His feet hit first, but not on the jagged rocks where all his relatives lay dead or rapidly dying. Crooked Tree’s right leg touched down on a sloping rock and snapped backwards, rotating him even faster. Next, the back of his shoulder struck the soft belly of his pregnant aunt. He crashed through bloody limbs and torsos, flipping across the piled corpses; his eyes remained shut tight.
Crooked Tree finally came to rest on his back. One of his hands still cradled his head, the other was pinned, useless, under his back. The trapped hand was stuck to the end of a ruined arm. A twisting break in his humerus jutted through the skin of his biceps, and breaks in both bones of that same forearm allowed the limb to double back on itself.
His opposite leg, the right leg, pointed straight up bent the wrong way at the knee. As Crooked Tree opened his eyes for the first time on the ground, his first image was his right leg flopping to the side, so badly reversed that he could see the upside-down sole of his right foot.
He shut his eyes and took inventory. He could hear his own heartbeat, sense his own breathing, and even feel his fingertips of his right hand brush across his stomach, but he felt no pain. His eyes flew open as he realized what he had become.
Crooked Tree moaned and understood that he must have died and instantly become a roaming spirit. Glancing around, noticing that his family all lay perfectly still, he understood that he was the lone roaming spirit of his extinct family. The weight of the responsibility settled on his laboring heart. A new feeling began to awaken in his broken body; it was hunger. He felt hollow. He squinted up at the sun and knew he had to find shelter from the light. Roaming spirits stalked the night, and now that he had become one, he had to seek a place to wait.
Even divorced from pain, his ability to move was severely hampered by his injuries. He pushed back with his right arm and managed to elevate his head a few inches. His breath hitched and his body convulsed until he managed to cough out a mouthful of thick blood. He spit to the side and a glob of phlegmy blood splattered on the forehead of his dead cousin.
Crooked Tree didn’t worry about the cough or the dozens of lacerations he saw in his flesh, he simply scanned the cliff until he found what he needed. Up the slope a dozen paces, a jagged rock created a dark shadow. He reached back with his good arm and grabbed at the sharp, blood-soaked rocks. Pulling with his arm and pushing with his left leg, Crooked Tree carved slow progress to the shallow cave, leaving blood and bits of flesh in his wake.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Davey
“HAVE YOU BEEN FEELING OKAY LATELY?” Melanie asked her son. She gripped the steering wheel at ten and two, compulsively checking her mirrors every ten seconds, and staying alert to the traffic around her.
“What do you mean?” asked Davey without looking up from his video game.
She glanced over her shoulder to look at Davey in the back seat. “I wish you wouldn’t play that in the car. You know it makes you sick,” she said.
“Mom, that was forever ago. I don’t get sick anymore.”
“Well still, it’s pretty rude when I’m trying to have a conversation with you,” she said.
Davey paused his game and looked out the window. Attuned to his mother’s moods, Davey knew that such talk led to direct orders. He had learned that by turning his attention to his mother in these situations, he could often avoid the impending decree.
“Thank you,” said Melanie, glancing back again. “So you feel normal?”
“Sure,” he replied. “I guess.”
“Everything okay at school?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Have you decided if you want to play baseball this summer?” she prodded. Switching randomly between topics sometimes startled Davey into revealing something.
“Yeah.” He maintained his complacency.
“Are you sleeping okay?”
“Sure,” he said, hesitating.
Melanie waited to see if he would make the connection to something else.
“Hey Mom?”
“Yeah?”
“You know right before you’re going to fall asleep?”
“Sure,” she replied.
“What happens if you open your eyes and you see something? Does that make it real?” he asked.
“No honey,” she replied. “You can’t just make something real by dreaming about it.”
“I’m not talking about dreaming,” he protested. “You know that time when things are possible? Like that time with the sideways-head thing?”
“Oh Davey, that wasn’t real. That was Dad’s accident, remember?” she asked.
“That wasn’t Dad,” he objected.
“I know it’s hard to think about,” she said. “But sometimes people have accidents and they get hurt, but you can’t just make that happen because you thought about it,” she thought back to that night two years ago, when her husband died. Since that night, she had convinced herself that when Davey had seen his dad, contorted and deceased, he’d made up his story about the sideways-head thing. “Have you been thinking about Dad?”
“No,” he said quickly. “I know Dad is gone. I’ve been thinking about the underground guy. I think he’s asleep, but he’s trying to wake up.”
Melanie wanted to pull over, but forced herself to keep the car on the road. Considering her own fragile emotions, she wanted to project an air of normalcy, and thought that pulling over to interrogate Davey would just scare him. “What’s that?”
“When I’m about to go to sleep, I see the underground guy. He’s been asleep for a long time, but he’s waking up now. He thinks that I’m dangerous,” said Davey.
“Davey, where are you getting this? Who’s been telling you this stuff?” she asked.
“I told you—right before I go to sleep,” he replied.
“Why don’t you tell me about school. How was your day yesterday?” she asked.
“It was okay,” he said.
“What happened?”
“We had a substitute,” he said. “I didn’t like her.”
“Why not?” she asked, slowing for a stop sign. She adjusted her rearview mirror so she could see his face as he looked out his window.
“Remember how I took my soccer ball, so I could play with it at recess?” he asked.
“Yes, I told you it would be too cold,” she said.
“I wasn’t cold,” he said, “but when we went out, that kid Ted said I had to give him my soccer ball.”
“Did you tell the teacher?” asked Melanie.
“I couldn’t, because Ted tried to take it from me as soon as we were outside,” he said.
“But you could go tell your teacher and she would make Ted give it back,” argued Melanie.
“I told you, I couldn’t. We had a substitute, so Mrs. Roberts wasn’t there.”
Melanie took a deep breath, balancing her need for logic with wanting to hear the rest of the story.
“So Ted just grabbed it as soon as we were outside and I told him to give it back, but he said no,” said Davey. “I hate that kid.”
“Davey,” she warned, “don’t say you hate him.”
“I do though,” said Davey. “I tried to grab the ball back, but he held on to it really tight and I couldn’t get it away. He said he was going to beat me up, but I grabbed him. He got me on the ground and I couldn’t get up, but his leg was right there, so I bit him. That made him let go. Then the substitute made me go inside and asked if I knew how to tell time. She told me to sit right there until quarter-of, and I missed all of recess.”
A honk from the car behind snapped Melanie from her concentration. She snapped back around, checked both ways, and pulled through the intersection. She glanced in the rearview and saw that Davey had retrieved his video game.