Eric smiled in the darkness. His arms hurt. His stomach ached. He was dizzy, but he said, “Good point.” Eric thought the story would have been a good place to end the night, but it didn’t. They talked for a while longer. He learned she’d lived in Aurora in east Denver, and that Jared picked her up on the highway when her car broke down. Eric told her a little about the cave, since she asked about it, but he didn’t feel comfortable talking about his dad, so the conversation trailed off, and after a bit he found himself drifting. I might dream about the ocean, he thought, if I don’t fall off the stool. With that thought, he rested his chin on his chest and relaxed.
Sometime later, a noise snapped him into attentiveness. He couldn’t place it. A squeak and a rattle. It was rope playing out of a pulley. He twitched his head side to side, trying to catch another sound, or a glimpse of anything. Something wheezed, like a dragon, he thought. Something’s in the room. The dark-haired woman whispered hoarsely, “Don’t, goddamn it.”
Cloth ripped.
“I told you I’d be back, missy.”
Eric stood on the crossbars. What’s happening? he thought, what’s going on? A scraping noise. Must be the stool.
“Don’t!” Then a muffled yell, like a hand was over her mouth. A metal clink. Belt buckle? A swishing sound. Cloth on skin? Another muffled yell, a pained moan this time.
Eric leaned forward, the rope snagging him short. His pulse beat in his ears like surf. Darkness pressed around. He recognized the feeling. It’s like the dream! I can’t stop the wave. I can’t do anything. The water’s coming in. I’m stuck. I’m stuck.
The noises came from below him. They were on the floor.
Fear, or something, anger, rose in him. He wanted to jump down, but he could feel the rope on his neck. The wave towered within him, dark, solid and unstoppable. There’s nothing I can do! He’ll kill us both. The noises struggled on the floor. Eric whimpered. His daddy wasn’t up the beach. What could he do?
The nightmare never ends, he thought. In the dream he was frozen; in the dream he could do nothing to save himself. And in the dark, it was himself. He was being attacked. He felt hot breath on his chest, hands pushing down his jeans. He was in the dark-haired woman’s head.
Jared’s voice filled the dark. “Lay still, you bitch.”
Then he couldn’t stand it any longer. I’m not in a dream. I don’t have to do nothing. I’m not a child. He opened he mouth and yelled, “Meg! Meg! Come down here quick!”
He felt the rush of air at his face before the blow reached him that knocked him off the stool.
Chapter Eleven
EARTH DANCING
Don’t get up,” said Teach.
Campfire light flashed rhythmically against the bluff’s tan wall of stone where a swath of black marked the smoke trails of previous fires. Eric rested his back on his still rolled sleeping bag. The rest of the party sat equidistant from the fire, their faces yellow in the light; the back of their heads lost in the shadows.
“’Scuse me?” said Eric. His stomach bulged pleasantly from dinner, a savory squirrel stew, and he felt tired and lazy. The night was so warm he thought he might just go to sleep as he was, without unrolling the bag, like Dodge and Rabbit.
Teach put his hand out to Eric, motioning him to stay still. “A rare privilege. Earth dancers.” He pointed beyond the fire behind Eric. The other men looked past him, holding their dinner plates still, as if frozen.
“Move slowly,” said Teach.
Eric dropped a shoulder and turned. At first, blinded by the firelight, he saw nothing, then white shapes resolved themselves from the blackness. Men. They were clearly men, naked and painted white, dancing at the edge of the clearing.
Teach said, “Have you seen them before?”
The dancers, perhaps fifteen or so of them, bent low, brushing their hands against the ground, then jumped for the stars, throwing their hands wide open. Other than the crackle of flame, Eric heard nothing, but the dancers bounced in rhythm, all of them low, then they burst up, as if on cue, hanging in their outstretched poses, a mountain ballet.
“No,” he whispered. He remembered the white figures in Phil’s videos, the ones driving him crazy with fear. “Maybe,” he added. “Who are they?”
One of them broke toward the fire, running, hands low and open, Forty feet away, he put his arms out like wings and veered away, rising from his crouch as if he could fly. One after another, others followed his lead, some coming as close as a dozen feet before curving back to the dark.
“First men,” said Teach.
When they ran particularly close, Eric could see that the white was a powder, like chalk, some places smeared thickly enough to crack at the elbows and knees, and almost worn off in other places. Their hair was thick with it.
“My boys think they’re spirits, or ghosts. Their momma’s scared them with stories of Earth Dancers, and now they believe them to be supernatural.”
Someone hissed, “We’re not babies anymore, Teach.” But the voice sounded awestruck. Teach continued, “Feral men. I think they’re the children of the children of the children. No, don’t speak to them. They’ll run. When the plague moved on, some of the survivors were little kids, four, five, six years old. They must have been horribly afraid, their parents dead, the dogs going wild, so they hid in the city.”
Eric hadn’t thought of that before. The plague killed ninety-nine percent. In the weeks after, when only the survivors were left, one out of a hundred of everyone still lived. One out of a hundred of his school mates. That would mean twelve of them. One out of a hundred criminals. In prisons, behind the bars with the rest of the dead, waiting for guards who would never come to let them out. Were there a hundred people in iron lungs in Denver? Maybe. How long did the person in the iron lung survive, unable to move, maybe only able to see part of the room in the mirror mounted over his or her face, seeing a nurse slumped over her desk? And, of course, the children wandering in the empty shopping centers. He didn’t know why he pictured them in shopping centers. Where would a five-year-old go? One out of a hundred of them went somewhere. One out of a hundred two-year-olds couldn’t reach the doorknob, or couldn’t turn it.
The image made Eric ill. He rubbed his eyes. The ground was real. It pressed hard against his knees. The slick fabric of the sleeping bag was real. The dancers, leaping unbelievably in the mountain air, beneath a million needle stars, were real. Bad memories shouldn’t be real.
One of the dancers charged the fire, stopped at the invisible boundary, and instead of running away, began to wave his hands in the air in front of him, as if to capture the flames. Eric started, almost falling off his sleeping bag. This dancer was a woman, young one, maybe fourteen or fifteen, naked like the others. The chalk was almost gone from her lower legs, brushed off by grass Eric guessed, and her strong, dark skin rippled with the intensity of her movement as she swayed. She stared directly at Eric. She knows me, he thought.
Teach said, “They must have grown up like animals, isolated, maybe even forgetting their language, until, eventually, they met up. None of them trusting anyone who was not like themselves, avoiding the adults who might have taken them in. Angry, perhaps, at the adults who were their parents who had died and left them alone.”
Another dancer joined the first, close enough to the fire that Eric could see the lines in their faces where the chalk had crinkled and fallen away from the corners of their mouths and eyes.