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“It’s getting cold out here, yeah,” I replied. “She should’ve brought a jacket. ”
“You’re hurt. ”
I shrugged. “Not bad. ”
“Not now, no. It’s closing up quick. ” Ah. The way he said “quick” it sounded almost like “quake,” so there was some change after all—an accent to the vowels that didn’t belong to Dana.
“Well, it’s stopped bleeding anyway. I think. ”
“More than that. It’s closing. What are you, anyway?”
“What do you mean? I’m not…I’m not anything. But I can see you, obviously. All of you, when you come out like this. ”
He snorted. “That doesn’t make you half so unusual as you think. ” The closing word sounded like “thank. ” “She can see, too,” the soldier said, meaning Dana.
“I know I’m not the only one who can see—”
He interrupted me. “Lots of people can see. And lots of animals, too. But you’ve got something else here, don’t you? The bullet didn’t strike you too hard. It hit a tree first and came back. I saw it. But the wound is all closed up now, where the bullet skimmed you. ”
I fondled the sore spot and frowned. “How do you know? It’s too dark to see a damn thing out here. ”
“With this woman’s eyes, yes, it’s too dark. But before, with my own, I could see it fine. I see the blood especially well. It glows, to us. It shines in the dark, like your tears, and your sweat does. We can see it fine. It reflects to us like a cat’s eyes. If you ever come back like us, you’ll see it too. ”
The blood was drying on my shirt, making the fabric crackle when I squeezed it. “I wasn’t hurt bad. I was in shock before, but now I’m not. That’s all. It’s no big deal. ” I only sort of understood it myself, and to know that the dead could spot me as strange made me deeply uncomfortable. It was as if I were more like them, and less like the living.
He laughed, harsh and hoarse. “No big deal. If we’d had an army of men like you, we would’ve never lost. You’re touched with something, whether you’ll admit to it or not. ”
Another soldier joined the circle, chattering and pointing.
Dana’s head shook. “I can’t hear you,” he told the ghost. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s just been too long since we tried to speak. I, I like these clothes she’s wearing, though. I like the pants. ”
I threw my head to the right, trying to bring the soldier’s attention to the other ghost. “Hey, buddy, I can’t hear him either, but I think he wants us to get a move-on. ”
“I can’t…” Dana’s head went back and forth again. “I can’t lead you out this way. I can’t see a thing. But I like her pants. I’ll let go now. We’ll take you to…there’s a, at the front of the place there’s a…there’s a building. We’ll take you there. ”
“Wait—don’t let her go yet. ” I held Dana’s body by the shoulders. “What’s going on? If you can talk to us this way, well then, talk. What’s going on at Dyer’s field? Who’s that asshole who’s been shooting at us? Why did Green Eyes leave?”
“Green Eyes,” he repeated. “That’s what you call him. He’s left us. He tried to keep the digging man away, but the bargain was up. The digging man isn’t afraid of us because he can only barely see us—only sometimes, at that. ”
The soldier’s mind was wandering; he seemed to have a hard time keeping a train of thought together. It sounded like a struggle to string the right words one after the other.
“The digging man—the man with the gun?”
“Uh-huh. That’s him. ”
“So you’ve seen him before. And there was some bargain made with Green Eyes, that he’d stay here?”
Dana’s body sagged back against a tree, and her knees began to fold. “A pact. Until the last descendant of the good general was gone. He watched us until the last one died. ”
“I don’t understand,” I said, which was possibly the understatement of the year. “Come on, stay with me now. I don’t understand. Please keep talking. ”
But the ghostly newcomer waved his hand and shook his head hard, motioning for quiet again. Maybe the “digging man” was closing in on us again, though I didn’t hear anything to indicate it.
Dana was slipping down, falling asleep by the look of her. I didn’t know what to do; I wasn’t in the habit of babysitting channelers. I didn’t have the first idea how to handle things, so I pretended she was fainting and I caught her.
“Please,” I said again. “I don’t understand. ”
“It’s because…it’s because we have no wings to the kingdom. ”
Then Dana’s eyes rolled back in her head, and she went limp.
The soldier spirit rose out of her and re-formed into a more recognizable shape, though he too appeared disoriented by the experience. He was fuzzy around the edges, and indistinct where he’d once seemed solid.
I cushioned Dana as she fell, holding her up and against me. It wasn’t hard. She couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds, soaking wet with rocks in her pockets. Her eyelashes fluttered against my neck.
“Come on, honey. Up and at ’em,” I said into her ear. “Rise and shine, Dana. Come on. ”
She twitched against me, coming around enough to push me away and stand with the help of her friendly neighboring tree trunk. “Shit,” she fussed, rubbing her knuckles against her temples. “Shit. ”
“Shhh,” I responded, indicating the ghosts around us.
They were all holding still, as if they too could step and break a twig, or otherwise give us away.
Dana cleared her throat and bobbed her head to say she got it. It was time to hush up and run again. The ghosts retreated, except for our new friend, and as they backed away the fog closed in again—but this time I thought of it as cover instead of nuisance. Dana took my hand again and staggered forward, close on the heels of the small soldier.
It must’ve been a shortcut; or then again, I might have misjudged the size of the park and our position in it. Within a few minutes of unchanging scenery—trees set in the white gelatin mold of the fog—we were back to the road, and in the distance I heard cars.
“Where are we?” I hissed, and the soldier pointed at something I couldn’t see.
Hurry. Go.
And he left us.
We were alone in the dark, but we were free of the trees, and if we stayed on the road we’d run into something shortly. The visitors’ center, I assumed.
Dana and I shuffled on, elbow to elbow, listening for the sound of trouble behind us. We weren’t disappointed. A crash and a muttered “fuck” told us we were only literally out of the woods.
My companion picked up the pace without any prompting, and I kept it with her. The puttering hum of a bad muffler went zipping by, not too far away, and the sound was music to my ears. We pulled ourselves towards the intermittent vehicles with all the energy we could muster. The road wasn’t busy—it wasn’t rush hour traffic—but it was a main thoroughfare, and even in the middle of the night there would be someone.
Anyone.
I realized with some dismay that I didn’t hear any sirens, and I hadn’t seen any blue lights flashing. Where were Jamie and Benny? Had either of them made it to safety? The digging man, the swisher, the shooter—whatever I called him in my head—he couldn’t have gotten them both.
He couldn’t have.
He’d spent too much time chasing me and Dana to have doubled back and taken them both.
To our left, a big square shape loomed. The building was much closer than the main road, but it was probably unoccupied. Probably. I didn’t have the faintest idea if there were park rangers who kept watch all night, but I didn’t believe the odds were good. If anyone had heard the shooting, surely they would have called the police.
Or maybe not. The memory of a dimly recalled story flashed through my head—some tale of how gunshots were so common on the battlefield that th
e cops didn’t heed those calls.
Ted had said something, once—he’d mentioned as a party story that he often heard people crying for help in his backyard. He said he’d heard groaning, and crying, and artillery fire; but when he called the police and told them, they told him to go back to bed and forget about it.
“Everyone hears them,” they said. “But there’s nothing we can or should do for them now. ”
Until I was running in the dark through the fog in the middle of the night, I hadn’t believed him. I’d assumed he was regaling us with bonfire stories, like any good campfire host would.
Hell, maybe he’d been telling the truth. What a horrible thought.
Summoning assistance might require a more tangible, deliberate action. “This way. ” I pulled on Dana’s arm. “To the center. ”
“There’s no one there,” she replied, and I nodded even though she couldn’t see me.
“I know. That’s okay. Hurry. ”
A sidewalk, or an offshoot of the road, went zipping up a hill. We took it, hobbling together up the incline and tripping simultaneously on a set of stairs. Dana fell towards a cannon and took me with her, but we recovered and found ourselves before the big glass doors at the now-dark entrance. I pressed my face up against the glass but saw nothing inside except flags hanging from the ceiling, plaques mounted on the walls, and a big ranger’s desk in the back. A stubby lamp was lit on the ranger’s desk, barely illuminating the place from within, but not giving enough light to really make it visible from the road.
Dana lifted an arm like she was going to beat on the glass, but I stopped her.
“No good,” I swore. “Something bigger. Heavier. We need to nail this in one stroke. ”
She caught on quick.
“By the cannon,” she said, and left me. A moment later she whispered through the fog. “Help me, goddammit. ”