by D. J. Molles
But in Walter’s present, there were no bright fields of green corn.
No promise of adventures misbegotten.
There was only darkness and God-knew what else.
There was only fear of what lay ahead of him, and no excitement at all. He was still escaping, but this time he wasn’t escaping into childhood mischief. He was escaping to survive. He was escaping to get away from a thing that was gobbling up his existence, and it was just right behind him, like a black hole, chewing everything up into nothing...
Into the darkness.
Go to the bridge.
Which bridge?
There was only one that mattered.
To Roy and Virgil and Walt, it was The Bridge, and had been since childhood.
The Baucom house sat in the middle of a 270-acre tract. While a great many of the trees in the Agrarian Districts had been razed to maximize the farmable land, they’d left strands of them in place to prevent soil erosion, and also to serve as a visible delineation between tracts.
These lines of trees, usually no more than twenty yards thick, with pines and a few hardwoods in the center of it, and junipers and blackberry brambles on the edges, served as a highway for creatures that did not want to be seen.
Deer. Foxes. Coyotes.
Also, packs of errant local kids that didn’t want to be spotted by the gunship patrols.
Walter remembered turning it into a game, as children have the incredible ability to turn almost anything into a game, even when the world around you is at war.
They would run along the deer trails, and they would pretend in that moment that they were freedom fighting commandos, on their way to a secret location, to blow up a CoAx ammo dump or perform some other daring task.
If they heard the sound of gunship rotors approaching, they would take cover in the leaves and brambles. And in those moments when the gunships were just overhead, and the little bit of rotor wash hit them, they would be perfectly still, their breath frozen in their throats, not a muscle moving except for their hearts beating spastically, excitedly, feeling the danger of it, relishing the tension, lying so perfectly still that the urge to pee would nearly overcome them.
These little strips of woods, thin highways for things and people on foot, they were like a whole other world for those young grower kids. And someone could follow them from one end of District 89 to the other, if they had the time and the mind to do it.
But always, before they traipsed these lines of woods and went where they pleased in the secrecy of their forested paths, they would meet. And there was only one place to meet.
It was a place where you could hang out, maybe smoke a cigarette that you’d swiped off of your pops, skip stones on water, and generally be left alone by the looming adulthood that would eventually consume you in a future that was both distant and absurdly close.
And that place was The Bridge.
The Rocky River Bridge, in longhand, but no one really called it that anymore. Only if you were being interrogated by an adult and they asked you where you’d been. If you were of a mind to be honest, you might say, “The Bridge,” and if they pressed for clarity, you might say, “The Rocky River Bridge.”
Just as long as you didn’t dime out who was there with you.
The Bridge.
The very same one that Walt had gone to with Carolyn. Where they’d thrown rocks and realized, as they’d refused to admit when they were children, that adulthood was no longer oncoming, but it was, at last, upon them. And it was just as harsh and unyielding as they’d been led to believe.
Walt knew the way very well, even now, even years after the last time he’d ever gone. The paths were still worn well in those woods, by new generations of children and wildlife.
It was dark, but his feet found the path.
He moved along it at a jog for a while, and then slowed.
The way was easy, and it had never changed. These lines of trees, untouched for generations. It was out the backdoor of his house, about three hundred yards to the nearest woodline. Then left. And then you kept going, and after a while, there would be an intersection. Another line of trees meeting at a right angle, and that was the place he needed to find.
He stopped and looked behind him. Shifted his position to find a small hole in the branchwork that he could look out of like a window, out to the rolling fields of cropland, trying to see if he could still see his little house. But there was nothing. Only darkness.
What am I doing?
In the sudden stopping, it was like everything had been chasing him and now that he wasn’t running anymore, it managed to close the gap and tackle him. His hands flew up to his head, raked his hair back, pulling the skin of his face tight, pulling his eyelids open wide.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered to himself.
Probably there was no one else around to hear him, but when you are in the woods at night there is a sepulchral feel to it that tells you to be respectful, and if nothing else, stealthy.
He bent over slightly, put his hands on his knees. Stared at the forest floor, breathing deep and smelling the pine, the vegetation around him, not that dank summer smell, but a light crispness, a freshness of new growth.
He just had to get to The Bridge.
Would Virgil be there?
Well, it had been implied, at least.
Go, Walt told himself. Just go.
He kept moving. Not at a jog anymore. But keeping a good pace. Plowing forward, pushing branches out of the way and wincing when ones he hadn’t seen whipped him in the face, or snarled his legs.
The nerves gave him energy he didn’t actually have. He started running again, because now it was twofold—now he was thinking about search parties, looking for him, fanning out from the house. But he was also thinking about whether or not Virgil would wait for him at the bridge, and if he waited, how long? If Walt took his time getting there, Virgil might decide to leave him.
He spat out gummy saliva that tasted very faintly of the cigarette he’d had earlier. Just get to the bridge. Get to the bridge, and you can decide what to do from there.
So he focused on that. That, and—as much as he could—nothing else.
In the background, his memories, his thoughts. Carolyn. She swirled through it all. She was attached to everything.
Carolyn.
Just get to the bridge.
Time did funny things in his brain. But he knew on some objective level that it had only been about a half an hour since he’d ran out of the back door of his house. And eventually, after a short eternity, he heard the rush of the water through the trees, and felt the ground begin to slope down under his feet.
He suddenly dreaded the prospect of sitting under the bridge, waiting.
Waiting? At a time like this?
Walt was not a patient person by any stretch.
This might be more than his sanity was capable of handling at this time.
Walt picked his way down the embankment. The trees were thinning out now. More hardwoods as he got closer to the river. The sound of it was beginning to fill him up, to surround him like a stifling blanket, and once in his life it might’ve been soothing but at that moment it was maddening and it hid the world from him so that he couldn’t hear anything over the sound of his own breath and heartbeat.
He only went down the embankment as far as he needed to in order to get under the bridge. Then he made his way along a small dirt path that was cut into the slope by years of passing feet, and finally came to the bridge.
He immediately slipped under it. It smelled dank and muddy down there. Like wet concrete and rusting steel. It was even darker under the bridge than in the woods. He sat in a slab of darkness. To either side, the slope created a triangular opening that was slightly lighter than where he was. Down below him, the river rippled in the moonlight, and disappeared into nothingness as it passed under the shadow of the bridge, only to reappear on the other side.
Walter sank into a squat. There on the concrete
slab, amongst cigarette butts pilfered from parents, and broken liquor bottles and smashed beer cans that had been purchased with fake IDs, he felt that he was in an abandoned place. A dead place.
It was easy to think that kids didn’t come down here anymore. That no one came down here anymore. And it was a cold and lonesome feeling, like a boarded up church or a shopping mall that has gone out of business.
He was sweating from his run. The air was cool. It was supposed to get into the forties that night. He was starting to feel it as it wicked the sweat off his brow, touched the wet shirt at the small of his back, drew gooseflesh from his forearms.
A few cars passed over the bridge. He couldn’t hear their engines when they came, but he could hear the thump-thump of their tires going over the joints in the bridge. One car would pass and he would look up at the substructure of the bridge that he knew was there, could picture in his mind, but couldn’t see in the darkness. And he would listen without breathing for the sound of the tires to slow, or for some sort of signal, for someone to call out to him, but no one did.
Silence.
Another car thumped across.
And then it was gone.
Walter’s knees were beginning to ache. Reminding him that he wasn’t as spry as he’d been even ten years ago. He muttered a string of obscenities and lowered his butt to the ground. The concrete was cold through his tans.
There had to be a way out of this, right?
Wasn’t there?
Somebody he could talk to?
Something he could do?
No, buddy. You fucked it up. You fucked it up good. Because you didn’t listen to Pops. You couldn’t just keep your head down and do what they told you to do. You had to try to get that extra money. You had to have your secret. Your little personal rebellion. And you didn’t even do it smart! You got your money from the resistance!
What were you thinking?
And with Carolyn gone, he couldn’t argue with that.
Oh, it was so easy when you were doing it to come up with a justification.
It was only when the consequences came that you realized you were rationalizing it the whole time.
Another car.
He heard the thumps.
Slower than the others that had passed.
Silence for a long moment.
Then a horn blared out into the night and made Walt flinch hard.
He sat there for another few seconds, looking up at the dark things over his head and wondering what the horn was supposed to mean. Was that Virgil? Was he just honking a horn to get him to come topside? Like Walt was his teenage date?
The horn sounded again, insistent. The car-horn equivalent of Let’s-fucking-go!
Cringing, clenching his jaw, Walt rose up and moved out from under the bridge. Up onto the slope. Above him, he could see headlights on the leaves, making them glow green in the darkness. He kept moving forward. Now he could hear the gentle hush of a small-drive vehicle.
He peered over the top of the bridge abutment.
Dark highway stretching in both directions.
One gray car, sitting in the middle of all that darkness, like a single candle in a dark house.
Walt couldn’t see the driver, but the backseat window was rolled down.
Virgil’s face, sterner and harder than Walt could ever recall seeing it, stared at him from over the top of the reflective glass. When he called out to Walt, it was surprisingly calm: “Come on, Walter. We need to move quickly.”
Chapter 10
Walt sat in the car and there was no hesitation—it rocketed off down the dark backroads before he could even close the door. The sudden forward movement closed it for him.
He sat in the backseat on the passenger’s side. The car smelled new. The readouts offered a crystallic, bluish glow over the driver’s face and Walt thought that it was the man who had been dressed in the deputy’s uniform earlier that day.
The one that had given him a cigarette and asked him why he kept on doing the things that he was doing.
Walt turned to Virgil, sitting directly behind the driver.
Virgil looked straight forward, his left hand perched over the door controls. His index finger stabbed the window button and it scrolled up resolutely against the wind. The sound of the air through the gap made its final pleas and then cut off with a final shoop.
Walt wanted to scream at Virgil, to shake him, to tell him, “They took Carolyn! They took Carolyn! Do something!”
Instead, he clasped his hands in his lap.
One iron grip in the other, they writhed and twitched subtly in the darkness like two fighters caught in a deadlock, but Walter’s face was stony, his body was still.
Something bad had happened. Something outside of Carolyn’s disappearing. Walter could see this in everything that Virgil and his driver did. The way Virgil sat there stiffly. The set of his jaw. His balled fist sitting on his lap. He looked stolid, but then Walt could see the way his eyes jagged around, searching the ever-present darkness for threats.
And the driver, the relaxed man with the cocksure attitude, now cold and silent, gripping the steering wheel with two forceful hands like they were at that very moment, being pursued.
“What happened?” Walter said.
Virgil’s jaw flexed, catching the blue lights from the dashboard. “This was a mistake. I told them this was a mistake, but they didn’t want to listen.”
“Who’s ‘they’?” Walter asked.
Virgil dodged the question. “We shouldn’t have tried to capture a New Breed. For all I know, the CoAx thinks that we’re the people that have been kidnapping all the other New Breeds.” He shook his head bitterly, then looked at Walter in earnest. “They’re coming after us, Walt. They’ve pulled the big red handle and they have no intention of letting us get away.”
“Oh, fuck,” Walt almost reached his hand up to clutch his head, like a sudden headache was coming on. But he kept them clamped in his lap. He felt heat rising, spreading like a stain out from his chest, up the back of his neck and prickling across his scalp.
“They took Carolyn,” Walt said, shakily, staring at Virgil. “They took her because of this shit.”
Virgil didn’t respond. He looked right back at Walter. Then opened his mouth. Then shut it. Then looked away with a tiny shake of his head.
“Virgil!” Walter nearly shouted, and out of the corner of his eye saw the driver glance at him and readjust his grip on the steering wheel. “Is that why they took Carolyn?”
Virgil snapped back to Walt, angry now. “What the fuck do you think?”
“Ah, Jesus…” Walter couldn’t restrain his hands. Together in a ball, they came up to his face, pressed hard, callused knuckles against his forehead while he clenched his eyes closed and pressed himself back into the seat. “Ah, fuck,” he groaned. “I shouldn’t have done it. I shouldn’t have helped you.”
“Hey,” Virgil reached across the seat and batted Walt’s hands down away from his face. His voice and expression had turned condescending and irritated, the way a tired father might handle an overly-dramatic toddler. “Now’s not the time to freak out, Walter. Save that shit for another time when we’re not about to get a flight of gunships up the ass.”
Walt whirled in his seat. He half-punched, half-shoved Virgil off of him, and suddenly felt so small again, felt ten years old, with big-bad Virgil and Roy hovering over him, telling him to man-up, telling him to quit whining and moaning it was time to come with them.
There is no worse feeling than when someone shrinks you back to your childhood size. It made him want to pummel Virgil’s face, but he restrained himself. Just barely.
“Don’t tell me not to freak out,” he grated. “It’s my wife, Virgil. I’ll goddamned freak out if I want to. Put your hands on me again and we’re gonna have problems.”
Virgil frowned. “Oh, we’re gonna have problems?” He pointed a finger at Walter, very close to his face—not quite touching him, though. My, my, how quickly we r
egress. “Let me explain something to you, y’knocker. This shit happens. You knew that it could happen. You knew the risks when you got involved. But you wanted the money. And I wanted your help. I promised your brother I’d look after you, and that’s what I’m doing.”
“Oh, cut it with that shit!” Walt snapped. “You don’t do anything that doesn’t benefit you.”
“No?” Virgil’s eyebrows shot up. “And coming down here to pick up your panicky ass benefited me how?”
Walt had no response, except to grind his teeth.
Virgil pointed to Walt’s door. “You want out, give me the word, brother. I’ll pull over and let you out. I promised Roy I’d take care of you, but I ain’t gonna fight you over it.”
“I’m not a fucking kid,” Walt said, and realized how horribly lame that sounded only after the words had already left his lips.
“Well, then act like a man.”
Walt let his breath come out like a hiss of steam through his clenched teeth. You motherfucker. I should kill you right now. I don’t even care anymore. I should throttle you in your own self-important backseat. I should beat you to death right here and now.
Walter couldn’t beat him in a fight. And they both knew it.
But there was something else that Virgil also knew: Walter didn’t care.
Virgil had seen Walt fight men that were bigger than him, and he knew that Walt didn’t care about whether or not he was knocked out, or lost a few teeth. All that mattered to Walt was opening up that little cauldron of bad temper that he had lurking down inside of him. And if he woke up on his back after taking a hit to the jaw, he’d buy the other guy beer and tell him “good fight.”
But until you knocked him out, he wouldn’t stop swinging.
And that was the worst type of person to fight.
Because it wasn’t victory they wanted.
