Jeff Hirsch - The Darkest Path

I flinched as the noise from an explosion rocked the house. A barrage of machine-gun fire answered, followed by a scream.

I moved to the door in a crouch. On the other side there was a hallway of sunlit hardwood beneath yellow walls. There were more voices now. Two different ones at least, talking back and forth. There was another explosion, but this time there was something off about the sound of it, something flat and distant.

“Awesome!”

I clung to the dull end of the glass shard and stepped into the hallway. The polished wood was warm beneath my feet. I crept along it, past framed paintings that hung beneath pinpoint floodlights.

“Whoa!”

“Got it! You suck! You! Suck!”

The hall opened up into a sunken den. There was a black couch against one wall facing a TV screen that was at least two feet high and three across. On the screen, three burly soldiers moved down a street that was hemmed in by crumbling skyscrapers, shooting at adversaries that leapt out of alleys and fired from smashed-in windows.

“Use your grenade launcher.”

“Dude, I only have like two left.”

Two guys sat in the center of the couch facing the TV, video game controllers in their hands. They were both thin and tan in shorts and T-shirts, one guy with shaggy brown curls, the other blond. A coffee table in front of them was cluttered with game cases, magazines, and piles of junk food. The room trembled as an in-game F-18 thundered across the screen.

“Oh my God, would you two idiots turn that down?!” A black-haired girl appeared from an adjoining kitchen, a paperback book open in one hand. “For real, I can barely hear myself—”

Her book hit the floor with a smack the moment she saw me.

“What, Kate?” the blond gamer shouted. “I can’t hear—”

He turned to Kate, then followed her gaze to me. My fingers tensed on the glass in my hand.

“Uh… hey, man,” he said, elbowing his shaggy-haired friend in the side. “How, uh, how are you?”

On the screen the soldiers had paused in the middle of the street, their barrel chests panting.

“Where am I?”

The blond kid popped off the couch and jogged over to the steps.

“Hey, no worries, man,” he said, extending his hand as he came up the stairs. “I’m Reese. We’ll—”

I caught him off balance, throwing my shoulder into his side and slamming him against the wall. The girl screamed when I pressed my cast into his throat and raised the shard of glass.

“Are you Path or Fed?”

“What?”

“Path or Fed?!” I shouted, keeping my eyes locked on his. “Where are my friends?”

“Take it easy. We can—”

Reese tried to move forward and I pushed him back again, wincing as my cast hit his throat. The tip of the glass touched his cheekbone.

“Dude, seriously, we’re just trying to help you. Okay? I swear.”

“Then why’d you lock me up?”

Kate piped up from behind me. “Because you were acting like this!”

I glanced at her, leaving my cast and the glass right where they were.

“Sergeant Mitchell and his guys found you and brought you back here,” she said. “But you went crazy, like you were going to kill us. You even broke Christos’s nose.”

She nodded over toward Shaggy, who had a white bandage plastered over the bridge of his nose. Red and blue bruises radiated from it.

“So we shoved a couple Valium down your throat and locked you up. Figured after you got some sleep you’d be, I don’t know, thankful or something. You know? For saving your life? That’s why we left the door open this morning.”

“Where’s Nat?” I asked. “And my dog?”

“The girl’s in the bedroom next to yours,” Reese said, voice shaking, eyes on the jagged tip of the glass. “The dog was acting like he needed to pee, so the others took him out. I think they went down to the lake. He’s fine. We fed him and everything.”

The bitter taste of adrenaline filled my mouth. I swallowed it and stepped away from Reese, keeping my eye on him in case he decided to try to take advantage and come at me.

“Okay!” Christos exclaimed after a pause. “We’ve made some serious progress, folks!”

“Christos,” Kate warned.

“What? Reese isn’t going to have his throat cut. I think that’s an achievement. Others may disagree, but I’m all for it.”

“Who are you people?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”

“Uh, just, you know,” Reese said. “Playing video games.”

“I don’t think that’s what he means, Reese,” Kate said. “Why don’t we take things one step at a time? We made some burgers a while ago for lunch. Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?”

My stomach rumbled but I ignored it. “I want to see Nat.”

“She’s that way,” Christos said, pointing down the way I had come. “Last room on the right.”

“There a key?”

“We didn’t lock her room,” Kate said.

“Why not?”

Reese and Christos looked to Kate.

“She hasn’t moved since we found you guys,” she said. “She won’t eat. Hasn’t said a word. She just lies in bed crying.”

There was no response when I knocked on Nat’s door.

“Nat?” I said. “It’s me. Cal.”

I opened the door into another room just like the one I had woken up in. The light from the hall spread across a small form curled up into a ball on the bed. Part of me thought I should just close the door and leave her be, that she’d come out when she was ready. But then I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.

“Nat?”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. Her back was to me and I hesitated a moment before reaching out and touching her shoulder.

“Hey.”

When she didn’t respond, I moved closer. Her eyes were open, staring blankly at the dark wall in front of her. She was still in her clothes from the day before, a sweat- and blood-stained T-shirt and jeans. They had wiped the blood and dirt off her face and bandaged up the deeper cuts, but I couldn’t be sure she wasn’t hurt worse, somewhere I couldn’t see.

“Are you injured?” I asked. “Natalie?”

She was motionless for a long time, and then she moved her head slowly from side to side.

“Do you want something to eat?”

Again she shook her head.

“Water?”

Nat’s eyes shut and her body seized as if she had been hit with an electric shock. Her knees rose up tighter to her chest. She looked like she was trying to disappear.

I drew away, but before my feet could hit the floor, Nat’s fingers had encircled my wrist. She was still facing away from me, curled up like a seedpod, one arm reaching back. I eased back onto the bed and drew my legs up, lying just behind her. There was only a thin border of darkness between us.

“I think I’m going crazy,” she said. Her voice sounded like it was coming from a hundred miles away.

“You’re not going crazy.”

“I just keep seeing it. Over and over.”

I lifted a hand to smooth her hair along her forehead, which was damp despite the air-conditioned chill in the room. I searched for something else to say, hoping to stumble across something that would help push her out of the moment she was trapped in, but I knew it was pointless. I slipped my other arm, awkward in its cast, underneath her. My fingers pressed into her shoulder and drew her close until her back touched my bare chest. I closed my eyes and we lay there until our breath fell into sync and my heart pulsed against hers.

“Hey.”

I turned to find Kate standing in the doorway.

“Can I come in?”

Nat had been sleeping for about an hour. Her breathing, ragged and shaking at first, had calmed. I nodded and Kate came in with a pile of folded laundry in her hands.