There's Blood on the Moon Tonight (113 page)

             
“Yeah, and it must’ve gotten Bilbo, too,” Josie said, fighting back the tears. She looked like she might be sick.
How am I supposed to break this to Bud?
She’d failed him, just as surely as she’d failed her own little brother.

             
Tubby put a hand on her shoulder. “I think Mr. Brown might’ve removed your markers, Joe. At least that one further down by the windfall we had to go around.”

             
“What’re you talking about, Opie? Why would—” 

             
“Hush, Gnat. Go ahead, Ralph…what’d you see?”

             
“Rusty and I had just circled around the windfall back there, and Bill was lagging behind us. I turned around, to make sure he could at least see me, you know? And that’s when I saw him untie your marker from that palmetto bush. He…he was sniffing that thing like…like…”

             
Josie felt her face flush. “Like what, Ralphie?”

             
Tubby shrugged, unwilling to say what was on his mind; that Bill Brown had a certain look on his face when he was sniffing that scrap of cloth; the way a horny fellow might sniff at the crotch of some discarded panties. “Like he was a damn
dog
, trying to get a scent,” he finally said, grimacing. “I caught up with Rusty, and to be honest, Joe, I just assumed Bill put the marker back where he got it.”

             
“Why would he remove it in the first place?” Rusty asked again. It made no sense to him. Unlike Tubby, and even Josie to some degree, he couldn’t see any significance in Bill Brown
sniffing
at a piece of damn cloth.

             
Josie opened her backpack and removed a Swiss Army pocketknife Bud had given to her when they were twelve. She smiled tightly, remembering how he’d handed it to her that day. Almost grudgingly.
“
Here
!”
he’d said on her front stoop, then running away as if his britches were on fire. No explanation as to why he was giving it to her. Just
“Here!”
That was the day Josie realized Bud liked her. The genuine Swiss Army knife had his initials burned into each side. Josie had added hers underneath; though she’d never had the nerve to add
+
to the equation.

             
She cut an arrow into a pine, the raw white skin of the tree in sharp contrast to the rough brown bark. “Doesn’t matter if he took them or not,” she said, snapping the blade closed. “I’ll leave a blaze the old fashioned way. Should have thought of it before. C’mon, we’re wasting daylight.”

             
Tubby was right behind her; only Rusty stood where he was, too shocked at first to speak.
“Wait a damn minute!”
he shouted at their backs. “What about Bill? We can’t just leave him out here! How will he find us?”

             
Josie turned to face him. Tears coursed down her cheeks. “That’s just it, Rusty. If we don’t get out of these woods soon enough, you can be sure that
he’ll
find us.”

             
                            *******

Finally
!
Something had
finally
gone right! Bud had made it to the Center’s perimeter fence and was about to climb it—hoping the razor-wire at the top wouldn’t shred him to ribbons—when he spied his good fortune, thirty yards down the line. Oak Swamp ended at an earthen dam, which the tall enclosure ran across. The Center’s landscapers had done an admirable job in keeping the swamp’s trees and other marshy vegetation several feet away from the fence line. Despite their best efforts, however, Hurricane Jack had toppled it with a wind-blown cypress. The old tree had flattened one ten-foot section of the chain-link. So much so, that all Bud had to do was to walk across the oak’s wide trunk!
Literally, one bridge at a time!

Bud waded over to the tree and climbed aboard, taking a moment to catch his breath and to ease his aching shoulders. Pins and needles coursed through his deadened arms. He checked his watch: 1:02. It had taken him less than an hour to cross the swamp! Despite making up some precious time, it was getting late.

He took his water bottle out of the bag and drank his fill, pouring the rest over his steaming head. He would refill the bottle at the Center. He stood up on the trunk, shrugged on the backpack, and slid the pump back on the Mossberg, snicking a shell into place. The hollow sound ratcheted across the empty grounds…

             
                            *******

Now that Bill Brown was a likely threat, Josie made sure she stayed close to her friends, ignoring her instincts to run like hell. Guilt consumed her for not living up to Bud’s expectations—of getting Bilbo safely to the Bunker, where Bud was probably already waiting with the vaccine.

No. Bud wouldn’t wait. Not for long, he won’t.

And that insight didn’t give Josie any comfort at all. It meant that Bud was either looking for them in the wrong place, or that he still hadn’t made it back to the Bunker.

Maybe he’s lost, too!

It made her want to run blindly into the bracken, screaming out his name at the top of her lungs. She swallowed down the rising panic and shook the feeling from her head. She couldn’t afford such selfish hysterics. She considered using one of her shells, in hopes of getting Bud’s attention; then maybe he could locate them from his end. Maybe send off a round of his own; letting her know which direction the lake was. But she couldn’t bring herself to waste even one of the precious shells. All she had to get them through the Pines was five measly rounds. And she was saving the last shell for herself. Just in case…

             
She carved another blaze, pointing the arrow in their direction of travel. Now that they’d stopped again, Josie heard something lumbering about in the brush behind them. The disturbance ceased as soon as she looked in that direction. The branches of a young loblolly swayed back and forth in the thicket, pine needles drifting down.

Rusty looked ready to say something, and Josie shushed him with a look. She raised the shotgun and pointed the double-barrels at the thicket, her fingers curling around the back-to-back triggers…

The brush erupted in a flurry of human limbs—and like a shot, Bill Brown vanished into the palmettos.

They were all too stunned to speak. Bud’s dad had been stark naked and in a frank state of arousal.

“Now we know,” Josie said, breaking the silence.

Twenty minutes later and the unlucky trio had returned to a familiar spot in the woods.

Two monstrous pine trees had fallen side by side in the storm, blocking the more manageable route.

As she’d done twice before that day, with her longer legs, Josie took the shortcut and clambered over the two trunks. Tubby and Rusty took the long way around, down by the massive root systems. Because they’d chosen to circumvent the trees on the leafy side the last two times, they didn’t know about the sinkhole on the roots-end.

Tubby fell into the shadow-hidden hole first, shouting out a warning as he dropped into the abyss.

Rusty pinwheeled his arms in a futile attempt to keep from following his friend. He dropped headfirst into the deep hole, landing on his back, Tubby’s considerable cushion breaking his long fall.

A sickening crack ensued. It resonated off the earthen walls in a hellish sort of stereo.

Tubby’s left leg had snapped like a stalk of crisp celery. Rusty, who’d come out of the twenty-foot plunge without a scratch, watched helplessly as his friend screamed in agony beneath him.

              Josie was looking over her shoulder, when one by one, her friends dropped from view. Seconds later, Tubby was shrieking like a grieving banshee. Josie dashed over.

             
“SINKHOLE, JOE!
“SINKHOLE!!!”

             
Rusty warned her just in time. Josie skidded on the carpet of pine needles, a few feet from falling in herself.

The sinkhole lay camouflaged in the shadows of the two towering root systems. It was easy to see how her friends had missed it. She’d been looking for the damn hole and nearly missed it herself!

Knowing how unstable the ground around a sinkhole is, Josie crawled the rest of the way over to the edge. She peered over the side but the hole was deep, the bottom concealed in darkness. The earthen walls smelled too rich and loamy for it to have been an old sinkhole.

Good thing for the boys; otherwise it could have been full of rainwater. Or something far worse.

             
“Ralph! Rusty! TALK TO ME, BOYOS!”             

             
Rusty’s voice carried up to her.
“Tubby’s broken his leg, Joe! Or I did it for him when I landed on top of him! How the hell are we going to get him out of here?!”

             
Josie could hear the hopelessness in Rusty’s voice. That familiar frightened tremor. “Easy, love. Easy. I’ve got an idea. If I drop one end of a skinny pine tree down the feckin’ hole, do you think you could climb out on it?”

             
Rusty hesitated before answering.
“I might…but there’s no way Tubby could! Aww, man, Joe! He’s fucked up bad! Oh, fuck me! I think I see his bone!”

Rusty dug his Maglite out of his pack and turned it on. Tubby had passed out from the pain, and Rusty knew why. Sure enough, a glistening bone had broken through the shin of Ralph’s lower left leg—right through his denim jeans, sticking straight up in the air. The jagged end aflutter with shreds of flesh. Rusty turned his head and threw up.

Up above, Josie had retrieved her flashlight as well. She too saw how desperate the situation was.

             
“I could still get you out, Gnat,” she called down to him. Wiping his mouth, Rusty looked up at her beseechingly. Looking for a way he could leave this hole, without leaving what was left of his manhood behind. His glasses, with its thick elastic strap, had managed to stay on. They reflected Josie’s light back up at her. She couldn’t read his eyes but Josie knew what her best friend was going through down there.
Rusty’s scared shiteless of enclosed places!
Those walls were probably already closing in on him. Like some diabolical Fu Manchu death chamber.

             
“We can’t leave him down here,”
Rusty whimpered. He looked up to her for another alternative.

“I could switch places with you, Gnat! You’re faster than I am! You could run and find Bud. Get him to bring a rope. What do you say, tiger?”

              Rusty looked down at Tubby; hoping his friend would have an answer for him. Maybe tell him it was okay to leave him down here. Anything that would forgive his cowardice. All at once, the image of his dad came to him:
Samuel J. Huggins, looking as hard and unmovable as a big brown boulder.
Leaving his friend behind would have been unthinkable to Ham. The man had stayed out looking for Mr. O’Hara until he’d collapsed from exhaustion!

Just then Rusty realized there were worse things in life than fear. Like
Shame
. Deep, soul shattering
Shame
. The kind he was feeling now, as he considered abandoning his friend for the second time in two straight days.

Taking a shuddering breath, he settled alongside his unconscious chum.
“No, Josie! I’ll stay here with Ralph! You go find Buddy boy!
Run, Big Red! Run!”

             
                            *******

Bud Brown knew he’d found trouble as soon as he dropped to the grassy lawn from atop the cypress tree. The Center’s guard dogs. Both of them. “Shit, I should’ve known they’d be rabid,” he said, hawking a loogey. The Dobermans staggered out from behind the line of oak trees and azalea bushes bordering the great lawn. The rabid dogs stepped out of the shadows, only to scrabble madly back into the shade, where their red eyes danced furiously.

              Bud didn’t hesitate. He had too much to do, and too little time to do it in, without wasting any of it on two mad curs. Undaunted, he strode across the lawn, now grown past his ankles, field crickets and grasshoppers leaping from his path in all directions. Ladybugs fluttered in his wake. In the corner of his eye, Bud saw a rider mower sitting sideways across the lawn. A few yards from that, the body of a gardener, decomposing under the hot sun. Bud could almost smell the stench through the smoke, lingering in the air like an early morning fog. There wasn’t much meat left on the body. The work of the Dobermans, he presumed.

The hungry dogs waited impatiently for his arrival.

              Bud blew off the two front legs of the nearest dog, as if they were matchsticks, left it yowling on its side, spinning in a sad little circle, going nowhere. The other dog jumped from side to side, whimpering like a frightened puppy. Insanity had robbed the poor creature of its flight-or-fight instincts. Bud racked out the spent shell and relieved the dog of its uncertainty. Without pause or penitence, Bud Brown pushed through the thick azalea hedge…and came to a dead stop.