August Ansel - Shadow Road

She smiled at him, and Arie was amazed to see a mouth full of strong, white teeth. She lifted an apple to her nose, inhaling and inhaling the sweet, particular scent, and took an enormous bite. Juice dribbled down her chin. She kept her eyes closed while she chewed, chewed, swallowed. Then she laughed a husky, infectious laugh. “So good,” she said, and opened her eyes.

Kory nodded, looking a little shy now with his good deed accomplished. He started to turn away.

“I can pay,” said the woman.

“No need,” said Arie. “Let’s go, Kory.” She drew him to her, and they pulled back into the street, watching her and keeping a weather eye on the windows and doorways all around them.

“You won’t see him again,” the woman said. “Your father.”

Kory froze.

“What the fuck,” muttered Renna. She put her arm around the boy. “Come on,” she said. “She’s nuts.”

“But—”

“Bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a’hunting,” said the woman. “He’s asleep in the woods, and there’s no waking him.” The dusty rasp of her voice had smoothed out. She looked steadily at Kory, her eyes a flinty no-color in her creased face. “You’re awake, though. Bright as a beacon, you.” Those glorious white teeth appeared again in a rapacious smile. “Stay near the lady in green. She’s no Madonna, but she’ll do.” She pointed at Arie then, and it seemed as though all the cringe had fallen from the woman’s posture. “This one… my, what a curiosity. What a Janus—looking forward now, turning back later. She carries her heart in her pocket and minds the time with her own flesh and blood.”

The sky had closed up again and the gray pall returned like a dropped blanket. Arie’s scalp prickled wildly. The burn scars on her shoulder tightened and the flock of geese cut into her thighs seemed to pucker. Handy caught her eye and motioned with his head that they should go, but Arie’s feet were rooted to the spot.

“Mind your manners, wash your clothes, eat your carrots, blow your nose,” the woman sing-songed.

“Enough,” said Handy. “We’re leaving.”

“When you’re wandering down the street, don’t forget to watch your feet. That means you, boy.” She took a backward step and waved the chunk of venison jerky. “Bye, baby bunting. Bye bye!”

They didn’t wait to hear more. Curran took up the rear again, rifle in arms, walking backward until they crested the hill and were well past the theater. None of them spoke. Kory was especially silent. He withdrew into their midst so that they were soon moving in a ring with the boy at their center. Talus was out front, ears cocked, tail held low.

Like most small towns along the coast, Arcata’s residential streets ran at right angles to the business thoroughfare, creating a tidy grid of letters and numbers. At each block, Arie looked right, looked left, and saw the same overgrown yards, empty driveways, dark windows. And everywhere those scrawled red Xs, red numbers—red, red, red.

“Almost out of here,” said Curran.

They’d reached the far end of town, some fourteen blocks north of the frontage road. The final two blocks narrowed into a rough Y-shape. A tiny, dilapidated strip mall—seedy even before the end of the world—slumped to their left, every one of its front windows smashed. To their right was a footpath that university students had once used for the short hike from campus to visit pizza shops, laundromats, and music venues. It was now hidden somewhere behind and beneath a massively overgrown hedge of buckthorn, juniper, and towering blue spruce.

“Good riddance,” said Arie.

It took much hacking to push through the tangle that had grown over and on top of the walkway. It had become a snarled tunnel that no full-grown person had accessed in a very long time. At one point, Curran had to crouch so far over he nearly resorted to hands-and-knees crawling.

“Here we are,” said Handy, out front with his machete. He held back the last few broken branches aside and they all came out on the other side with leaves in their hair and more than a few scratches on their faces and forearms. They brushed themselves off and rounded the final corner. The path became a proper sidewalk that ran up to and past the gates of Humboldt State.

Handy and Renna stopped so abruptly Arie nearly stepped on their heels. Then she saw why.

It wasn’t real at first. But such is the way of things outside the realm a healthy mind can conceive. Arie’s first thought was scarecrow. Something hoisted by a creative prankster. This notion was bolstered by the big raven perched on the figure’s shoulder, watching their approach. But then the bird gave a muscular flap of wings and settled itself at the top of the lamppost. The cloud of unreality broke like a soap bubble. This was no leftover Halloween boogeyman. It was a display concocted to terrify, and it did.

The man was fixed to a lamppost, lashed ten feet overhead in a perfect cruciform. His face was a balloon of black and purple, so bloated in its extremity it was difficult to parse the expected landmarks of eyes, nose, mouth. His head was bluntly foreshortened, and Arie realized it was because his scalp—the entire top curve of his head, really—was gone. Gone, too, were his hands. The cuffs of his denim jacket were as black with old blood as his face was, and his arms ended in abrupt points of bone that jutted from his sleeves. The perfect, clean white of those bones shone like something polished with terrible care. He had died wearing a dark coverall and thick-soled work boots, the sort of uniform favored by maintenance workers. Above his left breast pocket was an embroidered nametag too covered with blood to make out. Around his neck a large cardboard sign was scrawled with a single word:

The sign was a bit warped, its corners beginning to curl, but if it had been outside in the weather for any length of time, it would have been in much worse shape. This poor monster had not likely been out here for even a week.

“Go, go, go,” said Renna. She had pulled Kory close so that his face was turned away from the horror and against her shoulder.

They hurried by the grisly lamppost. The path, now a sidewalk, curved past the grandiose university entrance sign—a faux mission-style fabrication that sported a robust carpet of mildew and lichen—and meandered along the entire west side of campus. Scores of windows in nearby multistory buildings were like blind eyes, showing only a blank reflection of the deepening gray afternoon. Arie tried to keep her mind equally blank, tried not to imagine the one who wrote that sign— desecrator— gazing out at them now from somewhere nearby.

In a few minutes they were beyond the last straggling buildings at the campus’s northern edge. The sidewalk narrowed into a path again and then petered out to become another dirt trail. Beyond the university grounds, a bluff dropped precipitously to one side, straight down to the highway. On their other side stood a perimeter of scrub blackberry so dense a field mouse would have trouble getting through. They pressed on up the grade. At the crest of the rise, they came over the top, breathing hard.

“Of fucking course,” said Curran. He bent over and rested his hands on his knees, shaking his head and breathing hard.

Arie thought she heard Renna make a small sob, but when she looked, Renna was stifling a laugh. “I thought yesterday was bizarre,” she said. “Wrong. Turns out, rolling our dead acquaintance out of his barn in a pickup truck was pretty freaking normal.”

At one time the trail had led to a side road that wound along the bluff and merged into the next small town. Someone had decided that thoroughfare was a problem. Like the exploded on-ramp they’d encountered earlier in the day, the path abruptly ended at a small mountain of rubble. It was far more than a roadblock.