The Summer I Died

by Ryan C. Thomas

  Then there was nothing.

  “She’s in trouble,” Tooth said, running back toward the tree line. I stood where I was, paralyzed, as if my body and brain were at odds. Tooth looked back at me and yelled, “Don’t wuss out on me. Move!”

  I sprinted forward and crashed through the trees with him, smashing my knee on a low limb and grabbing his shoulder for support. We dodged more limbs and stumbled over boulders as we pushed further into the woods. The sun began to fade away to shadow the further we went, and the moist underbelly of the forest gave rise to slithering insects and small rodents that dashed out of our way in a frenzy. In front of me, Tooth used the gun to hack through some thick foliage. I took a look around me and realized I wasn’t sure which way led back to the car anymore, since we’d been twisting and skirting around so many obstacles. A few minutes later, we emerged into a little clearing where a couple small trees had been knocked over, probably by a storm. Up to my left I could see the mountain clearing we’d been up on earlier when we’d shot the beer cans.

  “Why don’t we go back up there and look out and see if we see anything?” I said.

  “We already looked out all afternoon.”

  “Not really, just shot the shit over the scenery.”

  “We won’t be able to see through the tree canopy.”

  “But we can’t see two feet in front of us now.”

  He seemed to consider this but I could tell he wanted to keep going the way we were headed. Reluctantly, he said, “Okay. Maybe I can get reception up there.”

  We trekked over to where the mountain began to slope upward and climbed up by grabbing tree limbs and hauling ourselves forward, almost like doing chin-ups. Probably it would have been easier to go around the base of the slope and find a path but I didn’t think of it until we were a ways up. The mosquitoes came back in full force, and since we couldn’t cover our faces they attacked like hungry vampires. They bit through my shirt and into my neck, my cheek, my elbows, all over. I made an attempt to swat at them at one point and nearly fell down the mountain.

  Tooth was first to reach the lip and get on top. He covered his face with his shirt, put the gun in his waistband, and pulled me up. From there it was about twenty feet to the clearing. I stepped over one of the beer cans we’d murdered earlier and recognized my own work. Tooth started dialing but again got no service. “Motherfucker!” he yelled. “See, this is why we need to move. Nothing here works.”

  I walked back to the edge we’d just come up from and looked out over the valley. I couldn’t see anything but treetops-a vast sea of green. Tooth had been right and I felt like sitting down and giving up. The whole Mighty Mouse routine was a bad idea from the start. I don’t know what we thought we were going to accomplish tramping through a mountain stoned out of our gourd. Hell, Tooth looked high enough to see God. We were going about this all wrong. I started to say this to Tooth but when I turned around he was gone.

  I found him on the other side of the clearing, looking toward the direction of Bobtail. He was squinting. “You see that?” he asked.

  “I’m not going to California,” I said.

  “No, dipshit, over there. You see that rock cliff?”

  In the distance, across a small valley of pines, was a sheer rock face.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, now see that?” He pointed off to his left, toward Bobtail. I followed his finger and squinted, clueless as to what he wanted me to see. Then the trees swayed and I saw what he was looking at. I was stunned. It was sort of the way you feel when you find Waldo in one of those cartoons. Once you see him you can’t believe you didn’t notice him earlier. What I mean was, there was a house. I could see it through the treetops as they blew side to side, could make out its log cabin walls and a beat up blue pickup truck parked on the side. There was also something moving under the canopy near the house, but I couldn’t tell what it was. Shadowy and large, it swam beneath the trees. A bear, I wondered.

  As if in answer, we heard a dog bark. Only it didn’t come from the house, it came from the rock wall.

  “It’s bouncing off the cliff,” Tooth said. “That’s why we’re having a hard time pinpointing it. It’s echoing off everything.”

  “This is messed up,” was all I could reply. Then, “What the hell is a house doing in the mountains? Aren’t there zoning laws and shit?”

  “Probably it’s further toward the road than we think. Look, the road goes around the mountain toward the house. With a long enough driveway, that would put the house back toward the edge of the woods but not necessarily in them. We’re not really that far in ourselves.”

  “Okay, so if that’s where the woman is she must have a phone.”

  “Maybe you were right, maybe something fell on her. Maybe she was working on her truck and the jack broke.”

  “She’d be nothing but mush by now.”

  “Well, we can’t leave her if she’s still alive.”

  “Yes, we can. Tooth, I don’t feel good about this. Nobody even knows we’re out here.”

  “Chill out, Wolverine. When we get there the first thing we’ll do is call the cops from her phone.”

  “But what if she’s dead by then?”

  “Then call Japan and ask for sucky fucky. They like that.”

  I looked at the house and listened to the barking coming at me from the other direction. There was a pang of shame in my gut because I knew I was being a wimp about the whole situation. I was like a squirrel who couldn’t decide whether or not to cross the road when traffic was coming, while Tooth was already on the other side safe and sound. I must have looked worried because he pulled up his shirt and showed me the gun.

  “Besides, we’ve got a little backup of our own,” he said. As I spun around to go back down the mountain trail, he grabbed my shirt and added, “Let’s go down over here. It’ll be faster than having to walk back around.”

  “We should get the car.”

  “It’ll be there when we get back.”

  “But what if we need it to get help, to rush her to the hospital or something.”

  “We’ll take her truck. C’mon.”

  “But what if it broke when the jack broke?”

  “What if I punch you in the boys for being a pussy? Look, it’s gonna take us twice as long to go down and get the car and then drive around than if we just run down right here.”

  Shit. He was right.

  We started climbing down the mountain again, breaking limbs and sending rocks rolling down the slope. Going down a mountain is always harder than going up because your body naturally leans forward. That coupled with gravity makes downhill hiking a bitch. The damn dog wasn’t helping my nerves either, and when a moment later I heard the first rumble of thunder in the distance, I knew this was going to be a stressful night.

  If I’d only known what was going to happen next I would have taken the gun from Tooth and put bullets in both our brains.

  CHAPTER 10

  Pushing through the woods was harder than I’d expected. The branches interwove like latticework and we couldn’t break them all with our hands, so we circled wide and came back around. As we neared the house, the overgrowth gave way to rotting logs stacked here and there. Some of them were split into cubes and small triangles, possibly leftover firewood. Then again, maybe not, because after the logs we had to scale a makeshift fence created from old tree limbs. Log cabin, split rail fence-maybe she was a lumberjack? I’d seen female lumberjacks before; they gave logging demonstrations at summer camps. They also scared the shit out of your average womanizer.

  The damn dog was still barking and I started to think we’d get bit before we could even find our damsel in distress.

  On the other side of the fence, we could see the back of the house clearly through the remaining trees. It was a small two-story deal, with cream curtains in the windows, and dead flowers in the window boxes. Between us and the house was a small back yard with a broken swing set, some car parts, and a big gas tank of some sor
t. The ground was all dug up like some big dog had been burying things, which reminded me. .

  I grabbed Tooth before he left the cover of the trees. “Watch out for Cujo.”

  He put a finger to his lips to shush me and followed the woods around to the left, where the driveway came up beside the house. We were keeping just within the tree line.

  Treading softly, I followed under the noise of the barking dogs, which were still out of sight. Seconds later, the barking stopped and I heard panting heading our way. I froze, praying Tooth had heard it as well. He did. We both stood like statues as two big rottweilers the size of bulls came trotting around from the front yard. They stopped next to a door set in a little windowless alcove that jutted out from the side of the house. From the look of it, it probably went down to a storage cellar underground.

  Man, those two dogs were beasts; they wouldn’t break a sweat taking down a wolf. Together they could probably make a rug out of a bear. They pawed at the door, whimpering, while we maintained our best tree impersonations.

  “Ten bucks says those are cellar stairs and she fell down them,” Tooth whispered.

  “How the fuck do we get past those dogs? If we move at all now, we’re dead.”

  “I don’t know. They look pretty concerned. Maybe they’re nice. Rottweilers are pretty nice animals, you know.”

  “We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. They’re not nice. They’re protection.”

  Slowly, he began to slide the gun out of his waistband. Was he going to shoot them? I may not have been a member of PETA but I didn’t see the sense in killing animals that were only doing their job. He said, “Just in case,” and moved toward the yard.

  As we tiptoed through the trees, we heard a voice coming from behind the door. It was muffled but it was still as hysterical as when we’d first heard it. Sure enough, it was our woman and she was still alive. I was studying the dogs, trying to figure a way to distract them, when I got this sudden rush that something wasn’t right. I couldn’t place it at first; it just made me nervous, like my spider sense was tingling. Then it hit me: the paw prints. The dogs had left bright red paw prints all over the door. Was it. . was it blood? Tooth had seen it, too, and glanced back at me over his shoulder like he was going to say something, but before he could utter a word, everything went to hell.

  Two bodies exploded out of the door, running full speed directly toward us.

  One was a woman, bound, gagged, covered in blood. The other was a thin shirtless man waving a hand ax in one fist and a saw in the other. My stomach lurched and I went rigid. I couldn’t move. My brain sort of refused to accept what it was seeing. Up was down, black was white.

  Instantly, both the woman and the man saw Tooth and me, and both went wide-eyed. The woman kept screaming, kept racing our way. The man went ape shit, his face twisting into furious determination.

  The gag on the woman’s mouth slid to the side and she wailed with all the energy of someone whose last attempt to live depended on it. It was deafening.

  She was almost to the edge of the yard, maybe ten feet from where we stood, when the man swung the ax down on her, wedged it into her skull with a loud crunch. Blood spit out like a fountain. Her body went into spasms but she kept running, bolting into the trees beside us.

  There was a loud bang.

  The gunshot shook me out of my trance and I pissed myself, screamed, and ran into the woods. I didn’t know where Tooth was, or who or what he’d shot at, and I didn’t care. I was pure adrenaline. I ducked low limbs and hopped boulders and ran right into the makeshift fence, which I’d forgotten about. I jumped up and grabbed the top of it when something plowed into me like a battering ram.

  It was the woman.

  Together, we fell to the ground, and I landed on top of her. She was out of her mind, mouth wide open, blood spurting from the ax in her head. Her eyes spun about like a robot’s with broken servos. She wailed, I screamed, she grabbed for me-I lost it. This wasn’t happening. I jumped off her. Screaming like a lunatic, I went for the fence again.

  Out of nowhere, one of the rottweilers clamped down on my leg and sank his fangs into my flesh, piercing my shinbone. I screamed for God to save me, to pull me from this blizzard of mayhem. I saw the trees go whizzing by my face, felt flesh tearing off my leg, saw the woman flip-flopping on the ground like a fish out of water, felt my head smack against the fence, saw the dog’s fangs snap near my throat, saw more trees whiz by, the dog again, the woman.

  A searing fire raced up my leg.

  The dog was thrashing me like a rag doll.

  I punched it as hard as I could in the face. I punched it again and again until I heard something crack. With a yelp it let go and dashed back toward the house. I reached down to my leg and ran my hand through the wetness running out of it, struggling to see anything through my own blinding tears. It didn’t matter; there was no way in hell I was going to look at it until I was safely away. If I saw my bones sticking out I’d have to stop to throw up.

  Thump thump went the woman on the ground. I stood up, scared so fucking senseless I couldn’t make a noise, white-hot pain blazing in my calf muscle. I wiped the tears away and looked around so fast I could barely make out anything. I kept expecting a hand saw to slice across my throat at any moment. Back toward the house, I spotted Tooth and the shirtless man swinging at each other, rolling on the ground. Next to them one of the rottweilers lay on the brown grass as still as a statue, a river of red running out of its neck.

  Like a jack in the box, the woman sprang upright in front of me and I fell down screaming nothingness. She had one hand on the ax and was trying to pull it out of her skull but it was stuck fast. I had this crazy image of her lifting herself off the ground with it, like in a cartoon. Her hair was coated in syrupy blood and little white bits that were either bone or brain. I kicked her in the stomach, sent her tumbling to the ground away from me. I never realized how fast I could run when I was scared to death, but I leapt up and scaled the fence so quick I doubt my hands even touched it.

  When I landed on the other side, my leg gave out and pitched me to the ground. Back from the yard, I heard a sickening thwack, followed by a grunt, and I knew Tooth had gone down for the count. I peered through the split logs that formed the fence and saw him on the ground, rolling ever so slightly. He put a hand to his head and moaned. The skinny guy was holding the gun, triumphantly, and I could tell he’d just beat Tooth with it. I lay still, watching, not believing this was happening. The man went and picked up his hand saw and gave Tooth a once over.

  I didn’t know what to do. I was lame, scared shitless, and I was about to watch my best friend get hacked to pieces by some sick fuck. And worst of all, I knew if I made a noise I’d be next. There was nothing I could do. I wanted to scream, to run, to take that saw and cut that fucker’s head off and slice him into tiny bits. I wanted to kill him, his family, his dogs, everything in this world that was even remotely related to him. Instead, I closed my eyes.

  I would not watch my friend get hacked up. That would not be the last image I had of Tooth. And yet, I had to know. Swallowing my fear, I opened my eyes and looked again.

  The skinny man didn’t shoot Tooth. Instead, he kicked him in the gut and once more in the head until Tooth went still. Then he kicked him again just to be sure. Satisfied with his work, he bent over the dog that was lying on the ground nearby and put a hand on its head.

  “Motherfucker,” he said, looking back at Tooth, “I’ll kill you so slowly it’ll feel like an eternity. Shoot my dog. You fucking piece of shit.” He kicked Tooth again, whose unresponsive body took the blow with a dull thud.

  He pulled the clip out of the gun, and seeing it still had bullets, slid it back in and started walking into the trees, straight toward me. I lay down as flat as I could, pushed some leaves over my legs and in front of my face. I had on dark brown shorts and my black Silver Surfer shirt, enough to camouflage me, but certainly not enough to save me. On top of that, I could smell the piss
on myself, and it was making me want to puke. I was a dead man and I knew it. As he walked toward me, I didn’t see my life flash before my eyes, I didn’t think of my parents or the comics I’d never draw. I just thought, please let it be fast, please let me not feel it. Then I started crying some more.

  He stopped a few feet from the fence, bent down, and picked up the woman he’d tried to behead. She was still alive, though I doubted she knew her name or what day of the week it was. She reached up to grab the ax and he swatted her hand away.

  “No no, my dear,” he said with a grin, “if you pull that out you’re likely to lose all your brains. You’d probably die pretty quick and we wouldn’t want that. We haven’t even started having fun with you yet.”

  I don’t know if she understood his words or not, but she frantically reached for the ax again, got hold of it and started to yank it out. He grabbed her hand, and in two swift motions, ran the hand saw across her wrist and lopped it off. It fell to the ground with a light thump.

  She wailed. All I could do was bury my face against the fence rung. When she stopped, I risked a look back up and could tell she was in another place. Not dead, just far away, farther than she’d been before, somewhere out past Mars. The man picked up the hand and waved it around. “Here, Butch, here boy.”

  Through the woods, the remaining rottweiler, the one with my blood smeared all over its mouth like clown makeup, trotted over and took the hand from its master. Carrying it in its teeth, it went back to the yard and lay on its belly, put the hand between its two front paws, and began eating it. Vomit raced up my throat but I forced myself to swallow it. Oh, God, please, I pleaded, I don’t want to die like this. Please. Please.

  Through the fence I saw the man’s feet step toward me, slowly, and my heart went wild. Did he see me? Did he know where I was? Would he pass by me and go looking for me? I gave in to tiny convulsions, shaking the leaves off me, my teeth chattering like a rattlesnake.

  A foot slid into the open space in the fence near my face and I realized he was climbing over. If I didn’t move he would land right on top of me, put his heels through my teeth.