And then came a thump in the air. It was the sensation of a sudden and powerful vacuum. I lost my balance and consciousness at the same moment.
“Chance! Chance, wake up.”
Alacrity was shaking me by the shoulder. Reggie was trying to prop up Addy into a standing position. She was unconscious, or mostly so. The forest floor was littered with the bodies of brightly colored butterflies. They weren’t dead, only stunned like I had been. Their giant fanlike wings waving slowly. A few of them were standing on weak, shivering legs.
“We gotta go, Chance,” Reggie pleaded.
In my stupor I was still amazed by the size and nature of the beautiful predators.
“C’mon, Chance!” Alacrity yelled.
Her voice was strained and commanding. I jumped up and took Adelaide from Reggie. If anyone was going to lead us away, it was him, and his pack was already large enough.
As soon as I hefted the swooning woman over my shoulder, Reggie was off. When I turned to run, Addy’s head slammed into a tree. It was a hard knock, but there was no time to stop.
He took the lead, zigzagging through the trees ahead. The waist strap of his pack had loosened, and the load pounded up and down loudly against his back. Alacrity ran behind Reggie, wielding a long branch like a sword. She turned full around every now and then, still running, looking for danger.
Wanita shadowed Alacrity, moving more like a normal child, slipping and wavering as she went.
We didn’t have the strength to run for very long — no more than ten minutes. I fell to my knees, exhausted. When I laid Addy out on a bed of pine needles, I saw that her head and face were lacerated. She was bleeding pretty hard.
“Come on, Reggie,” Alacrity said, throwing him a branch the size of a cartoon caveman’s club. Then she pointed to where he should stand for defense.
I took the gauze bandage from my first aid box and pressed it hard against the long cut down the side of Addy’s face, cursing myself for being so rough and careless.
“I don’t hear anything coming,” Reggie said.
“Nothing?” asked Alacrity.
I was trying to hold together the flaps of Adelaide’s skin under the bandage. The thought of the butterflies’ coming through the dense woods and the feeling of the blood slipping between my fingers somehow increased my feeling of numbness. The breath in my chest felt like a cold breeze through a deep cave.
For the next hour we sat there: Alacrity and Reggie on the ready for any attack; Wanita hugging on to Reggie’s leg; and me pressing on the big white bandage that I had tied around Addy’s head.
The forest was unnaturally quiet except for an occasional moan from Addy.
“I don’t think they’re gonna come,” Reggie said.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“No, I’m not sure,” he said petulantly. “What do you want me to do?”
Night fell and Addy became delirious. She went out of her head with fever and nightmares. We huddled around her in the tent, trying, I guess, to press her back to health. I dissolved aspirin in water and made her drink, but she was still burning up.
“Why not?” she begged some unseen torturer. “Why can’t we? No. No. We love the children. We love them.”
She begged all night, thrashing and crying.
I stayed up as long as I could, but sometime in the early morning hours I dozed off.
In the dream I met a man who wore a one-piece suit that sheathed him from head to toe; only his red-brown face could be seen under a hood of woven branches and fur that had flowers nestled within. The flowers, asters and small yellow daisies, seemed to be rooted there, growing out of the man’s head. The rest of his costume was no less unusual. It was a loose-fitting patchwork of cloth and skins, metal and wood, ceramic and bone. From the belt looped over his shoulder hung a large wooden knife, a dark quartz crystal, a small hide sack, and a handmade wooden mallet with a tree branch for a handle.
His eyes were small and very dark. His smile was permanent. And he smelled of the forest: strong, acrid, and sweet.
“Chance,” he said. “Is that your name?”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“I call myself Juan Thrombone, but don’t ask me why. I don’t have use for names much. They seem like the juggling balls in the circus.”
“What?”
“I throw you the yellow ball that I call Chance and then you throw back the red one — Thrombone.” He grinned and I did too. I had to.
“Like a baby duck,” he said.
“Excuse me?”
“Like baby ducks,” he said. “All of you here are like baby ducks following their momma up into the woods.”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I was nearly in tears at my own stupidity.
“But I’m not your momma, little one,” Juan Thrombone said. “I’m the Big Bad Wolf and you were just dreaming about your mother. You’re lost in the woods, Last Chance. Go back.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I have to save the children.”
“Save them? You can’t even see them. Can’t you see that, little man? Can’t you see?” With that, the many-textured man held his hands over his head.
His gesture compelled me to look up.
Suddenly I was in the center of a dark web. All around me there were large spiders slowly moving closer.
“They aren’t coming for you,” Thrombone, now disembodied, whispered. “Jump, little man. They’ll bite you just to spit out your blood.”
I thought that they’d have to swallow a little bit of that blood. I thought it, but I was too scared to talk. The spiders were big and scaly; they smelled like the foulest infection.
Twenty-two
I awoke to the sun shining brightly on the yellow fabric of our tent. My senses were alive with the world around me. The crystal-clear cold of the morning waited right outside. I was happy, ready to jump up and go exploring.
But when I sat up I saw the girls and Reggie sleeping. In their midst was Addy. She was pale and fragile-looking. I moved as quietly as I could, reaching around the sleeping girls to remove the day-old dressing.
The wound underneath was a spectacle as amazing and terrifying as the butterflies the day before. It was a long and jagged gash, white down the middle, bordered with bright red. The skin around the sides was darkening, not the blue of bruises but the black of deep infection.
“How is she?” Reggie asked. I could hear him stirring behind me.
“We’ve gotta go back, Reggie,” I said. “She’s real bad, man.”
He leaned over to see the deep cut down the side of her face. His eyes, I knew, were looking for some kind of path even down that infected valley. He saw none, though, and nodded.
When he stood up I noticed that he had an erection straining underneath his boxer shorts. He might have been inhabiting a grown man’s body, but he was still a boy who had to pee bad in the morning.
We left everything that wasn’t absolutely necessary. The second tent, two sleeping bags, pots, pans, books, and extra clothing. Reggie and I tied Addy’s arms to his shoulders. He carried a leg under each of his arms and hefted her as if she were a living backpack.
Alacrity and Wanita were quiet. Alacrity walked close behind Reggie and stroked her mother’s leg now and then.
“Will my mom be okay, Chance?” she had asked that morning with tears in her eyes.
I said that she would be, that I’d make sure of it. And for the rest of the morning I found myself, now and again, wondering if it was a sin to lie to that child.
“Reggie, are you sure this is the way we came?” I said.
It was about noon and we were descending a fairly steep hill toward a quiet stream. The pine needles were slick under my hiking boots, and I was trying to remember having scaled the side of that particular valley.