by R. W. Ridley
“Bostic wasn’t kidding. It is a mansion,” I said.
“Got a feeling we’ll fare better in this one,” Wes said.
“Couldn’t do any worse,” Tyrone said.
Lou tugged on the line to let Bostic know that a single harness was ready to travel back. “It’s a roof over our heads.” She tilted her head toward Gordy, who was propped up against the wall of the treehouse. “Gives us a proper place to tend to his wounds and to plan our next move.”
The harness disappeared into the fog. We all watched and waited for Bostic’s large frame to come barreling through the haze at any second. We waited and waited and waited.
“Where is he?” Wes asked.
Just as the words left his mouth a squeal soared through the tree tops followed by a howl that obviously came from Bostic.
We stood silently.
Another howl by Bostic. More squeals.
“What do we do?” April asked.
I grabbed one of the remaining harnesses and put it on. “We go back and help him.”
Wes grabbed the other harness.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” April said.
“No it ain’t, little girl,” Wes said.
“I should go,” Lou said.
Wes growled. “Why should you go? You some kind of superhero? I’m the full grown adult here. Let me act like it for a change.”
He clipped on the zip line and leapt off the platform.
“Wes!” I said as I hurriedly tried to clip on.
He soared past the fog before I could secure my harness on the line. I looked at Lou. “Stay here! No matter what!”
She reluctantly nodded in agreement.
I was off the platform and zooming across the zip line faster than I had on the trip over. The cool air was beating against my face. My heart was racing. I had no weapon. No plan. No idea what was waiting for me on the other platform.
When I was in the thick of the fog, I heard Wes let out what sounded like a warrior’s cry.
“Wes!”
He didn’t reply.
The outlines of two large men came into view. They were crouched and ready to pounce on something. I couldn’t make out what it was. The haze was too thick.
I landed on the platform with a thud and quickly unhooked my harness.
“It’s in the tree,” Bostic said with blood pouring down his face.
Wes was breathing heavily, and his hands were balled into fists. “It’s quick as all get out.”
“What is it?” I asked with my eyes on the branches above my head.
Bostic shook his head. “It’s new. Ain’t never seen it before.”
Whatever it was shrieked so loudly it felt like it was just inches from my ear.
I saw a branch shudder. “There,” I said pointing.
The creature screeched again and swooped down on top of me. It was long, dark, and bony. It came down so fast I couldn’t tell if it had two legs or four or eight. There were black dots in a circle around its head. I got a look at its rows of pointy teeth as its mouth opened and chomped down. I pulled back from the attempted bite and fell to the platform. The creature momentarily placed its feet on my chest and then leapt back into the branches.
“Holy cheese and crackers,” Wes said. “I ain’t never seen anything move like that!”
It shook the branches violently.
I scrambled to my feet. It wasn’t until then that I noticed Bostic was holding a baseball bat with dozens of long nails sticking out of it.
“I ain’t even got close to hitting it,” he said.
The creature swooped down again with one hand still holding onto the branches above. The other hand swatted at Bostic and the large man swung wildly, grazing its knuckles. The creature squealed in pain. It jumped up through the branches and onto a neighboring tree. It turned back holding its injured hand, gave one last screech before it moved onto the next tree and then was completely out of sight.
Bostic let himself relax a bit. “Doesn’t appear to take to getting hit.”
“Well, I say we zip back to the treehouse before it has time to regroup or, worse, bring some of its buddies back.”
“Fat fella,” Bostic said, “that’s the best idea you’ve had yet.”
I could see Wes’ jaw set at being called fat fella by a guy that outweighed him by a good 50 lbs, but he let the comment go and hooked himself to the zip line. “Hook on and go, Oz.”
I did as he said without argument. We were all headed to the other side within a matter of seconds.
Three
Bostic hovered over Gordy holding a piece of torn cloth to his own head. The creature on the platform had left a pretty good gash above his ear. “The girl, April, did this to him?”
Lou was pouring some Tennessee corn liquor on a rag. “It’s a long story.”
We were in the middle of a large open room. Gordy was lying on a flimsy cot. Everyone else sat on the perimeter of the room gathering their thoughts and taking in the interior of the house. It was big, but shabby. Bostic was not a neat man. I didn’t have a clue how long he’d been living alone in the house, but it looked like he’d shared it with a couple of tornadoes until very recently.
“She got a habit of taking a bite out of people, or was there something special about him?”
“Wrong place at the wrong time,” Lou said. She made a motion towards the wound on Gordy’s leg, but stopped short. “This is going to sting, Gordo.”
“Sting?” Bostic said with a chuckle. “It’s going to hurt like hell.”
Lou gently placed the alcohol-soaked rag on the edge of the wound and Gordy howled in pain. She shook her head. “I barely touched it.”
“Want me to hold him down?” Bostic asked.
Gordy took a deep breath. “That’s not necessary. Just do it quick.”
Lou did as he requested and guided the rag quickly across the wound. He strained and flexed, biting his lip to muffle his groans.
Bostic leaned down closer to examine the wound. “Infection’s set in. Not too bad, but the skin on the edges is turning black.”
Lou pulled the rag back and studied the area he was referring to. “What should we do?”
“Cover your ears, young fella,” Bostic said to Gordy.
Gordy gave him a puzzled look. “Why?”
“Because you don’t want to hear what I’m going to say.”
Gordy lifted his hands and covered his ears.
“Best thing is to cut away the dead skin,” Bostic said.
“What?!” Gordy said sitting up.
“It’s either that or cut the leg off,” Bostic said.
“Oh, man,” Gordy said lying back down with his hands over his face. “Why does this crap always happen to me?”
April skulked farther and farther away from them, her face full of guilt and shame.
Wes wrapped his arm around me and pulled me in close so no one would overhear what he was about to say. “Talk to her.”
I attempted to pull away, but his grip was too tight. “I’m not very good at that kind of thing. You do it.”
“People don’t look to me for things like that.”
“What makes you think they look to me for that sort of thing?”
He squeezed tighter. “Damn it, Oz. You’re the leader. Get it? We follow you. We count on you. April needs you. Understand?” With that, he released me.
I stepped back and shifted my gaze from him to Gordy to April. I ran a thousand reasons through my head why I shouldn’t talk to April, but I couldn’t shake the one reason why I should. It was the right thing to do.
When she turned her back and faced a wood-slotted window at the opposite end of the room, I gave in and approached her. I could tell by her body language that she could hear me coming. Without turning, she said, “I don’t belong here.”
“None of us do,” I said, staring at the back of her head.
“No, not here in this world. Here, with you and the others. You would be better off with
out me.”
“What happened to Gordy wasn’t your fault.”
“Yes it was.”
“No it wasn’t. It was part of the story. That’s the way things work here. The best I can figure, we don’t have any control over what happens.”
She gave my point some thought. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
“No it doesn’t, but that’s the way it is. We are characters in a story. That’s it.”
“Characters?”
“Yes.”
“Are you saying I’m not real?”
“No, you are real.” I stopped to gather my thoughts, to try to explain it to her in a way she’d understand. “We are all real... most of us are, anyway. We came from outside the story. The Storytellers put us here. They created this world we’re trapped in. They’ve written and drawn every move we’ve made.”
She turned to me. “Every move?”
“Exactly.”
She put her hands on my face.
“What are you doing?”
Without another word she leaned in and kissed me. A deep, lingering kiss on the lips. I struggled at first, but the longer it lasted the less I objected. Eventually she slowly pulled back.
“Did I do that or was that written by the Storytellers?”
I stared at her in shock for several seconds before giving her a one-word answer. “Storytellers.”
“You sure about that?”
I nodded.
“Then me trying to eat Gordy, that was the Storytellers, too?”
“Yes.”
She let go of my face. “Wow. That makes me feel...” She wiped a tear away from her face. “That’s such a relief. It’s not my fault?”
“No, it’s not.”
She hugged me and then quickly released me.
I turned to the stares of everyone else in the room. “What?”
Everyone but Lou looked away quickly. She held me in a disapproving stare for a second or two before continuing her efforts to help Gordy.
Wes sauntered over shaking his head and met me in the center of the room. “I said talk to her, boy. Didn’t say nothing about kissing her.”
“She kissed me,” I said in protest.
“Maybe,” he said, “but you didn’t put up much of a fight.”
I attempted to explain myself without knowing what to say. Every time I got to the end of a sentence I couldn’t think of the final word. After the third or fourth attempt, I gave up and walked away.
Four
“The boy will be down for a while,” Bostic said sitting down next to me on a homemade bar stool in the kitchen of the treehouse. The kitchen was an open space with an island in the middle that had a stove top and sink. It looked modern, but the stove was wood burning, and the faucet was a small pump that brought in water from a tank and filtration system on the roof of the house. “It’ll be touch and go for the next twelve hours or so. Me and the girl treated as much of the infected area as we could.”
The girl, Lou, had moved to the other side of the room. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me except shoot me the occasional evil eye.
“He’ll make it,” I said.
Bostic sat up straight on the stool, his eyes scanning my face. “Can’t figure you out.”
“There’s nothing to figure.”
“No, there is. You’re a kid, but you ain’t. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I’m not trying to.”
“You’re like this old man trapped in a young man’s body.”
My mind flooded with images of the facility. It took everything I had to let them pass without screaming my head off. “I’m just a kid. Seen things I shouldn’t have. Done things I shouldn’t have. But I’m still just a kid.”
He folded his arms and leaned back, stretching a kink out of his neck. “Maybe. Kind of think there’s more to it, but in the end, it don’t matter, does it?”
“No. It doesn’t.”
“You know what does matter?”
I shook my head.
“That you not lead these people down a primrose path to nowhere.”
I rolled my eyes and let out a growl. “Are you going to tell me how to lead, too? Ever since this whole thing started everyone’s chimed in whenever they can about how I should lead. I didn’t ask to lead anyone or anything. You think I want this? You’re nuts! You ever consider that I’m not really leading anyone at all? You ever think that maybe everyone’s just following me because they’re afraid to step up and be a leader themselves? You ever think of that?”
“You got me wrong, kid,” Bostic said. “I ain’t here to tell you how to lead. I’m here to tell you how not to lead. You got these people thinking that everything is going to be just fine and dandy if you all keep your heads down and keep moving forward. You got to settle their minds on the fact that things ain’t good.”
“You want me to take away their hope?”
“Ain’t saying that. I’m saying you need to give them something else to hope for.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because when I told you that it was going to be touch and go for your friend Gordy, all you said is that he’ll make it without considering the possibility he won’t.”
“So?”
“So, I’m telling you flat out that there’s more of a chance he won’t make it than he will. You need to get off your hero ass and clear your head of all the rah-rah-everything-will-be-all-right crap and prepare the others for the real possibility that he’ll check out sometime in the night.”
I peered past him and watched Gordy sleep on his cot. His chest was rising and falling with each breath and his body twitched every once in awhile.
“The worst thing you can do is let him pass without giving them a chance to get right with it first.”
“You want me to give up on Gordy, my best friend?”
“I want you to do the right thing. Even if it’s the last thing you want to do.”
I clenched my fists and ran through what he said in my mind. I was tired of doing the right thing. The right thing was way harder than doing nothing at all. Nothing was good. If I did nothing, what happens, happens. No one could get mad at me for that or hate me for telling them that their friend was going to die. “You don’t understand.” My voice cracked. I was about to lose it. “Gordy and me grew up together. I don’t know him because of this world. I know him because we went to school together. Always have, ever since we were old enough to go to school. If he dies, I won’t have anything that keeps me from forgetting...” I couldn’t say another word, not without blubbering like a baby.
Bostic put his hand on my shoulder. “Forgetting is the best thing you can do.”
I bowed my head and avoided eye contact with him.
He patted me on the back and stood. “I’ll throw together some grub. Won’t be fancy, but it will be stuff to put in your belly.”
I twisted in my stool and looked at Lou. What was the sense in remembering the way things used to be? I wasn’t going back. I couldn’t. I’d lose Lou. I wasn’t going to let that happen.
I stood and slowly made my way to her. “You got a minute?”
She shrugged and turned away. “Maybe April does.”
“That wasn’t what you think it was.”
“I don’t think it was anything because I don’t think about it.”
“She kissed me.”
“You looked like you were enjoying it.”
“I was being polite.”
She groaned.
“Look, I’m not really interested in talking about that. I want to talk about Gordy.”
She folded her arms in front of her chest. “What about him?”
I cleared my throat and searched for a dozen different ways to say he’s dying, but nothing sounded right. “Bostic says he’s sick.”
“You need Bostic to tell you that?”
“Lou, listen. He says he’s really sick. Sick, sick.”
She tilted her head and furrowed her
brow. “He’s sick. That’s it. He’s going to get better.”
“How do you know?”
She sneered. “I just know.”
“Bostic says different.”
“Bostic’s a stranger. He doesn’t know Gordy. He doesn’t know what he’s capable of.”
I squatted down next to her. “We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that he won’t get better.”
“Shut up,” she said loud enough to attract attention from the others lounging on the other side of the kitchen. “Don’t say that.”
“Lou...”
“No, we cannot lose someone else. We’ve lost too many. We lost Pepper. We lost Archie and Billy. We lost...” she covered her mouth with her hand and squeaked out, “Valerie,” before she broke down in tears.
I attempted to pull her in for a hug but she shoved me back, almost knocking me to the floor.
“You’re trying to quit.”
I shook my head. “I don’t know what that means.”
“You’ve given up.”
“He’s dying...”
“No,” she said with a bark. “I’m not talking about Gordy. You’ve given up on everything. You’ve changed.”
I almost laughed. “Who hasn’t changed?”
“I haven’t!” She screamed so loud it made my ears ring.
The others looked more frightened than I had ever seen them, and I had seen them in some pretty scary situations.
Wes approached. “You two got a real lively conversation going on here.”
I stood. “Yeah, well, it’s just a misunderstanding.”
“Tell Wes what you told me,” Lou said.
“I don’t think so,” I said walking away.
I heard Lou say, “He thinks Gordy’s going to die.”
I shot Bostic an angry look as I passed through the kitchen. He smiled back brightly as if he had won some great prize.
I stopped and stood in the doorway leading out to the open air deck. The night was brisk. I was burning up from the argument with Lou so the passing breeze felt good. It occurred to me that I was unnaturally hot after that exchange. The Délon in me was clearly still trying to work its way to the surface.
I stuck my head out and looked up into the forest canopy for any signs of the sadistic monkey creature that had attacked us on the other platform. It was nowhere to be seen. But the way it moved through the trees, I was fairly certain it could come from out of nowhere to pick up where it had left off.
