by Abe Moss
They knew something she didn’t, she thought.
It was beginning to occur to her, what that was. She continued on for a time, the realization remaining willfully out of reach. Before much longer, a dozen or so steps farther, she decided to finally set the baby down, having had enough elbowing the walls as she carried it in her arms. Its feeble bawling went uninterrupted as she set it delicately on the ground. She moved on without it, its cries falling behind ever so steadily.
“Come on,” she whispered, hands touching the walls, the dark in between. “Please…”
She moved forward, bumping side to side. With her palms flat before her, she touched cold stone. She turned, felt only more of it. She turned both ways, passing her hands across it, meeting in the middle.
“No, please, no…”
A dead end.
The baby’s cries persisted, though much quieter now. Quiet with distance. Were there multiple tunnels, she wondered? She’d gone the wrong way. Missed a turn somewhere. Now she was here, stuck. If she’d felt like crying earlier, well…
She pressed herself to the stone in front of her, slid her hands out, confirming there was nothing. Nothing at all. She passed her hands up the wall, toward the tunnel’s ceiling. Then she saw it.
Saw it?
Light.
She gasped with a lungful of terrified, uncertain hope.
She reached her hands above her head and felt wood. Wooden slats. Light shining through. A trapdoor. The exit. She pushed and there was no give. Frantic, eyes peeled in the dark, she patted her hands all around its frame, searching for a latch. Only wood. Traces of moonlight shining through. She pushed again, harder, that newfound hope draining out of her so easily. It wouldn’t budge.
“All right…” she muttered. “Come on, now… Come on…”
She paused. Noises from the tunnel. She cocked her head to listen, holding her breath once more. Voices. Over the distant sounds of the baby’s endless cries, she heard them. Raspy and choked. Cooing. The sounds of repulsive, monstrous creatures attempting to comfort a crying infant. They had come. They’d reached the baby.
She had little time.
“Come on, you fucker…”
She beat upon the underside of the trap door and couldn’t believe how little give there was. It was solid. It was locked. And there didn’t seem to be anything holding it there. No tangible lock she could feel…
—the way out—
There were many things assailing her mind in that moment, but one memory in particular grabbed her. His voice. Harvey’s voice.
—the way out—
—say it—
She froze momentarily, remembering. Thinking. It felt silly saying it, which felt all the sillier, given the current situation. She’d do anything to get out of this. And right now, she had quite literally nothing…
“Okay…” Her eyes swam back and forth in the dark, trying to remember just what it was he’d said. “Pale Mother’s heart… um… show me the way.”
Nothing happened.
The witches’ voices had quieted behind her. She wasn’t sure what that meant. Had they gone? Were they creeping up on her undetected?
“Pale Mother’s heart… open the way.”
She pushed against the door, punched it with both her fists. She winced, cradled her bloodied knuckles against herself. She took a deep breath.
“Pale Mother’s heart…” She couldn’t remember the rest. “Pale Mother’s heart…”
“Reveal your secrets,” came a voice in the dark.
She flinched against the wall. She eyed the wall opposite her, where she’d heard the sound. The voice. His voice. Not a thought, not a memory. Not in her head. Him. Absentmindedly, she touched her ear, where she’d felt someone’s breath…
She was both confused and wasting time.
Doing her best to forget it, she stood on tiptoe, lifted her face to the moonlight seeping through the wooden door.
“Pale Mother’s heart, reveal your secrets.”
There was a glimmer. Just barely. It passed over her eyes, like a shimmer of light upon gentle water, tracing the door above her head. She pushed against the trapdoor a final time and, to her quickening heart, it lifted open with the ease of cardboard. Beyond it, the starry night sky appeared to her. A cool desert breeze passed overhead, refreshing upon her face. She grabbed the ledge of the trapdoor above her head, setting the knife just there on the dirt outside. Then, pressing her feet against the wall of the cave, she hoisted herself up. For a moment she feared she didn’t have the strength. Her head was out, her shoulders too, arms on the dirt, feet kicking the cave wall down below as she climbed. Through strained, pinched eyes, she glimpsed the barren, moonlit desert before her, hopelessly dead.
And free.
She scrambled out. She picked up the knife as she stood. She kicked the trapdoor shut. Then she paused, brain temporarily lost. Scattered. She turned in a circle. She faced the moon, hanging low in the sky, and couldn’t decide where it might have moved from since last she saw it. But that didn’t make any difference whatsoever, did it?
With nowhere else to run, she just ran. Barefoot, marked by blood and bruises, she ran into the desert abyss, rambling into the pale, indifferent night.
✽ ✽ ✽
She ran for what felt like hours but was probably closer to forty-five minutes. She went until her lungs couldn’t any more. Until her feet couldn’t take anymore. She needed rest, to lie down. A glass of water. But she couldn’t have any of those things, so she settled for a slower pace instead. Only for a while.
Morning didn’t seem within reach anytime soon. No hint of sunlight over the black horizon. Only the moon, watching like a giant eye in the sky.
Periodically she waited and listened, scanned the desert in search of anything. Anyone. Them. They hadn’t just let her go, she thought. They would come for her. They were taking their time, was all. No hurry…
Because where could she really go? This land was their land. They probably knew it as well as she knew the streets of her childhood suburb. Once they were situated again, with their baby back in its basket, they would come. They’d descend upon her from the black sky, and even with her voice intact, there wasn’t anyone to hear her screams out here.
Only the coyotes…
✽ ✽ ✽
Another half-hour of walking and she was sure the sun must be coming up soon. Any minute now she’d see it, blooming pale at first over the distant hills. Not that it would help her in her escape. It wouldn’t quite give her direction. She had no idea where in this sprawling wasteland she was—a tiny, insignificant speck in its dry seabed.
She licked her cracked lips, her tongue hardly different than sandpaper against them.
Once the sun did rise, that problem would only worsen.
✽ ✽ ✽
—Pale Mother’s heart—
She tried to pick up the pace a couple times but found she hadn’t the endurance for it. She willed herself to hurry, but her feet didn’t get the message. She became more tired, even walking. Dragging her feet. It was painful to drag them, too. So many cuts and scrapes. Dirt had clotted many of them.
—reveal your secrets—
She watched the moon, eyes drawn to it like a lighthouse’s beacon as she marched lazily against it. Bright and pasty white. Pretty and comforting—ugly and dangerous, too. All at the same time. How it was dangerous, she couldn’t place. But it was. It wasn’t as gentle as most thought.
It offered peace and cruelty in equal measure.
✽ ✽ ✽
She sensed the attack just before it happened. Not so much a premonition or an instinct, but rather an interruption to the otherwise mundane sounds of the wild desert around her that she was beginning to be accustomed.
Panting.
She heard it just as it was almost too late. Coming up behind her. A low growl.
Her fingers tightened around the knife as she turned toward it.. She glimpsed it from the corner of her eye, time
slowing to a slog, a black shape moving toward her. Four paws on the ground. A snarl. The four paws left the ground and the creature was airborne. Fangs widening apart, dog’s breath coming to meet her face-to-face.
Maria barely uttered a scream as the wolf collided against her with its full weight. She fell back hard against the earth, rocked her head against the dirt. The knife escaped her hand. It skipped away, out of reach.
The wolf’s teeth glinted in the moonlight.
It bore down upon her, jaws snapping. She pressed against it with both her hands, holding it off herself as best she could. Its death-eating breath clouded into her own screaming mouth, into her lungs. She grunted, dug her hands into the matted fur around its neck as it gnashed its teeth toward hers, her quivering arms buckling between them. She couldn’t hold it much longer…
She pushed its face away from her own, redirecting its head with her arm beneath its chin. The wolf reared back. In another instant, that arm was in its mouth. Maria let loose a bloodcurdling scream. Its teeth pierced her, set into her flesh in a flurry of quick chomps. With her arm bit tightly, the wolf sidestepped off her body, jerking its head back and forth as it went, thrashing her arm about as if it were a rope to play with. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew it wasn’t what you were meant to do, but she did it anyway. In a panic, she pulled away from it. Her flesh tore. The wolf bit down harder. She pulled and pulled, legs kicking, scooting away from the wolf as it continued trying to drag her. She sobbed, watched the meat of her arm peel away from the bone underneath. A good chunk of it. Her blood dripped, soaked into the dirt. She tugged her arm once more and, with an audibly wet noise, the wolf ripped the flesh clean away, held it dangling in its beastly, grinning jaws.
Gasping, Maria let it have her flesh. That was fine. She turned over, crawled across the hard dirt in the direction of the knife, catching glimpses of her mutilated arm beneath her, tattered and gone. The knife lay a few paces away. Clambering on all fours, she reached for it just as the wolf was on her again. It bit into her calf, pulled her leg out from under her. She fell flat on her stomach. She reached, fingers scraping, wriggling toward the knife. It was there… just there out of reach.
She closed her fist around it as the wolf gave another tug on her leg, drawing blood through the cheap fabric of her pajama bottoms. It crawled over her, paws on her back. It happened so quickly. Its teeth chewed into her shoulder and flipped her over like she was nothing. The starry sky turned over her in a blur and she saw its animal eyes hovering, hungry and intent on a single purpose.
Without further warning, it found her throat.
Oh, god, it’s done…
She heard it again. That wet tearing. She felt the warmth down both sides of her neck, around the back, pouring in streams. She was opened. Quick as that.
Though her mind now was entirely blank, lost in an overwhelming rush of shock and… calm… she did what she could. With the knife in her hand, blade pointed down, she lifted it to the Pale Mother’s heart watching over them from the heartless sky, and stuck it into the wolf’s eye.
With a horrible yelp, the wolf danced away. Maria lay a second longer, heard its whimpering. The life was quite literally running out of her, she felt. Slowly, she sat up, rising like a vampire out of a coffin, the knife still clutched, the wolf’s eye dripping down its hilt over her hand like soup. She looked toward the wolf, its nose to the ground, rubbing its paw down its face, down its gory eye socket.
She climbed to her feet.
The wolf flinched as it noticed her. She stepped toward it, and it retreated several steps farther away, then resumed its hopeless pawing. Maria, thinking of nothing other than blood, and wanting more of it, advanced on the wolf without pause. She turned the knife in her slick palm. The warmth from her throat trickled down her chest. One step, two steps, three steps. The wolf looked up from its suffering and saw her coming again. Maria grunted, felt a burning flash of pain along her opened throat as she did. The wolf retreated again. It scampered toward a scattering of sagebrush not far off. This time, tail between its legs, it kept going, vanishing out of sight.
Maria stood for a time. She stared off in the direction where the wolf fled, mouth hanging open dully, her grip never easing on the knife. Immobile as a statue, her eyes wandered freely in her skull, outlining the hills in the distance, the sky above them. A zombie. That was what she felt like. Dead, but standing. Somehow. After a moment of thoughtlessness, she turned around in a slow circle, the gentle sound of her toes brushing the dirt, and faced the direction she’d been headed all along.
There it was.
It was arriving at last. Barely noticeable, but there. Soft and blooming over the far-off hills.
The light of dawn.
✽ ✽ ✽
She shuffled toward the rising sun for twenty or so minutes. Nothing but the sounds of her shuffling feet and her wheezing breath. The warm trickle of blood from her throat had slowed some. She had slowed some. She was tired. Exhausted. She found it easy to think nothing as she pushed onward, feet rough and scraping. Tedious. She really was a zombie, lost and wandering the desert without purpose. In the empty vacuum of her mind, it occurred to her she was dying, that she would be dead in a matter of minutes, and although that didn’t stop her from heading farther toward the brightening daylight before her, she thought the idea of dying now wasn’t so bad.
Better this way, she thought. Here. With fresh air and life surrounding her, however sparse it was. Better this way than in the possession of those devils in the ground, with their foul spawn wailing in her ears.
✽ ✽ ✽
And yet, death wouldn’t claim her. Each step she took, she grew doubtful. She looked about herself, at the weeds and harsh earth, and wondered if she really saw any of it. Perhaps she was still on the ground back there, the wolf chewing at her insides as she breathed her final breaths, hallucinating a fantasy. However bleak a fantasy this was…
And then she spotted something. As she steadily climbed a small hill, reaching its crest, peering into the distant valley, there was movement. Another animal, moving quickly across the landscape.
Not an animal.
It was a car. A road.
Oddly, at the sight of potential rescue, Maria felt no change inside her. No excitement, no hope, no urgency. She simply saw it and, supposing this was still a chance for her, continued toward it.
The first vehicle she missed, of course. There wasn’t another for a long while. Enough time passed that she wondered if she hadn’t imagined it, but eventually she reached the road, paved and well-traveled. She decided to follow it for a time, until she might spot another.
The morning grew brighter overhead. The sun peaked over the horizon, and its warmth felt good on her face. On her wounds. She looked toward it, not risen enough to blind her yet, and blinked wearily. When she looked to the road again, it was changing. The lines painted down its center seemed to fade, and the black asphalt seemed to darken. Meanwhile, the desert on either side grew brighter, washing out her view of the road. The sky throbbed. She stumbled a bit. She paused. The earth was turning underneath her, and she felt it difficult to keep up. She swayed, and the desert swayed. Her head grew fuzzier than normal. She peered into the distance, where now everything was fading, growing dimmer in her narrowing tunnel of vision.
The sound of tires against the road. She flinched as a vehicle passed by. She stumbled away from it, into the gutter, losing her footing. Briefly, before she fell crashing down to the ground, she saw the vehicle pulling over up ahead, coming to a stop.
Then the turning earth grew still and, falling down, she caught up with it at last.
PART TWO
ONE YEAR LATER
CHAPTER SEVEN
THINGS CHANGE
Face aglow in the bluish light of her laptop screen, Maria listened idly to the voices of three other young women laughing and whispering in the bathroom down the hall.
Someone—one of the three women—shrieked with laught
er. A sharp, ear-piercing sound. Peeking over her laptop, Maria met the half-lidded, equally unamused gaze of her friend, Paula, sitting across the dark room on the bed. The looks on both their illuminated faces said more than words ever could.
“You both know it’s a Friday night, right?” blurted one of the three women, suddenly appearing in Paula’s bedroom doorway. Maria jolted, her laptop sliding askew on her lap. The young woman—Jennifer was her name—smiled at them both expectantly.
“Was that you I just heard?” Paula asked. “I thought maybe you guys were drowning a cat or something…”
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “You two should come to Devin’s party with us.”
She looked eagerly between them, eyes lingering on Maria who sat in the far corner of the room at Paula’s desk. Maria thought that if she said nothing, or perhaps if she didn’t even look up from her keyboard, Jennifer would forget she was there.
“Are you studying, or what?” Jennifer asked. She looked over the dark room, at Paula’s things all over the floor. “Why don’t you turn on a lamp?”
“I was hoping if I left the lights off, you would think I wasn’t here,” Paula said, grinning.
“Okay… rude,” Jennifer said playfully. “I take it back, not invited.”
Another of the three girls appeared in the doorway, peeking around Jennifer’s shoulder. Yvonne was her name, Maria remembered.
“You guys aren’t coming?” she asked.
“They’ve got more important stuff going on,” Jennifer said. “I guess, at least.”
“Like what?” Yvonne leaned into the bedroom to get a better look at Maria in the far corner. She must have looked rather odd, Maria knew, with her laptop’s light revealing her like a ghost in the dark. “Maria, you should totally come!”
“No,” Jennifer said. “They’re waiting for us to leave so they can finally be alone together.”
Paula cracked up, knowing what was coming. “Okay, don’t even start…”
“Is that right?” Yvonne said. “I had no idea. You know you don’t have to hide that anymore, right? It’s totally cool these days. I mean… not even cool, just like… whatever. You could totally come to Devin’s party and just, like… lez out together in his living room and nobody would—”
