Despite all the folks at the festival in town, the road is quiet enough that Autumn can march straight down the highway’s dashed yellow median without fear.
It’ll be harder with Neel than with Wyn, she knows. The day they met, with Neel’s shotgun between them, Autumn saw the shadow of the children she used to play with out there in the brush and broken-down cars west of town. They’d talk to her, pepper her with questions, even play tag—but the moment night fell or one of the nearby farmers drove by, they’d scatter into the trees. Eventually, with enough mistreatment, enough abandonment, a child stops looking at adults with hope. Neel has passed that point. But he loves Wyn. Surely, that’s a thread Autumn can use to tug him back.
She had tucked Wyn in a blanket on the couch with her own worn stuffed tiger, Bastian. Her last sight of him was of a warm, cared-for child pulling on Bastian’s whiskers and watching her. Those not-words of his tree talk, birdsong, and leaf rustle are so familiar it seems all it would take to catch their meaning is straining a little harder. She’s so close to understanding him.
With careful prodding, Wyn gave her enough to go on to find the little house. No way is she dragging him back into the kudzu-choked woods—not when it took this long to get him out of there. So she laced her boots and started the long walk down the highway. She’d made only one quick stop downstairs to tape a quickly-scribbled note on the door of the bakery.
Just in case someone comes looking.
A loud corner of her heart still cries that she should wait for Sasha rather than go alone. But Neel can’t wait, and there’s no telling when Sasha will be ready to see Autumn. But on the slim chance Sasha does want to see her, at least she’ll know where Autumn’s gone.
After getting caught in that mountain lion trap, Autumn stays out of the woods as long as she can. So she follows the road. She’ll climb over the barricade of the construction work at its end. It’s what Wyn says he’s done before: crawled under the “orange branches.” She’s mulling over the potential routes when she becomes aware of the sound stalking her from behind.
Honk, honk, honk honk hooooonk, HONK, HOOOOONK…
Autumn starts. The silence is broken, a far-off morse-code blaring that, for a stuttering moment she thinks is the train.
She turns, and around the bend toward her flies a familiar rusty pickup. By the time she’s in view, it’s close, close enough to flinch—but it swerves to the roadside and rocks off onto the grass. Sasha takes her hand off the horn, relief clear even through the windshield. She jumps out of the cab and hurries over, hands in her pockets.
“Hey,” she breathes, a puff of cold air visible between them. “You might’ve called. Or we need some radios or something. Dammit.” She stomps her feet against the chill. She’s visibly irritated. “Wasn’t sure I’d find you.”
“I’m glad you did,” Autumn admits. She itches with the urge to throw her arms around Sasha and breathe in the scent of her hair. “I can’t just leave Neel—”
Sasha is already nodding forcefully. “We’ll go get him.” She glances around at the road. “Can we take the truck to—wherever he is?”
“They’re camping out somewhere past the construction zone,” Autumn says.
“Great.” Sasha looks worn, as well as annoyed. “Get in.”
They drive.
Autumn has so much she wants to ask her. Has she processed anything Autumn told her; does she see Autumn differently now? Is she angry? Has everything changed? She drums her fingers on the armrest, and the road ends before either of them can think of anything else to say.
Sasha stops the truck, rummaging behind the seat for her camera. Once flooded, the highway here is now a chapped lip, parched and cracked.
Not long ago, Autumn drove up on the other side of this construction block. She stood just beyond it, and felt like the only person left in the world.
“What will we do about the, uhh—shotgun situation?” Sasha mutters, huffing slightly as they clamber over the orange barrier fences and skirt a mammoth earth mover.
“Wyn thinks they ran out of shells a few days ago.” Meaning he and Neel were alone in their house with no protection, no weapon against the hungry man or anything else in these woods.
They don’t pass the obstruction to the wrecked bridge just beyond, but hook southward. There’s a bit of a jump over a deep mud ravine where even this dirt road has been taken out, where the land has slid out toward the destruction and nearly washed it away. But beyond, on the road toward the tracks, the earth is firm. Once they’re past the mudhole, Sasha turns and stares at the construction zone for a few moments. Cast in the harsh shadows of afternoon, the machinery sits there in dark, monumental repose. Sasha pockets her lens cap and takes a look through the aperture of the camera. Autumn hears the slow click of the shutter. Then Sasha slings the camera over her shoulder and follows her.
The dirt road is narrow, bounded by dense evergreens on one side and waving grasses on the other. Sasha is quiet. Eventually, when the road peters out, eaten by vegetation, they leave it and go into the dense brush. Autumn can only hope she’s going the right way, that she isn’t imagining the gaps in the bushes, the grass tamped down by little feet. They trudge through wheat-colored grasses, prickly bushes and burrs sticking to their jeans. The fields are opening up to the west, so flat she can almost see the curve of the earth. The gnarled and spindly pecan trees crouch low to the ground, like arthritic hands. It feels like this airless plain goes on forever. Every so often, there’s a low crack as someone’s heel comes down on a small bone.
But there, a few hundred yards away, leans a rotting shotgun house, gray and paintless, the small windows broken out, the door swinging. And Autumn comes to a stop. “I think…I think that’s it. He said it was a gray house.”
To call this corpse a house is almost dishonest, and they both stand there a little too long, breath taken by trying to escape the thickening kudzu snaking across the ground here. To imagine children living in this ruin, huddling together as winter came on—there is nothing to say.
Finally, Autumn picks her way nearer the wreck. “Neel?” she calls. “Are you in there?”
Silence.
“Look at that.” Sasha gazes at a now-familiar bundle of twigs that sits on the path to the house. Three little skulls, maybe of field mice, watch them, bound with bits of grass and string to the small sculpture. A breeze stirs and Autumn is struck by a rancid smell coming from the thing, which seems to tremble, wavering before her eyes, flickering…
Because it’s on fire.
“What’s happening?” she breathes.
“There.” Sasha nods to another protective altar on the sagging steps and then—another. Perched on a drooping windowsill. All flaming, their little offerings twitching in the fires they fed, exoskeletons collapsing, cobwebs billowing like toy boat sails. Sitting at the lowest hanging of the roof, a carefully formed pentacle of yellow grasses perches, charred and dancing. Children’s best attempts at protection, up in flames.
In her bones, Autumn knows it can’t be natural. The hungry man is hunting.
Neel.
Autumn dashes up the porch and pushes open the door, bile rising in her throat. Inside it’s cold, somehow even colder than the air outside, a dank icebox odor. There is a hobbled table next to a camping stove; here is a nest of blankets; here are crayons in twenty-four colors and pictures pinned to splintery walls. It’s home enough for more than two children—once, maybe not so long ago, there were more.
And all of these things, every stick of furniture, every relic of a home, are scorched. Great licks of soot shoot up the walls. The floorboards curl, nails melted. Even Autumn’s first step inside creates an ominous trembling.
There’s a loud blast from somewhere much closer than expected, and they both jump hard. The train. They must be very close to the tracks here.
At the sound, a lithe jackrabbit form springs away from them, tearing out the back. Neel is a blur of singed and dirty fabric.
“Neel!” Autumn bolts through the house, out the dangling door.
Behind her, Sasha swears as her foot goes through the rotten boards of the back porch. Autumn hears the clatter and snaps as Sasha pulls her foot free and jumps off the porch, landing with a crunch of bones. “Neel?” Sasha calls, and they run after the sound of crackling leaves. Neel is darting up a steep hill, toward a break in the trees; the train track that runs through the forest. Stay away from the tracks, Lou’s voice echoes in her head. “Neee—eel!” Sasha tries again, her voice ripping raw right at the end. The air is dense and charcoal-scented. He’s climbing up and away from them with a speed granted only by terror.
There’s a hush of displaced air and Autumn looks back. The shack is burning again, fire raging inside with a heat that billows out to nip at their backs.
It shouldn’t be a chase, but what else can they do? They scrabble after Neel, up the tree-lined incline, kicking up great clods of loose earth. Autumn hauls herself up with roots, up an incline no one’s meant to climb. It resists her every step.
And coming from around the bend in the tracks, the train is barreling toward them. Ravenous, it eats up the land, sparks bursting under the wheels. Autumn is snared in the glare of headlights for a breathless, sharp second, in the sharp tang of metal in the air. She is seen.
Neel spots it and freezes at the crest of the hill, eyes round and full with animal panic. Where’s Sasha; where’s anyone to help them? Wyn waits in her home, with a tiger and all the trust he placed in her, and here she is in free fall. The train, her body, the boy are all held in a deadly balance.
“Come back,” Autumn calls. “With me, with Wyn!”
He doesn’t even seem to hear her, only the train that’s surging closer, the sound hammering in their ears.
“I just want to help you,” Autumn cries. “I’m like you. I’m one of you—”
And finally, Neel glares at her. “No one helps us! Nobody ever helps us!”
Neel climbs onto the tracks and glances at the oncoming train. Then, without another pause, he launches his body off into the dense greenery of the other side. Somewhere, Sasha is shouting a warning.
But now Autumn can hear nothing; everything is engulfed by the blare of the oncoming train. The kudzu is so dense up here that the earth might as well be made of it, miles of ropey vine strangling every tree and telephone wire in an endless green monoculture. Neel is struggling, running like his shoes keep catching in the vine. Autumn can see it snapping the air at his heels like whips. Chuck Vickers, she thinks, and her body surges with a new, vast panic.
“Neel!” Before Autumn can think, she’s charging his way, straight at the tracks, straight at the train. “Neel, come back!”
She stops on the edge. The timber slats are warped, ready to catch her, trap her, break her ankles. Don’t get on the tracks. But it’s beyond, in wild enough land to be the edge of the world, where Neel, nobody’s child, has slowed, dragging his body forward in captive jerks, the kudzu curling up his legs. He’s wading through quicksand, and maybe he knows it now, because he turns, catching her eye, and opens his mouth to say something. She can’t hear him, or anything, through the wind and squealing metal in her ears. The train bears down, rattling her teeth in her skull.
With a snap she feels but can’t hear, another kudzu tether rockets from the ground to grab at his wrist. It pulls at him, hungry to heave him under. “Neel!” she sobs, and even she can’t hear it.
She gauges the distance, the gap between her and the train, and leaps—
Her last view of Neel is of his gaping scream, vine looping around his neck in savage twists.
Because something has her too, a thick restraint, like steel, slips around her waist and hurls Autumn back from him, throwing her to the ground, catapulting her down the hill. Autumn screams into the brush, choking on leaves and debris, her body striking rocks and sticks and animal bones as she’s tossed down, down.
The fall knocks the breath from her. It’s very dark, tethers seizing her. She drags uselessly at the air, fighting what holds her, clawing at the kudzu that wants to bury her, bury all of them—
“It’s me, Pip—it’s me,” Sasha yells at her. She’s barely audible over the train crashing by above them. “You idiot. You fucking—idiot.” It sounds like she’s crying, too. “You threw yourself in front of that train.” Autumn writhes, wrestling hair and leaves from her face, lungs still roaring for air. She’s lost a shoe somewhere, her bare foot scuffing the cold ground. But as she catches her breath, her pounding, screaming heart seeks out Sasha. She focuses on her face. Sasha looks as wrecked as Autumn feels, battered from the fall and Autumn’s blows.
“Sorry,” Autumn gasps out. “I’m sorry, sorry.”
Sasha is already dragging herself to her feet, listing drunkenly, ripping vines at random. “C’mon,” she mouths, offering her hand. It’s not easy to stand, but Autumn hauls herself up and they rescale the hill, getting as close to the passing train as they dare. Neel is just beyond.
“I can’t see him,” Autumn says.
“I know.” Winded, Sasha holds her side. “It’ll pass. We’ll look.” The train’s sleek body seems to stretch on forever, running boundless on the track. An age goes by, and another. All the endless years of her life have passed in a blink compared to this. The never-ending hours at her dad’s bedside. The train just goes gleefully on and on.
And, of course, when the railroad is finally quiet, the field beyond is empty.
Neel is gone.