The Pines (3 page)

The bald head of the dead man was splattered and darkening, and he stank of booze and other things, his abdomen a shredded pile that slopped through lacy layers of fat. When the ambulance rattled through a series of rapid lurches, the ruined organs quivered, slipping farther down, and fleshy tendrils vibrated toward the floor. Doris mumbled something about the damn road, and Jack replied with something about a tune-up and new shocks.

Athena tossed a blanket over the body. They were still a good twenty miles away from the nearest hospital.

…and Mary Bradley knelt in black water. The marsh was a darkly flooded vision of hell, and the nightmare landscape revolved, rushing with the blood that streamed down her left side.

“No! Please!”

Circling, the thing lunged. It tore at her, ripped her soft breasts, and the force of the attack sent her rolling in the morass. Now glimpsed in scattered moonlight, now invisible in shadow, the thing backed off, moving through dark water with incredible speed, again circling.

“Stay away from—!” A mouthful of warm, stagnant water stopped her screams as something spurted from beneath her rent T-shirt. She staggered to her feet, slipped in slimy muck and went down in a sitting position. Half submerged, she watched the red spot on her shirt spread, watched the water around her darken. “Don’t hurt me.”

It surged toward her. She was jerked upright. Struggling, she beat wildly, beads of blood flying as it lashed at her. She was thrown against a dead sapling, and the pine toppled, easily uprooted in the muck.

She came down on one knee in shallow water. Splashing, slapping noises surrounded her in the dark. She slid backward, falling across a mound of hard earth. If she could only rise…

Scrambling on all fours, she heaved out of the ooze, tried to get to her feet.

With a leap, it was on her back, wet and heavy. “Help me!” It pounded her to the ground with hammering blows. “Oh God!”

Again, it backed away.

Face in the mud, she listened, struggling to stay conscious. Her skull felt as though it had been crushed. Distantly, she heard it snarl with obscene ferocity.

Then it closed again and flipped her onto her back.

Weakly now, she flailed, as cloth and flesh ripped away. Belly exposed and white, she lay quivering, throbbing with pain. The thing leaned over her—huge, hot, dripping—and she trembled convulsively, closing her eyes hard, her body rigid, as the thing pressed against her, reeking breath in her face.

And then the forcing…enormous pressure…her screams emerging as mangled chokes.

“No!”
it hurts
“Don’t!”
oh dear God oh it hurts
“Please!”

It gripped her, plunging, clawing.

“don’t”

Her body arched in spasms, legs jerking as the bloody remnants of her urine-soaked cutoffs bunched at her knees, bound her stiffened limbs. She heard her own flesh ripping, as a sound emerged from deep within the thing—a groan of pleasure. Her mind retreated.

As it pounded and clutched, her bare back jerked from the mud again and again, her skin grinding against the coarse sand with each thrust. Her eyes opened: flesh hung from her left arm in a flap, veins laid open and pumping fluid, bone exposed to the moonlight.

It pushed hard, harder, until something swelled and burst within her. Numb, she rocked with pressure, the flap of skin swaying, dripping, as dark rivulets ran along the folds of her stomach and trickled over her side, making thick black coils in the sand.

The crickets sang.

my string bag…I’ve lost my…
Her hands twitched feebly on the ground, nothing but wet sand in the flesh between her fingers.

“Hey, we got company.” Jack leaned out the window.

Outside, swirling lights and a siren gained on them, the siren switching off suddenly. Somebody yelled, and Jack laughed. “What’s that? Yeah, she’s in here.”

“Watch what you’re…!” Doris sputtered. “What the hell you slowing down for?”

Athena stood up, wobbling. “Is that Barry?”

“What?” Outside, the siren screamed on again, cutting Jack off in midshout, and the police car swiftly pulled away from them. “They must of got a call,” said Jack over his shoulder.

“Barry’s going to hear about this! He can’t be holding us up like that—we could’ve had a patient in here for all he knows. For crying out loud, you’d think Steve at least would have better sense.”

“Come on, Doris,” Jack said. “They got a radio. They must of heard us call the hospital—Steve knows we got a dead ’un. Hey, before I forget, you know you got to drop me back at my car, don’t you?”

“I know it.”

“Just so’s I don’t get stuck like last time. I can’t believe I was the first one on the scene again. That’s three times in a row.”

Athena limped toward the front of the rig. Doris stood aside to let her pass, watching her walk, feeling the familiar tug, deep inside.

“Can you raise them?”

“You want to try?” asked Jack, not looking up.

Athena sat next to him and impatiently fiddled with the radio. “I can’t get anything. What did he yell?”

He navigated a series of rough turns. “Something about meeting you at the diner.”

“Real discreet,” Doris muttered. Slipping in blood, she lost her footing for a moment and steadied herself against the soft pile on the stretcher. “Shit. You’d think by now I’d at least know how to ride in an ambulance without falling over.” She wiped her hands on her jeans and reached behind the oxygen cylinder. “This tank’s almost empty. I’d like to know how in hell I’m supposed to run a rescue team without O
₂
”. She found the thermos bottle. “’Kill for a cigarette.”

“What’re you grumbling about back there?” yelled Jack. “You know you ain’t allowed to smoke in here, Doris.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she muttered and concentrated on sipping coffee without spilling it. “Just shut up and drive.”

“Forget it,” said Jack, noticing Athena’s attempt to roll down a window. “Stuck again.”

“Great.” As pines rushed past on either side, Athena felt the ground drumming beneath her, lulling her. Yet she sat very stiff, very straight. “In this heat.”

They all lapsed into a hot, weary silence. The right headlight, pointing upward at a crazy angle, raked across roadside trees.

Athena tried to concentrate on the radio but could only get static. “One more thing that needs fixing.” Hypnotic, the woods rolled endlessly past the window, formless as storm clouds. Suddenly, she leaned forward. For an instant, she thought she’d seen a beast trotting at the edge of the road.

“The woods still bother you, don’t they, kid?”

She started. Doris had come up behind her.

“Doris, don’t you know by now our ’Thena ain’t afraid of nothing?” Jack laughed. “Hey, you found the coffee? Gimme some.”

Athena looked away from the window. “What happened to his wife?”

“Whose wife, honey?”

She jerked a thumb toward the back of the rig. “I thought she wanted to ride with us.”

“I wasn’t going to let her in here. You kidding? The way he looks? I don’t know where she is though. Jack?”

“Neighbors had her when we pulled out.”

He switched on the siren, and it drowned his words, washing them away from Athena. Headlights gleamed off orange reflective disks by the roadside, and she watched as—faintly lit—they sank, dissolved in darkness one by one.

“No, they don’t bother me,” she began. “As a kid, I used to have nightmares about being lost in the woods. When you consider it, that shows rather a lot of imagination for a child in Queens.” She tried to laugh. “Don’t you think?”

“That all there was to the dream? Just the woods? Go on.”

But the younger woman stayed silent, lost in memories of lying awake, of the crutches by the bed, of her dream closing on her. Knowing that she couldn’t run had always made it worse. She’d always known that her grandmother would come if she cried out. But she hadn’t cried. Not ever. Too proud, even then. And throughout her childhood, through her adolescent spells of sleepwalking, every night the dark had swallowed her.

The mouth of a side road rushed past, opening deep into the woods.

“Yeah, honey, dreams can sure be rough on a little kid.” Even as she spoke, Doris felt the inadequacy of her words, and when Jack snorted in derision, she turned on him gratefully. “So what’s your problem? I suppose you never had a bad dream?”

“Who me? I never had no kind of dream in my whole life.”

“That’s not the way your mother tells it.”

“Shut up, Doris. What happened to that coffee anyways? Don’t I get any?”

“Not from what I hear. Watch your driving. Besides, it’s against the rules to have coffee in here anyways.”

“You’re drinking it!”

“I’m the squad captain.”

Athena only half-listened to them. The night overwhelmed her. Swelling like a huge black wave, it could flood across the highway, crush their tiny particle of light and movement, drown them all in darkness. She forced herself to look away, then leaned over to check Jack’s watch. “Did Barry say anything else?”

The thing in the back had stopped dripping, and as the ambulance barreled through the night, streetlights began to emerge, beacons of order in the chaos of the dark.

A thought stirred.
ohgodohgod it hurts
The amphetamines coursing through what remained of Mary Bradley’s blood system inexorably forced her toward something near consciousness.

She had no body, no localized perceptions. Enclosed by silence, she knew only the shape and size of absolute blackness, hot and suffocating.

Memory leaked—a nightmare of herself whirled and slashed through bleeding skeletons of trees. Awareness seeped back. She lay inside…a cave? A pit? A grave? And she seemed to be soaking in a puddle, could feel it on her shoulders and buttocks, thick and sticky like paint, crusty around the edges.

where
It seemed she should have arms, and she recalled things done in the mind to move an arm.
ohgod what
She wondered if her eyes were open.
dead

A hand fell upon herself, and memory flooded.
swamp and
Her fingers slipped along her gouged and oozing stomach, slid to wet and softly mangled places. She shook with nausea, and the movement created searing pain.

An oval area of lighter darkness was eclipsed, then reappeared, like an entrance momentarily blocked. She realized her eyes were open, and through the dampening field of pain, she heard sounds: straining breath, slavering growl.

It scrambled closer. She barely felt its damp breath on her thigh, barely felt the teeth.

The old Plymouth rushed along the paved road, headlights lancing the haze. Telephone poles loomed past repetitiously. Even dead tired, Athena Lee Monroe drove extremely well.
But then
this girl is good at everything.
She grinned humorlessly at the thought. She’d been stood up again.

The Chamong Diner was shabby and none too clean. This evening, Doris and Jack and some buddy of Jack’s named Larry had all stopped in, and the talk had been loud and cheery, what with the guys bullshitting about scuba diving and backpacking and all the women they were screwing, and Doris regaling them with hair-raising anecdotes from her days as coroner. Drinking coffee and watching the door, Athena had sat at the booth for hours, barely joining in the conversation, just toying restlessly with little packets of sugar and choking on the smoke from Doris’s cigarettes.

When she’d finally given up hope of seeing Barry, the others had tried to keep her with them, but she’d resisted, knowing they’d be there till dawn or until old man Sims chased them out. Passing the phone booth in the parking lot, she’d longed to call Barry…but Cathy would have gotten suspicious.

She smiled sourly.
Now why should calling at two
A.M.
make his
wife suspicious?
Shaking her head, she recalled the contempt she’d always felt for her aunt’s sordid little intrigues. How Aunt Jeanie would crow to see her now
. Not that she would see me.
She understood too well how completely her family had disowned her after her marriage.

The car lost speed, drifting to a stop at the mouth of a sand road. The way home. Just beyond the bright haze of her headlights, the side road plunged deep into the forest.

Dashboard dials gleamed a pale, plastic green, and her hands looked ghostly in the glow as she touched the radio scanner beside her on the seat, drew her fingertips across its tiny red light. Bracing herself, she fought down the familiar moment of panic.
The way home.
Mindful of the bogs on either side of the road, she drove carefully, fervently wishing she had somewhere else to go.

Home.
She thought of her grandmother’s house and smiled. On Athena’s ninth birthday, Granny Lee had given her a collection of children’s stories and poems. Vaguely, she wondered what had become of that book. Did she still have it somewhere, packed away with the rest of her past? She could still recall one of those stories, about a hag who lived along a dismal swamp. She tried to convince herself that it amused her to have become that woman.

Jagged darkness pressed around as the old automobile jounced over the uneven road. Downshifting, she slowed the Plymouth to a crawl…and the headlights found strange patches in the sand.

It could almost be blood. “Only children are afraid of the dark,” she said aloud. After that, she drove with deliberate slowness, fighting the urge to floor the gas pedal.
Nothing is watching
me.
Mosquitoes roiled in her headlight beams. They swarmed along the road, teemed in and out of the windows in this muggy heat. A road sign, riddled with bullets, crawled past, warning motorists about the proximity of the state hospital.
The insane
asylum.
She brushed away thoughts of her mother and resolutely searched for something on which to fix her mind.

Once, she’d seen an aerial photo of the barrens, the highways like razor-thin incisions. The photograph had trembled in her hands. She thought of pictures she’d seen of Canada’s Great North Woods—giant and majestic—but here, in the forests that stretched through most of southern central New Jersey, the barren sands could produce no such growth.