Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

His eyes were small and very dark. His smile was permanent. And he smelled of the forest: strong, acrid, and sweet.

“Chance,” he said. “Is that your name?”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“I call myself Juan Thrombone, but don’t ask me why. I don’t have use for names much. They seem like the juggling balls in the circus.”

“What?”

“I throw you the yellow ball that I call Chance and then you throw back the red one — Thrombone.” He grinned and I did too. I had to.

“Like a baby duck,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“Like baby ducks,” he said. “All of you here are like baby ducks following their momma up into the woods.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” I was nearly in tears at my own stupidity.

“But I’m not your momma, little one,” Juan Thrombone said. “I’m the Big Bad Wolf and you were just dreaming about your mother. You’re lost in the woods, Last Chance. Go back.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I have to save the children.”

“Save them? You can’t even see them. Can’t you see that, little man? Can’t you see?” With that, the many-textured man held his hands over his head.

His gesture compelled me to look up.

Suddenly I was in the center of a dark web. All around me there were large spiders slowly moving closer.

“They aren’t coming for you,” Thrombone, now disembodied, whispered. “Jump, little man. They’ll bite you just to spit out your blood.”

I thought that they’d have to swallow a little bit of that blood. I thought it, but I was too scared to talk. The spiders were big and scaly; they smelled like the foulest infection.

I awoke to the sun shining brightly on the yellow fabric of our tent. My senses were alive with the world around me. The crystal-clear cold of the morning waited right outside. I was happy, ready to jump up and go exploring.

But when I sat up I saw the girls and Reggie sleeping. In their midst was Addy. She was pale and fragile-looking. I moved as quietly as I could, reaching around the sleeping girls to remove the day-old dressing.

The wound underneath was a spectacle as amazing and terrifying as the butterflies the day before. It was a long and jagged gash, white down the middle, bordered with bright red. The skin around the sides was darkening, not the blue of bruises but the black of deep infection.

“How is she?” Reggie asked. I could hear him stirring behind me.

“We’ve gotta go back, Reggie,” I said. “She’s real bad, man.”

He leaned over to see the deep cut down the side of her face. His eyes, I knew, were looking for some kind of path even down that infected valley. He saw none, though, and nodded.

When he stood up I noticed that he had an erection straining underneath his boxer shorts. He might have been inhabiting a grown man’s body, but he was still a boy who had to pee bad in the morning.

We left everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. The second tent, two sleeping bags, pots, pans, books, and extra clothing. Reggie and I tied Addy’s arms to his shoulders. He carried a leg under each of his arms and hefted her as if she were a living backpack.

Alacrity and Wanita were quiet. Alacrity walked close behind Reggie and stroked her mother’s leg now and then.

“Will my mom be okay, Chance?” she had asked that morning with tears in her eyes.

I said that she would be, that I’d make sure of it. And for the rest of the morning I found myself, now and again, wondering if it was a sin to lie to that child.

“Reggie, are you sure this is the way we came?” I said.

It was about noon and we were descending a fairly steep hill toward a quiet stream. The pine needles were slick under my hiking boots, and I was trying to remember having scaled the side of that particular valley.

“I don’t know,” the boy/man said. He was breathing hard. “I’m not sure.”

“What do you mean?”

Reggie was always sure of where he was going. Ask anything that had to do with a direction or a place, and Reggie knew it. He could walk through the deep woods blindfolded and never hit a tree.

“I mean I’m lost.”

“Lost?”

“Look, Chance,” Reggie said. “I don’t know what’s happening. It’s like I’m not anywhere at all, like there aren’t any rules anymore.”

We stopped at the bottom of the valley. The stream was burbling and sunlight winked down through the branches and needles. We were lost in paradise and Addy was dying.

“Well, you can see by the sun that we’re on the west side of the range,” I said. “So that means if we follow the stream down, we’ll get to the lake sooner or later.”

“What difference does that make?” Alacrity asked.

“At the lake is a road. We can get a ride and get your mom to a doctor.”

It seemed like a good idea. Reggie hunched his shoulders, hitched his living load up a few inches, and groaned. Addy was deadweight; she hadn’t even opened her eyes that day.

We made it about a half a mile before coming across the bear. Big and black, he reared up in the middle of the stream and roared. I moved quickly out in front of the children. I waved my hands and yelled, “Ho! You big ugly bear! Get! Get away!”

As if he were mimicking me, the bear waved his great clawed paws and roared again. Then he charged.

“Run!” I yelled, pushing my arms behind me as if I were performing some underwater swimming maneuver.

Then I was flying. Up in the air and in a small arc until I hit the stream, and the hard stones therein, with a loud splash. The girls were screaming. Reggie had pulled a large stone out of the stream and was ready to throw it like a medicine ball.

“Drop it, Reg!” I shouted. “Run!”

And that’s what we did. Straight up the valley. The bear growled and came from behind but didn’t catch up. He just threatened and kept close enough so we couldn’t consider running up into the woods.

The girls were ahead of Reggie and me, screaming. The bear kept coming on.

Over the next hour our retreat slowed to a fast walk. The bear always behind us.

Finally Reggie fell to his knees.

“Take Addy,” he said. “Take her with you.”

I looked around for a weapon. Alacrity was already armed with a yard-long branch that she held like a baton.

But the bear had stopped too. He held back a few steps and sniffed the air. He let out a great bellowing roar that made Wanita scream and cry.

“Shut up, you ugly bear,” Alacrity said.

Reggie was lying on his side, Addy tied to his shoulders and still unconscious.

I struggled with the double weight of Addy and Reggie, pulling them both up a few feet from the stream. Alacrity stood guard with her stick, shouting at the bear now and then. Wanita stood close by me.

“Alacrity, come on back here to me,” I said in an urgent but muted voice. “Come on. Leave that bear alone.”

“Tell him to leave me alone,” she said, more to the bear than to me.

“Come back here,” I demanded.

Slowly she obeyed. You could see that she hesitated to back down from her attacker. She was ready to go down fighting.

“Come on, now.”

We huddled together on the steep sloping bank of the small mountain stream. The bear watched us closely from the other side. He alternated between sniffing the ground and standing on his back legs, surveying the full area.

“You can go to sleep, Chance,” Alacrity told me. “I’m not tired. I’ll watch him.”

I laughed to myself at the maturity of the child. I would have told her to take a nap herself, but before I knew it I was in a deep sleep.

“Hello, little man,” Juan Thrombone said.

He was sitting on a big stone set alone in a wide desert. The sun was already down, but there was enough light to see the receding field of sand and rock.