Jeff Hirsch - The Darkest Path

One of the cars started up and began to pull away from the others, but there was a sound like a string of firecrackers going off and the car exploded into an orange ball of fire. I fell onto the roadway, watching the flames and some dark writhing thing deep inside the burning.

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t move. I watched as Path soldiers stepped from vehicles and into the headlight glare, fanning out, rifles in hand. One refugee charged forward and was shot. The others drifted together into a small grouping, trapped. I saw it then. The main body of the evacuees had passed; now it was time to deal with the stragglers. A figure stepped from a Path vehicle and positioned himself directly in front of the group.

“My name is Beacon Radcliffe,” the man said. “And I am here to offer you all a choice.”

Somehow I found the strength to run. The trees and the roadway blurred, shifting into patterns of black and gray with flecks of yellow from the fire behind me. But then I felt a crash and I was on my back, staring at the stars. How did I get here? I wondered, delirious, as two sets of hands reached down and grabbed me. I thrashed senselessly, trying to pull myself out of the grasp of the dark bodies that had gathered around me, but I was too weak.

“He’s burning up,” someone said. “He’s sick.”

My back hit the road again, this time surrounded by the glare of a truck’s headlights. There were voices all around, murmuring shadows.

“What do we do with him?”

“Son? Son? Can you hear me? My name is Beacon Radcliffe.”

“Where’s James?” I moaned, barely aware of the words leaving my mouth. “Where’s Bear?”

“Give him the Choice and move on,” said a voice far above me.

“He’s delirious,” the beacon said. “He isn’t able to make a choice. Get a stretcher.”

“Sir, we don’t have room for any more. We can’t—”

“I answer to God and Nathan Hill, Sergeant, not you. Now, have one of your men get a stretcher. Once he’s better, we can give him the Choice.”

There was a thump of boots, and the beacon was beside me again, his hand heavy on my arm. I screamed as they lifted me to get the stretcher underneath my back. Every muscle in my body was filled with gravel and glass. Somehow I bit back my screams, but tears coursed down my cheeks. They got me into a troop carrier, dropping me roughly onto the deck, and then the engines started and we pulled away.

What I remembered after that came in a series of bursts as I crashed in and out of consciousness — the weary faces of the other captives in the back of the truck, their hands tied, bodies bent and exhausted; the nauseating lurch of the truck as it went from crawling to racing over uneven roads beneath the pounding of rocket fire; the way the green canvas cover above me lit up, almost beautifully, as bombs burst around and above us. When I closed my eyes to block it all out, there was still the constant shriek of machine-gun fire mixing with screams of pain and fright and the smell of smoke and sweat and fear-soaked urine.

All of this was entwined with the fierce heat of the fever that had moved into every inch of my body. It seemed to grind muscles and bones as if they were in a mortar. I turned my head to vomit onto the floor. My body wasn’t my own.

Time slipped and lurched. Along with the present, the past was there too. I could feel a lake and trees and the winds moving through the flowers of home, like a hand brushing through someone’s hair and then letting it fall. I was lying in the hammock late at night, happily sleepless, with James below me.

Then I was nine and in school, tiny behind my big plastic desk, so much smaller than all the other kids in my class. I felt the weight of the textbooks in my hand, their glossy pages and the rough grocery store paper-bag covers. School let out and I ran out the doors and met James. We found our way down to the creek, where we would leap from boulder to boulder, the slate-gray water coursing just beneath us.

But now it wasn’t only me and James; Bear was there too, barking happily, his tail up and wagging, hesitating at a boulder’s edge until we coaxed him to leap toward us. He would land, his sides shaking with fright at what he had done. James or I would scoop him up and tell him he was a good boy and brave, and we would carry him down the trail until he wriggled out of our arms and took off, leading us on.

The future was there too, but it was so hard to tell from the past, like a circle turning back to itself. I was older, tall for the first time, and living in the same blue house at the end of the street, only now it was my house and it was me who sat in the garden and played guitar late into the night. James was somewhere close, but I wasn’t sure where. Living down the street maybe or in a nearby town. Bear was at my feet, ageless, sleeping, his stub of a tail pounding the grass in time to the guitar. As the night fell deeper and cooler, the back door opened and two women stepped out. It was my mother, beautiful with her gray hair, and Nat walking side by side. They came to join me, but when they did, my fingers fumbled on the guitar strings.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked. “Why isn’t he here?”

Nat looked to Mom, and Mom reached down and scratched Bear’s sides until the dog wiggled over onto his back, his legs kicking contentedly.

“Where is he?” I asked.

Nat took my hand.

“Mom?”

But she just went on stroking Bear’s sides while Nat held my hand. I asked again, standing up at the edge of the garden, but no one answered me, no one even looked at me. It was like they were caught in some loop, immobile, out of time, and I was barely even there.

“Mom?”

“She’s not here, son.”

My eyes ached as I opened them. Someone was dabbing my forehead with a cool cloth. I was in the present again. We had stopped and the truck was empty except for me and Beacon Radcliffe, who was sitting on one of the wooden benches that lined either side. He was leaning over me, the cloth in his hand, his beacon vestments stained with dirt and bulky from the body armor he wore underneath them.

“You have to pray,” he said. “Do you know how to pray?”

I closed my eyes again and my knees were aching from kneeling for hours with the other novices in Lighthouse with Beacon Quan. He had us repeat our prayers over and over again until we could say them without thinking. Until the words weren’t words anymore, but ritual movements of air and lips and tongue held in muscle memory.

“If you pray hard enough,” Beacon Radcliffe said, “then God may allow you off this Path and onto another. Just pray. God makes the world. He can make yours.”

What would I have to do? I wondered. How hard would I have to pray for God to put me on the path home, along with James and Bear and Mom and Dad? Because if he won’t do that, then I had nothing to pray for.

I turned my head from the beacon and he finally relented and disappeared. There was a great stretch of blackness and then I was rising up into the air, free of the close stink of the truck. There were hundreds of voices all around me as well as the sounds of engines and boots and the rotors of helicopters flying low.

Had I slipped back in time again? Was I back at Cormorant, about to start my time as a novice all over again? My heart seized. How much longer then until I sat by that lake and listened to the Choice being given to all of those people who had trusted me? How much longer until I watched Grey Solomon die? Or Alec? How much longer until I abandoned Bear?

The sound dropped out again and I was somewhere cool and filled with only the softest rustling of feet. My clothes were torn away and what felt like steel wool dipped in freezing water was worked up and down my body. I was left alone, shivering and sweating at the same time, my skin livid. I tried to open my eyes, but they were so thick with tears and grime that all I saw was a fiery light filled with a black blur of distorted bodies.