Unstoppable Moses

by Tyler James Smith

  “I think we should keep moving.”

  “Yeah,” he said, before cupping his hands around his mouth and calling out to them. They walked over without saying anything else as though nothing was wrong and we hadn’t heard them yelling at each other. “We need to keep moving.”

  THIRTY-NINE: SLOW-MOVING LIGHT

  TEST HAD THE CORDLESS PHONE dug into the side of his head. He didn’t stop glaring at us. Faisal started to stand up with his hands out, ready to say something, but Test pointed at him and said, “Shut up. Sit down.” His attention returned to the phone. It was 5:08 in the morning.

  We had checked around the ice-rimmed lake. We’d checked the barn. We’d looped back through the camp.

  Matty’s hands were clamped in her lap and she wouldn’t look at any of us. Even after Michael had given up trying to make her feel better, Faisal had tried to tell her that it was going to be okay. They didn’t recognize the look on her face like I did though. The one that said, “We are immeasurably fucked.”

  Test plucked his glasses off with his free hand and rubbed the bridge of his nose, and spoke into the phone. “Elaine. Hi.” His eyes were closed behind his pinched fingers. “No, not really. I need you to get the faculty together. Quietly.” He turned his back to us. The hair he still had stuck up in the back like a crown and the front collar of his white undershirt, beneath his Camp Jaye’k zip-up, had drool marks that were only just now drying.

  We’d checked by the utility sheds. We’d checked by the main roads. We’d looked in the boys’ cabins; Michael and Faisal had both quietly gone through their own individual child-armies and gotten groggy answers that no one had seen Lump.

  The TV in Test’s office was decades old. It had the thick plastic dials that gave you fewer than ten preset options, and someone at some point had dropped it because there was a starburst smattering of cracks across the middle of the screen.

  We’d checked Lump’s bed again, hoping to find her fast asleep.

  Outside the tiny office window there’d been snow falling in heavy sheets. The same snow that had covered any footprints we’d hoped to find when we’d circled the camp three times and realized we needed help because things were not okay. At just after five in the morning we’d knocked on Test’s door.

  The snow had turned into a wet drizzle.

  Faisal reached over and swatted at Michael’s arm and pointed at a picture on the wall. A vacationing Test stared back from the Dad of the Year frame posing with a daughter who looked hauntingly like her father.

  “What a horrible co-winkie-dink,” Michael said, trying to smile.

  “This isn’t funny,” Matty said. “Lump is missing.” She checked to see if Test was listening. “She is actually missing and it is our fault.”

  My guts squirted sour. The ten-year-old in me wanted to believe that it was over and that things would be okay since we’d gotten an adult, but just because we asked for help didn’t mean that the situation was over or that Lump was okay.

  “If there’s any kid I’m not worried about, it’s Lump,” Faisal said, his eyes straight ahead. “Trevor, sure. Bryce, yeah. Kid would, God willing, get eaten by dogs. She needs to be found, but she’s okay. We’ll find her.”

  “I said shut up. All of you,” Test said, the mouthpiece of the phone pulled away from his face. “Sorry. Camp Buddies. I don’t think it’s anything like that. At least I hope it—no, not like that … right. But she’s MIA. Yeah. Yep. Good, all right, thanks.” He hung up the phone and stared at us. He leaned against his desk where the clues from Lump’s bed were spread out like you’d see in an old detective movie.

  The DRAFT posters she’d made, the mockups of the deer, the codebook with the missing pages, and the pictures she’d drawn of a hero-child in an aviator hat. All the clues that we had, that weren’t pointing us where we needed to be pointed.

  We stared back.

  He kept staring.

  “Shut up,” he said to me. He had seen my lips starting to move. “Elaine is getting the faculty and the Buddies together and we’re going to find her. And while she’s getting a search party together, I need some questions answered. Do I need to ask the very obvious questions?”

  Matty took a deep breath and looked Test in the eye, but Michael cut her off.

  “She snuck out after lights-out,” Michael said. Matty turned her head, slow, and looked at him with eyes that were all whites. Eyes that said, “She was in my cabin, I didn’t ask you to fucking answer for me.” Michael nodded at her, then at Test like it was common knowledge. Faisal ran his hand down his jaw, clicked it back and forth before blinking once, hard. “I mean, I assume it was lights-out. I talked to you on the phone a few minutes before you went to bed and everything was fine.”

  Test turned to her. “Let me get this straight. She left the infirmary after lights-out,” he said, nodding condescendingly at us. “Then she came back to the cabin, found it empty, then went off into the night.”

  “The cabin was empty because Shelly had the girls in the rec center,” Matty said.

  He rubbed his eyes. “How’d you know she was missing, Ms. Gable? Room full of snoring kids, how’d you have her pegged as missing?”

  “She called me,” I said. “I missed her calls and now her phone’s dead so I woke them up.” I pointed somewhere between the three of them. “Because they know the camp, and they know the kids.”

  “And why are all four of you sitting here?” he said to me, still rubbing his eyes with his thumb and finger.

  “She called us—”

  “I’m asking him, Bachman.”

  “Because I—we couldn’t find her.” I said, looking at the others.

  Test dropped his hand and moved his head to catch my eye. “You couldn’t find her.”

  “Right, and s—”

  “—I’m not finished. You couldn’t find her and now she’s missing. She’s out in the freezing rain because you four chose to spend valuable time trying to save your own asses.”

  Michael started to ask how we were trying to save our own asses when Test cut him off.

  “Stop. No more shit. You were out after LO.”

  “We were just trying to find her,” I said.

  “What was that, Mr. Hill?”

  “I sai—”

  “I know what you said. All of you: get out of my office. The horn goes off at seven—that means we’re going to have a lot more kids to keep track of. Keep looking for her. When we find her, we sound the alarm—whistles, calls, whatever it takes to get everybody together. We reconvene at the rec hall at noon. Go, now.”

  On the wall next to the old TV there was an old framed print of an even older Norman Rockwell painting where a kid in a huge, sagging uniform was saluting some flag or figure behind the viewer. The left half of the painting was yellowish white from years of sun damage, and it was like the kid in the picture couldn’t see the encroaching off-white that was slowly obliterating everything behind him, so he just kept saluting.

  FORTY: MY FIRST NOTHING

  THERE’S A MOMENT THAT does stand out to me from my life After Charlie.

  It’s July. The school year was rough; the crowded hallways were easier than ever to walk through, since the people parted around me like waves.

  People I’m supposed to have been friends with—even in passing—looked through me or over me or past me. People who I wanted to scream at: “I was there when you tried to bring your dog back from the dead,” or “My cousin had a huge crush on you.”

  I was a ghost.

  Summer doesn’t seem like it’s going to be much better. For the first few weeks, I just sleep or go online or watch movies.

  Come mid-July, I’m so fed up looking at my computer screen or the back of my eyelids or the TV that I get up and go for a drive without knowing where I’m going. Freddie’s been fixed so I tell myself I need to test it out, and at first I just drive around Guthrie, but I hate the sight of town too, and the cops all know me and in a small town it’s hard to avoid any
landmarks, let alone the one you almost burned down.

  So I head north to the city. I hug Lakeshore Drive with the gigantic buildings on my left and the massive, endless blue on my right.

  And eventually I’m in Evanston.

  And eventually I’m on 94.

  I don’t remember when I turned the radio off, but I realize I’m driving with nothing but the ambient sounds of the car. And for a little while, nothing sounds like gunshots.

  FORTY-ONE: SEARCH PARTY

  WE SEARCHED.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  And we searched.

  FORTY-TWO: 12:08

  EVENTUALLY LUMP WAS MISSING for long enough that we made our way back to the rec hall. Each time I blinked I dreamed of Lump running through the freezing night surrounded by hungry animals with frothing mouths.

  At 12:05 I swallowed three No-Snooze pills and, at 12:08, two shapes moved past the window by the door. They’d whisked through my peripheral vision and were standing behind the door like they were discussing some pre-entrance plan. I blinked, and when the door opened Lump came rushing through, exhausted and cold and freshly bandaged but wildly alive and frantically needing to tell her adventure story, but then I blinked again and it was just Test outlined in the doorway against the cold afternoon wind.

  He had her muddy, dripping aviator hat.

  FORTY-THREE: SPIRALING ROUND …

  THE FOUR OF US LEANED against the railing facing Test. The Maybe-Dickwad/-Hole and the other Buddy were inside presiding over the kids, who could tell something was wrong. We hunched against the wind Test had been out in for hours—his legs and face were red with windburn, but he took his gloves off and unzipped his coat when he talked to us.

  Faisal stood between Matty and Michael, and I stood at the end.

  “We found it in a tree on the north side of the grounds,” Test said when Matty asked where they found the hat. “It was ten, fifteen feet up a pine.”

  “She was climbing,” I said. “She was probably climbing to get a better view.”

  “A better view of what?” Michael said.

  I shook my head. Leaning on the railing, I could almost see through the trees to the road where the lights ran in both directions. The clouds in the otherwise exceptionally clear sky were scattered enough that they threw down circles of darkness that sailed across the snow-covered gravel parking lot, and in every one of the shadow scenes I saw Lump. The light she moved in was moonlight: not the yellow sunlight, but pale moonlight that only existed in the spotlight circles piercing down through the day. It made sense to me that a half dozen Lumps were running around and playing and cartwheeling and rolling around with baby deer and leaning against the pillars of daytime moonshine because I was more asleep than not. The only response that made sense to me was to say, “She found us.”

  “Moses?” the Lumps all said.

  “—ses?”

  I blinked and the cloud shadows were empty. “Sorry?”

  “Pay attention,” Test said. Somewhere far away through the trees, something was making a wailing noise.

  “Did you call the police?” Faisal asked.

  “I called the Department of Natural Resources first,” he said loftily. “DNR’s got stations scattered for a hundred miles around here. Put an APD28 out on her.”

  “What about her parents?” Matty asked, not realizing how much that family already had to deal with on an everyday basis.

  The awful fucking wind kept assaulting us, blowing into, under, and through our clothes. All of us except Test hugged ourselves warm. The distant wailing noise picked up and it sounded like a trapped animal.

  “They’re a couple hours away on account of thinking they had a vacation on their hands, but they’re on their way,” he said. But he was barely talking to us. The wind was too cold for this time of year, even the daylight hours felt all too frozen and lifeless. “When was the last time any of you slept?”

  Nobody answered.

  “You’ve been up all night and I need you all to be rested. We could have a long night in front of us.” He took the cordless phone he was carrying around out of his cargo pocket, pinched the bridge of his nose for moment, and dialed 911. He angled the phone away from his mouth and said, “Sleep, food, then back to it, okay? I need you guys t— Yes. Hi,” he said, bringing the phone back to his mouth.

  We headed for the cabins while Test began explaining to the dispatcher that there was a child missing and when his voice died mid-sentence, we all turned and looked at him.

  “Beg pardon?” The deep crease between his eyes went deeper. “What do you mean someone already called? Who called?”

  The wailing animal came barreling toward the camp’s driveway.

  Just beyond our sight line and the parking lot, swooping lights blasted through the snowy, late autumnal trees—all of the scarlet and lemon leaves weighed down under swaths of white—and turned the snow red and blue. The wailing sirens followed as two squad cars, a fire truck, and an ambulance came roaring down the small, winding driveway.

  “Holy Christ,” Test said, cramming the phone into his pocket.

  We ran toward the front of the building right as the first police car came to a slippery, snowy stop in front of us. Two officers spilled out, each with a hand on their belt, the driver saying something into her shoulder-mounted radio.

  “Who called you?” Test said.

  I looked at Test like he was a tired, bedraggled woodsperson in shorts who had just yelled semi-accusingly at the cops for showing up exactly when we needed them. The officer looked at him the same way.

  “We got a distress call from a child. Sir, please step back,” the immense police officer said to Test, who couldn’t figure out what to say to whom or where to stand. “She told us the name of the camp and that she was lost before the call cut.”

  The other vehicles came roaring down the path and packed themselves tightly around us.

  “Wait,” I said. “She said that? ‘She’ like Lump? Lump called?”

  “She’s okay,” Matty said to us while Test talked to the officers. “She’s still okay.”

  The officer didn’t take her gloved hand off her holster when she spoke. “Dispatch got a distress call from a young girl,” she said. “Like I said, her phone died before she could tell us anything other than the name of the camp.” You could tell she was used to talking to panicked-looking people in the middle of the woods.

  “But you traced it, right?” I said. “You traced the call here so you know where she is?”29

  “To the camp, yes.”

  “What else did she say?” Test asked. “Did she describe where she was, if she was hurt, if there were houses around?”

  They bounced back and forth, sharing non-information while the EMTs drank coffee out of thermoses and talked with the other first responders, all of us alternating between vibrating with nervous adrenaline and settling into static because nobody knew the extent of the situation and maybe, just maybe, if Lump had called 911 not that long ago, we could find her soon.

  Test suggested bloodhounds; the cop ignored him and spoke into her shoulder-mounted radio. “Dispatch, we have a 7002, possible 1001, requesting additional units.”

  The tinny, crackly voice on the other side of the radio responded that they understood and would be sending more cars.

  “So what do we do? Do we do an Amber Alert?” Michael asked.

  The officers had relaxed out of their initial Full Alert Mode that cops are always in when they first show up.30

  “No, that’s not how that works. Not if she’s just lost. If she’s lost then we find her. But we need to rule out other options.”

  “What other options?” Test said. “One of my kids is missing and she needs to be found.�
� He talked with his hands, speaking with his fingers splayed out like he was chastising a child, which the officer didn’t appreciate. “No, tell me. What other options are we considering?”

  But he knew the other options. He knew them the same as we all knew them, and if my guts hadn’t already been frozen through, they would have turned to water when the officer answered him:

  “We have to rule out the possibility that someone took her.” I pictured all the Lumps in the radiant nighttime sunlight, smiling and playing until twisted, gnarled hands reached out of the dark and whisked them away, one at a time, into the woods.

  “We don’t have time to consider that,” Test said, not trying to hide the tired anger in his voice.

  “I need you to step over here and speak with me,” she said to Test. The officer looked over at her partner and nodded; the partner said something into his radio before turning to the EMTs. They all started moving.

  Test and the officer talked about the possibility of abduction. They talked about the locals and the Buddies and the off chance that someone had stolen her away in the middle of the night, and after a while, the officer was convinced.

  “We can assign Buddies to watch the campers this evening. A slumber party in the rec hall,” Test said. “I’ll get flashlights and whistles either way—get them to the rest of the faculty.” He power-walked to his office.

  “We split up,” I said before anybody could ask what they thought we should do. “This isn’t a horror movie and there isn’t a killer on the loose, so a bunch of teenagers splitting up at camp in the woods to cover more ground is the best option.”

  “Attractive teenagers too,” Faisal said, the humor in his voice reflecting the new energy we were all feeling.

  “Just to be safe: no showering, no drugs, no skinny dipping, and no sex,” Michael said. He pointed at Matty. “Consider yourself cut off,” he said. “You too,” he said, pointing at Faisal.

  “You’re not my type,” Faisal said.

  “Bullshit I’m not.”