Gripping a jagged branch like a club, he closed in.
ENTRY 31
I rolled to the side an instant before the jagged end of the branch slammed down inches from my head. Chet wore a coil of calf rope looped over his shoulder.
I drew the revolver and aimed at his face, the barrel wavering back and forth.
Chet’s face. Chet, who used to sneak me free soda when he worked at the diner. Chet, who’d driven me to school that week Patrick had the flu. Chet wasn’t a grown-up. He was a high-school student like Patrick. Like Alex. Like me.
A bunch of images came at me.
Chet sitting on the bleachers, his face sunk into his hands as he wept.
His fingers gripping the chain-link as he stared pleadingly at us through the fence. I don’t want to be out here alone. I don’t want it to happen to me.
He came at me again, drawing back the branch. The end of the revolver wobbled even more in my hand. “Please don’t make me,” I said.
Patrick would shoot him, a voice in my head said. Patrick would’ve shot him already.
Chet terrified on the far side of that fence. I’m just a kid. I’m a kid like you.
That made it so much worse.
He stepped within reach, and still I didn’t fire.
He drew back the branch, and still I didn’t fire.
Cassius jumped up and bit his arm, dragging the branch down. Chet turned and kicked him. Cassius flew across the clearing and lay panting.
My sweat-slick hands bobbled the revolver. Before I could firm my grip, Chet swatted it out of my hands. It glinted as it flew off into a pile of dead leaves.
Chet backhanded me, knocking me down. Then he turned, picked up the sharpened branch, and went after Cassius. He drew the branch back like a spear, the jagged end aimed at Cassius’s ribs.
I dove for the gun, groping for it in the dead leaves. I would’ve done anything to protect Cassius.
As Chet drove the branch down to kill my dog, the trees behind Cassius seemed to explode. Zeus charged through the leaves as if shot from a cannon, the other ridgebacks behind him.
Zeus hammered into the makeshift spear, the point driving through his shoulder, Chet falling back under the force of 110 pounds of rage. Chet slammed onto his back on the ground, the end of the branch embedding in the dirt by his ear. Zeus was impaled on the spear.
But he didn’t stop.
Snarling, Zeus drove himself farther onto the spear to get to Chet’s face. The tip of the branch poked out of Zeus’s side, emerging between his ribs. Still his powerful legs churned the dirt, the branch sliding into him inch by inch, his snapping teeth ever nearer to his target.
Chet raised a hand, and Zeus tore into it, blood spurting, fingers severing. Zeus got to Chet’s forearm next and shredded it until it looked as though it had been stuck in a blender.
Chet wiggled back, and Zeus kept on, impaling himself further, grabbing Chet’s other hand and mangling it as well. The other dogs had circled up, barking. I had a firm grip on the revolver at last, but no clear shot.
Chet managed to roll free. Tanner and Princess snapped at him as he ran into the woods, pumping his arms, blood drops flying from what remained of his hands. Atticus, Grace, and Deja tore off after them.
Zeus keeled over onto his side.
I ran to him. Breath leaked from his punctured lung, fluttering the fur where the branch stuck out of his ribs. I was crying, stroking his russet head. His face bore the marks of coyote battles past. Even as a puppy, he’d been my biggest, best boy.
He lay still, breathing. Not a whimper.
My tears fell on him. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t do it.”
He turned his head ever so slightly and licked my palm.
The other dogs returned from the chase and surrounded us. Then I felt a wet muzzle in my ear.
Cassius.
I leaned aside to let him see his father.
Cassius gave a low whimper and ducked his head to Zeus’s. They touched noses.
Zeus’s eyes glazed, and air stopped wheezing through his side.
Cassius looked at me, then back at his father. He nuzzled Zeus’s head a few times, trying to nudge him back to life. Zeus lay there.
Finally Cassius backed up a step and sat.
The other dogs ringed us. Their coats were streaked with mud, their ears tattered from fights. They were wild now.
And yet they looked healthy and well fed.
I bent down and hugged Zeus, burying my face in a fold of fur at his neck. And then I stood, plucked the cowboy hat from the dirt, and put it back on my head.
There were still valleys to cross and mountains to scale and Alex on the other side. Patrick waited back at the school, breathing down his air supply.
I went around to the others and let them swarm me as I scratched behind their ears and patted their wagging rear ends. Then I started for the stretch of woods off the highway where we’d left the Silverado.
I tapped my thigh once as I reached the edge of the clearing. “C’mon, boy,” I said.
But I heard no rustling behind me.
I turned, and Cassius was sitting among the others, imploring me with his yellow eyes and wrinkled brow. He whined once, faintly.
Understanding came, and my heart fell away, a stone dropped into a bottomless pit.
I walked back to him.
“Okay, boy,” I said, crouching before him. “Good boy. Good, good boy.”
He licked my salty face, and I let him.
I looked as the pack of ridgebacks circled around me, proud and free. Then back at Cassius. I said, “Release.”
But he stayed there a moment, blinking at me.
I was finding it hard to swallow. “Go on, then,” I said, waving the dogs off.
They bounded majestically away through the trunks. Cassius paused at the edge of the clearing and looked back at me, eyes bright and alive above that black muzzle. Then he turned and was gone, too.
I stood there wiping my face until I could no longer hear the dogs forging through the brush. Then I stood a while more.
As long as they were here, the woods would be a safer place for me. But that didn’t make me feel any better right now.
Trudging heavily into the woods, I remembered Patrick’s reply to me before I left, after I’d told him I couldn’t do it without him.
You can. You always could.
Maybe Zeus’s death had cleared the way for Cassius to grow up.
Maybe it was time for me to grow up, too.
Remembering our run-in with the migrant workers, I gave Jack Kaner’s farm a wide berth, slicing north across a wooded ridge. The trees drifted by, an endless scroll. My legs ached. The night air grew thick, streamers of fog floating by. Visibility got so low that I nearly collided with the wrought-iron bars.
Leaning back, I took in the curved sign over the entrance: CREEK’S CAUSE CEMETERY.
Cutting through would save me a good twenty minutes, so I walked beneath the arch. The fog made the air so wet I felt like I was breathing the white wisps themselves. Staying alert, minding each step, I moved past gravestones and plots and a few mausoleums from richer families like the Blantons.
I was so focused on peering through the fog that I didn’t notice where my legs were carrying me until I had arrived.
My parents’ graves.
Two humble little plots, side by side, with white markers. It had been all we could afford.
It’d been a while since I’d visited. I’d carried anger at them since their car crash, anger that they hadn’t been more responsible, that they hadn’t thought more about their kids at home before drinking that extra glass of wine. Over the years that anger had loosened from a hard knot in my gut. But I realized now that it had never left entirely. It had just spread out through my body, less obvious, sure, but just as heavy a burden to carry.
I thought about all the ways the world had come undone and everything I had to face now. The loss of my parents, awful
as it was, had prepared me for this. I pictured the view over the revolver, Chet’s face wobbling in and out of the sights, my finger on the trigger, refusing to pull it. I’d made a mistake, and Zeus had died. I was human and imperfect and doing the best I could minute to minute.
My parents had been, too.
I owed it to them to forgive them. But even more, I owed it to myself.
I crouched before their graves and patted the green, green grass blanketing them. Closing my eyes, I sent them all the warmth from my body, from myself.
When I opened my eyes, the fog had started to thin. Even as I watched, it lifted, billowing up into the treetops and away into the crisp night air.
Something moved to my right. And to my left.
And then all around the vast cemetery.
Mappers.
Still dressed like ranch hands, probably from Billy Joe Durant’s two-thousand-head cattle operation to the north. At least thirty of them.
Somehow in the fog, I’d missed them. And they’d missed me.
They walked their patterns in every direction I looked. Their heads tilted downward, they swept through the cemetery like an army of ants, covering every square inch.
ENTRY 32
Standing before my parents’ graves, I unfocused my gaze, trying to take in as many of the Hosts as possible. The entire cemetery seemed alive, crawling with them. Their movements were coordinated, the Mappers keeping a short distance apart as they strategically covered ground. I thought about using the revolver, but by the time I’d spent the six shots, the remaining Hosts would’ve swamped me.
A ranch hand in a ragged denim jacket was closing in fast. He turned crisply on his heel, cutting across the back of a mausoleum. His next pivot would take him directly into me. And anywhere I stepped would be right into the path of another Host. A second Mapper trudged along behind me; others walked spirals to either side of my parents’ graves. Beyond the nearest Hosts were layers more, deep in every direction, stretching as far as the darkness and thinning mist allowed me to see.
I dropped to the moist earth before my parents’ plots. The grass smelled fresh like summer, like baseball. A few wisps of fog floated through the air.
I had let go of everyone and everything in the world. I was as alone as I’d ever been, as alone as I’d ever be.
A squish of mud signaled the ranch hand’s next turn. He emerged from the side of the mausoleum, heading for me, his head scanning the ground just ahead of the tips of his boots.
I grabbed the baling hooks so hard that my knuckles ached.
Wet grass slurped at his boots as he moved forward. His eyeless eyes were inches from noticing me. I watched the cant of his head.
And it struck me how I could save myself.
Sliding off my pack, I rolled neatly backward over my shoulders, landing on all fours atop my parents’ graves. Somehow the Stetson stayed on my head. The Mapper walked right past me, close enough that the cuff of his pant leg shushed across my cheek.
Easing to my feet, I pulled the pack on again and slid behind him. I kept right on his back, the tattered denim undulating between his shoulder blades inches from my face. I held his pace precisely, put my boots in his footsteps. When he turned, I turned. I could gaze straight through his head from behind, which helped me gauge where we were going. We crossed paths with another Mapper who drifted within spitting distance but did not look up.
Ever so slowly, our turns widened. I stayed on the Host’s back, wiping sweat from my brow. Other Mappers marched by on either side, scanning the ground at their feet, the awful boreholes directed just to the sides of my legs. The slightest misstep would alert the Host in front of me or put me into the path of another.
It felt like playing Frogger on the old-time arcade game at the One Cup Cafe, trying to zigzag between cars without getting squashed.
Walk, turn, walk.
A swinging arm whistled by to my right, a massive Mapper stomping past, sending off a waft of body odor.
Walk, turn, walk.
Painstakingly, we spiraled our way out of the inner sanctum of the cemetery.
Walk, turn, walk.
A half hour passed at this excruciating pace. Another. The Host in front of me halted, and I nearly stumbled into him, my splayed fingers brushing the back of his jacket. He did not turn. Instead he tilted his head up to the sky. A bluish white glow framed the boreholes and the edge of his head as he uploaded his data to the heavens and whatever resided up there. A clicking sound emerged, maybe from his throat, maybe from somewhere else. Staring through the rear boreholes as if they were binoculars, I watched the mapped terrain scroll across his front eye membranes.
The clicking stopped, the glow faded, the head tilted down, and he continued on. Gathering myself, I followed as carefully as before.
Walk, turn, walk.
We ambled over plots, threaded between tombstones, carved around grave markers. It was slow-motion insanity, my life hanging on every tiny motion. I was following the already dead out of the cemetery, like some mythological hero trying to escape the underworld.
At last the fence came within reach. I fought down a panicked urge to spring onto the wrought-iron bars and scale them. We did a final, endless rotation just inside the perimeter and, after what seemed like forever, walked out through an open rear gate. I followed the Host to freedom. Several Mappers remained in view, dispersing across the rolling hills.
I stayed on the Host’s heels until there were no other Mappers in sight.
Then I simply stopped walking. I let him drift on in a straight line through the woods. Way up ahead he turned ninety degrees and disappeared through a veil of branches.
I briefly remained as I’d been, clenched and tense.
And then the pent-up terror of the past few hours shuddered out of me. On cue my muscles cramped. I had to consciously unlock my shoulders, draw them down and away from my head.
Bathed by the moonlight, I breathed and shook out my knotted neck. Exhaling long and slow, I continued on my course.
After what I’d been through, the remaining bank of the ridge was a breeze. I broke out onto the dirt road, and there it was, mud-spattered and glorious. The Silverado. I grabbed the keys off the front tire where we’d left them.
Swinging in behind the wheel, I felt a charge of triumph.
I followed the bumpy road down, the ride smoothing out as I lurched onto the highway. The route through the valley was straight and true, and I encountered no real problems. Like before, the abandoned cars were easy enough to dodge and Hosts were few, far between, and easy to steer around. For a while I even rolled down the window and let the breeze riffle my hair.
At the gas station, using the same air tube Alex had used, I siphoned off more diesel from the huge fuel tank of the semi. The bitter taste of the sludge made me gag. Once I’d filled up, I drove to an empty stretch of highway and parked the pickup right on the dotted line. Sitting on the warm hood of the idling truck, keeping a clear line of sight in every direction, I ate a stale sandwich and washed it down with some water.
A picnic for one.
I drove on, Ponderosa Pass coming up, a black mass even darker than the darkness ahead. Remembering the mob of workers from the cannery, I eased off the gas before the barricade and killed the headlights.
As soon as the barricade vaguely resolved ahead, I steered off the road. It was pitch-black here, the mountains cutting off the moon from sight, so I slowed to a crawl. The tires sank in the marshy reeds alongside the road.
The overturned bus from the Lawrenceville Cannery seemed to leap out of the darkness. I almost smashed into it, managing to wrench the wheel to the side just in time.
After steering around the bus, I parked the Silverado at the base of the pass. The tree line sloped steeply upward here, impossible to scale. I hopped out, my boots smacking wetly into the earth. To start my hike up the mountain, I’d have to climb the barricade once again.
As I pulled my boots from the wet reeds, they made a
sucking sound. It was annoying and loud, but there was no other way for me to get back to the road. I continued on, stepping into a boggy spot. My boot sank even lower. When I went to lift my leg, my foot almost pulled out of the boot. I paused to firm my toes inside the boot.
But the sucking sound continued.
Behind me.
Then it stopped. An echo?
I waited, listening for the faintest sound. Nothing. I took another step, and the sucking noise came again in the darkness behind me. I paused, and it paused as well.
I tried to ram my fear back down my throat. If I started sprinting, I’d literally run right out of my boots. Even if I managed to get away, I wouldn’t last an hour out here barefoot.
I started up again.
The sucking noise started up.
But now it was in stereo.
Dozens of feet squelching through the reeds.
When I looked over my shoulder, there was only darkness. I swung my head back toward the highway. I was almost there. I could even make out the station wagon smashed beneath the fallen tree at the base of the barricade.
Ten more steps.
The invisible army marched behind me.
Seven steps.
Terror bubbled up from my chest. I swallowed it back down.
Three.
At last I eased onto the asphalt, keeping both boots.
I whipped around.
Emerging from the darkness, a band of cannery workers, looking even more ragged than those before. Seven or eight of them. Clothes half torn off. Bushy beards sprouting from the men’s faces. The women’s fingernails snapped off and bloody.
They broke into a run, their feet kicking up sprays of mud.
I turned and sprinted for the barricade, the backpack bouncing on my shoulders. Their footfalls pounded the highway behind me, closer and closer.
I leapt onto the hood of the station wagon, landing before the dead Host driver—Nick’s father. He was still sprawled through the windshield where we’d left him, his head pulverized. I used his back as a stepping-stone to launch me onto the roof, and from there I shot up onto the beaver-dam rise of fallen tree trunks. My hands scrabbled across the wet bark.
The Rains Page 22
