Suicide Forest (40 page)

Decided, I started back.

The
blind woman
didn’t look away from the earthenware pot when I emerged from the
crater. I glanced around the clearing, deciding how I was going to
stage the ambush. Given that I would be vastly outnumbered, close
combat was not ideal. Unfortunately, the spears were too light to
use as effective projectiles. Instead I scrounged several chunks of
rock the size of baseballs, which I could launch from a short
distance. I slipped off John Scott’s rucksack and was about to toss
the rocks inside the main pocket alongside the two extra spears
when I paused. There was something in the bottom of the bag. I
stuck my hand in and pulled out a number of rubbery, stringy items
which turned out to be the psychedelic mushroom John Scott had
picked. The caps were a light brown color, the gills dark.

What the fuck had the guy been
thinking?
I wondered.
There were enough here to have made
all seven of us see Jesus
—

Stung with an idea, I dumped the mushrooms
onto the ground, then searched the pocket for any I had missed. I
discovered another two handfuls and added them to the pile before
me. Easily two hundred grams, maybe three hundred. I’ve heard
mushrooms lose ninety percent of their weight when dried, the state
in which most were distributed and sold, which meant I was in
possession of anywhere between twenty to thirty street grams.

I tossed all of them back into the rucksack
and began tearing them into pieces so they would not be so
recognizable. Then I carried the bag to the fire. The woman heard
me approach and stopped stirring.

“Hey there,” I said quietly, amiably. “My
name’s Ethan. What are you cooking there?” I peeked into the pot. A
variety of vegetables bobbed in a boiling yellowish broth: sweet
potatoes and carrots and cabbage, as well as what looked to be
strips of
daikon
, a giant white radish. “Looks good, smells
good. What’s your name…?”

As I continued to speak nonsense I slipped
the ’shrooms into the stew, then backed away, watching the woman to
see how or if she would react. She began stirring again.

Faint with anticipation, telling myself this
was going to work, this
had
to work, I made my way deeper
into the trees, laying up where I would not be discovered but where
I still had a view of the party that was about to commence.

Ten
minutes later
the three eldest kids—Blackbelt, Horseface, and Toothless—emerged
not from the cave but from the forest. They moved so silently I
didn’t notice them until they stepped into the firelight, all long
black hair and gray yukatas. Horseface was limping badly, no doubt
because of the stab wound in his thigh.

At first I was irrationally convinced they
had been hunting for me—irrationally because they would have
believed I’d died in the fire. Then I noticed that Blackbelt and
Toothless were carrying dead rabbits. They clearly had better than
average night vision, but I didn’t think they could catch rabbits
in the dark, which meant they would be returning from checking
previously set snares.

Blackbelt and Toothless went to the zombie
woman, while Horseface disappeared into the cave. I tensed. Would
she tell them about me? Reveal I had tampered with the food?

They ignored her, withdrew their daggers,
set the rabbits on a large flat rock, and chopped off their feet,
tails, and heads. Then they skinned, gutted, and jointed what was
left, tossing everything except the intestines into the pot.

Shoving the zombie woman aside, they assumed
stirring duty.

They didn’t say much to one another, but
when they did it was more grunts and snorts than words. Moreover,
their postures were hunched, their body language loutish. No polite
bows or nods but only violent thrusts of their chins or arms.

I thought again about what Mel had called
them—feral children—and I realized how right she had been. However,
these were no noble savages; they were brutal, beastly, lacking
most of the social skills acquired in enculturation.

This made it easier for me to view them as
less than human—and eased my reservations about the slaughter I had
planned.

Horseface
emerged
from the cave carrying a large wooden chest. He set this down next
to the fire and opened it. The remaining boys spilled out of the
crater moments later, pushing and shoving each other all the way to
the fire, where they formed a jostling, noisy line that extended
away from the chest.

Akira appeared last, rising from the earth
like some battle-hardened, sour-faced samurai from centuries past.
His yukata, like Blackbelt’s, was secured with a black sash.

He paused at the top of the breakdown of
rubble and shouted something into the skylight. I noticed he
gripped three yellow ribbons in his hand. He tugged these sharply.
Nina lumbered into view, followed by Mel and some Japanese woman in
her twenties. All three of them were dressed identical to the
zombie woman in shapeless white robes. The ribbons were secured
around each of their necks, like dog leashes.

A blistering, indignant rage rose within me,
and it took every ounce of my willpower not to rush forward and
drive a spear through the fucker’s throat.

Akira tied his end of the ribbons to a tree
branch, then barked an order. The Japanese woman sat obediently,
but Mel and Nina didn’t clue in quickly enough. He walloped Nina
across the face, then backhanded Mel, knocking them both to the
ground.

I gritted my teeth and held my position.

Akira went to the fire. Horseface took a
ceramic bowl and a pair of wooden chopsticks from the chest and
passed them to him. Akira spent some time bent over the pot. I held
my breath, convinced he had noticed the mushrooms. But when he went
to sit down without incident, I realized he had likely only been
choosing the choicest pieces of stew. Blackbelt served himself
next, followed by Toothless, Horseface, then the rest.

They ate like animals, all of them, tipping
the bowls to their mouths and using the chopsticks to slurp back
the stew as fast as they could, smacking their lips, liquid
spilling down their chins.

Akira and the older boys finished first and
went back for seconds, then thirds. I silently urged them on.

When Akira was sated, he grunted something,
and Horseface tossed a few raw vegetables in front of the zombie
woman and some more in front of Mel, Nina, and the other captive.
The two Japanese women ate slowly, indifferently, while Nina and
Mel showed no interest in the food, even though they would have
been starving.

Then the scene morphed into a surreal
Saturday night with
The Brady Bunch
as everyone settled down
like one big happy family. Akira sipped from a bottle of what was
likely some sort of liquor and smoked a pungent pipe, both of which
had been inside the chest. Blackbelt and Horseface huddled next to
one another, playing the Gameboy, while Toothless poured over a
manga comic. The others organized themselves into teams and played
a game that involved kicking a rubber ball.

I watched and waited.

Roughly
ten minutes
later the kids playing ball began to lose focus in their game as
their trip kicked in. One after the other they stopped chasing the
ball and stumbled about aimlessly, struggling with what would no
doubt be intense head- and body-buzzes. Soon most of them plopped
to the ground, spaced out. The biggest stared in my direction,
slack-jawed, as if he’d just stuck a paperclip in an electrical
socket and got the zap of a lifetime. Then he began plucking at his
yukata, either trying to figure out what it was or why he was
wearing something other than his skin. He bent over and puked.

Oblivious to what was happening around him,
Akira stared at the bottle in his hands, apparently engaged in his
own warped version of time, space, and reality. Blackbelt and
Horseface remained insanely focused on the Gameboy. The music of
the game they played was now the only sound to disturb the night.
Toothless set aside the manga and wandered unsteadily to a tree to
relieve himself. Afterward he pressed his hands again the trunk’s
bark hesitantly, wonderingly, as if it he thought it might be
moving or melting or, what the fuck, maybe even breathing.
Eventually he turned around and sank to his butt. His eyes were
wide and scared, his breathing exaggerated, as if he’d forgotten
how to breathe and was trying to consciously replicate the
action.

Akira stood suddenly and shuffled in a
circle, shaking one hand, clearly struggling with some thought or
idea. Then he went to the zombie woman. He shouted at her. She
shook her head. He slapped her, and when she didn’t respond, he
slapped her harder. She bellowed something, the words butchered and
unrecognizable, and pointed toward the trees where I had first
emerged. Akira kept shouting and beating her. I wondered why she
was holding out, why she wasn’t giving me up—and then I realized
that perhaps, in an ironic twist, he had cut out her tongue as well
as her eyes.

Giving up on her, Akira stumbled toward Mel
and Nina and the Japanese woman. He untied Mel’s ribbon from the
tree branch and dragged her roughly into the firelight. She writhed
and wailed. He slammed her face-first into the ground, tugged up
her robe, and mounted her, using his knee to pry apart her
legs.

Blackbelt
and
Horseface were so stoned and fixated on the Gameboy they didn’t
notice me as I reared up behind them. Holding one of the spears
tightly in both hands, I shoveled it into the back of Blackbelt,
believing he was the more lethal of the two. It tore through his
flesh with little resistance and burst out of his chest, wet with
blood. Horseface stared at it in mute surprise. Then he looked back
at me just as I thrust a second spear into his side, above his hip
and beneath his ribcage. It hit a bone and came to an abrupt halt.
He leapt to his feet, howling, spinning in pirouettes, batting at
the spear hanging out of his side. I yanked it free, then drove it
through his upper chest.

For a moment I felt pity and revulsion, then
I heard John Scott’s voice in my head saying:
Tangos down,
motherfucker
.

And he was right.

Two down.

My head pulsing with a blood-rage, painting
everything red, I charged Toothless, who was trying to push himself
to his feet. I didn’t waste my last spear on him. Instead I
smothered his mouth with my hand and hammered his head backward
into the tree trunk. It bounced off the wood with a hefty thud. I
repeated this several more times until the back of his skull
cracked like the shell of a hard-boiled egg.

I stumbled away from him and spun toward
Akira. He was crouched above Mel, a dagger suddenly in his hand.
His black eyes shone with a wild, primal fury as he spat gibberish
at me.

I took a cautious step toward him, the spear
held before me.

He continued to yell. White spittle flecked
his lips like frost rime.

I took another step.

Mel tried to scramble away on her knees.
Akira grabbed her by the hair and yanked her against his body,
using her as a shield.

“Ethan!” she shrieked.

“Let her go!” I roared.

Akira spat more gibberish.

It was bedlam, everyone speaking at
once.

“Let her go!”

“Ethan!”

Akira again.

“Let her go!”

“Help me!”

Akira began back-pedaling, dragging Mel with
him. He was trying to retreat deeper into the trees. There was no
way I was letting Mel out of my sight, but as soon as I made a move
to follow he screamed manically and shoved the knife harder against
Mel’s neck, the blade depressing the skin and tilting her chin
skyward.

I halted and watched helplessly as they
slipped farther into the shadows. I felt like I was going to
explode. I couldn’t let Akira take Mel, but what options did I
have? Akira was a lunatic—a lunatic tripping out on mushrooms. He
wouldn’t hesitate to slit Mel’s throat from ear to ear.

“Ethan!” Mel pleaded, her eyes glistening
with tears.

I decided to risk a full-on charge. I
couldn’t lose Mel again. Couldn’t bear the thought of her being
held captive on her own in this forest, being raped over and over
by Akira, her tongue and eyes gouged out.

Death was better than that.

“Ethan!” Mel screamed—and there was
something different in her voice this time. More alarm than
fear.

Arms grappled me around the neck, crushing
my throat. They were slick with blood, and I couldn’t pry them
loose. As I grasped them with my hands, fighting to breathe, Akira
and Mel faded into the darkness of the forest.

I went berserk, twisting and bucking, and
managed to rotate my body enough to see who was behind me.

It was Blackbelt. The spear I’d impaled him
with was smeared red with blood and protruded a foot from his
chest.

He thrust a hand in my face, his fingers
digging into my eyes.

I shook my head, breaking the eye gouge. He
went for them again. I bit his hand, sinking my teeth into the
meaty part below the thumb.

Bone crunched. Hot, salty blood gushed into
my mouth.

Blackbelt released the chokehold. I jerked
around. His yukata was soaked black around the spear, his
complexion ashen. Yet somehow he continued to defy death and
reached for me.

I clutched the jutting spear with both hands
and wrenched it sideways. He screamed and slumped to his knees. I
worked the spear back and forth several times, widening the tear,
causing as much damage to his internal organs as I could. A geyser
of blood burst from his mouth, splashing me on the neck and chest.
His body convulsed. Then he fell forward onto to his front, his
left side twitching.