by A M Nixon
Mary looked out the door of the library, making sure the Major or his lookouts weren’t around. She went into her barracks and out the back door, and over to the fence she would exit through. She knew she had a few minutes to start the fire and get under the fence before anyone could see her leave. She loosened up a few of the staples holding the fencing to the post. She pulled the wire fence out and folded it over itself. Now she had a nice big hole to climb under that should fit her and her backpack without getting hung up. She walked back through the barracks, the courtyard and into the library. She wasn’t sure if a lookout watched her go in, so she didn’t turn on the light. She stood near the window looking out to see if any of the Major’s crew were lurking outside. After ten minutes the Major and a few men were headed toward the big house. She knew a lookout was probably posted somewhere in the camp, so she waited again, checking for any movement. If they were out there, they were hiding themselves cleaver enough to fool her. It was now or never.
Mary opened the hatch to the shed, and without stepping inside she struck a match and lit the piece of string she had soaked in the alcohol. It would give her a few minutes to get out of the shed before it ignited the lighter fluid and oil. Leaving the library, looking in every direction for a lookout or two, she walked as if she were returning to her barracks. Not wanting to get held up by questions from Erika or Debbie; she walked around the side where the light post didn’t shine and went straight for the fence and to the hole she had made. She knew she wouldn’t be out of danger until she was far enough away to see the smoke from the shed over the trees. Once she was on the other side of the fence, she turned to look in all directions making sure she hadn’t been seen. With no one around she walked backwards until she hit the first tree at the entrance to the woods and turned and ran for her life. Mary ran for a good five minutes when all of the sudden there was commotion from the camp, people were shouting fire.
Chapter Eight
Death
Mary wound up her flashlight for juice. At this point, she knew she was far enough away from the camp that no one would be able to see the light. The night temperature had to be in the 20s, but she was still warm from the run. She knew she would have to keep moving until it was nearly dawn, to make sure she was far enough away.
She had laid Hope’s body out on the shed floor and said prayers over it before she went to dinner. It was a good thing too, if she had waited in the shed, the Major may have caught her. He would have Hope’s body and no reason to cooperate with her. He would have been free to kill her. She hoped the Major’s crew would think it was her own body in the shed, and she moved the drum somewhere else. She had hidden it behind some crates in the shed’s corner, but once they burned, the only thing left standing would be the damn drum. She hadn’t thought the plan all the way through. Once they looked in the drum and didn’t see a body, they would know Hope was the burned body and Mary was still alive. The question for Mary was, would they come looking for her? Would they waste their time? She hoped they would let the woods do their dirty work for them.
Mary knew she was far enough away the Major wouldn’t trouble himself to look for her. She found a place to camp and to figure out exactly where she was. She had been walking for hours and assumed it was south-east, but she couldn’t find a compass at the camp so she couldn’t be sure. She was now deep in the woods and realized how the locals could imagine creatures, and otherworldly beings in it. It was so quiet, even the birds were scarce. She could feel eyes on her, watching her every move. She came up with scenarios to keep fear from taking hold. She imagined she was the scariest creature in the woods. No matter what creature confronted her, they should be the ones to run in terror. “Come on, give it your best shot,” she shouted; to the eyes, to the imaginary beings lurking in the woods; at nothing, at the trees. The trees were old; she estimated hundreds of years old, and Mary was sure if they could talk, they would fill a history book with all they had witnessed. It was possible they were around when the union army troops marched through or camped under them. West Virginia was considered the south and had the history to back it up. The trees were beautifully untouched by the meteorites as if the entity that sent them knew how precious they were.
She gathered sticks to make a shelter. She learned in her youth group as a kid how to make one. She found an area with two trees far enough apart to tie her string to. She used the string to hold the top of the sticks, creating a teepee of sorts, only there would be an opening at either end. It would keep the snow off but was useless for the cold. Once she had her sleeping bag and blankets inside, she made a fire. Reaching into her backpack, she took out the sandwiches she’d made at the mess hall. She ate one and wrapped the other to keep animals from smelling it. She had several rolls, and three bottles of water. She would need to ration if she were going to make it to Maryland. She had no idea how long it would take to walk the 400 miles. She had to try; she came this far and there was no turning back.
Running low on water, She looked for a stream to fill one of the empty water bottles. As she walked, she knew something lurked—out there. The hair on the back of her neck raised, and she sensed an energy. She looked around, hoping the local girls at the camp were wrong about Bigfoot. She didn’t have the energy to run. Trying to stay positive and not dwell on what may or may not be in the woods behind her, she found a stream. It was at least six foot wide and had a foot of water in it. She took a chance the water was fresh and filled the empty bottle. It wasn’t too far from her camp and considered making her teepee twig shelter closer to it but was too tired to do anything more. She sat at the edge of the stream, thinking about Hope. She closed her eyes and tried to channel her spirit. She knew if Hope could, she would come through and speak to her. Mary closed her eyes and cleared her mind. She could feel a presence. It flew around her like a soft breeze. She said out loud, “Hope, if that’s you, give me a sign and show me what happened or what you want me to know. I’m scared out here and thinking I made a huge mistake.” She added, “And if there’s a Bigfoot out here, can you keep him away from me?” She was joking but serious too.
A whisper said, “I did.”
Was that Hope? Was it to answer the Bigfoot question? She pulled the pendulum from her pocket and asked her guardian angel, “Was Hope here?” No, the pendulum answered.
“Was that you,” Mary asked referring to her guardian angel.
Yes, the pendulum answered.
She could relax knowing she wasn’t alone. She figured Hope was somewhere she couldn’t be located. Mary walked back to her campsite and reached in her backpack for the book she picked up on the way out of the library. She went to read what should have been,” The History of West Virginia,” but she accidentally grabbed a Roget’s Thesaurus instead. She played the divination game with it. She flipped the pages and stopped it when she sensed where to stop. It landed on the heading, “Future.” The definition: aftertime, offing, posterity, morrow, tomorrow, by and by, millennium, doomsday, day of judgement, crack of doom, hereafter, future state, afterlife, life to come, destiny. Now all She had to do was figure out which of those words pertained to her.
Mary had only gotten a few hours of sleep here and there. She was hungry but knew she had to conserve food. An hour later, she answered the hunger pains and ate the last sandwich. She only had one cookie left over from the food she had stored before it was raided. She was angry at Erika and Debbie for eating her stash, and that she wasn’t able to get enough food to last a few days, let alone a week. Not that it should take a week to walk 400 miles. She figured she would walk the woods and with the map, try to get to a road and maybe a military truck would be out driving and give her a ride part of the way. Or maybe she would be walking and find a house she could sleep in when it was too cold. Reality was setting in. She hadn’t planned on how hungry she would be and her inability to go without eating when the hunger pains arrived. She had three dinner rolls and two bottles of water. People have survived for days on less. After all she had bee
n through, she wasn’t able to save Hope, or the women at the camp. Her old friend now scratching at the door again.
As she ate one of the rolls, she wished her guardian angel would speak to her. She only heard her voice once, and it was when a friend was dying at her feet. It was an emergency, so she broke through the invisible barrier to speak to her. The voice was female, so she always refers to her guardian angel as a she. She told Mary to, “go be with him,” over and over but nothing more since. That was 15 years ago. She’d get the occasional warnings, intuitively, as if it were her own voice in her head, but nothing else unless she used her pendulum, or divination cards. She looked up to the sky, “Why can’t you speak now, after everything, this would be the time to speak to me,” No reply. She knew you can’t order the spirit world around. They would turn on a light or make a lamp flicker. If that wasn’t proof enough, you were out of luck. Mary could see their logic and had no idea how much energy was used to make lights flicker. She had channeled a spirit once before and it gave the family some resolution, but her ability wasn’t strong enough, hence her use of the pendulum. It kept her connected until she could remove whatever the block was. She had read blocks were often the spirit world’s doing, not her own. They would wait until she was ready and could handle it. She would have to be patient.
Mary went in search of firewood; it was getting darker and her wind-up flashlight’s light wasn’t as bright as she needed. She tripped over a log and twisted her ankle and did something to her wrist when she landed. She hobbled back to her camp, and a feeling of defeat washed over her. If her ankle was as bad as she assumed, she won’t be walking anywhere, not for two days at least. She had two rolls left, and her treasured cookie. She made one last plea to the universe to help her. She held up her arms and as loud as she could said,” Give me a sign, oh great ones of the universe.” Embarrassed using words that could have been in some fantasy movie. She continued, since she was alone and there was no one to be embarrassed in front of. “Show me what your plan for me is, or give me a sign, so I’ll know to carry on. Amen.”
She lay in the shelter, her wrist and ankle throbbing with each heartbeat. The temperature fell to around 10 degrees and her fingertips were going numb. She came all this way to die because of a sprained ankle.
Mary believed she was supposed to die back at the motel and was living on borrowed time. She would give in to the friend and let him in. She was at a crevasse; one she couldn’t cross. She couldn’t go back to the camp; the Major would most assuredly kill her. She didn’t have Hope to commiserate with. It had been a few hours since she asked for a sign and hadn’t received one. What if her babies were dead? She would want to be with them in the afterlife. She cried for them. She cried for Dickie; she didn’t want to, his betrayal still fresh. Now she would have to welcome death and prayed that it would be quick. Knowing the entity up in the cosmos is all love and forgiveness, maybe they would forgive her for giving up without a fight. The numbness spread to her feet and hands, and the shivers were starting to pass. She should get up and move to warm herself, but she didn’t have the energy to pull the blankets around her, let alone crawl out of the shelter. She couldn’t move, she had waited too long to seek a remedy. The hypothermia set in. She closed her eyes and fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter Nine
The High Priestess
The next morning, there was a rustling sound in the woods behind her. Something was coming straight for her shelter. She reached for the knife in her pocket and had it ready. There was panting and sniffing, and she could see greyish brown fur through the twigs of the shelter. She assumed it was a wolf or a stray dog until she glimpsed his partially skeletonized face.
She wiggled out of her shelter, her wrist and ankle were fine. Like it never happened. It was a gorgeous sunny day, and the weather had turned from winter to spring, overnight. She believed she was going to die of hypothermia, but the weather must have warmed up during the night. She had no idea how her wrist and ankle no longer bothered her. Perhaps the cold helped keep the inflammation down, she mused.
She faced the hound and reached in her backpack for one of the rolls. He took it gratefully, and gently from her. She reached out to pet his matted fur, and he leaned his good side into her hand. One side of his muzzle had exposed bone. It was as if he had been close enough to the aftermath of one meteorite, to get a blast of heated air and it burned part of his face. The scar tissue tightened over his skull bone and pulled skin away from his teeth. Exposing his large canine’s and causing him to look more ferocious than he was. Mary, missing her dog’s, wanted to love this poor creature, skeletonized, with matted fur; he was a survivor. She admired him for the pain he must have suffered, and how he would forever be treated as a monster by anyone who sees him. She wouldn’t be that person. She threw him her coveted chocolate chip cookie. He took the cookie and swallowed it whole.
She had to name him. Trying to think of something clever, such as the one she came up with for Izzy. Since he ate the cookie so fast, she recalled a commercial about cookies, starring Famous Amos. She asked him, “How about Famous?” He barked, and she decided that would be his name. Appreciating Famous might be named so because she was craving chocolate chip cookies and he ate the last one. If she made it back to the cottage, he was coming to live with her. After She shared her food with him, he laid down beside her. She sensed he was an answer to her prayer.
She needed to keep moving and hoped Famous would stay with her. She placed her bedding in the backpack and headed off toward what could be south-east. Using the moss only grows on the northside trick and was aware the trick doesn’t always hold true in dense forests, was all she had to go by. She also knew if you used a magnetized needle on a leaf in still water, it might work, but she had none of those items. She watched the clouds, the highest one’s travel west to east, and she also had the sun. She had only read of these suggestions, never putting them into action. Famous seemed aware she was trying to find the right direction and barked at her, then ran ahead. When she didn’t follow, he ran back to her, barked again, and ran ahead. She followed him, deciding to take a chance he might lead her to food and water.
They had been walking for a few hours when she decided to take a break. She sat on a log and split the last roll between the two of them. Famous swallowed his piece whole and looked to her for more.
“Sorry buddy, I’m broke.” Mary said, feeling angry at Erika and Debbie all over again, and realized it was ultimately her fault for wanting to leave so fast. Famous appeared to be as attached to her as she was to him. She would catch him staring at her, assuming he might be waiting for her to say something, so she didn’t think anything of it. She stood up, needing to move forward before the sun went down. Famous picked up the lead again. He seemed to know where he was going. Her curiosity kept her following him even though she knew he wasn’t going south-east.
Famous stopped and sniffed at an object along the path. Mary approached the object cautiously. It was a large boulder with several long crystals projecting out of it. With her love of crystals and knowing how much one of those crystals would have cost before the meteorites hit, she reached to touch one to check if it was loose. Immediately famous jumped up and blocked her hand from touching the crystal. He acted as if he were saving her life. The crystals could be fall out from a meteor or the white lights and may have landed there during the event. Perhaps it was radioactive and Famous was protecting her from it. They moved on from the crystal boulder and down what looked like a path. Someone or something traveled this path multiple times to create it. Maybe it led to an animal’s cave or to a clearing? Another stream?
Famous was moving swiftly down the path, and Mary could barely keep up. He stopped at a small bathtub sized hole. The water swirled as if it were a whirlpool. She waited while Famous drank some to make sure it was safe. When she attempted to reach into the water, he didn’t bark or try to stop her. She drank what was left in one of the water bottles and filled it up. It looked fresh,
but she didn’t sip it yet. She decided she would wait until she was desperate and out of the last bottle of known water before she would drink it. Famous drank from the small swirling pool and he seemed fine. They walked a little further, when she could make out an outline of a small building, covered in vines. The path they were on led elsewhere, and Famous kept up his pace, ignoring the path that led to the vine structure. Mary recognized it from somewhere, then remembered the book her uncle had given her. Could it be the vine castle—the one Priestess Isadore lived in?
While Mary wanted to stay and explore what could be the Zropu from the book, Famous had already ran up ahead. She was lost and had no sense of direction. She decided her best bet was to follow him since he acted as if he knew where he was going. As they traveled farther into the woods, they were startled by a loud thumping, like two tree limbs smacking together. Famous ran off the path and into the woods in the direction of the noise. The leaves and small branches started to raise and swirl like a dust devil forming. As Famous approached it, all the leaves and twigs dropped to the ground as if nothing happened. Mary didn’t know what to think of it. It didn’t look like the dark mass she’d seen at the camp. Whatever it was disappeared, and she was thankful he was with her. Continuing their journey, with Famous charging ahead as if a big plate of food were waiting for him at the other end, they came upon something that frightened and excited her.
