Strangewood (15 page)

That thought was still echoing in his head, along with the
rushing river below, when the bridge swayed dangerously to one side. The east
edge of the structure dipped and only because of his stance did the General not
lose his footing. Even as he turned, he saw several Orange Pealers slip and
roll off the side of the bridge to tumble, screaming louder than ever before,
into the rushing water below.

"Help!" Nathan shrieked.

The General was about to shout his name, to go to him, when
the resourceful boy grabbed hold of a wooden support on the west edge — what
was now the high side — of the bridge. A number of the Orange Pealers
only avoided tumbling to the river by holding onto Nathan's clothing.

With an ear-splitting roar, the beast that lived beneath the
Rickety Bridge swung up from beneath the wooden structure and landed with a
heavy thump on the floorboards. It did not lose its footing. Rather, the sway
and creak of the bridge seemed to suit it.

Nathan was just getting his bearings, and stood halfway
between the General and the monster.

"Run, boy!" the General snapped and moved forward
even as Nathan and the Pealers slipped past him, making for the other side of
the bridge. The Orange Pealers had forgotten his orders now, and were screaming
as loudly as they were able.

It did not matter now. The Peanut Butter General had been
foolish to hope that the beast would sleep through their entire trek across a
bridge so ridiculously loud. It made no effort to follow the child, however. There
was that, at least. Instead, it merely stared at the General, smoke billowing
from its wide nostrils.

It stamped its left foot and the bridge swayed. Then the
thing used its weight to continued the pendulous motion. The General didn't
dare turn his head to see if Nathan had reached the safety of the other side. Sword
in front of him, he began to back up, sliding his feet over rotted boards,
hoping he would not reach a spot where the wood had collapsed down into the
shoddy latticework that held the bridge up. It was not easy to keep his
balance, but the Peanut Butter General had an advantage the creature was
unaware of.

The bottom of his boots, coated with peanut butter, stuck
fast to the wood.

"General," the thing said, its voice a low,
laughing rumble. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Keep well back, Troll, or they'll use your guts to
lash this old bridge together," the General warned.

The Troll laughed. It was a hideous thing, three and a half
feet tall and nearly that broad. Stout as a wooden keg, its head and back,
belly, groin and feet were covered with fur, while the rest of it was a dry and
cracked brown leather. Its dark orange nose was huge and bulbous, and spread
halfway across its face. Massive twin tusks jutted from inside its lower lip. Nearly
six inches long, they came up to the side of the beast's nose. Its jaw was long
and its chin pointed, decorated with a long, tasseled bit of beard that hung
like a horse's tail.

When it fed, the Troll's jaw opened wide enough to swallow a
pig whole.

"You have no token for me, General?" the Troll
rumbled with amusement. "For safe passage across my bridge, you know I
require some sort of payment."

The thing's wide yellow eyes glanced past the Peanut Butter
General toward the other side of the bridge, and the Troll lowered his gaze. All
trace of amusement had left his voice when next he spoke.

"If you have nothing else," he said ominously,
"I suppose I'll have to take the boy."

The Peanut Butter General studied the Troll's wide yellow
eyes, saw the steam jetting from its nostrils, gauged the length of its
thick-muscled, ropy-veined arms, and then he smiled, peanut butter stretching
across the gaping grin. Then he waited. The bridge swayed west, then it began
to swing back east. As the wood beneath him tilted, the General nodded.

"That sounds fair," he said.

The Troll blinked in surprise. The Rickety Bridge paused in
its motion, about to sway back in the other direction. The Peanut Butter
General surged forward and drove the point of his sword deep into the Troll's
shoulder. As the blade whickered toward Troll flesh, the peanut butter seemed
to roll back from it, revealing a steel edge beneath, gleaming in the orange
starlight.

Steel pierced flesh. The Troll screamed. With huge
three-fingered hands tipped with vicious claws, the Troll raked the Peanut
Butter General's chest. The General fell backward onto the rotted wood, heard
the snap as several boards broke or crumbled beneath him. The Troll rushed
toward him, but the General rose quickly.

He heard the Orange Pealers howling. In that chorus, he
thought he heard Nathan screaming as well. For the boy, he must prevail. Failure
was not even conceivable. The Troll lunged for him, the General ducked his
attack and drove steel through Troll flesh once more. This time the blade
passed through the Troll's abdomen. Blue blood began to crawl like heavy cream
down the beast's pelvis and legs.

The Troll backed up. The General pressed his advantage,
moving in on the thing. Before he realized his error, he had stepped onto the
boards his fall had broken. Wood splintered around him, and the Peanut Butter
General fell. He dropped his sword and it clattered on the wood. He reached out
and barely was able to gain his grip on the unbroken boards around him where
they were still attached to the wooden supports that ran along each side of the
bridge.

Below, the thick latticework of rotten or discarded wood
that held up the bridge was broken in places. Boards jutted up at odd angles. If
he did not die from smashing into the crisscrossed beams, he might be impaled
instead. Worse, somewhere in that dark trap was the lair of the Troll, and who
knew what horrors lay down there.

"Hmm?" the Troll said and held one thick hand on
its broad expanse of gut, where the General's sword had passed. "Perhaps
you'll think twice about not paying a toll when next you wish to cross,
General?" the Troll grumbled angrily.

It stood, prepared to walk past him, but paused after a
moment. It glared down at the General, blue blood flowing over its fingers.

"I don't think I want the boy, come to think of
it," the Troll said mildly. "I think I'll just take your sword."

The Peanut Butter General's eyes widened with rage at this
insult.

"And your hat. Always liked that hat," the Troll
added, narrowing its eyes to study the General's peanut butter encrusted
military cap.

Then the Troll licked its lips. "And since I'm a bit
hungry, and you smell so very, very good . . ." it said, and then paused,
reached out, and gripped the General's right hand. Now the General held onto
the bridge by only his left hand, but falling had suddenly ceased to be his
primary concern.

"I'll take a bit of nourishment as well," the
Troll finished.

He crouched on the bridge, which had stopped its swaying, and
held the Peanut Butter General's hand up to his mouth as though it were a leg
of fowl. The Troll's jaw distended, tusks dropping low enough to allow the
General's entire arm to pass through the jagged teeth that lined the inside of
the beast's maw.

"No!" the General shouted.

The Troll snorted with amusement, smoke jetting from its
nostrils.

The Peanut Butter General narrowed his eyes, struggled to
keep his arm from the Troll's mouth. "No," he said again, angrily.

Dangerously.

Then he said another word, in a voice so low he knew the
Troll would not hear it. The word he said was, "Swarm."

The bees rushed in by the hundreds, an angry cloud of black
and yellow, the buzzing loud enough to drown out the rumble of the river below.
They surrounded the Troll's head in an impenetrable sheet of stinging fury.

As the Troll began to scream, the Peanut Butter General
climbed out of the hole in the bridge and got to his feet. He picked up his
sword, hefted it in his right hand, and walked toward the screaming Troll.

"Away," he said grimly, and the bees obeyed.

Face lumpy and swollen from the stings of the bees, the
Troll looked up at the General, his eyes pitiful. The General raised his sword.

"Wait!" the Troll said, suddenly terrified. "What
are you doing? You can't . . . you can't kill me!" he cried, his tongue
thick and swollen. "This is Strangewood."

For a moment, the Peanut Butter General hesitated. Then his
eyes narrowed to gooey slits and he set his jaw firmly.

"This is war," the General snarled.

The sword whickered through the air, peanut butter flying
off and leaving only the shining metal edge. It hacked through gristle and bone
with one clean slice, and the Troll's head separated from its neck, tumbling
through the air and down over the side of the Rickety Bridge to be carried by
the Up-River toward the Bald Mountains in the distance.

"This is war," the General whispered, as the blood
fountained from the decapitated body of the Troll, where it slumped to the
rotten wood of the bridge.

Greatly saddened, the General turned toward the other side,
toward home. He looked up, and only then did he notice that the screaming of
the Orange Pealers had nearly ceased. Only one Pealer remained to scream, and
its wail was high pitched and frantic.

Nathan was gone.

The Peanut Butter General moved swiftly but carefully across
the bridge and scanned the Winding Way and the forest around it, but to no
avail. The rest of the Orange Pealers were gone, as was Nathan himself. The
bees followed him and began to settle on and in his body once more, but he paid
them no mind.

"Nathan!" he screamed, his anger only tempered by
his growing panic.

"Where?" he demanded, lifting the remaining Pealer
into his hands and holding it up. "Where is he?"

The Orange Pealer, its teeth gnashing in savage contempt,
pointed into the wood at the side of the Winding Way. That was when the General
heard it. In the distance, the screaming of the others of its kind. He set the
screaming citrus creature on the ground and it took off into the forest. The
General followed as quickly as he was able. It led him down a steep grade to
the edge of a sheer rock face above the Up-River, where the black water churned
below.

A thick cord was tied to a tree and hung down over the edge.
Blood was splashed across the stony edge of the cliff where the Orange Pealers
stamped and shrieked, pointing down at the river. The cord hung down over the
cliff to the water, and as the General looked over the edge, he thought he
could barely make out a dark shape on the water upstream.

A boat of some kind. And in it, he knew, was Nathan.

"Who?" he growled.

The Orange Pealers responded, scrambling into the trees,
back the way they'd come. When they emerged, they held in their hands a green
felt fedora that was quite familiar to the General.

"Grumbler," he said in disgust. "Traitorous
little bastard."

"It's certainly not like anything I've seen
before," Dr. Gershmann said bluntly and shook his head in consternation as
he glanced over at Nathan. With his left hand, he stroked his bushy mustache,
while his right rested with familiarity on his prodigious gut.

"It's just so darned odd," the doctor added.

The strange odors had mostly disappeared, though Thomas
could smell just a phantom hint of orange. Or thought he could. He had been
taking in the depressing sterility of the room — even the walls
themselves looked as though they had been washed so often they were now faded
and dull — but now he blinked and just stared at the doctor.

"Odd?" Emily repeated, a horrified look on her
face. "Dr. Gershmann, he's been here nearly forty-eight hours. How can you
all be completely clueless? I'm sorry if this is insulting, but what the hell
are we doing here if you can't help us? Should we transfer Nathan somewhere
he'll be able to get help?"

A bleach-blonde nurse knocked lightly on the door, popped
her head in, and reminded Dr. Gershmann he had a meeting with someone named
Challis in twenty minutes. He thanked her without really acknowledging her
presence and then turned his attention back to the Randalls.

"You're certainly free to make whatever decisions you
feel are in your son's best interests, Mrs. Randall," the doctor said, the
harsh hospital light gleaming on his bald pate. "But I assure you, we're
doing all we can at the moment. He's in no danger, and if you wanted to take
him home, you'd need someone there full time to monitor his condition and to
handle the use of the IV and, of course, to clean him."

"I've been cleaning him for five and a half years, Dr.
Gershmann," she snapped instantly.

Thomas moved to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. "That's
not what he meant, Em, and you know that."

They stood together in silence, and she laid her hand on top
of his own. Thomas closed his eyes a moment, chewing his bottom lip. He wished
he were somewhere else. As horrible as it made him feel, he wished for the
quiet solitude of his office, his desk and computer, for the very act of
creating. Granted, he hadn't really felt much pleasure in that for quite some
time, ever since the pressures of producing had begun to outweigh his interest
in the characters. But just to have a moment of that bliss . . .

For just a moment, he wondered what had happened with
Francesca and the Fox people that day, and then cursed himself for even
thinking of it.

"Look, Dr. Gershmann," he said, for Emily seemed
to have run out of words, "I just don't understand how you can stand there
and tell us there's nothing wrong with our son. Nothing on the MRI, nothing
toxic in his system. It's like he's normal, but Jesus, just look at him! Does
that look normal to you?"

They all looked, then, at the small boy with tape holding
down his eyelids, whose face seemed frozen and distant. Unaware of anything
around him. Unaware, even, of the bee that even now crawled across his lips.