by P. T. Hylton
Mason took a long moment before speaking. “You gotta understand, he could be a difficult man at times.”
Frank grinned. “You don’t have to tell me. I used to share a bunk bed with him.”
Mason chuckled. “He never told me that. At least not that I remember. I was so young. Sometimes the memories get fuzzy.” He stared into the ruins of the house.
“You were saying he was difficult?” Frank prompted.
“Yeah. Sometimes he was. But he was also dedicated. If he believed in something, he’d fight for it.”
“What did he believe in?”
Mason smiled. “That much I remember. He believed in his friends.”
Frank cocked his head at that. Obviously, for Mason to exist there had to have been a woman here at some point. But friends? How many people had lived in these woods?
“My dad led a little community here. They called it Sanctuary. They worked together to keep the forest safe. They kept everything in place, if that makes sense. It wasn’t always perfect, but it was always peaceful. Until I was eight.”
“So what happened?”
Mason sighed. “New people would show up here occasionally. My dad always took them in and put them to work. He was kind like that. But one day a woman showed up, and everything changed.”
“Changed how?”
“Dad kept me sheltered from most of it, but even I saw what was happening. She had new ideas, a new way of dealing with things. There were a couple fights, and I know my father had to punish some people. And there was a tension in the air. Like something bad was coming.”
Frank looked out over the rubble and tried to imagine it as it was then, groups of people fighting and squabbling and living their lives right here in these woods. And Jake leading them.
“One night,” Mason continued, “there was a battle. Mom told me to go lock myself in the bathroom and not to come out until she came to get me. I waited what felt like hours. When I finally came out, there were bodies everywhere. Including mom’s.”
Mason pointed his flashlight toward a stand of trees twenty yards away. “I ran and hid in the woods and waited, praying for it all to end. I heard yelling, so much yelling.”
He waved his hand towards the woods to the right of the house. “There used to be cabins all along here, a couple dozen of them. The woman and her friends burned most of them. The fires burned for hours. I could feel the heat of it from where I sat. I hid in the woods and watched the flames. I kept waiting for my dad to come find me. It wasn’t until later that I found his body in the woods.”
“I’m sorry that happened to you, Mason,” Frank said. “I’m sure Jake did everything he could to protect you.”
“I know he did,” Mason said. “He was a good father. The best I’ve known, anyway. Besides, it wasn’t all bad luck. They left a few cabins standing, including the storage cabin. So I had shelter and supplies. Supplement that with plants and berries and I’ve managed to get by. As I grew a little older, I hunted when I had the opportunity. Sometimes deer wandered into these woods. Or squirrel. We had a bear once. I just had to kill the animals before the Larvae got at them. Like I said, the forest was more lively back then.”
Frank was still trying to decide what to think of his nephew.
“Let me ask you something,” Frank said. “Have you been alone all this time? Because you don’t talk like someone who hasn’t had human contact since he was eight.”
Mason grinned, showing yellowed teeth with plenty of gaps between them. “Oh I never said I was alone. There’s a man who comes sometimes. I might have sat in the woods looking at those fires forever if not for him. He taught me how to live out here. Which plants to eat. How to hunt on the odd occasion an animal showed up. I spent a lot of time with him when I was growing up.”
Frank felt a cold chill. “Who was it? What’s his name?”
Mason’s grin widened. “The way he tells it, you know him already. His name’s Zed.”
CHAPTER THREE: ARTIFACTS
1. Sanctuary
It was two days later the first time Sophie saw him.
They kept her isolated. Jake told her she needed time to adjust before meeting the others. She lived in the cabin where she had been hazed by Logan. The handcuff-enhanced chair and the hose had been replaced with a nice queen-size bed, a dresser stocked with simple and practical clothes, and a small bookshelf stocked with popular fiction from a variety of eras.
She spent the first day mostly unsupervised. She could hang out in the house. She could work in the vegetable garden out back. As long as she didn’t step outside the tall wooden fence that caged off the backyard. She occasionally heard people walking past the fence, usually alone and quiet, only the sounds of their feet shuffling on the hard dirt giving them away. But sometimes there were groups, and she heard talking and laughing. She was forbidden from calling out to them. It was against the rules to talk to anyone outside this cabin. She got the feeling climbing the fence and peaking over it at them wouldn’t be appreciated either.
Just for now, Jake told her.
So much for there only being two rules.
Jake had been much like Nate had described. Friendly and pleasant, but in a surface way. There was something distant about the man, like he was only partially there in the room with her. But it wasn’t like his mind was wandering. She never got the sense he wasn’t paying attention. It was more like a vital part of him, of his personality, his soul maybe, was missing.
Her only companion in isolation was Frasier, the man who had been in the cabin when Leonard and Baldwin brought her in. He was always around, not following her, but not avoiding her either. He was a quiet man, and she was dying for some conversation.
“Was Frasier your first name or your last name?” she asked him. They were in the garden. She had already pulled all the weeds she could find, and not having a lot of gardening experience, she didn’t know what else to do. She wanted to talk to Frasier, and she hadn’t been able to think of a good question despite wracking her brain for the past twenty minutes.
He grinned a toothy grin. “See, this is exactly why you need time to adjust before joining up with the rest of the crew. It’s not polite to ask that kind of thing.”
“I didn’t ask about your past. I asked about your name. Your name is who you are. Always.”
Frasier shook his head. “Not anymore. Now it’s just the one name. Get it through your skull. The old life’s gone.”
Sophie grunted. “Man! You’re a stone wall.” Her eyes combed the garden for the twentieth time, hoping to find a weed to pick.
“It’s kind of freeing though, isn’t it?” he asked. “Not having the weight of the past on you. You can be anything you want here. Look at it as an opportunity to reinvent yourself.”
Sophie looked at him. “Am I allowed to ask about Jake?”
The old man stretched, cracking his back loudly. “Sure. No rule against that.”
“Does he bring us here? This is gonna sound stupid, but does he have some kind of machine or something? Or, I don’t know, some power?”
Frasier chuckled. “You figure that one out, you tell me. He’s pretty tight lipped. All I know is he has this book. I think it lets him know when a new person is coming. He tells us a couple of days in advance. Usually anyway.”
“I remember Leonard saying they weren’t expecting anyone the other night.”
Frasier nodded. “Either Jake didn’t know, or he had some reason for not telling us.”
“If people get here by asking for Sanctuary in unexpected, life-threatening situations, how does Jake know it’s gonna happen ahead of time?” Sophie asked. Frasier started to speak, and she held up a hand to stop him. “I know. He’s tight lipped. I’m making conversation. Asking you to speculate.”
Frasier shook his head. “Like I said, if you figure it out, you let me know.” With that, he turned and went into the cabin.
Sophie groaned. Of all the people to be stuck with for an indeterminate amount of ti
me, she got Stonewall Frasier.
If the purpose of this time in isolation was to make her more comfortable in Sanctuary, it was having the opposite effect. She had far too much time to think. She thought about her parents, the way they’d already lost one child, and how they must be frantic at the disappearance of their remaining daughter. It made her sick to her stomach. She had to find a way to get back, and not just to bring Taylor to justice. Her parents deserved better than to be left wondering for the rest of their lives.
The next day, Frasier let her sit on the front porch with him. It wasn’t much, but it beat the hell out of being stuck in the backyard, fenced in like an animal. Here she had a view.
The trees in front of her were unlike any she’d ever seen. They were unbelievably tall, and the trunks were as thick around as her Honda Civic. They first reminded her of redwoods, but they were different. Part of it was the color. The bark reminded her of butterscotch. And they were twisted. The trunks bent and spun and angled out in odd directions in their journey skyward. The shadows of the massive trees fell over everything.
The trail, she assumed the same trail she had been carried up three days ago, snaked out of the woods, past the porch where they sat, then wrapped around the back of the cabin, off to who knew where. The people she’d heard the day before must have been walking on that trail.
It was dusk, and people occasionally passed the cabin. Either they knew not to talk to newcomers or this was an especially introverted community. Most of them didn’t even acknowledge her. A few gave a curt nod. One, a boy who couldn’t have been more than eight, waved at her shyly.
Frasier introduced her by proxy after the walkers disappeared around the corner. “That woman in the red tee shirt’s Abby. She’s a hard worker. Had a baby about six months ago. Cute little girl. Named her Gavin. The man with her is Vance. They’re together. Though he’s not Gavin’s daddy. Baldwin’s the father.”
Sophie reached over and playfully slapped his knee. “Guess there’s no rule against gossiping.”
His face turned beet red. “Just giving you the lay of the land,” he muttered. “Thought you might want to know.”
Sophie smiled. “No, no, please continue. Who was the kid who waved?”
He cleared his throat, making a show of his reluctance to gossip further. “Him you’re gonna want to know. That’s Jake’s boy. Mason.”
“Huh,” Sophie said. “Who’s the mother?”
Now Frasier grinned. “You met her.” He leaned forward, clearly enjoying this. “Logan.”
Sophie groaned. “Doesn’t surprise me. She gave off a queen bee kind of vibe.”
Frasier shrugged. “She comes on strong at times, that’s for sure. Officially, she and Jake are broken up, but unofficially not much has changed.” He gave her a wink. “She’s good people. You should cut her some slack. She’s been through a lot.”
“Considering how people get to Sanctuary, I’d say been through a lot applies to every person here.”
Frasier chuckled. “Yeah, I guess it does.”
That was the moment it happened. He rounded the corner, and there he was, right in front of her. Charles Taylor.
He looked older than Sophie remembered. His scraggly beard was as much salt as pepper now. But that made sense. It had been nearly a decade since she last saw him. The picture they’d been flashing on the news the past few days was the old one, the famous one from his trial, where he was sitting behind the defendant's table, smirking as if the proceedings were a joke. But his most defining characteristic, his thick arms and his huge, catcher’s mitt hands, remained the same. Sophie could never look at those hands without picturing a baseball bat in them, couldn’t look at those arms without imagining them swinging a bat into the back of Heather’s head so hard her skull broke into a hundred tiny shards of bone.
He froze when he saw her. The sun was behind Sophie, and Taylor’s squinted into it, as if not sure of what he was seeing. He took a few steps forward and fell under the shadow of the cabin. He stared at Sophie for a long while, his head tilted slightly, as if trying to place her.
Sophie felt the old familiar anger flow through her. She wanted to leap out of the rocking chair and dig her fingernails into his throat, to squeeze the breath out of him, to stand on his face as he died. But she felt something else too. Something stronger. Something unexpected. Fear.
She wanted to move, but she couldn’t. She was frozen under his terrifying gaze. All the old fears came rushing back. The Curbside Killer had finally come for her.
Charles Taylor slowly smiled. He tipped his baseball cap at her. Then he moseyed down the path. Sophie’s eyes followed him. She didn’t breathe until he rounded the corner and disappeared from sight.
Frasier gently cleared his throat. “That was Taylor. But I’m guessing you already knew that.”
Sophie kept her eyes on the path, as if Taylor might come charging back around at any moment. “We don’t talk about the past,” she said.
“Fair point,” Frasier said. “And I wasn’t going to ask.”
She felt the life come back into her limbs, and with it something else: shame. It was a moment she’d been waiting for the last seven years. She’d planned a thousand things she’d say if she ever got the chance. A thousand things she’d do. But, instead, she’d acted like a scared child who saw the boogeyman. Worse still, Taylor had seen her fear.
She’d lost the element of surprise. She’d lost her edge. Taylor knew she was here, and he knew she was afraid.
“Piece of advice.” Frasier spoke slowly and softly, his fatherly side coming out for the first time. “Taylor? The man’s not right. I don’t know what’s between you, and I don’t want to know. Whatever it is, let it stay in wherever the hell you came from. Steer clear of him as much as possible. When you do see him again, pretend like you’re meeting him for the first time. If he has any smarts, he’ll do the same.”
“Easier said than done.”
“Maybe, but it’s what you need to do. I can help.”
Sophie looked at him, finally pulling her eyes away from the spot where Taylor had disappeared. “Help how?”
“I can keep you busy. It’s time we start talking about the work we do here. But first, an important question. You any good with a knife?”
Sophie raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking me to cook?”
Frasier stood up, a noisy process involving groans, cracks, and pops. “No, I’m not. We use our knives for more than cooking here. I think it’s about time I showed you.”
2. Sanctuary
Jake stood, as he often did these days, staring out his office window toward the trees at the edge of the woods.
The one benefit of living in a clearing in the middle of a constantly shifting forest was that your view was new every day. But over time, he had learned to identify some of the trees. The way a low branch crooked out a certain angle, the way the trunk took an unnatural twenty-degree turn about fifteen feet off the ground. These were the things that distinguished one tree from another. It always made him a bit queasy looking at those trees. Each one of them represented another memory he couldn’t forget.
There was one that was worse than the others. He paused at the window each morning before he looked out, hoping he wouldn’t see that particular tree. When it was at the edge of woods, it cast the shadow of a foul mood over him for the rest of the day. Something about that one tree, a tree a bit taller and a bit gnarlier than the rest, disquieted Jake at a deep level.
Thankfully today that tree was not at the edge. It was buried somewhere deeper in the forest, which was fine with Jake. It could stay buried in there forever for all he cared. He glanced over at the small bookshelf in the corner. How long had it been since he’d gotten himself a new book? In the old days, he had torn through novels like it was a mission from God to get to the last page as quickly as possible. But in the last few years he’d had a hard time concentrating while reading. The top shelf currently contained two John Scalzi books, one Scott Lyn
ch, and one Patrick Rothfuss, all unread.
Sometimes Jake wondered if maybe the book with the broken world symbol had somehow sapped his love of reading anything else.
There was a knock at the door, three quick taps. Jake never locked the office door unless he was leaving the house, and everyone respected his privacy. People rarely disturbed him, and, when they did, they always knocked. Everyone but Mason. Mason burst into his father’s office like it was his own bedroom. Which was as it should be, as far as Jake was concerned.
Sanctuary. Had any father every given his son a more awful birthright? A childhood of isolation in a place he would never be able to leave.
From the sound at the door, Jake knew it wasn’t Nate, who always used a distinct knocking pattern to identify himself.
“Come in,” Jake said.
The door opened and Yang walked in, a sheet of yellow legal paper in his hand. Yang was a thin man who was quick with a smile but generally kept to himself. He seemed happiest when he was in the kitchen preparing the communal meals.
He handed Jake the legal paper. “Just dropping off the shopping list, boss.”
Jake grimaced. It seems Nate’s nickname for Jake was catching on with some of the others. “Thanks. You need it today?”
Yang shrugged, a wicked smile playing on his lips. “If possible. If not, I can always make meatloaf tonight.”
Jake couldn’t help but smile himself. Yang knew Jake loathed meatloaf. “Message received. I’ll get to work.”
Yang winked and ambled out of the office, swinging the door shut behind him.
Jake pulled the curtains shut, returned to his desk and took the book out of the faded red lockbox. He ran his hand across the symbol on the front of the book, a globe with a jagged crack running through it. The image was slightly raised and running his hand over it somehow calmed him.
He’d found the book only moments after arriving in these woods, and for a long time—close to two years by his calculation—it had been his only companion. The first time he’d looked through it, it had been nonsense, a series of strange, seemingly unrelated drawings surrounded by text composed of letters unlike anything Jake had ever seen. But, slowly, the book revealed itself to him. Line by line, page by page, the nonsense words became English. It was as if the book were learning to trust him.
