Sara Reinke - Backwoods

“Mister Braddock, it’s getting late,” he said. “The sun will be setting soon.”

“I’m telling you, this isn’t what I saw,” Andrew insisted.

“You’ve done a lot of that since your arrival, Mister Braddock,” Prendick said, his voice growing sharp, his eyes cold and brittle. “Telling, I mean. It seems to me that in a few short days, you’ve seen all kinds of things in these woods, more than the rest of us have in months. At least, according to you.”

Andrew bristled. “I’m not lying. Or imagining things.”

“Be that as it may…” Prendick’s voice trailed off and he offered a condescending shrug. “It’s raining and cold and if we stay out here much longer, at least half of us will have hypothermia by the time we get back to the barracks. Besides that, I’m hungry and tired and don’t feel like humoring you anymore. If you want to stay out here and walk in circles a while longer, by all means, be my guest.” He held his hand up in the air, fingers folded into a fist, a signal to the soldiers. “As for the rest of us, let’s head back in.”

Upon their return to the compound, Andrew beat a hasty retreat to his room for the rest of the night, humiliated and frustrated, ignoring even Dani’s attempts to make sympathetic eye contact with him. Flopping onto his bed, he propped himself up with pillows, kicked off his boots and tried to watch some of the video he’d borrowed the night before.

As the opening credits for Universal Soldier rolled, he closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. A headache had been brewing there even before they’d found the putrid deer hanging from the tree, and he could feel it pulsing now behind his eyes, the steady, rhythmic cadence of a midget banging a bass drum deep inside his skull.

I didn’t see a dead goddamn deer, he thought. His head hurt. He was exhausted, his mind foggy, his emotions scraped raw with fatigue. I wasn’t imagining things. It was a soldier in the tree. A dead soldier. I saw him. I know I did.

But in that moment, with nothing but the music from the TV overlapping with faint buzz of the overhead fluorescents and the whispered rush of the building’s central air-conditioning to surround him, he found himself no longer so certain.

He’d known other foresters who’d panicked while out in the field. Without a compass or GPS readily in hand for orientation, it was all too easy to feel disoriented and confused. Even small animals could make noises that made them seem larger, more menacing in a carpeting of dried leaves, and one’s imagination could certainly play tricks, filling in the blanks, conjuring up mental images of all kinds of unseen horrors crashing and lumbering through the underbrush.

Maybe that’s it, he thought, forcing his pride aside, the part of him that insisted he’d been a trained field professional long enough to know the difference between fact and fantasy, that he’d delved into deeper, thicker, denser woods than these a hundred times, if not a thousand, and made it out again with only his wits and an occasional glimpse of the sun overhead to guide his way. Massaging his aching temples, Andrew struggled to push this part of him away, to muffle it. Because the only answer that makes any sense is that I imagined it all. I got scared, got lost, got caught in a trap and saw a dead deer hanging from a tree. Anything else was all in my mind.

“All in my mind,” he whispered, and man, he wished he could believe that. It would have made things a hell of a lot easier.

He heard a knock at the door and his eyelids fluttered open. He hadn’t meant to doze off, didn’t even realize that he had until he tried to sit up in bed and winced to feel the tight strain of a crick that had formed in his neck as he’d napped.

With a groan, he swung his legs around, his feet to the floor. Shoving his disheveled hair back from his brow, he glanced at the clock and realized he’d lost almost an hour.

“Alice?” he asked, blinking stupidly to find her on his threshold.

The little girl looked up at him. “There was smoke everywhere.”

Bewildered, he shook his head. “What?”

“When the fire started, there was smoke everywhere,” Alice said again. “I couldn’t see. Martha couldn’t either and she got lost.”

It took him a second of fending off the last residual, groggy cobwebs from his mind before he realized what she was talking about. The night her house was firebombed.

“They found her after they’d put the fire out,” Alice said. “She was all burned up in a corner of the kitchen.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, moved with sudden pity for her. Folding his legs, he squatted down to her eye level.

“She was seven steps from the back door,” Alice said. “And in the smoke, she didn’t even know it.”

“Is that why you always count your steps?” he asked and she nodded once, reluctantly.

“So I always know how to get out,” she whispered. “So I don’t end up like Martha.”

Andrew cupped his hand against the back of her hair and drew her to his shoulder, offering her a hug. If she drew comfort from his touch, it didn’t reflect in her posture. She stood rigidly against him, as stiff as a plank of lumber, and made no move to return the embrace. Feeling awkward, Andrew drew back. “Sorry,” he said, but she only blinked at him impassively. “You want to come in?”

She didn’t answer, but brushed past him, her bare feet whispering on the tile floor. He closed the door behind her, then ducked ahead into the bedroom area, switching on the bedside lamp to counter the growing shadows. There was a particularly loud and violent montage underway on the TV screen, full of people screaming and things exploding in enormous fireballs and Andrew darted forward, shutting it off.

“Where’s Suzette?”

“Fixing supper. She’s making salmon croquettes tonight. And creamed peas to go with them.”

“Yuck.” Andrew wrinkled his nose, grateful all at once to not be bartering sexual favors in exchange for his supper.

“I know.” Alice nodded solemnly. “Where were you today? I didn’t see you out in the courtyard.”

Oddly touched that she would have been distracted enough from her habitual counting to notice his absence, he said, “I went for a hike in the woods.”

A strange look came over her at this. Her eyes grew momentarily wide, and her bottom lip drew in beneath the shelf of her upper teeth almost anxiously. “You shouldn’t do that.”

“What? Go into the woods?” he asked and when she nodded, he asked, “Why not?”

She looked up at him, all round, dark eyes. “The screamers live there,” she said in a voice so soft and faint, he couldn’t be sure at first he’d heard her.

“The what?” Folding his legs beneath him, he squatted in front of her. “What did you say, Alice?”

Still, she stared at him, locking her gaze with his own. “You’ve heard them,” she whispered. “The screamers in the night.”

He nodded, a chill shivering through him, prickling the hairs along the nape of his neck. “What are they?” he whispered back. “Do you know?”

She shook her head. “But I’ve seen them in the trees. You have, too, haven’t you?”

Andrew nodded again. I think I saw them today.

He got Alice a snack from the vending machines in the downstairs rec room. She’d lapsed into silence in his room, saying no more about the things in the woods she’d called the “screamers.” He’d meant to leave her for only a few minutes, then try and broach the subject with her again, but it took longer than he’d intended because he hadn’t paid much attention to the contents of the machine until that moment. As he looked inside, he realized there wasn’t much except for junk food to choose from.