Steps (2 page)

Chapter 3

Footprints   
(Edwin)

E
dwin knelt and motioned for Perry to do the same. The boy paced beside him, never behind, because you don’t want an armed child behind you with a shotgun full of squirrel-shot. Edwin put a finger to his lips and pointed at the trees.

They waited, and after a while Perry said, “Dad?”

Edwin put his finger to his lips again. He should not have brought the boy. Perry started to stand, but Edwin touched his shoulder and guided him back down. He leaned close to his son’s ear and whispered, “Sit still and do what I tell you. They can hear us and smell us before we can see ’em.”

“How hard is it to find a stupid squirrel?” Perry said it too loud. There was a rustle in the trees ahead of them and the bounce of a limb. He should not have brought the boy.

“Dangit, son.” Edwin stood. He raised his voice because it no longer mattered. “Fine. Let’s do it the hard way. This is the last time I bring you, though. Walk around the tree.”

“Over there?”

“Yeah, it’s a pecan tree. He’s waiting up there for us. Don’t point your gun at me. Point it up at the top of the tree, and don’t swipe it across anything you don’t mean to shoot. I’ll go around over here and see if we can flush him to one side of the tree. If you see him, open up, but don’t shoot me. You understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now go over there and keep your gun pointed up. Watch your step, son.”

Edwin circled the pecan tree with his shotgun pointed up, checking the treetop, listening for the scratch of little feet or the chatter of a little mouth. He heard nothing and saw no limbs bounce. He and Perry spiraled in until they met beneath the tree, and Edwin said, “He went to ground. I know where he is, though. I’ll come back in the morning, and tomorrow we’ll have some squirrel stew.”

“Can I shoot him?”

“I said I wasn’t bringing you. You stomp around like a drunk monkey. We’re not out here to horse around. We need food, son.”

“I’ll be quiet, Dad.”

“Well, you show me how quiet you can be when we head back, and I’ll think about it. Now look around for pecans. See if you can find ones that aren’t black or split. Those are rotten. You want the brown ones.” Edwin toed the leaves on the ground, soggy, mud up to his ankles in most places, to his calves in others, mud inside his boots and all over his pants and shirt. Only the gun remained clean. He leaned down and picked up a pecan. “Like this one. Brown.”

“Okay, Dad.”

“And keep your gun clean, son. Nothing else matters but to keep your gun clean.”

“Yes, sir.”

He set Perry to finding pecans and hiked farther on. It had been too long since he hunted; high school, and the last time involved a mother bunny, whose pink babies spilled out with her guts. Something about the dead bunnies haunted him, and he had not hunted since.

He heard a flutter of wings and a chirp. He froze. He swiveled and brought the gun to bear on the ruddy-brown chest of a female redbird as she flitted through the roots of a downed tree. The gunshot startled the silence and ended the redbird.

He carried the bird by the legs. Perry met him halfway to the pecan tree.

“Dad?”

“Be quiet, boy.”

“Did you get one?”

“Be quiet, boy.”

Edwin handed the bird to Perry. His son rotated the bird in his hands, spread the wings, played with the lolling head, and touched its claws. “Sharp.”

“All birds have sharp claws. Did you find some pecans?”

Perry patted his front pockets. They were stuffed.

“Good. Now show me how quiet you can be heading back to camp. No more talking, and walk like I showed you. If I stop, you stop, and don’t move until I tell you to move.”

“Yes, sir.”

Edwin led the way Indian style, slightly crouched with long, slow, balanced strides, if not as long and balanced as they had been in his youth. Perry settled into the slower gait silently. When they reached the cabin, he showed Perry how to clean the bird, and he boiled it in the cabin fireplace while Amalie, Shelly Lynn, and Perry hovered behind him holding tin coffee cups. He had not realized how hungry he was until the smell hit him.

“Is it ready, Daddy?” Shelly Lynn asked.

“Not yet, Baby Bird.”

After a while, she said, “Is it ready, Daddy?”

“Just about. Meat’s not quite done. Why don’t you count to a hundred for me, slow. I bet it’ll be done by the time you get there.”

“One. Two. Three.”

Shelly Lynn counted. Edwin stirred the soup and stoked the fire. It was a long count to one hundred. When she finished, Edwin took her cup and scooped in some of the soup. He filled Perry’s cup, and then Amalie’s.

“Are you going to eat?” Amalie asked.

“You all eat first. Have seconds if you want. Perry did a good job finding pecans, and tomorrow we should have squirrel.”

Edwin rested the spoon on the hearth, took up his shotgun, and walked into the driveway. He fought against the slip of the mud. He listened to the trees. When the wind rustled the leaves, leftover rainwater fell in a memorial sprinkle. Somewhere a bird chirped, one of the little ones, sounded like a sparrow or a wren or one of those small birds not worth shooting.

The ruts at the end of the driveway sunk as deep as his kneecaps, sharp grooves cut by the rainwater. He stepped over one. His foot caught the far edge and shot out from under him, and he saw his boot in the air where his chest should be. He shoved the shotgun over his head and away from the mud, but it cost him a blow to the back of his skull and all of the air in his lungs. He lay watching the trees spin until the ringing stopped. Then he stood without using his hands, to keep the shotgun clean.

The road dropped off into a stand of trees, a valley, up another mountain, down again, all of it a wrinkled mess of rocks and trees in the middle of Nothingland, Arkansas. Mudslides cleaved out sections of the mountain’s muddy undercoat and left it wrinkled at the base of the hills.

He hiked along the road, avoiding the edge lest he slip again. Nothing moved in the trees, and what flew was either too far, too fast, or too small to hunt. Eventually he came to a tall pine standing alone among its fallen neighbors. The limbs had been stripped, and on this vantage point perched a hawk. He stopped and crouched. Quietly, he shucked through the birdshot in the shotgun until he chambered the four-shot, something with a little range on it. He stuffed the ejected shells in his back pocket. Inching forward, he held the shotgun aimed at the hawk until he reached the range of the four-shot, and no closer. He fired, and the bird tumbled off the limb, shook its wings, and fluttered to the ground.

Edwin left the shotgun leaned next to a tree because he needed both hands to fight the muddy slope. He made his way to the hawk, wedged its head beneath his belt, and cinched his belt an extra notch. Then he climbed back up the mountainside, almost vertical, his chest pinned against the mud, his face inches from the ground.

When he reached the road, he lay there a moment and caught his breath. His stomach growled and his hands shook from hunger. Even the mud smelled food-ish. He closed his eyes, stuck his nose to the ground and willed the sensation of taste into his throat. He mingled a roasted hawk with the nutty grit of warmed pecans and mint tea, and when he opened his eyes he leapt to his feet.

He had not seen it before, but footprints much larger than his padded across the road. Now he had stabbed his nose into one. The print measured as long as his arm, barefoot with the splayed toes of a man who had never wedged his feet into a shoe. He marked the stride at six, maybe seven feet. Holding his hand to measure the spread of it, forearm-deep in the mud, he scanned around and found a few more. His boot prints pressed over and around several of them. He had thought they were ruts among the ruts.

He cleaned his hands on the inside leg of his pants, grabbed the gun, cycled through the loads until he chambered a slug, and reloaded the rest.

Edwin hiked back up the mountain road toward the cabin. The footprints continued until they dove into the woods, aimed toward his family.

They were on the front porch as he made his way up the driveway, Amalie in her rocking chair, Perry and Shelly Lynn in the mud working with rocks and sticks, poking at some sort of structure they had built.

“Shot a hawk,” Edwin said. “Gonna eat good tonight. We have any pecans left?”

Amalie shook her head. “Shelly Lynn finished them off. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Nah. We know where the tree is, and where there’s one, there’s bound to be a couple more. Perry and I’ll head out tomorrow and see if we can bag a squirrel.” He pointed over his shoulder. “We won’t make it down in the Tahoe. Need a good four-wheel drive for that run. It’ll take a week before it dries out enough. I think we’ll be all right, though. The game’ll come out now that it stopped raining, and they’ll be as hungry as we are. Perry, come on and meet me behind the back porch.”

“Why?” Perry said.

“Because I said so. Come on. I need to clean up, and so do you.”

Edwin unstrapped the hawk from his belt and propped it on the porch railing in front of Amalie. “Dinner.”

“A week?” Amalie asked.

“We’ll be all right.”

“I lost eight pounds. Shelly Lynn’s lost six. She’s thirty-three pounds, now.”

“We’ll be all right.”

“I hope so. Thank you, by the way.”

“For what?”

She pointed at the hawk.

“You’re welcome. Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, and that one was lucky. We’ll be all right, so long as we keep being lucky.”

“And if we stop being lucky?”

“Then I’ll be good. Quit worrying.”

Edwin followed Perry around the corner of the cabin. He held the water hose while Perry washed his hands and face, and then Perry held it for him. When they shook the water off their hands, Edwin said, “Look. I want you to do something for me, and it’s a no-messing-around thing. It’s serious. You understand?”

“Yes, sir. Like what, Dad?”

“Like this. I need you to keep that shotgun of yours close-by. Sleep with it. Don’t keep a round chambered, but keep it loaded. You understand what I mean?”

“Yes, sir. Load it, but don’t pump it.”

“Right.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so. If your momma asks, tell her it’s in case we see game around the cabin.”

“That’s not why?”

Edwin glanced at the trees, the ones leading back to the road and the footprints. “Yeah, son. That’s why. Tell your momma if she asks. Now get your shotgun and stay out of the mud.”

Chapter 4

Welcome to Camp Mayberry   
(Gentry)

P
rivate Dillon Gentry had never driven a bulldozer before Camp Mayberry. He had grown up on a ranch, a place with cows and horses and a hillside covered with Bahia grass and Indian Paintbrush. A place with a long creek and two oil wells to which they owned no mineral rights, but they made a little on the lease permits. Gentry had driven mowers, balers and diggers, and he knew how to drive all sorts of trucks, but he had never driven anything with treads.

It handled different than tractors and trucks, but it didn’t take long to figure out how to use the levers to steer the bulldozer, and how to lift and lower the scoop. It was simple, really.

Gentry had horse-sense, that’s what Sergeant-Major Walthers told him. “You got horse-sense, Genny, climb on up and figure this out.” The gas mask muffled Sarge’s voice, his eyes glazed and sweaty behind the plastic. He resembled an over-heated green spaceman in his gas suit. They all did.

They both stood wide-eyed over the scene for a few seconds, quiet that first night. They all grew quiet sometimes, especially in the dark, and then the Sergeant-Major added, “Hell, Genny, if a country bumpkin like you can’t figure it out, ain’t none of us going to figure it out. Now hustle up and back this thing off the trailer. Then get to work.”

Gentry lowered the scoop on the bulldozer and tried to think about anything except his work. He focused on the mechanisms of the bulldozer, pull the lever, work the scoop, lever-scoop-lever. He remembered fields like this, an endless rolling green wave during the daytime. If you watched long enough, you might see the hills shift beneath the grass, and the cows and wildflowers ripple with their passing. He thought of the sky, and the smell of horses and fresh-cut hay, and the sounds of an uninterrupted country night.

In front of the bulldozer, their arms waved at him as he shoved them into the trench. Their legs flailed and their heads lobbed. Rigor mortis had set in on them, and they stood and tumbled upright into the trench atop rigid legs and rigid backbones. They became bloated, inhuman things, limp and lifeless with broken joints twisted in sick directions. Their heads bobbed backward on crumpled shoulders as if they had been deboned. Women, children, men, babies, and people of every color blended into a singular race of gray-black lifeless pulp. The trucks dumped them into piles. The sanitation team hosed them down. Gentry and the other dozer grunts pushed them into the trench.

The trucks never stopped coming. A string of headlights stretched off into the darkness like a glowing worm. A count formed in Gentry’s head, calculating the number of bodies per truck, multiplying the number of trucks that had come and would come. When he reached a number with six figures, he lost count. Gentry stopped thinking and focused on the bulldozer levers and the sweat dripping down his nose inside his gas mask. He thought of quiet country nights beneath a bright full moon. He thought of nights like this, but without the bulldozers, trucks, and the waving arms of tumbling corpses. After a while, he cut off his headlights. Nobody seemed to mind that he worked by the more forgiving moonlight. One by one, the other trucks and bulldozers and tractors did the same, and for the rest of the night they worked in the bliss of moon glow.

At 0100 he killed the diesel, and a hundred engines around him rumbled and died. The Earth shook one last time as the diesels clanked into a silent sleep. Then they were all plunged into a quiet black with only the sounds of rustling gas suits and men’s voices hollering.

“I’d blow a donkey for a cigarette.”

“I got your donkey.
Bra-bra
.”

“You ain’t got no cigarette or a donkey. Shut the hell up.”

“Genny, that you? We’re over here.”

The last voice was Sarge, all of them anonymous and muffled in their suits. Gentry fell in with his Dirty Dozen as Sarge and the other leaders yelled through their hoods, “Keep the gaps, boys, maintain your gap! Seventy paces between you!”

The hood suffocated him, and his face felt melted, even though the temperature outside was a cool sixty-five Fahrenheit. Gentry kept his gap, following Leroy and Billings, with Sarge in the lead and the others to the rear.

Gentry raised his hands and spun as the sanitation team foamed him. He scrubbed the suit with his gloved hands, rubbed foam between his fingers, around the eye-sockets, between his legs and beneath his arms. He rubbed it into the folds, spun as they sprayed him a second time, and repeated the scrubbing process.

Outside his tent he un-smocked with the rest of them. He hung his suit on the night rack, removed his flashlight and held it between his teeth as he pored over his suit, searching for damage, wear, tears, anything that might allow viral entry.

It was painstaking, serious work, the work of a man in a minefield with a bayonet, poking, inching forward, aware of how much a mistake might cost him and his team.

Gentry didn’t notice the group of yellow-suited docs who approached the tent. They smelled of fresh foam, were wet and slick from it. “Dirty Eight-One Delta?” one of them said. Three others flanked her.

“That’s us,” Sarge answered. He hadn’t noticed the doctors either, none of them had, but when Sarge spoke, all the men stopped their inspections and listened.

“Please line up,” she said.

“What’s this about?” Sarge said.

“Please line up,” she repeated.

Sarge flicked off his inspection light and motioned for the rest of them to do the same. He lined up first between the four yellow-suits. One of them produced a jet-injector and screwed in a gas canister and a glass tube with a clear liquid. Another lifted Sarge’s sleeve, sprayed his shoulder with a bloody-red burst of iodine, and another asked his name, rank, number, and wrote it long-hand on a clipboard. The yellow-suit delivered the shot with a muffled whump, and Sarge stepped out of the way.

Billings stepped up next, and then Gentry. Behind the yellow mask a pair of eyes stared back at him eye-level, because the doc was his height. They were dark eyes bent to serious business, but they lingered just long enough for him to sense something primal. “Name, rank, serial,” she said.

Her nametag read
D. Moore
. “What’s the D for?” Gentry asked.

“Darcy.” She plunged the injector into his arm. “Name, rank, serial.”

Gentry complied and moved to the end of the line. Leroy stepped up, then the others, and when the docs finished they fell back from the tent where a sanitation team waited. After the san-team foamed them, the docs marched on to the next tent, seventy paces away.

Gentry rubbed his arm and they stared at each other.

“You think that was the magic bullet?” Billings asked.

“Only if it puts you out of my misery,” Leroy answered.

“Ha freaking ha,” Billings said. “I bet this don’t work on beaners. It’s one of them racist magic bullets.”

“Then your black ass is fucked, too, bro.”

They looked at each other for a moment, and then put flashlights between their teeth and resumed inspections. The flashlight tasted of dirt and grit, and Gentry tumbled the name
Darcy
over in his head so he would not forget, just in case he met her in some other world, in some other time.