A sharp-edged rock slides into Joan’s sandal, and she loses her rhythm for a moment. The pond is behind them now, and a thick wall of bamboo has sprung up along the narrow creek to her left, so she can no longer see the water.
Kailynn is a few feet behind her. Mrs Powell is a good ten feet behind the girl. It is clear that the teacher is struggling, even before she calls out, ‘Go on without me.’
Joan slows down. She is not that much faster than the teacher, not with Lincoln pulling on every muscle.
‘You’re doing fine,’ she calls back.
She is not sure whether she says it because she wants to encourage the teacher or because she wants to avoid more interminable conversation.
But the teacher slows to a walk, and Kailynn jogs to a stop. Joan has no choice but to pause.
‘I can’t,’ says the teacher. ‘My knee’s not going to cooperate. I’ll find a spot around here and wait it out.’
Joan nods and turns.
‘We can’t just leave you,’ says Kailynn, unmoving.
This is the problem. They do not have time for consideration and politeness, and they do not have time for talking. It will kill them all – haven’t they learned that already?
Joan has learned it, and she has learned it well. She will leave them. She is done considering her options. She has covered a few yards of track, has managed not to look back and see if the others are following her, when she hears a gunshot. It makes her jump after the long seconds – minutes? – of quiet. Above her head, one of the looping white lights explodes, and her first ridiculous thought is that the bulb has blown. But then she puts the sound and the broken glass together, and she fits in the fact that she heard wood splinter and that a crape myrtle branch over her head is tipping down.
Robby Montgomery was only playing with them.
Or Mark and Destin the killing machine are hunting them down.
The specifics do not particularly matter right now.
There is another sound of wood cracking, and leaves flutter down around them all. She looks behind her. For once, thank God, no one wants to talk – they all know the sound of bullets now, and they are all running again, even Mrs Powell, whose teeth are digging into her bottom lip. There is pain in every line of the teacher’s face, and there is nothing to be done about it. Joan tries to look beyond Kailynn and the teacher, but the track swerves left and right, and she cannot see very far.
No more bullets come. She thinks she can hear feet, though.
In twenty or thirty steps they are coming up to the playground, with its massive rocks and rope bridge. Then the frog and turtle statues that Medusa left behind in her wake. I’m a turtle, I’m a turtle, Lincoln will say when he’s on the toilet, making the toilet seat his shell. Or he will wiggle under an ottoman or put a pillow on his back – I’m a turtle.
Joan runs faster. Her breath wheezes out, and her lungs burn. The teacher is keeping up, barely. Now they are past the playground, and here comes the splash pad with the fountains still arcing in the air.
The merry-go-round, animals mid-prance.
Even over her own harsh breaths, Joan can hear the teacher grunting with each step. She looks behind her again and can see no sign of the gunmen. But, still, there is the far-off grind of gravel. She does not think she is imagining it.
‘Get off the track!’ she calls over her shoulder to the teacher. ‘Go behind the merry-go-round. Stay down.’
‘What?’ says the teacher.
‘Go on, Mrs Powell!’ she hisses, because she cannot think of the woman’s first name. ‘Just keep behind the merry- go-round and they won’t see you.’
There is no time to explain – she cannot see anyone, so hopefully Robby Montgomery or his friend or the killing machine cannot see them, either. But she can hear their feet, so maybe the men will be guided by sound, too, and they will just keep coming down the track, and she owes this teacher something, doesn’t she? Also it will simplify things – it will be one less person slowing her down. Mrs Powell has stepped off the track, limping and then disappearing behind the rows of wooden horses and giraffes and antelopes.
The teacher is gone.
Kailynn is still behind her. Joan rounds a bend and can no longer see the merry-go-round, and then the track curves again and she is beyond everything that she knows, entering the other world of the zoo, the one you only see on the train, and she cannot hear anyone behind them, but she is not sure.
If you shaved a tiger, the train conductor said one time, you’d find out that their skin is striped, too.
Everything is blessedly dark. Not the complete dark of the countryside on her childhood camping trips but city dark. Mostly dark. They are on the back side of the exhibits. More bamboo blocks whatever the zebras and ostriches might be doing, and the woods are thick all around her, with occasional light-up decorations hanging from the trees – a glowing ghost, a string of blinking black bats, a laughing skeleton.
There is no need to stay close to the track anymore. The woods are all shadows and moonlight. They can disappear into the trees.
‘Do you think they—?’ she hears Kailynn begin, but the rest of it is lost on the breeze.
Joan hops off the rails, landing heavily, sandal twisting crookedly on the chunks of gravel, but she catches herself and is off through the weeds and pinecones and rotting chunks of wood. Drifts of dry leaves come halfway up her calves. She cannot see where her feet land.
There up ahead, closer than she expected, she can see what must be the outer fence of the zoo, almost invisible – not substantial at all – nothing but chain link. It is maybe six feet high, and she could climb it no problem with her shoes off. As she hears Kailynn come to a stop behind her, Joan jogs closer, putting one finger against the fence, not positive that it is not electric – she should put Lincoln down, but there is no time and she touches it so lightly – and the risk pays off. There is no shock.
They can do this.
She will boost Lincoln onto the fence and help him wedge his feet into the gaps, getting a good grip with his fingers, and she will climb behind him, and she can hold on with one hand while she helps him climb higher, and it might be slow, but they can do it.
Then she sees it. At the bottom of the fence, on the outside, there is a ditch at least five feet deep. She cannot make out the bottom of it. And there is no way she can navigate it with Lincoln, not even if she could figure out how to get him over the fence. Her fantasy of climbing with him is deeply flawed, even with Kailynn helping. They would be so easy to shoot, stretched out defenseless on a fence.
She turns and runs in the other direction, back over the railroad track and toward the animals.
She vaults over a dead log, grunting, and she will not try that again, not with a forty-pound weight on her hip. There are unexpected dips in the ground, and Lincoln cries out when his chin bangs against her shoulder. There are logs everywhere, dead trees decaying into mulch, and the leaves are still thick and deep, and there are more light-up bats dangling. She sees the silhouette of giraffes off to their left, inside fences that are surely eight feet tall.
She feels Kailynn’s hand tangled in the back of her shirt again, pulling the material tight. She can hear the girl breathing. She has not heard more gunshots, and that bodes well for Mrs Powell. But there are other sounds: now that she and Kailynn are awash in leaves, their steps brittle and snapping, she can distinguish the grinding of other shoes on rocks. And if she can hear the men, they can probably hear her.
If she slows down, her footsteps will be softer. But if she slows down, they will only catch her faster.
‘They’re behind us,’ she wheezes to Kailynn, turning her head.
Her shirt loosens as the girl lets go of her. And then, without a word, Kailynn is sprinting off to the left, taking an angle toward the giraffes, and it is a good idea for the girl to try a different direction, because they are a bigger target together. There is no safety in numbers at all. In fact, she has wanted to get rid of Kailynn, hasn’t she? The teacher and the girl were both more trouble than they were worth.
It is simpler when it is only her and Lincoln. It is safer.
So Joan does not say a word as the distance between them widens. She can still make out the girl’s zigzagging shape at the moment when her own foot catches – maybe her sandal finally breaks and the ruined shoe causes her to trip, or maybe the strap snaps as she falls, she will never know – but there is a long moment of falling, of panic, of feeling Lincoln slipping from her arms and hearing her own high-pitched yelp. She tightens one arm around him even as she tries to twist so that she won’t land on him. Don’t drop him don’t drop him don’t drop him, she is thinking all the way down. She somehow manages to turn enough that he is half on her back when she hits the ground, but her elbow slams down hard, and the impact makes her arms fly up, and he is flying up, too, no matter what she has told herself, and she watches him fall, his head bouncing against the leaves.
She has landed entirely on her left shoulder and elbow, hand bent back against her side – and she’s sunk her teeth into her lip. She licks off blood. She tries to make her arm work as she reaches for her son, and her arm does what she wants it to do, but her hand does not.
He is not crying. This panics her. She cannot see his face in the darkness, only the outline of him. But then he is moving, pushing himself up, stuck on his back like a turtle for a moment.
‘Lincoln,’ she whispers.
‘We fell,’ he says.
‘You okay?’ she asks, crawling toward him, scooping him toward her with her good arm.
‘I’m okay,’ he says, reaching out one hand, touching her. ‘Your face is wet.’
She wipes at her bloody mouth, listening.
Voices.
Not too close but close enough.
Her right shoe is gone, as vanished as the girl. Her knee is bleeding, and her hand is still just hanging limp, although it doesn’t hurt much. Could she have sprained her wrist?
She cannot carry him if her hand doesn’t work.
She hears something else in the trees behind them. A branch moving. The crackling of pine straw or leaves. Small movements, maybe only the wind, only none is blowing now. A squirrel, possibly.
She pushes herself to her knees, stifling a gasp as her weight hits her injured knee, and then she gets to her feet. The ground is cold and not quite solid. She wiggles her toes and considers kicking off her left shoe, too, but the ground is full of sharp things, and she thinks it is better to have one foot protected. She steps toward Lincoln, bracing herself, and still her knee buckles and she nearly hits the ground again.
The sounds behind her change: there is not a crackling anymore. There are steps, slow and cautious.
The men are coming, and she has no idea if they are ten steps behind her or an acre away, and the police still do not actually exist here. Her knee will barely hold her weight, and her wrist is not working, and she cannot move fast enough. Prickly edges stab into the sole of her bare foot.
They are about to die, she thinks, and she hates herself for the thought.
No. She is not an animal. She has more in her than fight or flight. She takes Lincoln’s hand and whispers that the men with guns are coming, and he is running with her, only he is so loud, crashing through the leaves, and he is slow. They cannot do this.
They cannot outrun the killers.
Footsteps, footsteps.
She hears the creek again, somewhere close, water against rocks, splashing. Lincoln missteps, nearly falling, and she lifts him by his one hand, swinging him forward, easing him down lightly onto both feet as she keeps them going.
She looks up, considering the trees. They could climb – more than one of these oaks have spreading branches and forks that lead up to the dark sky. But if she is wrong, if they are spotted, there is no escape, and she is not sure she can lift him, and she does not have time to think about this, but lifting him – lifting him. She thinks of it, of placing him somewhere safe.
Not the trees. She swerves, still keeping their momentum but studying the landscape, all shadows and moonlight and occasional dangling decorations. There is a shrub ahead, as high as her shoulder, and it is thick with leaves. She leads him to it, and she runs a hand through the branches to feel for thorns before she lifts the lower branches and makes a space underneath.
‘Stay here,’ she tells him, her limp hand pressing lightly against his back, steering him. ‘Get down on your belly and crawl in. Be completely quiet. Do not call my name. Do not say a word. I will be right back, but if you make any noise, they’ll kill you.’
He whimpers, although he is also crawling, and she does not want to give him a chance to argue with her and she does not want to give herself a chance to consider what she is doing.
‘Make yourself disappear,’ she says, already standing, taking an extra second to put her hand on his head – the precious curve of it – as she lets the branches fall. He disappears except for his feet, so she reaches under and bends his legs slightly.
Then she is jogging, a staggering kind of run that makes her feel like a pathetic heroine in a horror movie. She pushes back the pain and makes her strides longer and faster and her knee is irrelevant and there is a beach-ball-sized spider with a lightbulb inside it, hanging from a tree, floppy-legged, incomprehensible. It is smiling through fangs dripping red.
She thinks Lincoln will stay there, both because she has told him to do so and because it is dark outside and he does not know where he is. He is not prone to wandering, especially when he is nervous. He will stay. But noise – that is another issue. She does not trust him to be quiet.
She smashes her feet with as much force as possible. Leaves explode under her feet, turning to dust. She grabs at a passing branch and snaps it in half. She suspects she sounds more elephant than woman. When she thinks she is a long way away from Lincoln, she cries out, a short staccato Ah! that she thinks will carry for a distance. She exhales, long and loud. She holds her hurt hand tight against her belly. She goes back to stomping loudly, moving as quickly as she can, because although she wants to draw them to her, she does not have a death wish.
She can hear the men moving behind her, steadily, making plenty of noise themselves. She feels a rush of satisfaction and bloodlust and fear.
She is past the elephant habitat, and to her left is a nondescript, multistory building with LARGE ANIMAL RESEARCH FACILITY in big letters. The silver gutters and tin roof are shining in the moonlight. She pushes forward, leaves and twigs slapping against her skin. She passes a low-hanging string of pumpkin lights. Her knee throbs, and she thinks of the teacher, of her hobbling movements, and she imagines her safe behind the merry-go-round. She thinks of Kailynn’s hands tugging at her, and she misses the girl’s warmth, and she would not even mind her mindless chatter, and the girl’s hair is so lovely, like red ribbons blowing.
If Lincoln sees a shining light and he is curious – would he move? Or if a bug crawls near him and he runs from it or if he imagines he hears her voice? She is unraveling, the panic catching up to her, and so she runs faster. She thinks of trash cans, solid and safe, and she thinks of how he was an easy baby, good at eating and good at sleeping, but every now and then there would be a spell where he would cry unremittingly and she could not stop it, and she remembers the waves of savage frustration that left her imagining – so briefly – what if I shut him in the closet and left him there? What if the baby’s mother felt that, a thousand times multiplied, terror and exhaustion and frustration, and in one weak second she left the baby and ran, and can’t Joan understand that?
No. She cannot.
But what if the men were coming close, as they are now? What if that other mother put down her baby and tried to draw the men away? What if that? Joan can see the woman running, hair in her face, arms empty.
She has not been fair to that woman.
There is a give to the ground under her feet. Leaves and mulch and pine straw, she assumes, and then – with her shoed foot – she steps on something different, something that makes her throat close up. It is soft and substantial – the unmistakable feel of flesh and muscle. She jerks back, then realizes that, whatever it is, it is far too small to be human. She peers down, and in the dim light she sees the triangular point of a wing and a rounded head.
A bird. A dead bird.
They have a library book about the ancient Greeks and their sports, and Lincoln has told her that hockey back then was played with a dead bird, and when a team scored a goal, the bird came back to life and flew away.
Lincoln. She forces her feet to move again.
She can hear wind chimes.
Once when her uncle was driving her to the country, she realized the turn signal ticked out the exact tune of a tongue twister she’d just learned – Rub-ber ba-by bug-gy bum-pers / Rub-ber ba-by bug-gy bum-pers – the blinker sang the rhythm of it every time, and it was so clear, so obvious, that the blinker was calling out the words, and now the jingling chimes are ringing out Lincoln’s name, and so are the leaves under her feet – Lin-coln Lin-coln Lin-coln.
She has succeeded – the men are far away from Lincoln now – but she has not thought about this part: how can she get rid of them? She cannot lead them back to Lincoln. And she is not even sure they are still following her. She cannot hear them anymore, actually, not over the sound of her own footsteps and panting breath. She stops.
Nothing. Nothing but leaves and wind chimes.
She does not pause for long. Maybe she has lost the men, but maybe they are still tracking her. Regardless, she has been away from Lincoln for too long. She needs to work her way back toward him, and she can change course if she sees any sign of the men.
It is difficult to make plans while dodging tree trunks and brambles. It is difficult to orient herself – which way should she be going? The trees are all the same. But then she hears the creek as she scrapes her shoulder on the scaly bark of a huge pine tree. She is disoriented enough that she does not know which way leads to the outer fence or which way leads back to Lincoln, but she knows that the creek will take her in the right direction. The sound of the water will help mask her footsteps, and when she spots that hanging spider, she’ll know that he is close by.
The darkness is more complete in this section of the woods. She can no longer make out the ground, and she slows, because she cannot afford to turn her ankle.
She realizes that she does not feel her arm at all anymore, nothing from shoulder to hand, and maybe it should worry her, but it is a pure blessing at the moment. She keeps following the sound of the water, and in the darkness she almost steps into the creek before she sees it. She skids slightly in the leaves and squints down at the water – only a gash in the forest floor. She could easily leap across the entire width of it if both her legs were working properly.
Despite the creek’s narrowness, the bank is several feet high, and it is steep. She cannot tell how deep the water is. It is a shiny black nothing. She thinks she sees a small footbridge farther downstream or upstream or whatever, and she has no idea who would be using a bridge out here, but it is the way toward Lincoln. Then again, does she need to cross the creek? Is Lincoln on this side of the water or the far side? She rubs at her forehead, infuriated with herself, because she needs all her sharpness, all her focus—
She hears feet moving through the woods again, even though she has been so sure that they have lost track of her. She can hear them coming, and she thinks again of her father – his hands were huge – popping heads off doves.
Lincoln, Lincoln, Lincoln. Their feet in the leaves sing out his name, too.
And then she sees them, two shadows walking. They are closer than she expected. She cannot take her time to see if Robby Montgomery is one of them. Instead she drops to the ground, flat-bellied.
Soon their boots will mash her like a dead bird. She lays her palms flat on the ground and pushes, rolling herself down the creek bank, angling herself so that her feet slide into the water first, slowing her.
She goes under the water without a sound.
The cold takes her breath, and she’s squeezed her eyes shut because if she loses a contact lens, she won’t be able to see a thing. But she swipes at her eyes, blinks them open, then she gets her bearings. The water would barely come past her knees if she were standing, but she is stretched out nearly horizontal, almost submerged. She cannot see past the rise of the creek bank. The shadows are dark and safe. She eases her hands into the water, the creek bed squishing between her fingers, and then she is walking on her hands, seal-like, her body floating behind her.
She assumes there would be bullets if the men had seen her.
The cold water has sharpened her. She is aware of each handprint she is leaving in the creek bottom, each rock against her knee, each spray of water on her cheek, each bit closer she comes to the bridge. She thinks that – if she does not die – she might have been brilliant without realizing it. She can get back to Lincoln like this – floating, not making a sound. She only needs to let the men move past her, and then she can head downstream and find Lincoln.
She gets to the bridge in a few seconds, and then she flips over and backs into the alcove. Her head brushes the bottom of the wooden planks. She is not getting warmer, and she wraps her arms around her knees. There are soft chunks of something – algae? – brushing against her arm, and she does not like that she cannot see what’s under the surface, but that means the men cannot see anything, either.
There is no sound except the rushing of the water. She squats lower. It is warmer to be in the water than to be in the air. The bridge is arched, and she looks out through the semicircle gap between wood and water.
Here they come: she sees two sets of feet on the creek bank. She can see nothing above their knees, because the bridge cuts off her view. One pair of feet leaps over the creek, a long, easy jump, one foot landing and then the other. She is glad that he either did not notice the bridge or thought it was beneath him to bother using it. She waits for the second pair of legs to make the leap, but those legs do not move.
Go on, she thinks. Go on.
But the second man does not cross the creek. Instead the first man vaults back over the water – did he get called back? – and he steps close to the second man, as if they might be talking.
She does not think they would be standing there if they had spotted her. Unless it is still about the game. Trying to flush her out. She slides down deeper, turning her head so that her cheek dips into the water, and she gets a better view of them both. They are facing away from her, and one of them has the thick shape and baggy jacket of Robby Montgomery. The other one is smaller and thin-shouldered. Robby’s friend, she assumes.
So here they are, she thinks. The three of them.
Somewhere out there is the teacher and the girl and Lincoln and the faceless monster in armor and, she supposes, the police. Somewhere out there is a screaming infant in a trash can and a missing mother. Joan thinks about her son and his piles of plastic people and about how sometimes those people are not where you expect them to be. Sometimes Thor has fallen behind a couch cushion and Iron Man becomes the star of your show. Sometimes an arm breaks off the Joker, so you use Poison Ivy as your villain. You recast. You rethink.
The men are maybe two dozen feet away. It occurs to her that she has left her purse somewhere. She is beginning to worry about hypothermia. She thinks of her uncle’s story about how, as teenagers, he and his best friend, Larry, were driving across a bridge over the Tennessee River and a woman going in the opposite direction veered into their lane. Their car crashed through the guardrails of the bridge, and both boys were thrown through the windshield into the river. Did it hurt when you went through the glass? she’d ask. Did it hurt when you hit the water? Did you touch the bottom? Her uncle couldn’t answer all her questions. He couldn’t remember anything from when his head hit the dashboard at the first slam on the brakes until he was stepping up onto the riverbank, his shoes gone. Did you kick them off when you were swimming? Did they get knocked off when you were flying through the air? She was fascinated by what he could tell her – the feel of the slime between his toes and the fact that the woman driving the other car had white hair – but it was the parts he couldn’t tell her that she daydreamed about. She imagined herself there, and she saw all the things that he didn’t remember.
Did you save Larry? she would ask him. Did you yell for help?
I lay there, he would tell her. I just lay there in the mud and I watched.
Her thoughts are drifting again. Her brain is going numb. And her feet are numb, too, numb enough that she is concerned she will not be able to stand, much less walk. She is no good to Lincoln if she can’t walk.
And still the men are only standing there.
No. They are shifting, separating. The thin one is heading away from the water, and Robby Montgomery is grabbing hold of his arm. But the smaller one breaks loose, and there is some other kind of movement that is not clear in the darkness, and then she loses sight of the small guy.
Robby stands for a moment, and she is about to take her chances heading downstream, but then she sees someone else coming. A pair of feet and legs, moving carefully, and Joan recognizes those skinny legs and tight jeans even before she sees the thick mass of hair.
She sees the moment when Kailynn notices Robby in front of her – the girl’s entire body goes stiff. She sees the moment when Kailynn notices that the other gunman is there, too – the girl spins, a quarter-turn. She is holding something in her arms.
Joan cannot hear anything that they’re saying. If she backs a little farther under the bridge, she will be unable to see anything.
Maybe it is better that way.
She sinks deeper into the water.