Posted on June 30, 2007

Part 16

Elliot was ready to swing it at the leg of the taller one—try to knock him down long enough to pull away from the short crazy and get away—when the woman turned around and saw him. She shouted something, a warning to the other two, and they dropped Elliot’s legs.

He quickly rolled over and pushed himself up off the damp ground. He could hear them talking, faster now, back to the more crazy form of the babbling he was used to. Standing up, he waved the gun in front of himself, and the two men backed away, hands held out and guarding. Elliot backed away, too, cautiously, trying to project a stern look that said he was ready to bash in the head of anyone who got too close.

The crazies held their ground as he increased the distance between them. The woman looked angry, frustrated, while the two men mostly looked disappointed and maybe confused. Elliot couldn’t be sure but it was like they just didn’t expect him to do this, were wondering why anyone in his right mind would behave the way Elliot was, and if they could only get him to understand their motives, whatever important thing they all had to do could get properly done.

He wasn’t going to give them the chance. When that distance had stretched to a good fifteen feet, Elliot turned and started sprinting. He heard the woman in red call out, but then the sounds of his own flight masked any pursuit. This time he made a point of glancing at the ground more than periodically, trying to be certain he wouldn’t trip again, fall again, and end up back in the hands of those three.

The woods blurred and he ran without direction, just wanting to get away—he’d figure out where Evajean was or how to get back to the truck later. The road was north, he thought briefly, and so he could follow the sun’s compass until he found it. But now… Now the only goal was speed.

When he saw the ground open into a clearing of flat grass, he risked taking a look back. The crazies were nowhere, gone from view, and so he slowed his pace, giving himself a chance to breath. The cool forest air felt amazing and invigorating and Elliot stopped long enough to lean against the weathered trunk of a huge tree, set the gun down, and close his eyes. What the hell was happening? How’d he get from the peace of the drive—with Evajean’s increasingly pleasant company—to being lost in the Appalachian forest with at least three psychos out to do… something to him. What would Clarine have thought of this “adventure?” She’d have pegged him as crazy, just like the three whack jobs out to get him.

Nahom, he thought. I need to find it. If there are more of those people out there, more than just the three, then safety in numbers is the only kind of safety there is. A village, even if it were only “140 or so,” would be a great deal better than alone with only a locked shotgun.

So he began walking again, this time at a careful pace, paying special attention for any signs of civilization.

It was twenty minutes later when he finally saw one. He’d been following a deer path for no other reason than that it gave him an easy method to backtrack if he found nothing. He’d lost the crazies, he was positive of that, and so it was in a relatively calm state that he saw the first marking.

On a tree to his left, at chest height, was a circle carved in the thin bark. When he got closer he could see that it wasn’t merely a circle but more of a round border around a soup of symbols, strange glyphs and wiggles of varying sizes, all incomprehensible but with a look of deliberateness. The wood they exposed had darkened and weathered but not so much to indicate great age. These weren’t fresh, but Elliot was sure they weren’t more than a few weeks old, either.

He began looking for more on other nearby trees and was rewarded with half a dozen circles, all like the first, though with slightly different assortments of symbols. Every last one looked to be the same age, however, and Elliot found himself hoping this was just the kind of thing stupid kids had done, bored in the woods and looking to leave their mark. The alternative, that the circles were carved by someone who’d placed significance in the work, made him think of the many stories he’d heard about the weird people who lived out in Appalachians, cut off from the modern world not only by geography but also by a backwardness of culture and an education founded more in the superstitions of the old ways than in good liberal science.

Careful, Elliot, he thought. You don’t want to end up cannibalized or sodomized or just shot because you’re one of them outsiders. And then he chastised himself for being so silly. How the hell did he know these people, the residents of Nahom—if they were out here—were backwoods nuts? Better to be optimistic. Evajean would be.

And so he made himself take the circles as merely a sign that he was on the right track and continued walking, following the deer path as it eventually widened into a footpath and then into what could be be described as a narrow dirt road. This latter had deep tracks in it, four inches wide and pressed three inches into the hard soil, like it’d seen the passage of years of wheeled carts.