by Lynn Red
The next roar blasted my ears so hard I thought I’d fall straight on my ass. The second sound, which I immediately knew was indeed a howl, even though it was different somehow from what you’d hear at a zoo, almost made me wretch. “What is happening?” I looked his way, but he was fixed squarely on that damn clipboard.
“No idea,” he said. “Animals fighting, I don’t know. But I’ve never heard anything like this. Hell, I’ve never heard of anything like this. I don’t even know what it could be. It sounds like… bears and wolves going after each other?”
“I don’t know, Dave,” I said. “I don’t know what the hell could be going on, but I do know that whoever is missing needs to be found right the hell now!”
“Hold on,” he said, like I was trying his patience. “I’m trying to figure out who it—okay Angela Jackson. You know her?”
I shrugged. “Don’t think she’s one of mine.”
“Angela!” I started to call. “Angela! Over here honey! Over here!”
The tingles of danger and anticipation were rising up in my throat, burning like I’d just taken a shot of whiskey. The thing is, I didn’t remember that little girl’s name at all. And even if she wasn’t in my class, that’s not normal. I’m usually the teacher with the room full of kids every morning before school, the one where all the girls come to tell me about their impending death-slash-period when it hits and they need ‘supplies’ before there’s a disaster. So, to not know someone in my grade was definitely strange. That is, unless she was new, I told myself, but no, in that case I’d know that there was a new girl.
But there wasn’t time for any of that. Miller was beginning to edge his way toward the bus, and I got the distinct feeling that he wasn’t exactly a picture of bravery. “You gonna help me find her?” I shouted to him, in between increasingly loud, increasingly close, animal war cries.
“I’m calling the damn park service, Adriana! What on earth would me charging off into the woods do except get me lost too?”
“I don’t know,” I answered brusquely, “maybe save a little girl? If you’re not going, I am.”
“No you’re not!” he cried out, as the vein in the middle of his forehead throbbed. “You can’t, I’m calling the forest service and that’s that. Get on the bus right now and we’ll wait.”
Even if I had been considering such a thing, the horrifying, pulse-thudding roar that followed, and the howl that came right after it—so close I could almost feel the sound—would have changed my mind. I wanted to run and hide and get on that bus, but at the same time, I knew that wasn’t something that I could do, not if I wanted to face myself in the morning.
“Give me the flare gun,” I pushed open the bus door and said to the driver. From the look on his face, he didn’t have a clue what was going on.
“Why?” he asked.
“Because there are bears in the woods, and one of our kids is lost. Unless you have a hunting rifle stuffed under that thing, give me the damn flare gun so at least I can signal when I find her. Okay?”
“Cain’t have a rifle,” he said. “Ain’t legal on a school bus, yanno.”
“Right, thanks,” I said, getting huffy. “Give me the flare gun or I’ll break the fuckin’ box and get it myself.”
The chorus of gasps that came from the kids occupying the front few banks of seats, followed by their giggling, reminded me of where I was. Still, desperate times and all. I edged nearer the BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY glass, and the driver took the hint. He took his hand off the wheel and lifted it defensively. “I can’t open this thing, I gotta—”
I didn’t let him finish. I pulled my shirt down over my elbow and bashed the glass. It gave like it was gimmick stage glass made of pulled sugar, and I fetched not only the flare gun from the box, but also the emergency axe, which I always thought was for breaking out a windshield or hacking through a door in case of emergency. I guess “bear attacks” were just another possible application.
“Do any of you know Angela Jackson? Maybe a new girl?” I asked the kids. They all gave me the faces of children who are both confused and terrified, though they aren’t really sure why for either. “None of you? This is important.”
“No ma’am,” little Janice said. “I dunno who that is.” Her lisp carrying her voice into a higher soprano than it was normally. “Never heard of her,” another said.
“Are you sure? She could be new, could be someone absent a lot?” I was really reaching, trying for anything that could tell me who she was, and mostly, if she really existed. “She’s on the list,” I pleaded, “one of you must’ve heard of her at some point. How can someone who doesn’t exist be on this list?”
I was starting to get heated, which is never a good thing when you don’t want to panic a bus full of kids. They were surely beginning to figure out what was happening, but the thing is, none of them seemed scared. They just looked curious, and confused, but mostly curious.
“Ade,” Miller said, coming up behind me. I swung around brandishing my axe and flare gun like something out of the final scene of a horror movie. I was the last warm body left, and I meant to carve a hole in the villain before he killed me… if he did. “Shit!” he jumped back, and the kids went to giggling again.
Teachers swearing trumps a lot for kids. Really, it does. In the back of my mind I was thinking how glad I was they were so entertained by the cursing because otherwise, there might have been a lot of panicked screaming that made this whole thing a whole lot worse. “Ho-kay there, calm down with the weaponry. I found who she is, but… this is weird, I don’t recognize her, and neither does anyone on the 8th grade bus.”
He passed me an attendance sheet, which was little more than a handful of paper with names, pictures and student ID numbers for everyone on the trip. It’s always strange to look at those things because the pictures are never exactly current, and the kids are, half the time, making faces that render them almost unrecognizable. This girl though, not at all.
She had an angelic, kind of eyes-half-open blissed look on her face. In the photo her hair was very light, so that probably meant either blond or a very pale shade of red. Her eyes too were pale, and she was covered in a light dusting of freckles. In a way, she reminded me of myself when I was a younger girl. Looking at the sheet, I found myself lost in her strange, unearthly gaze for just a moment.
“I have no idea who this is,” I said to Dave Miller, although my voice seemed a distant echo inside my own skull. “But… it feels like I know her. We sure this is the one who went missing? Are there any empty seats? I’m still not completely sure about this.”
He shrugged. “The kids are starting to figure out something’s wrong so the moments of non-chaotic explosion are quickly falling behind us. If she’s on the list she’s on the bus, that’s how it works. Probably just a quiet kid no one notices. God knows I forget the quiet ones all the time.”
I couldn’t respond to that, no matter how much it irritated me.
“Well okay fine, you get on the bus and try to keep the kids calm. I’m going after this girl.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked. “Are you nuts?”
“Is the forest service coming? Have they called back?”
Almost on cue, the bus’s radio fuzzed to life. There was significant interference and for a moment I got a flash of one of those middle-of-the-ocean disaster movies where the people on a ship are screaming “MAYDAY!” into their receiver and all that comes back is a steady whine of static, broken up by a voice asking over and over for them to repeat what they said because they couldn’t be understood.
Except they could understand us. “Is this the school?” It was a deeply southern voice, one that I assumed must be the park ranger. “That bus what come up in here earlier?”
“Yes sir,” I said, when Miller said nothing. “We need a search party for a little girl,” I described her, told him about the noises, and for some reason said something offhanded about the strange color in the sky. The ranger
was quiet the entire time I spoke, and then sucked air between his teeth.
“I don’t know how to say this,” he said in his slow drawl, “but we cain’t get up there. There’s somethin’ blockin’ the road, and even if there weren’t there’s a hell of a rainstorm comin’, pardon me if any little ears are listening.”
“They’re in a lot worse danger from what’s out there than hearing you swear,” I said. The blood was rising in my temples, and my pissy attitude along with it. I was starting to get that old edge again, reminding me of how I felt when I waited almost endlessly for one or the other of my friends to get out of the hospital, out of jail, whatever. It was panic, yes, but not the kind that makes a person act irrationally—it was the sort that hones the senses to a laser focus; the kind that makes someone who’s never been in an emergency before in their lives yank a car door off its hinges and fish a baby out of a flaming car.
“You’re telling me a rainstorm is going to stop a national park ranger from coming here to help a little girl?”
Another few moments of silence heavily filled the air like uncomfortably thick slush on a winter road. “Cain’t,” he said again, almost plaintively. “Uh… well, tellin’ you the truth, our choppers are all havin’ some kinda trouble. I don’t know what-all’s goin’ on up there, but I can’t even get ahold of my men.”
“That’s… not good,” I said. My voice was a hollow echo in my chest. I felt the blood in my temples thump-thumping away, and my jaws had begun aching from how I’d apparently been clenching them. “But how can that be? We didn’t have any trouble getting up here, and until these animals, or whatever, started howling, we were having just as good a time as you please.”
I could almost audibly hear his shrug. “Look, ma’am,” he said, “I don’t know how to explain it. This is the only radio call I’ve been able to make or get since you’uns went up there. I’m guessing you’re in the center of whatever interference is making the problem, so it ain’t screwin’ with your signal.”
“So what am I supposed to do?” the technical aspects of why they could or couldn’t help us were sailing right past my head. “I’ve got an axe and a flare gun and I’m about to go into the woods looking for this girl.”
“I cain’t recommend that as such, ma’am,” he said. I could hear the worry in his voice, but there wasn’t anything to be done about it. “Officially, you understand.”
I let out a sharp exhale, and looked behind me to find Miller had wandered off somewhere. All the kids in the front row of the bus were starting to get a little pale, but they still had that look of fascination and curiosity about them. They were all dead silent, which was as strange as any sort of animal yowling.
“Officially?” I asked, after heavily swallowing. “What would you suggest unofficially?”
“I’d say you need to do whatever you can to get that girl and get the livin’ hell out of that place because something is happening and I can’t tell you what it is, when it’ll stop, or what on earth caused it.” His voice broke slightly. “The bears, y’see, they don’t act out like this. And the wolves… I just don’t know. I’m about fourteen miles from where you’re sittin’, if my map marker is correct. Anyways, it’s not normal, but some of the old timers around the park say they heard it before, but not for fifty, sixty years.”
“This is starting to sound like a ghost story,” I said. “Or like a something story. It’s just some animals making noises, probably fighting over territory.” I heard my own voice crack almost inaudibly, but just enough for me to notice. “What else could it be?”
In the back of my mind, I thought back to the dream that I’d, until that moment, completely forgotten. Those bears… or men, whatever they were. Grave, Craze, Wild, and that cave and how they touched me, ravished me… “Do you think they’re looking for mates?” I asked, and immediately felt stupid for voicing such a thing. “I mean, getting territorial or whatever?”
“Could be,” the ranger said. “Like I say, I never seen anything like this, and the old timers they told me it happened before, but it was fifty, sixty years in the box.”
In the box, of course, meaning, in the past. “Could be anything,” he said again, like he was consciously trying to fill time, to keep me from doing what I told him I’d do.
“What’s the danger?” I asked. “If they’re territorial, and they just want each other, then what’s the danger to a girl? Or to… a woman?”
“Plenty of danger,” he said. “If it’s territory they’re pissy over, these animals don’t never keep to themselves in them type situations. They lash out, they’ll fight damn near anything. Though bears are known to protect little ‘uns, y’see.”
“I’ve heard stories, but I never really believed them. Figured that stuff was all a pants-load,” I said. “Okay so bears might protect her if she happens upon them, but what about wolves? We’ve all heard stories about wolves taking in kids.”
The ranger grumbled something inaudible.
“What’d you say?” I asked. “I couldn’t hear.”
“Uh, well, I said that, you know, the wolves around here ain’t the type to be too friendly. They don’t seem like normal wolves, if I’m bein’ honest with you. They keep to themselves, you don’t much hear ‘em howl, so most folks don’t know they’re around.”
“So you’re saying…bears okay, wolves no?”
“Yeah well, more or less, I s’pose,” he said. “Though that’s simplifyin’ things a bit much for my taste. I wouldn’t want her getting near any of ‘em, y’see.”
“Well, right,” I said. “It’d be best if we could get her. Okay well, I’m going into these damn woods. Where do I hit one with a fire axe if I get cornered?”
He laughed, then wheezed as he inhaled. “Keepin’ the nerves whetted by makin’ jokes?”
“No,” I said flatly. “Not at all. Where do I hit a bear with an axe if I need to? Skull?”
The ranger clicked his teeth again. It occurred to me that I’d not actually heard his name, but at the same time, it didn’t much matter right then. “Well, I s’pose… no, they got thick skulls. If you can hit one in the eyes, that’s best, or maybe take a hack at a shoulder. Ain’t gonna kill ‘em, but it might hamstring ‘em long enough to get away. But ma’am?”
“Yes?”
“You won’t hear ‘em comin’ if they don’t want you to hear ‘em. If you can wait until this interference clears and we can get our choppers and a team out there, that’s for the best, but—”
“No,” I said. “We can’t wait that long.” I took my ear away from the receiver just as another clash of violent sounds came from both sides. They were closing in on us, and no matter how I tried to pretend they weren’t, there wasn’t any getting around the truth. “I think I need to find that girl and get the hell out of here before we have two school buses full of kids right in the middle of some kind of animal fight.”
“You won’t hear ‘em comin,” he said in that same, forboding way. “If they’re makin’ noise with the roaring and howling and what-all, they’re stayin’ their spot. That’s what the old timers say, anyways.”
He was very obviously haunted by the very words he was saying. Something about his story wasn’t true, and I was certain it was a practiced story, almost like something he was told to say in case such a thing happened.
“Won’t hear ‘em coming,” I said, only realizing it was out loud as the words escaped my lips. “You sure you’re telling me the truth? This story about interference is kind of ridiculous, especially given all the radio towers and all this stuff I see everywhere.”
“God’s honest,” he said, and then added, “ma’am.”
I dropped the receiver on the floor of the bus, where it rebounded off the rubber walking path through the seats. I took one last look at the kids in the front row. Janice gave me a knowing look, which seemed to me a little too knowing, and then I stepped down the stairs, and out of the bus.
One hand full of an axe, one full of a flare
gun, I swallowed, hard.
I felt like a damn superhero.
I felt like I was going to cry.
Either way, I was going to find that girl if it was the last thing I ever did.
2
After the first few times I took a look at the picture I’d torn off the attendance roll before going into the woods, I didn’t need to see her picture to see her. Angie – or whoever she really was – was as clear in my mind as the cup of coffee I’d had that morning and longed to repeat.
Every bone in my body was aching by the time I hit the edge of the woods, and not from physical exertion. I carry tension and worry in my neck, and I’d been clenching it up for so long that the strain was running down my back. At no point did the completely obvious issue that I had no idea what in the hell I was doing ever occur to me – I’m almost sure it was just adrenaline driving me at that point.
Adrenaline, and the picture of that girl that wouldn’t leave my mind. Leaves crunched under my feet, and the soft, spongy mass of humus, moss and rot gave with wet squishes as my feet fell one after another through the trees. Vines pulled at my hair, thorns tugging at my shirt, but nothing seemed to have any way to stop me.
That’s when I realized, about four hundred yards into the western side of the forest, where the wolves had been calling before, that it had all gone dead silent.
You won’t hear ‘em comin’. The ranger’s words echoed through my mind. Won’t hear ‘em comin’.
I’d come this way purely on the force of intuition. I guessed that what the old man said about bears being a safer bet for a little girl than wolves stuck with me, though I hadn’t consciously made the decision. Once again clenching my jaws tightly together, I felt every muscle running down the sides of my neck go taut. It felt like I was going to pull my skeleton apart from all the tension coursing through me, but I just kept walking.
Walking.
Walking.
Into the silence.
That’s when I realized I’d stopped running. It was almost like I was trying to stalk whatever was out there, like I knew I’d never take them by force, so I was sneaking best I could.
