lived there just yesterday, the house seemed as if it could have been abandoned for a thousand years. Everything looked different, even the pictures on the walls. He felt as if he was seeing it through a stranger’s eyes. He grabbed some food, an extra pair of clothes, and a fork (the best weapon he could find and a poor one at that) all in a bag made of a blanket decorated with rodeo cowboys.
He looked around a moment from the door, wanting to say goodbye somehow. It was no good though. What he wanted to say goodbye to was already gone.
The distance between the last of the Perfect’s houses and the edge of the woods was less than a ten minute walk. It would have been so easy for the Rejected to go after the Perfects in their houses, especially since they didn’t have locks. Spencer wondered what kept them from coming into the town. He thought that maybe Smiling Jack had cast a spell on the town to protect it, though the idea seemed somehow childish.
He stood there at the edge of the woods, a blanket over one shoulder and a fork in his hand, staring into the tangled dead trees and trying to catch any glimpse of movement. What was in front of him was more frightening than what was behind him. Behind him was a fear he knew, before him were shadows and hints of monsters only glimpsed at.
But behind him there was no hope, the forest held a slim chance. And he had a plan. So he started moving, ducking under the low branches and trying to make as little noise as possible.
* * *
If Smiling Jack’s army followed him into the woods, Spencer didn’t know it. He had gone pretty deep, and found that you really didn’t need to go that deep at all to hide. Getting lost would have been a major problem if not for the sun and moon, but as it was he didn’t need to worry. With the false sky as low as it was, the stationary sun would only move in relation to oneself. Since the woods surrounded the town, and the sun was over the center of town, from inside the woods the sun always pointed directly towards the edge of the woods. A navigation point even more accurate than the real sun. Spencer figured Indian trackers like in the movies could follow his trail, but he didn’t really think Jack could. Especially considering the forest was almost entirely dead, no vegetation to disturb. Dead bushes, dead trees, dry logs. Winter without the cold or snow.
He didn’t see any of the monsters, which both relieved and worried him. He didn’t really want to see one of them ever, but if he was going to run into one he would definitely prefer to do it in the daylight rather than the dark. He wandered for hours, making his way west according to the plan and frequently stopping to rest his foot.
The whole plan for survival rested on one big guess, but it was a pretty good one. It was a guess that the monsters in the woods needed to eat, and that the food they ate had something to do with that bone pile in back of Nanny Gurdy’s. They must feed on the bodies of Jack’s failed experiments, which Spencer figured was just about all of them considering how few Perfects there were. The rest of the plan made assumptions too, but they were obvious enough not to be called a guess. While living with Julie he had had plenty of time to think it through. The fact was they would never stop looking for him until he was dead.
So he had to die.
Soon it grew dark, and Spencer was exhausted. He’d had little exercise in his time with Julie, and discovered traveling through the deep woods was much harder work than he was used to. A few hours into the night he found a fallen log and made a place for himself underneath it, as well concealed as he could manage. He spread the blanket on the ground and wrapped himself in it, nibbling on a few pieces of bread that he hoped to make last as long as possible. The ground was cold and hard. No more Julie and her soft bed and warm body. He thought about her standing there in her underwear, trying to imagine what she had wanted to do, wondering if it was like in the movies that he wasn’t supposed to watch. He thought about her and their time together and felt guilty about what happened to her, whispering an apology to her in the darkness.
But he didn’t think about her for long. He thought about Smiling Jack, just like he used to do every night before falling asleep. He thought about what would happen if Jack found him in the night. Thought about waking up to that Smiling face. He fell asleep trying to keep his eyes open.
* * *
Living with his parents, sitting on the couch watching TV every day, Spencer couldn’t help but feel like the must be something better he could be doing. He’d climb the tree in the backyard sometimes, noticing how his muscles were getting stronger despite the sedentary lifestyle. Probably because of the better nutrition. And rarely he would try and look through a book, remembering how to read. But overall, if it had been a summer vacation he would have felt he was wasting it.
It wasn’t like he didn’t ever leave the house though. His mom kept making token attempts. Bringing him to the grocery store or on other errands. It made him feel paranoid and claustrophobic to be around the people, as if someone was going to make a move on him. Unknown to her he carried one of the smaller kitchen knives with him wherever he went, often clutching it in his pocket when he got nervous. He was glad he didn’t really own anything else to carry around, because the damn thing had stabbed a hole in every pocket of every pair of his new pants.
Eventually after a few weeks his mom got the idea to take him and Baby Suzie to a movie. At first Spencer had been excited, even though it was a little kids movie. He didn’t like the idea of being around people, but in a movie no one was going to be paying attention to him. Plus he figured if TV was as good as he remembered, movies would be too. It was all going fine, almost like old times.
Until the lights went out.
Once that happened he realized he might as well have been in a giant closet. The theatre was all dark corners and dark faces. The light of the screen somehow made it even worse, blinding you. He tried to ignore it, to tell himself he was safe and to enjoy the movie.
Surely Jack can’t just show up in any dark room he wants, he thought. It couldn’t work that way. There’s got to be more limits than that.
But as the movie wore on the fear just got worse. He’d see forms slinking out of the shadows. See Jack’s face on people in the rows behind him, smiling down at him. He only made it half way through the movie before he couldn’t take it. He ran for it, stumbling out of the theatre to the relative light of the lobby.
He stood there, waiting. He was content to wait, didn’t mind waiting for his mom and Baby Suzie to finish watching the movie. But she came out anyway, dragging a crying Suzie behind her.
“It’s all right Spencer, we can see it another time,” she said half heartedly. He could barely hear her over Suzie’s wailing. Wailing which conti
nued all the way home, driving Spencer to a simmering and barely controlled rage.
Several hours later Suzie was still in rare form. She’d skipped her nap and was basically throwing one marathon hours-long tantrum, still complaining about the movie in her garbled gibberish way (which Spencer figured was a new record in her attention span for anything). Spencer’s mom was loosing her cool, and Spencer himself was far beyond that point. His dad was working late, which he could tell was also contributing to his mom’s anger and the general bad temperament of the whole house.
Finally it all came to a head when Spencer decided to turn on the TV and drown her whining out. She toddled up to him and grabbed at the remote.
“DORA! DORA,” she screamed.
Spencer yanked the remote away from her savagely, swinging it in an arc that knocked her arms away at the same time. The sickening snap that followed was unmistakable. Spencer had heard the sound of bones breaking before. He’d broke peoples bones before. There was no mistaking that sound, or the way Baby Suzie’s arm hung at a wrong angle.
There was a breathless moment of stunned silence from her, then the scream that followed was unlike any that had preceded it. It was a scream of pain.
Spencer stared at her, stunned.
Jesus, he thought. How could anything be so fragile?
Spencer’s mom rounded the corner into the living room. She took one look at Suzie and guessed at what had happened well enough.
“How could you!” she screamed at Spencer. She picked up Suzie and went straightaway to the garage. Spencer heard the car leave a few moments later, obviously to take Suzie to the hospital. He was left alone, not knowing what to do with himself.
Fucking stupid kid. She should have known not to mess with me.
This was it for him, he knew it. They’d never keep him after this. Baby Suzie was their real child, he was just somebody they all had to live with. There was no competition between the two. They’d send him back to the hospital, or somewhere else. After all he’d risked to get back, he was going to be expelled again.
He went to his room, not wanting to be around to face any of them when they showed up. He sat in the corner with only a lamp for light. Stared at the open closet, his hand on the lamp’s power cord. Thought about turning it off, letting them come for him. He felt angry at Suzie, or something like it. The truth was he didn’t really know how he felt, but whatever it was it was terrible. He wanted it to be over. All of it.
Maybe it was for the best that they send him away. The truth was that his parents acted like they had lost everything, survived it, then been given back something broken to serve as a reminder. They didn’t seem to know how to handle it, and the thing about it was that he didn’t care how they felt about it. Any tender feelings he’d had for them had faded a long time ago, faced with the fact that there was absolutely nothing they could do to help him in Nowhere Blvd. The moment he realized he was truly on his own over there was the moment that in his heart he no longer had any parents. In fact any tender feelings he had at all seemed to have left him. He felt like he wasn’t a person anymore. That he couldn’t be a person ever again. He felt like a rock made of fear and violence. Not a human, a rejected thing.
* * *
As Spencer woke in the Rejected Woods the day after the manhunt, he ran over the plan in his mind. He’d never actually seen the transfer of bodies to the bone pile, but that didn’t mean anything. The angle was such that the only way to see it was from Smiling Jack’s mansion or from the woods themselves, two places he’d never been in his time on the run.
As he began walking west (finding his ankle to be considerably improved by the nights rest) he knew he should be prepared to wait a few days for another body to be delivered. Though in truth he didn’t think he would need to. He knew enough about hunger to know that if food didn’t show up fairly regularly, the Rejected monsters would start making sojourns into the town, no matter what normally prevented them. But of course he might have to wait for the right body.
He had quite a few fears about different parts of the plan, so much could go wrong. But as he walked through the forest that morning, one was already coming true. He figured the Rejects would be clustered around the food, like any animal. Especially considering the forest seemed to contain absolutely nothing edible, just trees locked in endless Fall. And as he walked towards the goal his theory was confirmed by the increasing number of furtive movements he saw off in the distance (or sometimes not so far off). Thankfully they seemed to be avoiding him, like most wild animals did when he and his dad had gone hunting. Either that or they were setting a trap for him…
Spencer arrived within telescope site of the bone pile around noon and watched it from the branches of a tree. The wait was long but his patience was of a quality he wouldn’t have thought possible back in the days of TV and video games. Over the course of the day he was witness to horrors the likes of which he’d never encountered in either.
The telescope spotted four of them throughout the day, the monsters of the forest. By the third he no longer questioned what they were. The first he caught digging around in the ground, perhaps for food that Spencer couldn’t see. It was the size of a faun and dark and hairless. It seemed to have fleshy snakes for arms, but closer inspection revealed instead that each arm had five or six elbows, allowing them to bend in strange ways. Its legs, contrarily, had no knees. And so it walked stiffly on all fours, lifting its neck painfully to look around. Its face looked very much like that of a boy of perhaps five.
The second looked something like a giant snake. It had mottled black and white flesh (human like, not scales) and squirmed along the ground. On closer inspection he noticed it had fingers in the front instead of a head. The head itself seemed to be lower down, the face presumably dragging along the ground. Unlike a true snake or worm, you could tell by the way it moved that it was clearly jointed in at least four places. No snake would ever move in such an inefficient manner, and he wondered if it might be injured.
He thought about where they might have come from, tried to think up different theories about how they might be born out here in the underground forest. But all his theories were hazy, didn’t seem to make much sense. Until the third creature came along. Unlike the first two she was clearly human. A girl of perhaps eight, with bright red hair. Also unlike the others, she was dressed, as if she hadn’t been out in the forest very long. She wore dirty jean coveralls and a green shirt and was normal in all ways except for the second head attached to her left shoulder. The head, which seemed to belong to a younger Asian girl, was clearly dead and was starting to turn black with rot. It hung there lifeless, stretching the stitches that held it on. Thick black stitches which Spencer could see even at a distance.
He looked at her and was somehow reminded of his last glimpse of the twins, and then suddenly he knew where they came from. He felt stupid for not seeing it before, it was obvious even if it was too horrible to think about. After all, it was all in their name. The Rejected. He realized that his assumption had been wrong. The Perfects weren’t the only ones who survived, they were just the only ones who came out right.
Why did Smiling Jack make these? Was it for some kind of monster’s fun? Jack hadn’t looked like he was having fun when working on the twins. He’d looked frustrated. And in retrospect, maybe even confused. It was like Julie said, Smiling Jack just didn’t think like people, didn’t understand them right. Spencer knew now that whatever else Jack was, he was batshit crazy.
Once Spencer realized the poor girl was a person he thought about calling out to her, trying to talk to her somehow. But how? What would be the point? She wasn’t really human anymore, and even if she was human, there was nothing he could do for her. He would just be putting himself in unnecessary danger, just like when he had come back to warn the kids from his original group.
He watched as she wandered away without seeing him, carefully never looking to her left. Finally he turned away to renew his watch on the bone pile. He thou
ght about Julie again. He no longer felt guilty, not even a little.
* * *
He only saw one other Reject from his perch that day. An older boy, maybe twelve, who looked familiar somehow. His right leg had been moved about a half foot further up the side of his body. And while the boy still walked upright, it seemed to cause him some pain. By nightfall Spencer was beginning to think that he would have to wait another day for his plan and was getting ready to climb down from the branch. But just after the last rays of the sun faded to black he saw movement from Nanny Gurdy’s house.
A form was coming out of the exterior basement door in the back of the house, moving in and out of view as it rounded the tall hedges that hid the bone pile from the house. It was hard to be sure in the dim light, but the shadowy figure was round and walked on two legs and was clearly an adult. Nanny maybe, dragging something heavy behind her.
Spencer climbed down two branches then jumped to the ground, falling hard onto legs that were too cramped to hold him. He fought quickly back to his feet, hiding his blanket/pack under some dead wood and securing the fork and telescope in his waistband. Ignoring the pins and needles pain of his legs he started running as best he could to the bone pile. He had to time it just right. Had to get there after Nanny was gone, but had to be there and gone himself with the prize before the Rejected caught wind of the meal.
Making the distance to the bone pile in record time, he ran to the end furthest from the woods. There was a sickly sweet smell rising from the bones, but surprisingly not an overpowering one. Only a faint miasma in the area to let you know how many bodies lied below. No meat left on the bones meant nothing to decay but the bones themselves.
