Drawn Into Darkness(88)
“Hell,” Justin muttered. “Damn everything.” He wanted to get moving, he needed to get moving, hunger dogged him to get moving, but how could he, in the nighttime woods where he could feel the prickle vines winding around his bare ankles?
Wide-awake and fuming, too annoyed at himself to sit down, Justin stood waiting for his vision to adjust to the dark. After what felt like forever, he could see, minimally, shadowy trees and the shining water of the creek. He pulled the bill of his hat down to protect his eyes from twigs, then started to feel his way forward, each barefoot step an ordeal.
He wanted to reach the creek and wade along its bank back the way he had come, to the road. Just the first part, getting to the water, took seemingly hours of stumbling, as if the tree roots were clutching at his feet. Then, as he waded along the edge of the creek, some unknown object tripped him so that he fell into the water. He didn’t mind, but he would have enjoyed his impromptu bath better if he had seen it coming.
Limping along the edge of the shadowy water, he bumped against some kind of a wooden structure and explored it with his hands for a while before he realized it was the bridge where the road crossed the creek. And even then, getting out of the water and onto the roadway was a feat accomplished by sheer blundering.
Finally he felt smooth sand beneath his sore feet again. He looked up, but could no longer see the stars. So he studied the faint sheen of the creek to make sure he was headed in the direction he wanted. Then he walked onward. His hunger had become, like his injuries, pain to be ignored.
After a while he urged himself into a lope. After another while he realized why he was able to do this. It was getting light out. He could see a little.
It was morning, but not Thursday anymore. Realizing it was Friday, Justin felt a little bit like Rip van Winkle.
He kept loping along the dirt road until the dawn turned to daylight, and far ahead he saw metallic glints sparkling between the trees: traffic. People going to work. He had almost reached the paved road. Looking down at himself, all dirty and damaged, he realized he could not let anyone see him that way. So, keeping his fragmentary glimpses of cars and pickup trucks within sight to guide him home, he headed into the woods again, woods with normal, narrow trees. He had put swampland behind him now. He was not too far from home.
Home? Like hell. He knew Stoat would kill him on sight, yet he was still thinking of Stoat’s house as home and he knew this was crazy, which was just another reason why he couldn’t tell anybody about himself yet. Because then the whole world would find out what a fucked-up mess he was.
The woods slowed him to a walk, and even though he could now see where he was going, he still got his skin ripped by the green thorny vines that twined everywhere; there was no avoiding them. Once the woods finally let go of him, he forced his overtaxed body into a trot through a cotton field, staying so far back from the road that nobody could recognize him even if they noticed him. The smudges of blood from his bleeding feet nearly matched the red clay.
Then he had to fight his way through woods again. Make that jungle so damn thick he ended up getting down on all fours to burrow under the green tangle like a fox. So his feet were grateful for the break, but his hands and knees were not. It felt like a very long time—hell, it was a long time—before he made it out of that mess. With the sun scorching him from high in the sky, he felt weak from heat and fatigue, hunger and thirst.
But he recognized the cow pasture he was in. Home—no, Stoat’s blue shack—was getting closer. The shack where his socks and shoes and spare clothes were, and some food, and money. That was all. Then he would buy a bus ticket or something, go to his grandfather.
He handled the cow pasture the same way he’d handled the cotton field, trotting straight across at a cautious distance from the road, meanwhile wondering whether he could possibly find something to eat. He was wavering and stumbling as he jogged. When he neared the far side, he saw a feeding trough. The next moment he was there as if he had flown, looking for anything edible. Dried corn would have been fine with him. Purina cow chow would have been even better. But he saw only wisps of hay and a few nuggets, some kind of kibble, scattered underneath. With shaking hands he tried to gather them—
“Hey!” a man’s voice yelled from somewhere across the pasture. “What the hell you doing?”
The farmer! A friend of Stoat’s. Justin ran without looking back, never knew how close or far away the man was. He did not dare give him a glimpse of his face. He sprinted past a house and two trailers to dive into the woods. But as soon as wax myrtle, yaupon, and palmetto hid him, he collapsed to the ground and had a kind of fit like a sick dog, convulsing and shaking hard, trying not to whimper and yip; he bit his lip till it bled. It took a while before he was able to get up and walk on.