There was a trace of electricity in their voices that hadn’t been there since the night before. Something alive and resonating and reverberating, something coming back from the darkness.
Like volts to the heart.
Matty said, “We’ve got this,” as I thought it.
The tree line around us was a mix of mostly old pines and small birch trees with peeling bark, and if you looked high enough you couldn’t keep track of where one tree’s branches ended and the other’s began.
Michael went to squeeze Matty’s hand but she flinched back just noticeably enough that Faisal and I had to pretend we didn’t see anything. Michael smiled and nodded just as discreetly and said, “She’s okay, Matty. We’ll find her.”
She was almost smiling when her eyes went sharp as she saw Test jogging up behind us.
“All right, let’s do this,” he said, tossing small LED flashlights to each of us. He had more in a Meijer bag, which we knew because one of them was on and, when he moved, the bag would twist around like a searchlight hidden in a thin fog. It was just after one in the afternoon, but sun wasn’t going to last. I didn’t want to think about what those flashlights implied or that we might not find her until we really needed them. “I’ll round up the others. You all: go.”
We went.
I checked to make sure my flashlight worked, and after we agreed on our separate directions, we ran. In front of the rec hall there was an audience of monsters. All along the railing running the length of the building were the pumpkins we’d carved. I shot past them all; one at a time the monstrous faces beamed at me; the city-crushing giants wrecked cities despite me; and the audience of silent, purgatory-stricken faces smiled or snarled or glared or rolled their eyes, and at the end there was one soul made of an infinite winding loop that circled up into the stalk. Whether it was my momentum or the velocity of October, the last pumpkin spun on its axis so the wavy line blurred into one perfect continuous spiral like there was infinity waiting for the poor monsters too.
The plan was dispersal. The plan was to explode out and rain down numbers and safety on the only lost child we knew. Through the big windows of the rec hall, Test was tossing flashlights to Buddies and gesturing toward the wilderness. Through another window the remaining Buddies were setting up pillow forts and tents and lanterns for a makeshift camping adventure.
I ran for the petting zoo. I knew she would’ve started at the broken fence where the deer escaped. Everyone else was sticking to the roads and the paths and looking around the lake and they were all in a light different than my own. But I had to start from the beginning; I had to start where she would have started, in case we missed something.
My light was the barn light. The one that shone down on the broken fence where only a stupid kid with a hero complex would go. So I went.
I told myself to think like a kid.
Think like a hero child.
What would Charlie do?
I ran.
For hours and days and years I ran. I moved between trees and over frozen puddles and cold branches and around the voices calling her name; I moved with the wind; I moved always forward. All of the spots we’d already checked were checked again and again because now we knew she was close.31 The other voices ricocheting around the afternoon knew it too. The voices were fueled; they were unshakable beacons.
I sprinted down the trail toward the barn before bursting into the clearing where it sat against the tall, frozen grass. The barn was exactly how we’d left it but it was completely changed, just like everything else. Like the world was broadcasting through a high-definition filter of potential. Everything was radiant. Everything was a clue. All because of that one EKG beep—the one nobody is ever sure they hear. The one that cuts through all the noise in the world.
“Lump?” I yelled. I pressed my ear against the barn doors and listened. Inches away, the other baby deer were curled up warm and safe, surrounded by a cast of chickens, goats, and at least two teacup pigs. I pounded on the wooden door, rattling it against its old hinges.
One of the animals—probably one of the pigs—let out a startled crying sound and started making noises. I called her name again. I closed my eyes and tried to shut out all of my senses except for hearing. I waited to hear her say something back; I waited to hear her shush the animals; I waited to hear the metal click of the door’s lock being thrown open.
The only thing I could hear were the sounds of the search party off in the woods. I kept moving.
I cut through the snow.
I barreled through the cold.
Unlike Prufrock, I affected.
At some point it rained. The only time I stopped was when I checked my phone to see if anyone else had called with any new information and to catch my uncatchable breath. There were no messages, so I called her.
Voicemail.
I moved.
By five in the evening, the sun was beginning to sink behind the western trees while voices echoed across the woods, calling out to the missing child. The night sky was clawing its way up as the day disappeared.
October twentieth was unstoppable; the save had to be in the day, whatever was left of it.
She had to be found before the sun sank and declared her missing. Because survival rates plummet when more time passes. Getting to her before the sun disappeared meant defying the headlines that would read, “Local Girl Missing For Second Day.”
I told myself to think. To focus. To step back from it all to see the bigger picture. The last shreds of daylight were all but gone; the freezing rain had stopped but had settled into a glass coat over the world.
“Fuck you, asshole,” I said to myself. “Fuck you, think. Think.”
I thought of the rope wall; I ran.
The deeper I went, the darker the sky turned. The stars faded in a billion at a time and the world went further into pitch oil, stampeding through the remnants of the day. I chased the light and couldn’t stop the color bleeding from the sky.
The fence around the rope wall rattled in the crisp evening air because I kept rattling it and cursing at it. It was locked because we had made sure we locked it and it was covered in barbed wire to keep less resourceful youths than ourselves out.
I flung my coat over a section of the brownish barbed wire. Without my coat but still wearing a hoodie, a long-sleeved thermal undershirt, and a referee T-shirt, as well as a hat and gloves, the air still felt like a frozen hurricane hitting every inch of my body.
At the top I could see the world, but it was getting too dark. Lights were beginning to show up: light from the cabins clicking on, light from the dingy yellow utility bulbs, a lazy green light swooping in slow circles above the trees, flashlights through the pines, stars struggling against the night.
I focused on the laser dot in the center of my mind. The swirling nexus of a whirlpool. The cherry ember of a Winchester cigarette against an infinite blackness. I opened my eyes.
“Holy shit,” I said and looked above the trees at the dim, swooping light. The dead light from the airfield that hadn’t worked in ages. The one right next to the windsock Lump had seen that was still snapping back and forth.
I ran.
FORTY-FOUR: ELEPHANT SHAPES
IT’S LATE SPRING AND WE’RE sitting on Freddie the 2002 Mercury in the immense parking lot at O’Hare waiting for Grandma to land, and from the middle of the sky to the horizon the blue is mottled with planes.
Charlie’s on his third cigarette of the hour.
“You ever think about what makes your heart beat?” he asks me out of nowhere, out of the cloud of nicotine smoke he’s bathed in. I’m reclined against the hard, smooth glass of the windshield and Charlie is laid out across the roof, cigarette pointed to the sky, resting between his fingers. “Like there’s something that keeps it going. And,” he says, rolling to his side to face me, making the roof of the car pop, “you had a first heartbeat. Think about that: you had a first heartbeat. Like there was a time before your heart ever beat, and th
en—” He swipes his hand, sending a thin line of smoke spiraling up to the planes.
“So does everybody,” I say. “A first heartbeat.”
“Exactly. And it’s fucking wild. All of these people landing in all these planes, all of them had a first heartbeat and all of them’ll have a last.”
And I’m thinking the same thing, except I was imaging the planes in the distance as flying away instead of getting closer. Every once in a while, if we don’t say anything for long enough, Charlie asks about beating hearts. He’s done it before and he’ll do it again because there’s still a year before we burn down a bowling alley.
I want to ask him why he thinks the planes are landing instead of flying away but I don’t because it’s always been easier for him to ask weird, oblique questions than it is for me. And I think, if we had never seen the car beneath us or anything like it and we were blind, it would feel different to both of us. If asked, Blind Charlie would say that the car was a hollow sheet that led to a downward slope. And if Blind Moses was asked, he’d say it was all hard skyward incline. Beneath both of them, though, “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Stones is playing.
It’s one of the first times I notice that Charlie and I have truly inherent fundamental differences. All these years and it never occurred to me just how differently we see things.
How we’ll always see things differently.
Even after we’d blown up at each other, I’d never thought that we were really, truly different people.
After all, we were each other’s other half.
FORTY-FIVE: … AND AROUND
IT WAS FARTHER TO THE airstrip than it seemed, and there was no clear path. Each time it felt like I was headed straight for the green light I found myself turned around and trying to reorient myself. The sun couldn’t reach all the way through the trees, but it wanted to.
The airfield looked like an abandoned airfield because it was one. I came through the trees by an old, blasted-out logger road that dumped out to a landing strip littered with tires and mangled pieces of metal that looked like they were dripping with tetanus. I could see straight through what was left of the small hangar, and at the far end of the property there was a small pillbox guard station with a sixty-foot tower climbing from its roof. On top of the tower there was the swooping green light.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and yelled her name. When she didn’t answer I tried calling her real name.
“Allison!”
Her real name echoed back to me.
“Sorry I called you Allison,” I said. Then, “Lump?”
More nothing. Just ghosts of sound. I jogged down the dilapidated airstrip, checking around the piles of tires for anything that might help. I checked the hangar.
“Lump!” I called. My voice banged off the rusty walls. Aside from the stacks of old newspapers and burnt-out oil drums, the hangar was gutted. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the hangar as only Lump would see it: filled with streamers and golden light, one mighty plane fueled to travel around the world.
My breath burned in my chest and my legs shook like cowards as I ran to the guardhouse. I pulled my phone out to check for messages, but it was dead.
I tried the big, locked door before pressing my hands against the squat building’s glass and peering in. At first I didn’t see anything, just a closet and an old control panel in front of an equally old calendar that showed a woman poking her head out from behind a mostly transparent shower curtain. And then I saw it.
“Fuck.”
I ran to the other side of the building. There was a hole in the wall where something forever ago had punched through. On the inside, though, there were fresh candy wrappers laid atop a FOUND poster.
I shoved my shoulder against the hole and tried to squeeze through, but it was impossible for anybody other than a child.
While the guardhouse wasn’t huge, there was a smaller door inside of it that was closed.
“Lump?” I called while I circled back to the front and started banging on the glass. “Are you in there? Lump?”
I went quiet and moved my ear to the glass. There were corners under the control panel I couldn’t see, and there had to be something behind the door.
“Lump, if you’re in there: don’t move. I’m breaking the glass. I’m coming, okay?”
I pried a rock the size of a volleyball from the frozen ground.
“Okay, Lump,” I said with the boulder cradled against my stomach. I swayed my arms and torso back and forth and gathered window-destroying momentum. “Here … it … comes,” I said and underhanded the huge rock at the dirty glass.
The rock hung in the air. It floated in lazy thousand-frames-per-second slow motion until it hit the glass and obliterated it. I let one sharp puff of air go and climbed through. I didn’t hear my feet crunching over the broken glass and I didn’t feel my palms cut on the window frame because I was trying to look everywhere at once and I kept picturing worse scenarios:
We’d missed the hole where she’d fallen into the lake.
She was wandering farther and farther into the woods, away from us and warmth and safety, with winter screaming closer every minute.
She had found the bears she wasn’t afraid of.
Someone had found her, and this someone had taken her.32
I looked under the control panel; I opened the small door and of course she wasn’t there because it was just a broom closet filled with mouse shit and cigarette butts; I looked at the calendar for clues. I blinked hard and the poster was still on the ground. It didn’t disappear or shimmer away like a dream trying to be remembered.
There was another code written on the paper. Another expanse of seemingly random numbers.
711 627 4310 913 915 519 3626
Below the code it looked like she’d written a note to herself. It said, “Up down equal. How many X.”
And when I shook the candy wrappers off to read it better, the goddamn poster still didn’t disappear like a bad dream because I was awake and there was blood on the picture of the deer. Just a few smudged fingerprints, but unambiguously blood all the same.
I felt carved out. It was that empty sensation in your gut that reaches out and makes your palms and fingertips cold and feels like maybe you forgot to put all the bones in your feet. It was cold outside of me and it was cold inside; early-evening, Midwest-October cold, and the trees were bare, inky shadows against a pink, billowing sky that was just a painting in front all of the unlimited space full of dead stars. I was cold. I was hot. I was all there and I was not there at all.
The numbers refused to make themselves understood.
I couldn’t stop my breath speeding up and the childishly impotent frustration that shuts you up because if you talk your words are going to come out cracked and staggered because you’re too busy trying not to cry or scream.33
There was a metal control box on the wall. The rusty lever sticking out of it, ending in a faded red rubber tip, had been pushed up. The only part of the lever that wasn’t rusty was a small semicircle at that bottom that was a clear, unvarnished silver. My hand pulled the lever down and, outside, the lazy green light clicked off. My hand pushed it back up and the light came back to life.
I unlocked the door and stepped out. Everything felt disconnected and upside down and heavy. My legs decided that I needed to sit down.
“She’s probably dead. Or she’s about to be,” Charlie said, sitting next to me. He took a pull from his cigarette before offering it to me.
I waved it away.
“We have to talk, Charlie. About me and you.”
“I know,” he said, looking off into the middle distance the way I always imagined he would when we had this talk.
“We weren’t good together. Something broke between us and it never got fixed.”
“I know,” he said again, lacking the devastating rebuttal I was always certain he’d have.
“I hated you so much of the time. As much as I loved you, I hated you too.”
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Charlie nodded and took a deep drag on his cigarette.
“We were toxic. You were reckless. I was always the one left to pick up whatever mess you made. I was always the one left standing because you were always so confident that I’d get back up. Pull some stupid, dangerous shit: let Moses deal with it. It’s okay, he’s family and he’s bulletproof.”
He raised his hand. “Can I say something?”
I smiled, even though I was terrified of what he’d say. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to have this conversation for a long time. But first: I have good news. Give me your hands,” he said, placing the cigarette in his mouth.
“I don’t have time for this, Charlie.”
“Would you just give me your hands?” he said around the Winchester like I was being an unreasonable asshole.
I held my hands out, palms down, and he shook his head, puffing air out of the corner of his lip, and said, “Other way.”
“I have to find her, man.”
He nodded and smiled with the corner of his lips and blood started trickling down his forehead. It started as a single bead that lolled down his brow, around the concave of his eye, and worked its way around the groove of his mouth, and when it dripped off his head it fell on my gloves. He took my hands. The blood kept flowing until it covered his face like a mask.
Everything but his eyes; they were clear, and when mine connected with his, he said, “Then go find her,” right as he dug his thumbs into my bleeding palms.
I sucked air into my mouth and swung my hands in front of my face, spattering blood onto my cheeks. My gloves were soaked through with red and there were still tiny slivers of shattered glass sticking out of the dark fabric.
I would need stitches across my palms and wrists, and I knew they’d heal to look like brackets.
The sun was fifteen minutes lower in the sky than I’d remembered it being. In the non-wind I could hear the faraway voices of the search party calling out for her; the only other noise was the hum from the green light spinning around a hundred feet above me.
I pulled my gloves off and looked at my raw hands and after two deep breaths I made fists as tight as I could. It was like grabbing two live wires: white pain exploded outward like the universe being Big-Banged and after the red blur faded around my vision everything went unfathomably vibrant.
Unstoppable Moses Page 22
