The Way Home
by
Seanan McGuire
Buckley Township, Michigan, 1954
Good idea: responding to nebulous reports of “acid-spitting salamanders” by getting the shotgun and heading for the woods to investigate. Even if she had to do it by sneaking out through her bedroom window, on account of she was grounded again. Someday, her father would understand why it was more important for her to spend time in the library than it was for her to do stupid things like trying out for the cheer squad. And about that time, pigs would fly.
Bad idea: going to investigate alone, three hours before she was supposed to be out of bed or would potentially be missed, without telling anyone where she was going or leaving a note behind. While wearing shorts. Without protective covering for her face or hands.
Worse idea: actually finding the damn salamanders, and confirming—the hard way—that yes, indeed, they spit acid.
Cursing herself for being Miss Natural Selection ’54, Alice put her arm up to protect her face, put her head down, and ran like her life depended on it. It wasn’t difficult to achieve that sort of speed; after all, technically, her life did depend on it. If those salamanders caught up with her, they sure weren’t going to be nice just because she’d gone into the woods without proper equipment. That actually struck her as the sort of thing that just got a person eaten.
Darkness had leeched the color from the woods, leaving them a study in bleak blacks and grays. It wasn’t a full moon, so the swamp lights and will-o-wisps weren’t an issue—a small favor, considering everything else that had gone wrong since Alice slid down the drainpipe outside her room—but that also meant there was relatively little available light. She wasn’t quite running blind, but she was close enough to it that she could call it a kissing cousin and not be overstating matters.
Given the darkness, it really shouldn't have been a surprise when she failed to see the tree before running head-first into the trunk, slamming her face hard against the rough wood. It shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was.
Alice’s last, irritated thought before she hit the forest floor was that she should really have gone to Sally Duffy’s stupid party after all.
It was all like some sort of dreadful primary school math problem. A bus left Chicago heading toward a remote part of upper Michigan. The bus traveled at a rate of forty miles per hour, which should have meant that the drive would take a little under eight hours. Sadly, this math assumed that the bus was moving, something which it was not always inclined to do. If the bus stopped every fifty miles for a span of fifteen to forty-five minutes, allowing passengers to board, disembark, and mill around socializing while the driver had a smoke behind the depot, how long would it take for the exhausted Englishman sitting in the second row to snap, kill everyone on board, and claim the bus as his own? How long would it take him to hide the evidence? If he began his killing spree while at a remote bus stop, what were his chances of getting away, quite literally, with murder?
Thomas Price had always considered himself a reasonable man. Even when his thoughts and opinions had first started to diverge from those that were considered “acceptable” by his colleagues, he had endeavored to remain calm, collected, and capable of arguing his point. But if the man behind him persisted in describing his woes with what he called “the bait and tackle” for one more mile, Thomas might well be forced to stoop to extreme measures.
As if there were any measures extreme enough to get him out of this situation. He had done his best to be a good little soldier, and when he had failed at that, he had done his best to be a good little researcher, traveling the world at the Covenant’s behest, documenting the strange and wonderful things he found. Writing everything down so that it wouldn’t be forgotten after the hunters who were using his words as maps came sweeping through and washed the world clean of everything that should never have existed. He had tried, really he had.
But then he had come to Australia, and the Philippines, and Hawaii, and Japan. All those glorious little islands that had never been swept completely clean of monsters and of magic. He had managed to be mostly honest until he saw those places, which were so fragile, and so essential. The world would have been so much poorer if he had drawn maps to those places, if he had explained the ways to sweep them clean. And so, after a lifetime of honesty, he had set himself to learning how to become a better liar.
Thomas Price had always excelled at the things he chose to do. It had taken several years for the Covenant to become suspicious, and even when they had, they had been unable to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that he was lying to them. Oh, he had covered his tracks well. The glorious monsters of those islands would never be caught, not by this generation of monster-hunters. They knew their enemy’s face. He had explained it to them enough times, patiently waiting for them to understand, and if there had been any question in his mind as to their intelligence, it had been answered when they had looked at him, one after the other, and said, “I will beware.”
Perhaps it had been inevitable that someone would begin to question his calm descriptions of landscapes untroubled by monsters, country after country and island after island where the Covenant was unwanted and unneeded. Why should they go where there was nothing to slay? Perhaps it had been inevitable that a team would be dispatched, quietly and without his knowledge, to verify his findings.
His superiors still didn’t know for sure that he had lied. Monsters could be tricky. They could have hidden themselves from a single man on an exploratory mission. As his work had been exemplary until that point—until the point when, he admitted quietly to himself, he had begun falsifying data in an effort to save lives—they weren’t quite ready to call him “traitor” and lock him away to be forgotten. No, they had devised a much more elegant punishment. He, who had seen wars and wonders and untouched vistas, was being sent into exile.
In Michigan. Upstate Michigan, as if that made all the difference in the world; as if he should be delighted to spend an untold number of years in a place that believed worth could be measured in how many lakes you had. He wasn’t even being sent to look for signs of monsters, although he was to keep an eye on something similar: Alexander and Enid Healy, the great traitors of his father’s generation. They had settled in a place called “Buckley Township” with their youngest son, and were apparently making quite a name for themselves among the creatures and aberrations of the North American continent.
According to his instructions, he was to keep his distance; monitor their movements; and document any offspring they or Jonathan might have produced since last the Covenant had set eyes upon them. There were rumors of children, perhaps young enough to be carried back to Europe and reeducated in the ways of the sword and the bow and the executioner’s axe. If he could, he was to keep himself from being noticed at all, blending into the town and becoming a part of the background—unseen, unremarked upon, and entirely overlooked.
Thomas was fairly sure that the people who were responsible for his instructions hadn’t left their libraries and comfortable sitting rooms in a decade or more. They certainly hadn’t tried to approach a family of paranoid, famously dangerous traitors.
No, Thomas Price had plans of his own. But before he could put them into motion, he had to accomplish the most dangerous feat of all. He had to make it to Buckley without killing everyone else on the bus.
Thomas closed his eyes, and thought of England, which—if he was lucky—he was never going to see again.
Alice woke slowly. Her mouth tasted like bog, a nasty combination of mud, peat moss, and her own blood. She raised a hand and felt her face gingerly. She’d managed to split her lip when she ran into the tree, but that seemed to be the worst of her injuries; the rest were just superficial sc
rapes and bruises, and she still had all of her teeth. That was a nice bonus. She hadn’t really been looking forward to getting home and explaining her upcoming dental bills to her father.
The sun was up. Judging by the light filtering through the trees, it was somewhere in the late morning, and she’d been asleep for hours. That was not such a nice bonus. Her father was going to kill her when he found out she’d not only gone into the woods alone, but she’d managed to parley it into accidentally skipping school.
She tried to stand. Her legs didn’t respond. That was…even less nice than the fact that the sun was up. Heart sinking, Alice twisted and looked over her shoulder, quickly identifying the source of the problem. It wasn’t unreasonable that she couldn’t move her legs, considering the big green pod-thing that had closed over them to the thigh. Really, it was much more unreasonable for her to have expected them to move in the first place.
Cautiously, Alice concentrated on her toes. She could feel them, still wrapped in her thick woolen socks and crammed down into her slightly too-small hiking shoes, which had been a gift from her grandmother on her last birthday. She might be willing to go out into the woods in shorts when the weather was nice, but she would no more go out in the delicate, impractical shoes that the other girls in her class liked than she would go out without a bra, or without extra ammunition. Being sixteen was hard enough without getting eaten because she didn’t like the way bullets stretched the pockets of her culottes.
So whatever had enveloped her legs, it hadn’t actually started to digest them yet, possibly because it was trying to figure out how to deal with her shoes. That was a good sign. Alice closed her eyes and focused on the sounds of the wood around her. The frickens were singing. There were no bigger cowards in the wood than the frickens, which made sense—they were small and soft and most things seemed to think that they were delicious. So whatever was chewing on her was either something that didn’t eat frickens, or it was something that hunted so slow the frickens didn’t take much notice of it.
Put “green,” “ambush predator,” and “hasn’t chewed my legs off yet,” and it wasn’t hard to come up with “probably a plant.” Alice opened her eyes and attempted to squirm into a position that would let her reach the thing that had hold of her, all the while wracking her brain looking for a name to pin on the thing. Vegetable predators weren’t all that common, thankfully. Barnacle geese mostly didn’t eat people, although they had a tendency to hiss and honk a lot. Screaming yams were adorable, delicious, and harmless. Whatever this was, it either wasn’t common or wasn’t native. Possibly both.
Most of the time, Alice would have taken a moment to gaze in wonder at the thing, which was a species she’d never seen before, after all, and was hence worthy of being regarded with a fair degree of awe. Most of the time, she didn’t make the acquaintance of a new species when it tried to eat her. Under the circumstances, she felt that reacting with irritation and yes, violence was acceptable.
By twisting her hips hard to the side, Alice was able to lever herself into an uncomfortable half-sitting, half-lounging position. She pushed against the ground with her left arm and pulled the knife from her belt with her right. Her father kept trying to convince her that respectable young ladies didn’t go around with knives shoved into their drawers. That might be true, but if it were, then respectable young ladies were probably eaten by monsters on a pretty regular basis.
“I’m very sorry about this, whatever-you-are,” she said apologetically. “I’m sure you’re very pretty, and that you serve an important ecological role in whatever sort of place it is you come from. But right now, you’re trying to eat me, and I don’t like that very much.” With the sort of niceties that one could really only observe with extremely slow monsters out of the way, Alice began carefully working her knife under the edge of the big green thing.
It was slow going. The creature, whatever it was, had been working on sucking her in for a while, and it had formed a very good seal against her skin. Fortunately, it hadn’t gotten around to digestion just yet, and she had an excellent knife.
After enough time spent cutting that her arms were going numb—the one from supporting her body weight, the other from trying to cut the plant without cutting herself—the thing finally decided that she wasn’t worth the trouble, and opened itself like a flower blossoming, revealing the beautiful turquoise and purple petals that it had been concealing. Alice scooted backward as quickly as she could, not caring how much mud she got on herself in the process. The thing was beautiful, sure, and it had a lovely perfume, like a mixture of apples and ripe strawberries, and that was swell, that was just fine and dandy, but it also had teeth. Dozens of them, like fishhooks leading down the center body of the plant, into what she assumed had to be its digestive system.
“Gosh, you’re pretty, and gosh, no thank you,” she said, finally allowing herself to look down at her legs and feet. They were intact. Covered in a thin layer of viscous slime that smelled faintly of the thing’s perfume, but intact, which was really what mattered. She attempted to stand. Her attempt was quickly thwarted by gravity, which had other ideas. The plant-thing must have had some sort of numbing agent on its petals. That explained a lot, including how it was able to engulf her without waking her up. The affected parts of her body had just…gone to sleep. Her feet must have been spared by her thick shoes.
“I have never loved a pair of shoes this much in my life,” she muttered, and resumed scooting backward. Eventually, as she had hoped, her back hit a tree trunk. She looked up, scanning the branches for threats. There was nothing visible, and the frickens were still singing. They’d never let her down before. She was willing to trust that they weren’t letting her down now.
Alice’s legs still weren’t working very well, but that was all right. Her physical education teachers had always been impressed by the number of pull-ups she could do, saying that she had remarkable upper body strength for a girl. Her father had been less complementary about it, saying that no boy was ever going to want a girl who could beat him in an arm-wrestling competition. Showed what he knew: she didn’t think any boy was ever going to want a girl who’d been digested by a giant plant monster from the swamp, and it was only her ability to haul herself, hand over hand, into the safety of the branches that was saving her from that particular fate.
By the time she made it into the tree, her head was spinning, and an odd lassitude was spreading through her entire body. She had time to wonder whether the plant might have been venomous in addition to everything else, and then—for the second time in less than eight hours—Alice lost consciousness, sliding down into the dark where nothing could hurt her.
Much.
The bus—which had been scheduled to arrive at the Buckley Township stop by two o’clock in the afternoon—pulled off the highway shortly after four. It took another half hour for them to roll to a leisurely stop, in front of a little sign that had been tacked up in front of the post office almost as an afterthought. The people of Buckley did not, it seemed, value access to the outside world the way that they ought.
Thomas’s stomach had been sinking since they’d first driven out of the woods and into view of the township. It was a sleepy, bucolic looking little place, the sort of community where someone from the outside would be “the newcomer” for fifty years. The Covenant’s original plan hadn’t just been wrongheaded: it had been foolish in the extreme, and represented a total failure on the part of the research division.
Assuming any research had been done in the first place. Thomas rose and filed off the bus with the other disembarking passengers, clutching his travel valise and considering, not for the first time, the possibility that this was an elaborate way of both testing his loyalty and tying up loose ends. If he stood out too much, there was a good chance the Healys would take care of him the easy way, and simply attempt to kill him. He didn’t know how many of them there were, how well prepared they were for an attack, or how much they had kept up their training. Even mo
re importantly, he didn’t know if he would be capable of firing the first shot.
He had been a killer for the Covenant, when necessity arose. He had never shied away from getting his hands dirty. But he had never been an assassin, and he wasn’t going to allow them to turn him into one now.
According to the dossier he had been provided, the deed to his new, if temporary, home would be waiting for him at the bank, which would be open for—he checked his watch—another thirty minutes. If he didn’t want to sleep in a field tonight, he would have to make it to the bank before they closed, as they were apparently quite strict about closing on time.
Thomas had slept in fields before, of course, and in things that were far less pleasant than fields. But he had never done it on his first night in a new community, and he had certainly never done it without making a proper survey of the area first. If he wanted to have any confidence that he was not going to be devoured by something unpleasant while his eyes were closed—which was to say, if he wanted to get any rest at all—he had to reach the bank in a timely fashion.
The bus driver had secured their luggage in a compartment beneath the vehicle, and if this stop was to be anything like all the others, he wasn’t going to feel any real urgency about getting it off. Thomas positioned himself outside the bus doors and, when the driver emerged, cleared his throat politely.
The bus driver ignored him.
Clearly, a more forward approach was necessary. Thomas cleared his throat again before asking, “Sir, if I were to step away on a brief errand, what would happen to my baggage?”
The bus driver turned to blink at him, expression broadcasting disbelief. “Excuse me?”
“I have to get to the bank before they close, you see, and if I fail to do that I’m going to have a great deal of trouble tonight. So if I were to step away to take care of that, what would happen to my baggage?”
The Way Home Page 1
