Steps (10 page)

Chapter 19

Naked Woman   
(Gentry)

G
entry held Sarge’s left arm as he, Billings, Arroyo, and Fletcher carried him by his limbs through the forest toward the cabin. They ran at that steady, awkward clip as dictated by Billings’ busted leg, and Gentry could see that Billings hated the halting gait, like a man running upstream against the current, and just as helpless to change it.

Edwin and Perry ran ahead and out of sight, and after a while Gentry heard yelling over his heavy breathing and the grunts of the other men.

“Hold up,” Billings said. He glanced at Sarge and said what the other men already knew, and they placed Sarge’s body on the forest floor and bolted toward the cabin.

The yelling died off as they neared the cabin. Billings led and did not slow until they reached the front of the cabin, in the driveway where Edwin had burned the bodies. Edwin lay in the gravel, bloodied but conscious, and he tried to stand but fell on a busted, twisted ankle.

Edwin pointed down the driveway. “He stole the truck. I think Amy and Shelly Lynn are with him.”

“Who stole the truck?” Billings said.

Gentry didn’t wait for the answer, because there was only one answer, and he ran down the driveway toward the truck parked near the road. He heard the unmistakable thump of a shotgun, followed by the screams of a child.

Riggs lay beside the truck, and beyond that stood Perry with his shotgun. There was a large hole in Riggs and the side of the truck, all of it smattered with pulled-pork-looking pieces of bloody flesh and a tremendous amount of blood. Inside the truck Shelly Lynn wailed. Her mother tried to shush the child through her broken jaw.

“He tried to take my momma and sister,” Perry said. “And he hurt my dad. He beat him up and stomped his foot and—”

“You’re not on trial,” Gentry said. He stopped and held out a hand. The expression in Perry’s eyes ignited terror in him, and he wanted to take cover, but he stood firm. “You did good, you did good. Now let’s take it down a notch.”

Billings appeared, and when the boy saw him, his face changed. It did not soften that Gentry could see, but became sharper, more edged and firm, far too stern and hard for a boy who had probably never kissed a girl.

“Shoulder your weapon, soldier,” Billings said. At first Perry did not move, and so Billings added, “Do it now, Maggot. You’re done shooting for the day. You copy?”

“Sir, yes sir,” Perry said.

“Gentry here is going to take you up to the cabin and check on your dad. Fletcher and Arroyo will stay here with me. You keep your weapon shouldered or I’ll make it mine and you’ll be using rocks and sticks. I don’t care what else you see or hear or what else happens. I got a titanium foot I’ll stick up your ass if you so much as take your weapon off safety. You copy, Maggot?”

“Sir, yes sir,” Perry said.

Perry seemed cowed, and a little ashamed, and so Gentry added, “You did good today. He did good, right Billings?”

“Best I ever seen,” Billings said, meaning it. Fletcher and Arroyo added their approval, and that seemed to take the edge off Perry’s hurt expression.

Gentry grasped Perry by his side, and they shuffled toward the cabin. Edwin met them halfway, leaning on a stick for balance.

“They’re all right, all of them,” Gentry said. “Billings and them will take care of your girls, Edwin.” Gentry motioned with his eyes down to Perry, and Edwin seemed to understand what he meant.

“Why don’t you help me back up to the cabin, son,” Edwin said. He handed his shotgun to Gentry, motioned for Perry to do the same, and then slung his arm around Perry and hobbled back up the hill.

Gentry paced ahead of them and laid the shotguns on the master bed. He ran water in two cups and had them waiting when Perry and his father collapsed onto the couch. Perry drank his in one long swill, and then he stared out the window and said nothing at all. Edwin watched his son and rested a hand on his back.

The boy’s back tightened, followed by the sounds of retching and the smatter of vomit on the wooden floor. Gentry removed two towels from beneath the sink and carried the kitchen trashcan over to Perry. He aimed the boy’s head over the can, and as he cleaned the vomit from the floor, the boy heaved another mouthful of bile into it, spat, wiped his mouth, stood, and stumbled to the bay window.

“Perry,” Edwin said.

The boy shook his head, and Gentry put his finger to his lips to silence Edwin.

When he finished, Gentry rinsed the towels in the sink, soaked one, wrung it, handed it to Edwin, and said, “It ain’t ice, but wrap it on your foot anyway. It’s still pretty cool water. Is it broke?”

“I don’t think so. Bruised, sprained.”

“We have wraps in our field kit. Let Fletcher take a look at it when he gets back. He’s had some field med training.” He leaned to Edwin’s ear and whispered, “And let that boy of yours soak a little. He has to find his compartments, where he can file what all’s happened to him. It’s like building little rooms in your head where you keep the good things separate from the bad things, so one doesn’t spoil the other. That’s what he’s doing. Let him soak.”

Edwin nodded, and Gentry ran a hand over Perry’s shoulder as he passed, squeezed, said nothing at all as he walked out onto the patio.

Gentry heard footsteps out front, but nothing from the woods behind the cabin. The front door opened, closed, and there were voices behind him. The loud one was the woman, Amalie. She screamed through her broken jaw, slurred but sharp as a steel-tipped spear, and she aimed at Edwin’s chest, right where his heart would be. The words sounded painful in every respect: physically, emotionally, spiritually, harming everyone in earshot, and Gentry imagined that must have been just what she meant.

Gentry did not turn when the back door opened and Arroyo sidled next to him. They waited until the screaming died off behind them, and then Arroyo said, “They just started firing at us, chico.”

“I know.”

“No, you don’t know. It was like them people in the cabin, only these guys were trained and armed, and on the hunt and stuff. They opened up like we come from the depths of hell. But it wasn’t like they aimed or nothing, chico. They shot up this whole imaginary army, shouting weird slurs. Guy had that grenade launcher even fired one straight up in the air like he was tracking a bird or a plane or something. Hollering gibberish and stuff. And then Sarge, chico. I don’t think he fired one single shot. He called us off and tried to make peace or something. I think he lost it. You don’t stand up in a firefight.”

“He’s Sarge. He has a different relationship with all of us. He calls us his boys. You know he left his wife down in Killeen, in Fort Hood.”

“We all left somebody somewhere.”

“He received word about a week ago. Hood is a Q-Zone.”

“No fucking way.”

“It’s affirmative, my brother. Told me because I used to be his driver, and because he needed to unload it somewhere. I think his wife is gone, and so are most of the other families from Hood. We agreed not to say nothing to nobody, on account of morale and whatnot. Only reason he found out is because he’s a Sarge-Maj, and he still had a few channels we don’t. Thing is, he knows the score. He
knew
the score. Ain’t much to go home to. Maybe nothing. So why not stand up in a firefight.”

The back door opened and Billings stepped out onto the porch. He pointed with his rifle into the forest where they had fought. “Need to hump back up there before dark, do some recon and collect Sarge. Fletch and I can recon. You two bring in Sarge. Tie him to a branch, hands and feet and carry him between you. You understand what I’m saying? You got cord?”

“Yeah,” Gentry said.

“We’ll bring Goetsch, too,” Arroyo said, but Billings shook his head.

“Leave him. Leave all the other soldiers. Leave their equipment, leave everything. Don’t go near them. Maybe in a week or two we’ll head out and salvage what we can, and maybe we’ll bury or burn them, but we can’t go near—”

“Yaya, chico,” Arroyo said. “We copy. Can’t expose ourselves no more. Come on, Genny.”

It took him and Arroyo half an hour to backtrack where they had dropped Sarge. It was not the distance but the woods they fought. Every direction appeared the same, and Sarge was in his desert grubs, all of him muddy and prone and absolutely still on the forest floor. Gentry split away from Arroyo and they formed an arc between them, sweeping back-and-forth until they found Sarge in the leaves face-down the way they had dropped him. His spine and arms were cocked at an awkward-looking angle, like those waving arms back in Mayberry, before they tumbled over the edge and into the ditch. Gentry almost stepped on him because Sarge had become a log and not a person, and he called out to Arroyo. For a while neither of them said anything, though they both stared down at Sarge as if listening for a voice neither of them could quite make out.

They placed Sarge in the front driveway where Edwin had constructed his original burn pile, and then carried Riggs up the hill and dropped him beside Sarge. Gentry dragged in larger branches while Arroyo formed a bed of smaller branches and leaves and spread the other ashes as if he were afraid that mixing them would be sacrilegious. He mumbled Spanish as he worked, and Gentry thought he recognized it as the Lord’s Prayer. In any case he heard
Dios
and
Madre,
and those were the Spanish words for
God
and
Mother.

Darkness fell as Gentry probed deeper into the woods for larger branches. He carried his rifle as did all of them. His ears perked harder as the light betrayed him and the woods filled with shadows. The trees clapped their limbs in a constant clackity-clack of windblown song. Another sound stopped him. Crouching, he held his breath and listened to what sounded like soft footsteps. The footsteps halted, and were replaced by the husky breathing of someone who had been walking at a brisk pace.

He swiveled his head to the source and thought it might be a trick of shadows that made this figure appear to be a naked woman. He made out the curve of her waist and leg, a length of one arm, and either a disfigurement or a backpack thrown over the other shoulder. Above that rested a head with a tightly drawn ponytail outlined against her neck, all of it so still it could have been carved wood.

Gentry froze and put his hand to his weapon, but she did not seem to notice him, despite the noise he had been making. She focused behind him, toward the cabin lights, and Gentry stared with her, wondering if she were real. Finally he brought the gun to his shoulder and said, “Hello?”

Her head rotated toward him and he knew then she was real. As if to solidify his belief, she said, “He led me to you.”

It did not make sense to Gentry His first instinct suggested gibberish, and he should gun her down, but then she cocked her head as if listening to a voice. “He says to tell you Kelsey is safe with him. She is home.”

Gentry lowered the gun not because he wanted to, but because his arms went slack. He felt deflated by an invisible gut-punch. His knees grew soft until both touched the ground, and the gun fell in front of him. It happened in the span of two heartbeats, and he spoke, kneeling, staring up at the shadow, “What do you mean, Kelsey’s
home
?”

“She is with God,” the woman said.

Chapter 20

Into the Flames   
(Moore)

C
aptain Darcy Moore began to sing. She sang the words as they came to her, not from her mind but from deep within her subconscious, and she forgot them as soon as they passed her lips. She spoke off a record written on her
DNA
in the time of creation. Her rational mind functioned as her lips moved, and she understood the meaning of the words if not the words themselves. She sang of solace and comfort, a song of strength in the face of loss.

The soldier said Kelsey was his daughter, and he listened quietly to her song, as if in confirmation and understanding, with an utter lack of surprise.

Moore stepped nearer and touched his hand. Even in the darkness, he was beautiful. Blood and dirt marked his night’s work along his hands and forearms. Moore pressed his hand against her bare chest. “Do you feel my heart?”

She held his hand against her skin for long minutes, waiting with the patience of the woman in the stream. She imagined holding him this way for all eternity, until the forest consumed and buried them beneath a million years of mulch.

She ran her hand down the length of his arm, and her touch erased the bloodstains and dirt. She repeated the procedure on his other arm and his face, cleansing him as she might rinse an infant.

He inspected his hands, smelled them, and said, “Who? What are you?”

“Darcy Moore, and I am, or I was, a captain in the U.S. Army.”

“Are you infected?” the soldier asked.

“I don’t think so. I haven’t been told.”

“Told by whom?”

“The Embodiment of God.”

“You sound infected,” he said. “Count backwards from twenty in increments of three. Twenty, seventeen, fourteen. Like that.”

Moore counted, and the soldier seemed pacified when she stopped at minus one. He inspected her, not in lust, but in recognition of her nudity.

The soldier laid down his rifle and peeled off his shirt. “Here,” he said to her. “It won’t cover all of you, but it will cover enough. We, um. I have clothes back at the cabin.”

She pulled on his shirt and slid the
MOLLE
bag over her shoulder. “What is your name?” she asked.

“Dillon Gentry. The guys call me Genny.”

“Genny,” she said. She took his hand and led him through the forest. She did not need him to lead because the path flowed ahead of her like a glowing white stream coursing through the forest as far as she could see.

A second soldier leaned over a stack of limbs in the driveway beside two bodies. He glanced up at her, paused, straightened, touched his hand to the weapon slung over his shoulder, and said, “What up, chico?”

“I found someone in the woods,” Gentry said. “Or she found me, rather.”

“She infected? You can’t be bringing nobody into camp like that. You’re mucking with the quarantine. Keep her back.”

“I’m Captain Darcy Moore,” she said. “And your name?”

“Gilberto Arroyo. Where you from?”

“I’m from the 2nd Armored Fort Polk, Combat Medic and Surgeon, P.A.”

“Like Fletcher,” Arroyo said. “We already got a medic, and that captain rank don’t mean nothing no more.”

“You’re like a doctor?” Gentry said.

“Almost,” she said. “I had six more weeks in rotation. But yeah, I have all my schooling and training.”

“Fletch just has some basic first aid training,” Gentry said. “She’s like a full-blown doctor. I think she’s clean. We could use her.”

“You a doctor, too, Genny? You can suddenly tell when people are infected or not? And your interview process is what, whether or not your shirt fits them? Damn, boy.” Arroyo backed away from them and waved his hand as if to brush away the air. “Go wait by the truck until Billings and Fletch get back. Then we’ll decide what to do with her. This ain’t no stray puppy-dog pound, chico. She done touched your shirt, so I got to assume you infected if she is. Ain’t nobody got no sense no more.”

A man appeared in the doorway of the cabin, holding the railing in one hand and a shotgun in the other. He hobbled his way onto the porch. Behind him a young girl stepped through the door, and he said, “Shelly Lynn, head back in the house.”

“But Him Potty Man is with her, Daddy,” Shelly Lynn said.

The white-lit path led to the little girl. Beside Shelly Lynn stood the soft shadow of light Moore had first seen at dusk, a few hours after touching the woman in the stream. She had sat on the bank, naked but clothed in His glowing warmth, listening to the songs of the woman as she pitched them from the far side of the stream. At dusk, the woman disappeared into the trees, and Moore heard a whispering voice urging her to stand. It was as if she had hooked her hand into the crook of her gentleman’s lead, and a path lit before her. She carried the
MOLLE
bag, and she remembered staring at her clothes as if they were soiled rags that would only dampen the warmth already blanketing her. Naked, she followed the shimmering path, walking beside the shadow-light until it delivered her to the soldier. Now it trailed the girl down the steps, across the driveway, until both stood next to Moore.

A woman tried to follow, but stopped short as she could not make it down the steps. The man watched in silence. Moore leaned down to the child, took her hands in hers, and they both heard the words of the Embodiment.

Shelly Lynn spoke. “Him Potty Man says to lay the bodies on the pyre.” She spoke to her father. “Daddy, what’s a ‘pyre’? Is it like a fire?”

“Yes, Baby Bird, it’s like a fire.”

Moore had not seen him before, but a boy appeared behind the mother, a quiet shadow, and he said, “I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do it.”

He stumbled over the words, and the hint of a seizure shivered through his body. The signs were too subtle for the others to notice, but Moore had been studying them for weeks, and she recognized the early signs. They were all infected, or would be soon, and each would either fall or rise in their own time, herself included.

The mother tried to stop the boy, but he forced himself past, walked to them and lifted the heels of one of the bodies. Arroyo did not move to help, but kept his gun trained on Moore, and so Gentry stepped around her and lifted the arms. Together they laid first one and then the other body onto the pile of limbs.

“Him Potty Man says to step away,” Shelly Lynn said.

This time Arroyo listened, and he backed away from the bodies until he stood beneath the man on the porch, while Shelly Lynn, Moore, Gentry, and the boy stood nearer to the woods.

“Him Potty man says,
Ashes to ashes
.” There was a gasp of air as the oxygen was sucked from around them, a moment of absolute stillness, and a sudden, blinding burst of flame overtook the bodies with such heat that Moore dragged Shelly Lynn by the shoulders away from the raging fire.

In the firelight, Moore glimpsed a half-human face framed in shadow peering out from the woods behind the cabin. It winced as the flames took hold, and when she blinked, the only evidence was the shaking of a limb.