Jeff Hirsch - The Darkest Path

I climbed the embankment around the pipe, awkwardly leaning forward so Bear’s weight wouldn’t throw me off balance and send us tumbling backward. He began a steady whine in my ear. The sound of it gutted me. I wanted nothing more than to stop and hold him until it passed, but I kept pushing us on, focused on the highway sounds ahead. A couple feet from the top, I set Bear down and belly-crawled the rest of the way until I could peek between two thin trees.

The highway was choked with a river of cars and trucks stopped dead. Horns and voices blared and miles of brake lights glowed bloodred, from where I stood out to the horizon. Bear stood watching it all, his injured paw held tight to his chest.

“Hey! Over here!”

A rusty Chevy sat a few cars down from us. The passenger-side window was open and a gray-haired woman was leaning out of it and waving us down. Bear lifted his head and then hobbled over to her. When he reached the car, he jumped up on his hind legs and hooked his one good paw over the window. The woman produced a bag of crackers and fed them to him one by one.

“This your puppy?” the old woman asked.

I nodded and dropped down beside Bear. “You know there’s Path just on the other side of those trees.”

“Yep,” she said. “Saw ’em a ways back and they waved us right by. Word is they decided that it was better to hand the Feds a refugee crisis than deal with it themselves. Say one thing about those Pathers — they ain’t dumb!”

She cackled, then turned to the man driving the car and exchanged a few words. Bear moved down the length of the car, sniffing around the backseat where an old mutt was curled up among their things. He lifted his head when he heard Bear and pressed his nose against the glass.

The woman leaned back out the window and waved me over. “Listen,” she said, her voice low. “The rest of these jerks are more than happy to leave people like you behind but we got room and, sorry to say, but you two don’t look so hot. Why don’t you jump in? We’re heading to my sister’s lake house out in Bull Lake, Montana. You guys can snuggle up with Roscoe back there. Rest a few days with us before moving on.”

I shook my head. “We’re heading to New York.”

Bear hopped back to us, and the woman continued to feed him, watching me over his shoulder.

“Not my business,” she said. “But I can’t say I like your chances, son.”

I looked down the miles of road that lay ahead. How many of them could I walk with Bear on my shoulder before we fell over? The woman’s offer made sense — go to Montana, rest, then continue on — but thoughts of Grey Solomon loomed. Surely these people would hit a Path checkpoint eventually. What if they were still looking for an escaped novice traveling with a dog? Did I want to see this woman lying by the side of a road too?

I watched as Bear devoured the food from the woman’s hand. Despite our time at Alec’s house, his ribs still stood out under his coat. He was filthy too, caked with mud and the blood from his injuries. I could only imagine what kind of infection was working itself into him from the filth of that sewer ditch.

Brake lights blinked off and the cars far down the line started to move. I looked back again and Bear was panting happily as the woman rubbed his ears. I felt a suffocating weight pressing down on my chest and imagined that my voice was something separate from me.

“Can you take him?”

The woman stilled Bear with one hand on his shoulder and looked over him at me. “You sure?”

As if he sensed something in the air, Bear came down off the car and limped over to me, pushing his nose into my leg. It took everything in me not to look down at him.

“Got a long way to go yet,” I said, fighting the hitch in my voice, trying to get it out before I stopped to think. “And he’s hurt.”

People behind us started to honk as the cars just ahead of the woman’s began to pull away. She said something to the man at the wheel and then reached behind her to pop the back door.

I threw my arms around Bear’s neck and pulled him close to me. I closed my eyes, burying my face in his side. He yipped and wiggled, his whimper growing sharper and more distressed. The cars ahead moved down the road. The honking grew louder.

“A cabin sounds pretty great,” I whispered into his ear as he squirmed and whined. “It’ll be better. Okay? There’s a long way to go still, and I don’t know if I can take care of you.”

“Rup!”

His anguished bark hit me like a punch to the chest. As much as I wanted to keep my arms around him, the honking horns were growing more insistent. People had begun to shout for the couple to move their car. I swept Bear up in my arms as an awful pressure built in my chest.

“Rup! Rup rup rup rup!”

The woman’s dog cleared out to the far side of the car as I laid Bear onto the backseat. Bear jumped up, barking, but I slammed the door before he could get out.

“We’ll take good care of him. I promise. Son?”

I couldn’t look at her. Couldn’t look at Bear. I ran toward the tree line to escape the sound of his claws scrabbling madly against the raised window.

“Rup! Rup rup rup! Rup! Rup! Rup!”

His barking grew louder and more broken-sounding, mixing with the angry horns of the piled-up cars. All I could do was keep moving, stabbing my boots into the unsteady gravel as fast as I could to get away, into the safety of the trees.

“RUP! Rup! Rup rup rup rup rup rup!”

The woman’s car drew alongside of me and then the engine thrummed as they pulled down the highway. Bear’s barking peaked into an anguished wail as they passed and then it faded and I was alone.

I reeled through the woods, reaching from one tree to the next to hold myself up. Without Bear, the night seemed like a hand pushing me into the ground.

I walked until I couldn’t anymore and then fell onto a mossy bank in the midst of towering oaks. Skeletal branches and black sky hung over me. I rolled onto my side, curling around a keen emptiness, a void where the heat of Bear’s body should have been. I could still feel his chest rise and fall beneath my hand and hear the little yips and barks that escaped his lips as he slept. I tried to imagine him safe and warm in the back of that car, but it was no use. How could I have let him go? How was I going to make it home without him?

Exhausted, I felt myself dragged down and I passed in and out of fitful sleep throughout the night. When I woke for the last time, I was covered in sweat. I struggled to sit up, my body feeling like it was made out of lead. My head was pounding and my stomach churned. I planted one hand in the dirt and rolled myself up, legs shaking, half bent over. I made it twenty or thirty feet from my camp, then fell to my knees just off the highway’s shoulder.

There was a pause like being held over the edge of a cliff and then my gut clenched and I vomited up the foul ditch water until I was breathless. The sickness came in waves, one after the other. When there was nothing left in me, I collapsed onto my side, spent and trembling.

The wind moved through the trees all around me, but I couldn’t feel it. A fever was smoldering in my skin and I was slick with sweat. Cramps moved up and down my body, subsiding and then flaring up without warning.

There was a grinding metallic sound and then a bright light rose up all around me. I looked down the length of the road, squinting at the intensity of the sunrise coming up between the trees. No, not the sun. Headlights. Floodlights. I scanned the roadway through bleary eyes and saw that I wasn’t alone. Bodies emerged from camps on the highway’s shoulder and from their places at the backs of pickup trucks. They all turned to stare into the ball of light down the road. I stumbled forward, drawing closer to it, shading my eyes with a quivering hand.