Being in Nilhollow at night didn’t bother him. He wasn’t afraid of the place like some of the other guys. He wasn’t afraid of much of anything, but certainly not of a bunch of trees. He thought most of the stories people told about the place were grade-A bullshit. No, it was just that he could think of a hundred better ways to spend an evening. Was he concerned about his fellow officers? Well, sure he was, a little. But they’d been gone less than twenty-four hours, and he didn’t really see any reason for the captain to panic just yet. For all anyone knew, they could be out drinking at a bar somewhere in the next town over, or shacking up with chicks on the company dime, or hell, shacking up with each other, even. Who knew? And even if they were in the woods . . . well, he didn’t know those guys well, but he thought they had at least enough of a brain between them to hole up for the night, get some sleep, and wait until daylight to try to navigate their way out again.
To Brent, this was a prime example of why he had to have administrative aspirations. Where were the high-risk factors in these cases? What made the bosses suspect an immediate threat to their safety? It was a waste of taxpayer dollars to pay cops to uselessly tramp through the darkness when nothing he’d been briefed on proved they were even missing. As for the civilians . . . well, the guy probably offed the woman and then himself. That’s how those things usually went. He and his team were looking for bodies, not living people—bodies they could find more easily in daylight. The whole thing was a waste of time.
Brent knew that with his personality and his training as a state trooper, he was exactly what the public needed and exactly what the media said was wrong with cops. He was okay with that. The general public wasn’t that bright. They needed people like him to put things in perspective. It was a different world than when Mallon was starting out. It was an ugly, dishonest, thieving, lying, murdering world out there, even in small towns, and the fucked-up things people did made no sense unless a person accepted that humans tended toward moral entropy. A society like that couldn’t be policed by the idealists of the world, like Mallon—the people who assumed lost cops couldn’t possibly be lost because they wanted to be. They had to be policed by the realists of the world. And he was such a realist.
This job, and its constant call to interpret how to uphold the law, had made him a realist practically before he was out of the academy. He had been disillusioned early on to find his job was more paperwork and speeding tickets than shoot-outs and car chases. Still, Brent liked being a cop. The occasions on which he could exercise his authoritative common sense—his sister called them power trips—made it bearable. This wasn’t one of those times, but there were enough to keep him going. Breaking up bar fights, arresting meth-heads—he loved that shit. He also loved that he got to carry a gun. Plus, chicks dug the uniform . . . and the handcuffs. They went wild for the handcuffs. In fact, he’d had a date to show them off to a chick named Barbara before he’d been pulled in for rescue duty.
Eyeing up the ranger chick, though, he thought he might be able to salvage something from the night after all. She looked nervous as hell to be out there, which Brent thought kind of funny, given that she probably knew Nilhollow better than any of the cops did. From what he could see, there wasn’t anything to be afraid of. Sure, it was unusually quiet in those woods, except for the occasional joke or snippet of conversation from one of the units, and even those were uncharacteristically restrained, like in a library or church. And yeah, in the dark, the trees looked a little like long spines jutting from the earth, with bristling hairs growing down their lengths. Many had lost their leaves already, probably to something like Dutch elm disease or whatever affected the trees out here. And there was a faint smell that reminded him of the time he had to rake out rotting leaves from under his grandmother’s porch. Still, it wasn’t nearly as creepy as all the old-timers made it out to be. Listening to them, Nilhollow was a fairy-tale death trap.
“Hey,” he said, repositioning himself in the search line to walk alongside her. “Oksana, right?”
She blushed and nodded, tucking a long strand of brown hair behind her ear.
“I’m Brent,” he said, offering her a winning smile. “Nice night for a search party, huh? These woods are something else.”
She nodded again. Evidently, she wasn’t much of a talker. Brent was not deterred. “So tell me, why so tense, huh? You being a ranger and all, you must know these woods like the back of your pretty little hand.”
Oksana looked distinctly uncomfortable. “Da. I know these woods. In Russia, I grow up near the forest—beautiful, peaceful, loving forest. My whole childhood I spend there. I love it. Except when I come to work here. This place . . .” She made a face and shook her head. “This forest is no good.”
“Really?” Brent continued, feigning interest. “What’s so bad about it? I mean, really, besides an apparent tree fungus and whatever that smell is . . . you guys smell that?”
“You know,” Oksana said. “You heard about this place, da? The woods are not safe.”
Brent chuckled. “You’re talking about the spooky campfire tales the old people tell? It’s just a forest, and those are just stories.”
She shook her head. “No, not just stories. When you spend time here, you feel it. The leshiye are all around here.”
“Leshiye?”
“I don’t know word for it in English . . . I think, woods-spirits? Ghosts of trees. Not dead but not alive as we know it. And I think there are . . . other things.” She blushed deeply in the faint flashlight glow.
Brent glanced over her head at the other two, who were listening to the exchange with small smiles. He tried to hide any trace of mockery in his expression as he turned back to Oksana. “Other things? Like what?”
“I don’t know what they are. Bad thoughts. These woods are bad. Always I don’t take night shift, only day shift. I leave gift, and the leshiye leave me alone.”
“You, uh, leave gifts for tree ghosts?”
She nodded, blushing again.
“What kind of gifts?” Brent pressed her.
She glanced back at the others, aware that all three pairs of eyes were on her, listening with scoffing amusement, and shook her head. “No more. We talk about this no more. We have a job to do.”
“Aw, come on, I’m sorry if I offended you,” Brent said, giving her a warm smile. “Seriously, I’m genuinely interested. What kind of gifts do you leave?”
She hesitated. Her expression was one of mistrust. She seemed to consider it for a moment, then reached into a pocket of her uniform and pulled out a small lattice-type construction of sticks, vaguely pyramidal. Tiny colored strings bound the sticks together.
The other two moved closer to her, shining their flashlights on the lattice so they could see.
“That’s pretty cool, actually,” Helen said. “Did you make that? What is it?”
“Is it Russian?” Carl asked.
“No, not Russian. Older than that. Much older. I learn about it here from other rangers. I don’t know word for this. Don’t know what they think it means. It works, though.”
“And that,” Brent asked, “keeps them from . . . what?”
Oksana looked him in the eye for the first time since she met him. “From tearing us apart.”
The others were silent. There was something about the earnestness in her words that made Brent uneasy. This wasn’t some cutesy old-world folklore to her. She believed it.
It was then that they heard a crashing in the woods to their right, and Oksana flinched. Brent squeezed her shoulder. “No worries. Probably just another unit overlapping our search area.”
It wasn’t anyone from another unit that came out of the woods, though. It was a pair of silhouettes, crouched low and creeping between the massive trunks about thirty feet away. They were big and they moved like animals but were vaguely shaped like people. Brent couldn’t make out any details other than that their eyes glowed bright green in the dark, like an animal’s.
Brent clicked the safety o
ff his gun. “Hey! Hey you! Hold it right there!”
The figures stopped, their heads snapping up. The glowing eyes focused on him and he felt a sharp pain in his head.
“Damn it, man, what are you doing?” Helen whispered, drawing her gun. “You gonna invite those bears to come over here and eat us?”
The silhouettes stood. Brent didn’t think they were bears, and he told Helen so. For one thing, the shape wasn’t right. These were tall and bone skinny. It looked to him like they had long, sharp sticks growing out of their heads and shoulders.
“What the fuck are they?” Carl asked. “Are they people?”
“Bears,” Helen whispered.
Brent drew his gun, his wary gaze fixed on the silhouettes. Those glinting eyes glowed now, tiny lantern-lights of green.
“I, uh . . . I really don’t think those are bears,” Carl muttered.
“Leshiye,” Oksana breathed.
“We need to radio this in, guys.” Carl tilted his head to speak into his walkie’s shoulder mic.
“We need to run,” Oksana said, clutching the stick pyramid. She turned to Carver and grabbed his arm. “Now.”
“Guys, come on. Get it together. Those are not bears and they’re not ghosts, okay? Act professional here.” Brent pinched the bridge of his nose, hoping to stave off the pain that had moved to just behind his eye, like a splinter in his skull. It made it hard to think, let alone be patient with these people. Not only was he on a wild-goose chase, but apparently, he was also on babysitting duty.
He strode with purpose a few feet ahead of the others toward the silhouettes. When his flashlight caught them in its beam, though, he stopped. The two figures were not people at all, and certainly not like any animal Brent had ever seen. They were a little like Oksana’s stick-thing, composed of interwoven branches, bits of vine, and bark to form heads, powerful-looking bodies, arms, and legs. The eyes, he could see now, were sparks of green fire burning in twin pits in their faces. A horizontal crack appeared like a fault line in one of the faces, slightly crooked, and the thing let out a growl so loud that it seemed to fill his ears and the air all around him and so deep that he could feel it in his chest.
From somewhere behind him, he faintly heard Helen’s scream. He was annoyed to find the screaming increased the throbbing in his head.
“The fuck are you?” Brent muttered.
The second one’s eyes flashed their fire. It looked like they were studying him, burning through him, igniting him. He felt a sudden, intense anger—anger at the idiots in charge for putting them in the path of these tree-things and anger at the useless pieces of waste behind him who were taking up time and space. The latter irritated him immensely, because they were near and they were helpless, and their stupidity radiated from them like heat and light, hurting his eyes, hurting his head.
He turned and fired a bullet right through Carl’s left eye, and the vise grip which held his skull loosened slightly.
One less to babysit. One less beacon of incompetence.
“Oh my God!” Helen screamed in a high, hysterical voice. “Oh my God! What are you doing, Brent? What the fuck, man?” Helen pointed her gun at Brent; it seemed funny to him. Funny little thing, a gun. So much damage, without even trying at all, really. He bowed his head and looked at his feet. Just a little squeeze of his finger. He pointed the gun down and then shot himself in the foot. A little hole exploded in the boot and quickly filled with his blood. He smiled. Then he shot himself in the other foot.
Behind him, the creatures made sounds like rustling leaves. Maybe they found it funny, too.
“Brent, stop it! What the fuck are you doing?” The sound of Helen’s voice seemed to come from far away, a sound heard underwater, muffled and strange. His ears were already stopped up with wind-sounds, and his head with thoughts he considered maybe weren’t all his.
When he looked up, he could see mouths moving—Helen’s and Oksana’s, at least—but the muted sounds were gibberish. He laughed. They looked ridiculous, with their mouths flapping and their nonsense syllables spilling out of them. He held up his left hand to wave at them, and then shot straight through the back of it. It left a round hole the size of a quarter. He held it up to his eye and peered at them through it. Oksana was clutching her stick-thing and saying something over and over again in Russian. Helen, shaking a little, had her gun pointed at him. Without ever dropping her aim, she grabbed Oksana’s arm and they started backing away. Carl just lay on the ground, bleeding from the hole where his eye had been. Funny. Damn right hilarious, actually.
Then the fog in his head suddenly cleared, taking the humor of the situation with it, and pain rushed to fill its place. This time, he was the one that screamed. What had happened? God, he was shot! What had he done? He tried to take a step forward and the agony that flashed up from his feet dropped him to the ground.
The women had paused, hovering uncertainly between running away and coming to his rescue. He was a fellow cop, for God’s sake! They had to get him out of there. He needed a doctor. What the hell were they waiting for?
“Help me!” he cried. “Helen! God, it hurts. Don’t leave me here. Help me!”
Helen’s eyes, though, were focused on the things behind him, the things looming over him.
He tried to crawl toward the women. “Helen, for fuck’s sake, don’t just stand there. Call in for an ambulance. Officer down! You know how to fucking do it. Helen—”
That pressure behind his left eye was building again, and he winced, then choked out a cry as it got so unbearable that his vision went black on that side. Then he felt movement behind the eye. He didn’t know how that was even possible, but he could feel something moving around in his skull like a bull in a china shop, tearing through tendons and delicate tissue. The pressure built to an excruciating degree and then there was a pop as the thing behind his eye pushed it out of the socket. He felt it plop, warm and wet, against his cheek, and he began to whimper. What was happening? Good God, what was happening to him? The moving thing had poked through the now-open space in his head and was meandering upward. He could feel it tugging against his skull. He reached up to touch it with his damaged hand. It felt rough, like a tree root.
With his remaining eye, he looked up at Helen and Oksana. Their eyes were big, ridiculously big, and their mouths were hanging open. That anger welled up inside him again. Stupid chicks with their big dumb eyes and mouths gaping like idiot fish. No way chicks ought to be cops, ever. Too stupid and weak and—
He felt the same pressure building down where one of his kidneys was, and he whimpered again.
“Helen, you bitch! Help me!”
Another tree root burst out of his back. Then his body was a fireworks display of explosions, like the gunshots, except these were from the inside out, one bloody root after another shooting out of him.
Finally Helen, that useless bitch, was spurred to action. She fired at the creatures behind him. A bullet tore through one’s shoulder, and the thing roared in anger and pain. Within seconds it was in front of her like a leaf in a strong wind. One branch-like hand wrapped around her throat and the other around her wrist. The tree thing tore her arm off, tossing it and the gun aside. Helen screamed again . . . bitch was always screaming, screaming . . . and then the creature clawed open her abdomen. Swaths of ribs dripped blood and little shreds of skin. Finally, it twisted the hand around her throat and snapped her neck like a twig. Her eyes still wide, her mouth still gaping like a stupid fish, she sank to the ground next to Carl.
If he could have by then, Brent would have laughed at how funny she looked.
Oksana, who had jumped when Helen’s blood splattered her uniform, otherwise seemed too stunned to move. She closed her eyes, still muttering in Russian . . . was it Russian? He couldn’t tell anymore—and held her stick-pyramid to her chest. The creature loomed over her, its face so close to hers that the fire of its eyes could have singed her eyebrows. It seemed to be taking her in, the sight and smell of her. It reached to
ward the stick-thing she held, seeming to feel the air around it, then blew back to where the other creature stood.
Brent’s vision in his one eye grew fuzzy for a moment. His head felt heavy and his throat felt stuffed with cotton. He was bleeding everywhere; every root was slick with it. He was losing too much of it, dying right there on Nilhollow’s forest floor. He turned as best he could to face the creatures behind him and raised his gun. Fuck it, he thought. If I’m gonna die, I’m taking one of them with me.
He emptied his clip into the one in front of him, each bullet jerking the creature back a step in tiny sprays of splinters. He kept firing long after the clip was emptied, just a series of pathetic little clicks as the angered thing stalked back to where he lay.
“No,” he croaked. “No.”
Their eyes blazed, but they stopped their advance.
“Please,” he said, tears streaming out of his remaining eye. “Please don’t.”
The root that had grown out of his rib cage snaked into his ear in a sharp drill of pain. The ones in his wrists yanked him down as they dug into the ground.
One of the creatures reached down with long branch-fingers toward his ruined eye. He couldn’t see what it was doing, but he felt the sharp ends of those fingers dig into the skin along the side of his cheek and jaw. There was a wet tearing sound and then his face felt like it was on fire. He saw something red and floppy hanging from the stick-fingers. It took several seconds in his haze, but he realized with horror that it was the skin of his face.
He didn’t see the creature’s other hand until a second before it came down on his skull. Somewhere far off, he heard something crack and felt an odd change of pressure in his head. Then, everything went dark, and Brent Carver, roots and all, sank half into the ground.
* * *
Oksana ran blindly through the dark, her feet barely touching the ground, dodging trees only by some instinct. All she was aware of was darkness and the keening of the wind, if it really was the wind, and the strangled screams of that obnoxious state trooper behind her. She had to find other people.
Savage Woods Page 17
