The Darkest Path

by Jeff Hirsch

  Rotating red and blue lights appeared in the rearview mirror, followed by wailing sirens. Military Police. My stomach tightened.

  “Cal?”

  The lights grew brighter as they gained on us, filling the inside of the truck. The exit onto the highway was just ahead.

  “You can’t outrun them,” James said. “We’re in the middle of nowhere, so it’s not like you can lose them. What happens when they get a chopper in the air?”

  “They’re not sending a chopper after two kids in a stolen truck.”

  “PULL OVER!” an MP announced over his loudspeaker. “YOU ARE UNDER ARREST.”

  I swerved at the last second and took the highway exit. The MP overshot it, but as I accelerated down the ramp and onto an empty two-lane road, I heard his brakes squeal. It was only seconds before the MP’s lights emerged in the rearview again. The truck’s engine revved as the speedometer climbed past seventy, then eighty. It hit ninety and the truck began to shake. Still, the MP drew closer.

  “Even if we made it to the border,” James said calmly, “no one will let us across. Monroe will listen to you, Cal. I promise.”

  “When did you do it?” I asked. “When did you trade Mom and Dad for him?”

  “I didn’t,” James said. “I grew up. That’s all.”

  The panic that had been fueling me began to drain away, replaced by a buzzing numbness. My foot eased off the gas and the truck slowed. Eighty-five. Eighty. The MP cruiser was moving alongside us now, its bumper approaching my door.

  “It’s okay,” James said soothingly. “We’ll go back home and everything will be just like it was.”

  Just the sound of that word in his mouth, home, and something inside of me went molten. I glanced out the side window. The cruiser had pulled even and was moving ahead.

  “Hold on to Bear,” I said.

  “What? Cal—”

  I jerked the wheel, hurling us into the side of the cruiser. There was a shriek as metal hit metal and then a split second of weightlessness before the seat belt yanked me back. James’s screams, mixed with the glass and steel crash. Everything was lit by the red and blue of the police lights until they winked out and everything went dark.

  • • •

  We ended up sideways in the middle of the road. The windshield was a spiderweb of fractures, and smoke poured out of the hood. James was slumped in his seat, dead pale with his arms clapped around Bear.

  The cruiser was twenty feet down the road, flipped upside down at the end of a trail of shattered glass and torn metal. The windows were smashed and I couldn’t see anyone moving inside.

  “James? Are you okay?”

  He moaned. I pushed open my door, but my legs were useless. I collapsed the second they hit asphalt. I lay facedown, every nerve in my body buzzing at once. No time, I thought, nearly delirious. Got to move. Glass crunched under my palm as I forced myself up. I kept one eye on the cruiser as I came around the front of the truck, like it was a monster that could come to life any second.

  Bear was as dazed as James, whimpering and shaking as I lifted him out of the truck. I checked him for injuries but found only cuts and scrapes. I set him down by the side of the road, then undid James’s seat belt. He fell into my arms and I eased him down beside Bear and grabbed our backpacks. I got mine on and staggered out into the roadway.

  “Come on,” I said, draping the backpack over James’s shoulders. “We have to go.”

  “No,” he mumbled, nodding listlessly toward the wrecked MP cruiser. “We have to stay. Have to help them.”

  I stared at the cruiser. There was still no movement inside. No sound.

  “They’re fine,” I said. “Let’s go. Bear, come on.”

  James tried to pull away from me but he was too weak. I threw my arm around his shoulder and drew him away from the side of the road. Bear trailed along behind us as we moved into the desert.

  I dragged James along until the flat land fell away and we found ourselves at the crest of a ravine. There was a narrow trail heading down into it, but it was impossible to see how far it went or if it would even support our weight. I looked around for another option and found none. I pulled a single chemical glow stick out of my pack and cracked it. Any light was risky, but taking the trail blind was sure to be suicide.

  I headed down first, stepping slowly into the chem stick’s pale green glow. James came next, with Bear sniffing along behind us. Now that the shock of the crash had passed, every step sent waves of pain through my body. The bones in my wrist felt like they were grinding together. Soon, exhaustion began to nip at every muscle, settling over my thoughts like a fog. The dark of the chasm yawned beside us as the trail grew more and more narrow. We had to find someplace to rest, and fast.

  It was an hour or more before I let James sink to the rocky floor and then sat down beside him, struggling to catch my breath and wishing away every stabbing pain throughout my body. When I could summon the strength to move again, I cracked another glow stick and looked around.

  We were on a small shelf of rock just wide enough for the three of us. Bear sat panting, eyes shining eerily in the chemical green. The gash on his side was still sealed, but he yanked one of his front paws away with a yelp when I tried to look at it. He tucked it close to his body and licked at it.

  James was beside me, bent in half over his knees, with his back to me.

  “James?” He didn’t turn, so I reached for his shoulder. “Listen to me. I—”

  He fell into the light and I saw that his mouth was open wide and he was gasping soundlessly, tears streaking the sides of his face. Both hands were clasped over his chest, clawing at his lungs.

  I dropped the light and tore through my pack, nerves screaming as I searched through clothes and useless gear. I found the inhaler, dropped it, grabbed it again. James started to thrash in the middle of the trail, pounding at the dirt with one fist, his face streaked with panic. I pulled him to me and set the inhaler to his lips, but one hand flew up and knocked it away.

  “Don’t need,” he insisted in a tortured rattle. “Don’t… need…”

  “Yes, you do. Now take it before you pass out.”

  I forced the inhaler into his mouth and clamped his jaw shut around it. I triggered a blast of medicine into him and then another.

  I watched as he struggled, and timed the next blast for the tiny intake he could manage. With each puff from the inhaler, I felt the rigid muscles in James’s back yield. The wheeze faded and James settled into a halting, staticky breath. His arms were limp, and even in the green glow, I could see the palor of his skin and the sheen of cold sweat all over him. I dropped the inhaler and wiped the sweat from his forehead.

  “You’re okay,” I whispered. “You’re going to be okay.”

  Bear appeared in the dark, sniffing at him with great concern. James managed to lift one weak hand and pat his side. He took a shaky breath, then pulled himself into the deeper shadows on the opposite side of the platform. Bear followed, standing halfway between the two of us. He looked over his shoulder at me.

  “Look,” I said to James’s back. “You need time to adjust. Okay? Once we get away from them, you’ll see.”

  I stopped at the faint sound of James’s voice.

  “James? I can’t hear you. What are you saying?”

  I moved closer until I was at his back. I put my hand on his shoulder and turned him around.

  “… consecrate my life to the Glorious Path. I am the light in the darkness. The hand offering guidance to those who have gone astray. I am the rod that falls upon the backs of the defiant….”

  My hand fell from his shoulder as I backed away. The glow of the chem stick faded and I was left there in the deep dark with nothing but the sound of my brother praying.

  8

  I spread our map out on the ground the next morning and bent over it.

  Path states were bordered in gold, Fed in blue. I used a pencil to sketch out the western and eastern fronts. The closest Federal territor
y was California, but that was a pipe dream. California was a major prize for the Path, second only to the new Federal capital in Philadelphia. Fighting along the border had been intense for years. James was right; we could never cross there.

  I moved my finger over the map to Nevada and Oregon, which, with California, made up the Federal-controlled land in the region. Nevada was a slightly better bet, but it was still westward, the wrong direction, and the word for the last few weeks was that Idaho was probably going to fall any day. If we were in Nevada when that happened, it’d close off our only route back to New York. We’d be trapped on the West Coast until the end of the war — forever if the Path came out on top.

  The only possibility left was Wyoming, which seemed insane. Between us and Wyoming were more than eight hundred miles of Path lands in Arizona and Utah. On top of that, Salt Lake City sat too close to the Utah–Wyoming border and was among one of the Path’s major strongholds. Two scruffy-looking kids and a dog trying to walk anywhere near that city would be in jail before they took two steps.

  I kicked the map away and sat back against a rock. It couldn’t have been more than eight o’clock in the morning and the sun was already intense. I wiped a film of sweat from my forehead and reached for our canteen but stopped before taking a drink. It was almost a thousand miles to Fed territory and we had one canteen and a handful of food. I set the water back down.

  James was at the end of the trail, knees hugged to his chest, watching without expression as Bear splashed about in a thin stream of water. James and I hadn’t said a word to each other since we’d woken up at dawn.

  I rummaged in my pack and threw an MRE down to him.

  “You should eat,” I said. “We’ll leave as soon as it gets dark.”

  “Leave for where?”

  I grabbed my own breakfast and ripped it open. Beef stew. “Home.”

  “You think you’re going to get all the way to New York? Cal—”

  “We just have to get across the border,” I said. “Once we explain that we’re captures, the Feds will help us from there. And the Path isn’t going to get bent out of shape searching for two escaped novices. We’ll travel at night. We’ll be careful.”

  “You can’t run away from this.”

  “Run away from what?”

  “You killed someone.”

  It was like a punch in the gut. I flexed the sore muscles of my right hand, still able to feel the kick of the gun.

  “You know the kind of person Quarles was.”

  “And you made sure he never had the chance to become anything better.”

  I glared across our camp. “And how many people has the Path killed, James?”

  “It’s a war. It’s different.”

  “You learn a lot about war sitting in camp and fetching Monroe’s coffee?”

  “As much as you did mucking out a dog kennel.”

  I threw the half-eaten MRE into the dirt and stormed down the trail.

  “You want to know how I really got that medicine for you?” I asked, holding up my cast. “How I got this? It was a little deal I worked out with your buddy Monroe. Your medicine in exchange for Rhames going at me with a baseball bat so I’d look pathetic enough to draw some Feds out of their base. I was right there, James. I listened while they gave them the Choice, while they murdered men, women, and children.”

  “That’s not true!” James said. “Anyone who refuses the Path is taken to a camp until the end of the war. After the war—”

  “I was there! I was right there. What did they do to you?”

  “They didn’t do anything to me! I made a choice.”

  “Then make another one. Get your things together. As soon as it’s dark, we leave.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “I swear to God, I will tie you up and drag you home if I have to.”

  James pressed his wrists together and thrust them toward me. “Do it.”

  “James—”

  “I am on a Glorious Path,” he spat at me, his voice quickly finding the rhythm of a first-year novice prayer. “I will not turn from it even if it means my death. I will not succumb to the temptations of the lost and the wicked. I will be their beacon instead.”

  He stood there, hands out, daring me. I went back and rooted through my backpack until I found a length of rope. Bear ran up from the stream, growing increasingly distressed as I bound James’s wrists, yanking the knot tight enough to make him gasp.

  “We leave when the sun goes down.”

  I left James, snatching the map off the ground and flattening it in front of me. I searched the map’s blocks of gold and blue for a way out. Salt Lake City sat like a citadel near the southern edge of the Wyoming border, but north of that, the border looked nearly empty. A plan started to snap together — head north, skirting west to avoid Salt Lake City, then head east to cross the border. It was a tough route, but as long as we stayed away from the hornet’s nest of SLC, maybe we had a chance.

  I sat back and breathed deep, trying to calm the thud of a headache that was pounding just behind my eyes. Once it calmed, I drew my finger across the map, past Wyoming and South Dakota and Iowa, all the way to New York and Ithaca.

  I closed my eyes, seeing it all as it was — the lake, the trees, the cobalt-blue walls of our house — going over each image like they were the words of a prayer.

  • • •

  After the sun had been down for more than an hour, I threw on my backpack and went down to the stream. James and Bear were nowhere to be found.

  “James?” I called as loudly as I dared. Nothing. “Bear?”

  I cracked another chem light and held it up. A shuffling sound came from somewhere beyond its reach. I crept toward it as silently as I could until I came around a pillar of rock and saw him.

  James was on his knees in the dirt, his back to me, his bound hands in front of him. His forehead was pressed into Bear’s neck and his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he was having another attack, but then I heard his voice.

  “I just want to go home.”

  He said it over and over, quiet, but so strained it was like the words were slicing his throat on their way out.

  “I just want to go home. I just want to go home. I just want to go home.”

  Bear grew anxious, dancing back and forth and then setting his front paws on James’s legs with a whine. James flung his hands over Bear’s head, drawing him in as he cried. Soon Bear went still and then James did too.

  A rock shifted as I took a step, and James turned toward the sound. When he saw me, he left Bear and slowly crossed into the circle of green light. James put his bound hands out in front of him.

  “You said you’d be dragging me.”

  Bear whimpered at his feet, staring up at me. I seized the ropes and flung James out onto the path ahead of me. He stumbled, nearly pitching into the dirt before righting himself and continuing on without a word. Bear shied back with a growl.

  “What? You want to stay?”

  Bear barked once, an angry yap, but then I took his collar and hurried him along too. As we climbed, the deep blue sky shaded to black. By the time we were topside, the stars were out, circling a full moon. The land was quiet and flat, vastly dark. Bear dashed out into the night to explore. I found the Big Dipper and traced a line from it to the North Star.

  Beside me, James began to pray.

  It was like a knot tightening inside me. I remembered the nights I stood in the dark by his bunk trying to quiet him as he sobbed. We’d just been taken by the Path and he’d gone days without food, surviving on nothing but the few drops of water I was able to force into him. How many of those nights had I lain below him in the bunk, sleepless, terrified that I’d wake to find my brother dead of grief?

  Listening to him pray, some dark part of me wished I had. I felt sick even as I thought it, but at that moment, even his absence seemed more welcome than standing beside this stranger.

  “We should go if we’re going,” James said when
he finished his prayer.

  I slipped my knife out of its sheath and cut his bonds with a single slash. James looked up at me, confused, as the ropes fell to the ground. I shoved his pack into his chest.

  “Go home.”

  James was motionless for a few seconds and then he drew the pack toward him.

  “Maybe we don’t have to go back to Cormorant,” he said, tempering the edge in his voice. “Beacon Quan told me about this place in Oklahoma called Foley. It’s a real Path town, way behind the lines. Just a few farms and a small Lighthouse. Maybe we could—”

  “The highway we came in on is that way. Leave now and you’ll be in your bunk before morning.”

  James started to protest, but whatever fight he had in him seemed to evaporate. “What do you want me to tell Monroe?”

  “Tell him whatever you want,” I snapped. And then, “Tell him… tell him I had a gun and I tried to force you to come with me but you managed to escape. Say I’m heading west to California.”

  James nodded. I dug through my own pack and held out the asthma inhalers.

  “Here.”

  “I don’t need them.”

  “Don’t be—”

  “I don’t have asthma.”

  “Then what was that last night?”

  James kicked the sand at his feet and then looked up at me. His eyes were gray in the moonlight. “A lack of faith.”

  “James…”

  “I should go.”

  Bear trotted out of the dark, tail wagging. He ran to James, who dropped down beside him and gave him a scratch under his chin.

  “Take care of him,” he said.

  James slipped his backpack on and started away. Bear followed for a few steps and then stopped to look back at me, confused. He barked toward James, but my brother had already begun to melt into the darkness.

  I wanted to call out to him, stop him, but I knew it was useless. Even if I found the right thing to say, even if he walked by my side for the next thousand miles, the truth was I lost my brother years ago. I stood there until the dark overtook him, and the whisper of his footsteps faded away to nothing.