Applewood (Book 2): Fledge

by Myers, Brendan P.

  Coming back to himself, the boy cocked his head to the east and heard the sound of machines, felt the rumble of fast moving vehicles tremble the earth beneath his feet. He knew now that this place offered no place to hide, not even for its ghosts. Glancing toward the hill, he began moving quickly in the direction of the old mine.

  While scratching and clawing his way up the slope, he tripped over the rusted remains of what had once been a large conveyer of earth. When he got to the mine entrance, he looked within its shadows and saw it had been blasted shut with dynamite. Giant rocks and boulders blocked the way. Standing there, for a brief moment, he felt a trace memory of drunken teenaged boys with slicked back hair who had entered the mine on a foolish dare. He felt the souls of those lost boys still hovering somewhere on the other side of those rocks.

  As the sound of helicopters grew louder, he pressed himself against the sealed opening. Moments later, they blasted over the hill forty feet above him, kicking up sand and grit and dust. Searchlights from above began to probe every inch of the abandoned place. Speeding vehicles filled with black uniformed men screamed into the ghost town. The boy crouched low as he crept and clawed his way to the right, stopping every now and then when he felt eyes probe near where he was, or searchlights come dangerously close.

  Halfway around the hill, he was walking at an angle when the earth suddenly gave way beneath his feet. A loud crack echoed through the night. Moments later, he felt pain, understanding then that the cracking sound had been his right leg snapping. He clamped his tongue between his teeth to suppress his cry. Blood began to flow in his mouth. Waves of shock swept through his body.

  After a blackout moment of nausea and panic, he used his arms to pull his lower body out of the old shaft and began moving again on only three limbs, dragging his now useless leg behind. He had gone only a few feet before summoning the courage to look down. Jutting from a tear in his jeans below the knee was a white protrusion where no protrusion should be. Worse than that, he was bleeding, and he knew he couldn’t afford to bleed.

  After what seemed an eternity of clawing and dragging, he made it to the other side moving as fast as one leg and two arms could take him. The sound of motorized vehicles and the voices of increasingly angry men became more distant. About a mile from the hill, the pain in his damaged leg and the weakness from blood loss finally got the best of him and he began to crawl on his belly. Red desert sand overwhelmed his nose and mouth while his precious lifeblood continued to spill. His vision faded in and out not long before he fainted from exhaustion.

  Even weaker when he came to, unaware how much time had passed, he looked down to see his pantleg now soaked red. Reaching down his filthy hand, he squeezed the denim to salvage what liquid he could and then brought his hand to his mouth to lick the coppery fluid from his palm and fingers. Still, he felt himself grow weaker. Rolling onto his back, he saw the sky was now a dangerous shade of pink. His vision again grew fuzzy. At that same moment, the earth beneath him began to tremble with the sound of machines.

  Looking up, he saw the sky was brighter still and knew he was done for. He didn’t exactly know what would happen when he was exposed to the sunlight. But even a fish out of water knew it was over. He used his arms to raise his body from the ground.

  Off in the distance, a large machine bore down on him, heading straight for him. As the sky grew brighter and the machine larger, he found himself curious just which of the two would win: the hateful men who hunted him or the blasted sun. His own ineptitude was almost laughable. Eight hours without human assistance and it was all over. Some vampire, he thought. Real scary.

  He might have laughed, but at that moment a sharp pain shot up his leg. He looked up and saw the machine was now closer. Grimacing, he turned onto his belly and the movement reopened his wound. Once again he felt his lifeblood drip from him. The sky was brighter now. Dawn was seconds away. He had to struggle to stop from passing out. His vision began to haze over anyway.

  The roar of the giant machine drew closer, the sound exploding in his sensitive ears. Then, it was on top of him, whipping his hair in the breeze as it moved past. He looked up and saw it was no more than ten feet away. It took his foggy mind another moment to realize it was a train, moving about three-quarter speed along invisible tracks.

  Gathering his remaining strength, scowling in pain, the boy stood on his good leg and watched the train pass by. He hopped toward it, dragging the useless leg behind. Stumbling alongside the train, waiting and hoping for some sort of handhold or open door, he was in its shadow when the first rays of the morning sun appeared. He felt himself burn.

  Howling in anguish, he closed his eyes and thrust out his hand to grab hold of anything at all, when he felt a hand take his own in a firm grip. He was all but unconscious now, but the strong hand held on. He felt himself dragged for a moment, then felt a second strong hand grab hold and lift him off his feet.

  Moments later, he was in the cool shade of a rail car, where two sets of hands half dragged, half carried him to the corner and lay him facedown upon a bed of straw. While turning him over to get a better look, they bent his damaged leg. A howl of pain escaped his throat. Convulsively, he bared his teeth. He heard hushed gasps and whispers. Opening his eyes, he saw they were all monsters. A bulbous headed man giggled in a corner. Above him, an ancient little girl stood beside a hunchbacked creature from another world. The last thing he saw before losing consciousness entirely was the monster bending over to peer into his mouth. The beast then said words in a language the boy didn’t understand.

  “Ees git tha coise . . . guh ma a banket.”

  The last thing he heard before sleep overtook him for the day was the frail little girl with the face of an old woman ask excitedly, “Can we keep him?”

  Part Two

  “Life is a carnival . . . believe it or not . . .”

  – The Band

  Chapter Three

  1

  The boy awoke to find himself trapped in a boxlike enclosure. When he pushed at the sides of the box and felt no give, claustrophobia set in. His panic rising, he reached up with both hands and pushed hard at the top of his dark prison. It moved aside easily. Relieved to feel once again the cool night air on his face, he kept pushing until whatever it was finally thumped to the floor beside him.

  He sat up to see he was in a long, narrow room. Garish clothing and loose makeup were strewn haphazardly throughout every surface. He looked down at himself and saw that once again he wore someone else’s clothes, this time a white shirt and black suit with matching shoes. He was embarrassed to realize suddenly he had been washed more than thoroughly while he slept and doused with strong cologne.

  His own dirt encrusted and bloody clothes had tumbled to the floor beside him. They had been atop the bench seat he now realized had been the top of his sleep chamber. His brain clearing slowly, he began to remember the events of earlier that morning: uniformed men, a chase through the desert, and his broken leg. Reaching down, he slowly and carefully pulled up his pantleg to gauge the damage.

  The broken bone had been set while he slept. A bandage of fine silk was now carefully wrapped around the place where bone had poked through skin. Carefully unwrapping the gauze, he saw the still open wound seeped a yellowish fluid. A white powder of some sort had been poured into it. Yet even as he sat there, he felt the bones fusing themselves together. It itched maddeningly, but there was no pain as such. It was more like an intense awareness of his wound. Moments afterward, he realized that in place of pain was something far worse, a tortured longing for his own lost and wasted lifeblood. He felt the gnawing Hunger for more.

  Setting those thoughts aside for the time being, he rewrapped his bandage and stood. He stepped out of the box, favoring his good leg. But even the bad leg was stronger now. He limped only a little. After returning the bench seat to the top of the storage area where he had slept, he walked through the narrow room and pushed open a flimsy screen door. He stepped tentatively down three wooden
steps and found himself standing in the middle of a vast sea of recreational vehicles and campers. He wandered a while through the maze, stepping over electrical cords here and around propane tanks there, heading toward the sounds of noise and activity. When he came upon the last of the campers and stepped out of the maze, it all began to make sense. He started walking along the center of a wide dirt path, glancing in every direction to take in the scene.

  Beneath towering light stanchions, dozens of burly men worked. He watched a bearded man in tight shorts that barely accommodated his beer belly bang away and swear at the motor to a Tilt-a-Whirl. Next to it, other men were completing the assembly of The Scrambler. Further down the midway, the Ferris wheel was going up. He passed trailer after trailer of carnival games: ring toss, whack-a-mole, and balloon squirtgun. He stopped in the center of the midway where a large tent was going up. A dozen men hefted impossibly tall poles, sticking them beneath an acre of flattened canvas.

  “Boy,” a man shouted. “You there, boy. Give us a hand here, willya?”

  He turned and saw the man who had beckoned him, an older man with long gray hair who wore a Confederate soldiers cap. Something within the boy recoiled at that, but the man’s face was kind. Limping over, he saw the man gesture him to grab an unmanned pole that lay on the ground. He reached down for it and took the rest of his cues from the man beside him. The large man across from them in a cowboy hat was apparently in charge of the tent raising. He grabbed his own pole before shouting, “Okay, men. On a count a one . . . two . . . three!” The boy watched the man beside him use his foot to keep the pole anchored and then yank upward. He did the same. With the sound of a large sail flapping in the breeze, the mammoth tent rose from the dirt.

  “Hang on, fellas!” cowboy hat man shouted. Behind them came men with sledgehammers to grab the dangling ropes and pound tent pegs into the earth. After his stakes were pounded, Dugan wandered off again. But everywhere he went, he was put to work. A shout of, “Boy, come here and hold this a second,” led to a half-hour helping get the Salt ‘n Pepper Shakers erected. A plaintive, “Hey kid, do me a favor willya?” had him holding a flashlight while a sweating, pot-bellied man bent over the innards of the mini-coaster.

  He carried fifty-pound blocks of hard shortening to the fried dough stand and the fish and chips booth. He carried pots of water wherever they needed to go. Eventually, he ducked away from the hustle and bustle of the rising midway to sneak around a corner, finding himself on a midway of a different kind. The Haunted House was going up along this path. Beyond that, a large tent invited passers by to see The Wonders of Nature! On that tent were paintings of two-headed calves and alien babies, a cycloptic cat, and a unicorn that looked a lot like a horse.

  The last building along this path was set away from the others, as if even a two-headed calf or an alien baby might find what was inside objectionable. But he recognized some of the faces painted on faded murals draped along the sides of the structure: Light Bulb Man!, The Monster!, and Old Before Her Time! Others he didn’t recognize: Wolf Boy! and The Mermaid!

  Walking nearer the structure, he heard boisterous laughter come from deep within. After taking a moment to decide, he went past the empty ticket booth, climbed the staircase, and went inside. The interior was dimly lit. He passed empty cages on his right before coming upon the first that was occupied, where a woman was being helped into mermaid getup by an eight-foot giant of a man who cursed a blue streak the whole time. Dugan caught only a glimpse of an otherwise normal sized woman whose lower body was shaped like a tongue.

  He walked past a few more empty cages, before stopping at a half open door at the end of the trailer. While reaching for the handle, the door opened to reveal what could only be Wolf Boy! His entire head was covered in reddish black hair as thick as grass, with not a spot of flesh to be seen. He was short, but whether he was truly a boy or a man was hard to tell. The Wolf thing saw him and muttered something in Spanish as he went by. Dugan watched him walk away, then turned and walked through the now open door into a smoke filled lounge. They were all there.

  The hydrocephalic one — Light Bulb Man! — began giggling at the sight of him, then took a half-turn and began fidgeting with his hands while banging his head against the wall. The ancient little girl was seated on a couch beside The Monster! But the boy realized now that he was no monster, simply a man with massive tumors — or maybe it was a single tumor that had managed to engulf him entirely — sprouting from his face and head and neck. Parts of it fell baglike halfway to his chest. Dugan looked away from him and at the girl. When she saw him, she smiled. Getting up off the couch, she came over to greet him, but her every move looked pained. She reached out her small hand for his.

  “Thought you were going to sleep the night away!” she said happily. “Come over here. Sit with us.”

  When she took his hand in hers, he felt her tired heart pumping blood weakly through her veins. She led him to the couch and sat him down between herself and the tumor man.

  “Thit wee wuz gnna loose ya fa a min, ba! Seet! Seet!” he said, emitting some croaks that might have been a chuckle, causing the baglike things hanging from his tumor to jiggle like Jell-O.

  The boy noticed the man kept his right arm beneath the largest of them, which seemed to keep them all in place. Looking closer, he noted the man’s head tilted at an almost impossible forty-five degree angle, as if the tumor had fused his head to his neck. It was brown, but speckled black in spots. It had so completely taken over the man’s upper body there were no facial features to speak of, no way to tell where nose or mouth should have been. The tumor had taken one eye, or perhaps simply grown over the thing. The remaining eye was where no human eye should be, having migrated south of where it no doubt once was. To the boy, the tumor looked like some sort of giant alien parasite, a living, pulsating thing. When the girl tore him away from his thoughts, he was embarrassed to realize that’s exactly what it was, and that he’d been staring.

  “My name’s Alice,” she said. “How’s the leg?”

  Her high-pitched voice was a curious blend of little girl and old woman. Through his brief contact with her hand, he knew that even those short sentences were an effort. The boy thanked her for asking and answered it was fine. “Who set it?” he asked.

  She smiled and pointed to the man beside him. “Rudolph here is our doctor. He took good care of you.”

  The boy turned and said he was much obliged. The man might have laughed before answering in words the boy did not understand.

  “And don’t forget Gunther!” the girl added playfully, pointing to the hydrocephalic. “He helped too.”

  The boy looked toward the man with the light bulb shaped head. He was still giggling and pressing against the wall. But the boy noticed long scratches ran down the man’s face he did not recall seeing last evening. Embarrassed, he turned to Alice.

  “Did I do that?” he asked.

  “Don’t you worry about it,” she answered kindly, patting his hand. “You got a little squirrelly when Doc set your leg, is all. Gunther was holding you down.”

  The boy looked over and thanked Gunther as well, then stayed silent and thoughtful a while. The girl squeezed his hand.

  “What is it, boy?” she asked. He sputtered a bit before asking awkwardly who had washed him. She laughed.

  “I had eight brothers,” she said, adding with a wink, “Nothin’ I ain’t seen before.”

  His embarrassment gone, he smiled and thanked her for that too when another question suddenly occurred. “How did you know about me?” he asked. “What I mean is . . . what I am, I mean. You know what I mean?”

  The girl laughed at the clumsiness of his question but understood its deeper meaning.

  “Rudy saw your chompers,” she replied.

  From the corner of his eye, the boy saw tumor man move his head in an approximation of a nod. The girl continued.

  “We used to have one here just like you. Not much older than you, neither. Hey, what is it
about boys like you gets you in trouble like that?” She laughed before going on. “Anyway, Rudy here worked with him too. And Gunther was his good friend, weren’t you Gunther?”

  Gunther wheezed a bit before answering. “Good friend. Good friends with Gunther.” He kept moving his hands about and rubbing them together.

  The girl caught the boy eyeing a pack of cigarettes on the small table in front of them. Reaching for the pack, she lit one and then reached across the boy to place it in tumor man’s mouth. One mystery solved, he thought. Puffs of smoke began to emanate from one of the dozens of flaps on his face.

  She lit another and placed it in his own mouth. He took a deep drag and immediately coughed and spluttered. Bellows of laughter came from them all. By the second puff, he remembered somehow that he used to do this and it was good. The room went silent for a while as they sat and smoked. The boy broke the silence.

  “Where are we?” he asked.

  “Just outside a little town called Ruidoso, New Mexico,” Alice replied.

  “How’d ya get me off the train?”

  “Well,” she answered, “that’s something else you have to thank Gunther for. See, we was all coming back from Mexico. We had a week off between gigs, so we did some freelance stuff down there. Big Ben is good like that. He lets us find other work when there’s a little downtime.”

  “Who’s Big Ben?” the boy asked.

  “Ben Steinhoffer. He owns the carnival. Been in his family since forever. He’s a tough old bird, but fair. Anyhow, I ain’t got no complaints about him. It’s the son you gotta watch out for.”

  The boy saw Gunther’s restless hands start moving faster at mention of the son, but decided to leave the question alone for now. When his cigarette burned down, he reached for the pack and took another. He let some time pass before deciding to ask something else that had been on his mind.