Leave No Trace, page 12
“I gotta whiz,” I say, and step all the way out, zipping the tent behind. There he is, a shadow by the flames, all by his lonesome. I know we have a job to do today. But that’s not the job I need to do. Gillie has to get home and safe again. I don’t care about letting this big monster and his stupid friends go kill something, all so they can take pictures and maybe the head and call themselves tough.
Maybe not Stef. She’s not like that. Or I didn’t think she was.
Anyway, I’m on Gillie’s side. Whatever side that is.
I walk into the darker brush and go into my crouch so I can get cleared out and it feels amazing to not have a full bladder anymore. When I’m done I start back to the tent.
“Get over here,” says Tony, waving at a place by the fire.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” I say.
“Get over here anyway,” he says. “You and I need to have words.”
I think about going back to Gillie but Tony’s like Daddy in some ways. Daddy tells me to do something, I do it. The way it’s always been. So I walk over to the fire and toss in some kindling, get the flames up again. Tony’s got his pack all ready for the day. There’s a compound bow with pulleys and a sight on it resting on his pack. Compounds are for cheaters. I use a recurve.
“Anyhow,” he says, handing me a mug of coffee, “I’m happy to do the talking for now.”
I sniff the brew. Coffee’s rare ’round here. Daddy says it’s a drug, so I almost never get it. I take a sip and it’s hot lightning down to my belly. All we had last night were trout fillets and potatoes and marshmallows for dessert and that all came up once Tony’s gun went off and I’m crawling hungry right now.
“So let me see,” he says. “You got up and found the creature and Stef followed you, am I right?”
I shrug.
“Didn’t think she knew what was what,” he says, almost to himself. “D’you understand why I had to shoot that thing?”
I spit a mouth of coffee in his face.
He backhands me and his ring bites into my cheek. I fall back and my face is on fire. My hand goes up over my cheek and there’s some blood there. I scramble to my feet but I don’t have my bow and arrow and my knife’s still in the tent. Stupid.
“That’s all you know how to do,” I bark. “Hit things. Shoot them. Kill them.”
He makes this soft little laughing sound and it’s strange, coming from him. Tony isn’t a guy that does a lot of laughing, I bet. But he thinks I’m pretty funny. He points at the log. “Sit.”
I don’t want to, but I do.
“That’s a free one,” he says. “Next time I hit you, you don’t get back up. Got it?”
I nod. But I make him the same promise, in my head. I can do it. I just have to be ready to do the thing nobody expects. To be Offguard.
“You’ve been out here a long time, so I’m giving you benefit of the doubt on what happened last night,” he says. “You and Stef and T.J.—you’re all in the dark. So’s a lot of the country. We try to keep it that way. Keeps everybody from getting panicked. But most of the rest of the world knows the truth. We’re being invaded.”
I look at him, cold as snow.
“You had a favorite toy, didn’t ya?”
“I don’t play with toys,” I say, though I do still have Marches. “Stuffed dog.”
“Great. What if that little dog suddenly walked and talked and turned out to be rabid? And she bit you and made you rabid, too?”
I’m frowning. Toys don’t come to life.
“If that happened, you’d shoot her just like you would a real animal. Even if it was cute. Even if it did tricks.” He leans into me and his breath has alcohol on it. Not beer. I’ve smelled that. “D’you see what I mean?”
Then I do. “Gillie’s not a dog.”
“Gillie,” he says in a dark and hard voice. “Even sounds cute. Maybe is cute to you. But you don’t know shit. You ain’t seen the dangerous ones. Look, we’ve been safe so far here in the U-S-of-A. They mostly stay in their home countries once they get out. But you have to be ready. You never know when they’re gonna try the next incursion. Or where. Your friend could be the first of many.”
“What do they do?”
He shakes his head. “Stuff that doesn’t make it into the papers. Turn people into animals, who we gotta shoot ’cause when they turn back, they’re insane. Make you dance ’til your feet break and bleed. Sticks that fly outta nowhere and beat on you. That’s the tame stuff. Only things we know that repel ’em are the plasma and the EMPs, strange to say. That’s what the PEPs are for. EMP knocks them out, takes away what they can do. Plasma takes care of the rest. They’re working on armor now that bounces whatever spell they throw at us right back on them. That’ll make ’em think twice.”
He takes another sip of coffee. “See, you got to take them out fast after you knock ’em over; I hear they heal pretty quick. Fact is, they’re not like us and don’t have any place among human people.” His voice goes far away while he talks and it sounds like he’s remembering things, not just telling me about them. “They should just stay on their own turf. Suck it up there.”
“You fought them,” I say. “In the war.”
He nods. “For a time. Then I got injured and stuck in an office. Then I got back on the field and then—well, I came home. After. They let me go from the forces, and now I’m here.”
“What’s wrong with magic?”
He grunts. “Christ, have you drunk the Kool-Aid. Magic’s this random thing that changes all the rules. They think we’re magic, by the way. ’Cause we can build guns and clocks and cars. So we scare ’em too. If people were meant to have magic we’d have it.”
“Some do,” I say.
“Oh, yeah?” He leans forward. “Anybody you know?”
I shrug.
“Anybody like … you?”
I think about how he took it away from me. “Not anymore,” I say and my throat closes up.
He sits back, thinking. “Well, now. That makes sense. The gun.” He nods. “So you’re cured.”
My eyes fill up. It sounds like he’s saying I won’t get it back. Which means Gillie won’t go back, either. “It’s forever?” I whisper.
He sighs. “No,” he says. “In the field we just kept thumpin’ ’em until—” He looks at me. “Anyhow, let’s just say I never saw one who got to live that long after getting thumped.”
Tony still hasn’t told me why magic’s bad, though. He sounds like he’s just angry ’cause he doesn’t have any. Ones that have make the ones that don’t mad, and everybody has to be the same so get rid of the weird ones. That’s what I’m hearing.
He’s still talking, though, doesn’t matter if I’m listening. “These creatures are just walking around like this is their world right now,” he says. “Like they belong here. Like they’ve always been here. And when we get too close, yeah, some of us get infected.” Tony spits into the fire. “And there’s no quid pro quo, you know. We’re not supposed to go into their sacred places unless they take us. Toirmisgte, they call it. Forbidden.”
We’d go mad, Gil said.
“Gil says it’s green there,” I say. “A forever going-on place.”
“Yeah,” he says, and finally goes quiet for a breath. “Who’d ever want to leave that.”
The fire pops between us, then settles, a log falling over. “I think they have to,” I whisper. “I don’t think they’re choosing to leave.”
“Feh,” he growls. “They’re just greedy. Want what we’ve got.”
“You went,” I say, remembering what he asked Gillie back at the stand. He’d asked about her queen. “You were there.”
He’s quiet a minute longer, then makes that funny muffled laugh again. But there’s no fun in the sound. “Close. But no.”
“So how do you know?”
“I looked inside,” he said. “Saw an air hole—an aperture, whatever—and she spoke to me.”
“She?”
He stares into the fire. “Ever been in love, kid?”
My face gets hot and my stomach gets tight and I think of Gil. I shrug.
“Well,” he says. “Thing about the world over there is once that window opens, you fall in love for the first time every minute. And after that window shuts, you’ll do anything to get it back.”
“So shooting them … helps?”
He looks at me. “It’s complicated.” Suddenly he grabs my chin, pinches it so I can’t get away. “Here’s what it boils down to. You don’t want your dad to know what you were up to last night, do you? He already thinks we gotta put down anybody who’s ‘sick,’ he told me that a couple times already. Here’s our deal: You go along with whatever I say, whatever I do, and your friend won’t get hurt and your dad won’t know. If that thing makes a run for it, two things are gonna happen: I will kill it, and then I will tell your father it was something you cared about. And he will thank me.”
His eyes slide across my face, looking for something. “You both are here to find us a deer so I can take a picture of T.J. standing next to it and we can wave it around in front of the CloudPress and he can get on with making us a fuckton of money. Then we are getting in that chopper and going home and you can stay here as long as you want. For as long as you can.”
“What about Gillie?” I say but my words are mashed ’cause he’s still got my face.
Tony releases me and I’m shaking. “It’ll come with us, probably.”
“No,” I say. “No, no, no.”
He leans into me and I lean back. “You wanna break our deal already?”
I think about what might happen if he tells Daddy I was sick. That I had a friend who made me sick. I don’t think Daddy would hurt me. But he did hurt Jim. Stropped him good. And then Jim went away and didn’t come back. My eyes get burny and I feel like such a baby but I nod at Tony.
“So we’re clear,” he says. “I say ‘frog’ and you jump.”
I keep nodding. But inside I’m shaking my head. He’s not leaving with Gillie. He might leave with a deer head but Gillie stays here. Whatever I have to do. I promise everybody: myself, Gillie, the world.
“Good,” he says, and looks up into the clouds. He takes a big drink of his coffee, sets the mug down and claps his hands. “Well, with that out of the way: I’d like to check out that ridge up ahead where I hear the deer—if not the antelope—play. We’re gonna have Stef babysit your friend, and you’ll take me to the hunting spot. Now.”
Guess he just said “frog.”
So I take Tony to the place where it will be all right to kill something.
We Live Here Now
Jim was the one who found Artio way back when, even though we didn’t know that was her true name. We were new to the forest—maybe one winter and part of one spring—when we saw her. Daddy sent us out to the Great Meadow and said we had a job: Bring home something we could eat. Jim said look for nuts so I kept bending into the grass figuring they might be hiding. I didn’t know better yet.
Then I looked up and Jim was gone. I looked this way and that way and called out, Jim, no hiding! I figured he was doing hide-and-go-seek without telling me but then I heard it—a hoot-owl call. Daddy taught us the calls almost first thing we came out here. Way to signal without alerting anyone, people or animal. Xcept the Oscar owls, they know the difference I bet. Anyway, since it was the middle of the day and even I knew by then that owls came out at night I knew the call was really Jim.
I turned ’round and ’round but he wasn’t anywhere.
Then I saw it, this wavy motion coming from high up in a tree like a leaf out of control. Jim’s little white hand stood out against the green needles and he was up in an old pine. So I jogged over kind of mad he was being all secret about something. I stared up the trunk through the branches and there he was, maybe higher than four Daddys, looking down.
C’mon, he whispered.
I wasn’t good at climbing but when Jim asked me for something, I wanted to do it. So I hugged that sticky sappy trunk and grabbed higher and higher until I was right next to him, and the whole time he was staring down at me and waving his hand, making me move more and more.
Once I was up on the limb with him, I started to say what kind of mad I was but he put a hand over my mouth and pulled back a branch. Back in the field where I left my basket stood a giant. I’d seen pictures of bears in books, so I knew what I was looking at, but she was big as the car Daddy drove us here in. Prolly bigger. She nosed in my basket, then stood on her hind legs and was twice the size as before.
That’s beautiful, he whispered.
Barney bear, I said. Our first bear needed a name.
He shook his head.
Why?
First off, she’s not a boy.
How can you—
He pointed again. Two bumbly little cubs were cutting through the meadow grass, making right for her. They were all the same color, this brownish black that made me think of those Special Dark chocolate candies only Mom would ever eat. The two cubs bumped right into the big bear and she went back down on her front paws and we watched as they nosed. Then she moved in the other direction and even though we were far off I swear I felt the ground shake.
She’s only looking, said Jim in a calm, soft voice that made me feel better. Only looking.
My mouth was dry. Something in me wanted to go up to her and those babies and pet them. Another part of me knew this made the forest a whole lot more dangerous than we ever thought. After a long, long while she went across the meadow and out of our sight.
Jim let out a breath. Let’s call her Artio.
The cliff fills up one long side of the meadow, and we reach the base of it after about a thousand steps. We start climbing, and Tony’s almost as fast as me going up and up and up. His arms are thick and tight like ropes and he doesn’t make a peep even when he slips and nearly falls on his butt halfway up the rock face. When that happens, I turn to one side and mutter some bad words, ’cause I’m sorry he kept his grip.
He follows me good, setting his hands where I do, toes where mine go and up and up and up until—leap! We’re on top of Blueberry Cliff and the sky is turning gray and milky and it’s starting to get light. We stand on top of the grass where the trees don’t live and stare out over the long narrow field.
Daddy and me—and Jim when he was here—came out to Blueberry Cliff all the time, sometimes with clients and sometimes only us. Deer love running through the field below from one side of the forest to the other and there are fat juicy berries growing on all the bushes at the bottom of the cliff. You just have to get there before the bears do. Or about 100 other hungry little animals. It’s an easy place to take folks so I know it real well. You can see the whole meadow and there’s a little hill on the other side we can tell clients to hide behind so the deer don’t see them til it’s too late. That’s where Daddy’ll bring T.J. in a bit.
I didn’t read Tony right when he first got here. Didn’t think he was dangerous. Even when he grabbed Daddy on that first night I didn’t think he was this kind of bad and mean. But that was my not wanting to see it. Before we left camp just now he unzipped my tent and hauled Gillie out and brought her over to Stef’s tent and woke up Stef and shoved Gillie inside. He told Stef to make up a reason why she wasn’t coming to the hunt, and to keep Gillie a secret until after T.J. had his deer. Just let T.J. and Daddy come to the meadow.
Stef didn’t like being woke up like that. Her hair was standing up this way and that way and she had a squished up look on her face.
If it runs, it dies, Tony told her. Remember it was your idea to keep it alive.
Stef looked at Gillie and nodded. Guess it was.
Gillie curled up at the back of the tent and gave me a quick look with one eye open and I swear it seemed like she had a couple blades of grass in her hair but then the tent went zip zip and Tony and me were off.
So now we’re here and there’s no deer, not yet. I slide my eyes over at Tony. I know he’s somebody I got to keep an eye on. Gil warned me. What I don’t get is how sometimes I want to keep an eye on him. Even knowing everything. I make a list to figure out why:
He’s tough and doesn’t take shit or shine-o-la.
He knows what he wants.
And what he doesn’t want.
I hate him for hurting Gillie but I want to be as strong as he is someday.
He’s scanning the field like a machine taking in information while I watch him and I have a second to know exactly what I want: to push him off. I could prolly do it. Just wander behind and run up and push hard and he would fall all the way into those blueberry bushes and if he wasn’t dead when he landed, he’d die soon after. Nobody would know and we could let Gillie go and nobody could tell Daddy secrets.
“Don’t get any smart ideas,” he says, never even turning from the field.
“Wasn’t.” I toe at the ground, then point off to the west. “Deer come from over there.” Then I point to a chewed-up part of the ground. “Stop here, most times.”
“Fish in a barrel,” he says.
“Deer in a field.”
He looks at me and his eyes get all squinty, even though it’s still pretty dark. He’s ’valuating me, I feel it. “You are a weird thing.”
I take a seat and dangle my legs over the cliff edge. A minute later he sits down, bow across his legs. On the way I said I preferred my recurve bow and he said his was state of the arts or something and cost eight thousand dollars so it practically killed the animal for you. I didn’t tell him it was a cheater’s bow.
Now he takes a piece of paper from his pocket. “Interesting how we walked all day yesterday but we’re really only about seven klicks from the original campsite,” he says, showing me the paper. “Made a map.”
