20

Once hidden deeper into the corn, I made a space and laid her down.  “How bad is it?” I whispered.

“Ouuuuu!” she replied.  Her face contorted as I tested her ankle.

“You’ve pulled a tendon.”

“Feels broken.  What time is it?”

I checked my watch.  “Almost noon.  Are you hungry?”

“No!  How can you ask me that now?”

“Sorry.”

“And stop saying that, please.”

Sorry, I thought.  Then, looking at her foot, I said, “You can’t put weight on this.  Looks like I’ll have to carry you to . . . wherever.  Piggyback.”

“But how can you, with your leg wound?”

“I’ll manage.  You’re as light as . . .”  I paused, listening to what I thought was movement in the corn far away.  We hunkered silently for a full five minutes before Julie chanced a whisper.

“As a feather?  Is that what you were going to say?”

“What?”

“As light as a feather?”

I stared at her in disbelief at her question.  It was commensurate with asking for a refill of ice water to be served on the tilting deck of the Titanic.  But then I saw her motive in mimicking me, which had to do with coping, with survival.  “Not exactly.”  I forced a smile.  “I don’t know.  A pile of feathers?  The nice, soft, cuddly kind?”

She favored me with an ironical smile, against her own pain, while I considered the prospect of carrying her again.  “Do you even know which way to go, Sir Lancelot?”

“Can’t you tell me, Gwen?  And is that your name, by the way?”

“No.  And hey, how would I know what direction, anyway?  I was following you.”

I chuckled in astonishment.  “Me?  But I’ve never been out here before.”

“Neither have I, actually.”

“But you said—”

“What did I say?  I said it was eight miles to either town, as the crow flies.”

“You said nothing about crows,” I contested.  “You pointed at the road.”

“Well, if I did, I . . . well, I’m sure I meant it’s easier to walk on the road, where there’s less chance to twist an ankle.”

“Huh?”  I felt my bemusement evolving into exasperation.  A burn on my neck was revived by the heat of the sun.  “You mean you’ve never been down the roads we were just on?”

She shrugged, staring at her ankle.  “I don’t get out much.  What can I say?”

“How about explaining why we didn’t bring a map or a compass—can you say that?”

“Why would we need a compass, when we could follow the sun?”

“It’s noon,” I pointed out.  “It’s summer.  The sun is right above us.  I can feel it, believe me.  And anyway, we’re heading east, not west.  But even if we were following the sun, using your logic, where would you propose we follow it to, anyway—the planet Mercury?”

For a moment she was silent.  No way out, logically.  But she was a woman.  Very definitely a woman.  So she lifted one hand, and pointed.  “That way,” she announced.

I turned and looked over the neck-high stalks in the direction she indicated.  Then I sneezed, and followed that with a slow three-sixty.  It was the same in all directions.  Low rolling hills of farmland, beyond which might be anything.

“You sure?” I asked, skeptically.

“Positive,” she replied, with just a detectable trace of uncertainty.

“What—woman’s instinct?”

“Don’t knock it.  It’s never failed me before.”

“I’d rather have a compass,” I told her, “and a map.”

“Men,” she said.

“Women,” I mimicked.

She looked up at me, squinting over a wry smile.  “What?  What about women?”

“Always changing your mind, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your usual complaint about men is that we never ask for directions.  Well, I’m asking, am I not?”

“And I’m answering,” she insisted, and pointed again.

I studied her raised arm.  “Yes, you are,” I admitted.  “But in a slightly different direction now.  As the crow flies.”

We ate what we could, then left the backpack behind, along with Julie’s jacket.  Carrying her piggy back wasn’t as much fun as I expected.  Her arms were crossed in front of my chest, and my hands were locked under her legs for a good fit, but I guesstimated her weight to be a hundred fifteen pounds, to my one hundred eighty.  Relatively light, but with every step that I took, an electrical spike of pain shot from my leg through my groin and into my back.  I didn’t complain at first, with her arms and legs snugly around me, but it soon felt more like I was carrying a backpack filled with Tom Cruise’s fee on a Mission Impossible sequel—and in hundred dollar bills, no less.  Whenever my left leg impacted the ground, I gave a slight wuffing sound, as though repeatedly gut punched.

“You really should leave me,” she said.

“In the middle of nowhere, with Cody and company on the loose?”  I noticed that the dirt road ahead appeared to parallel what looked like a hog farm.  “Besides, what would I have to do then?”  I indicated the buildings there, while panting with fatigue.  “Carry a wounded hog?”

Wuff, wuff, wuff.

She shifted one hand to throttle my neck.

“Careful,” I gasped when she released pressure.  “If I pass out, then where will you be?”

She didn’t answer.  Maybe she didn’t know.  I surely didn’t.

A farm house came into view beyond a stand of maple trees.  The large corrugated prefab storage building beside it bore the word Jensen’s on top in faded twelve foot letters.  I could hear animal sounds too, but there was no movement on the grounds yet.  Then, with a subtle shift of an uncomfortably hot breeze, we soon smelled the unmistakable odor that only confirmed what I’d guessed at a greater distance.

“Do you want to tell me what you saw in the last house now?” Julie asked with an erratic hesitation, as though she’d been waiting a long time for the appropriate moment to ask.

“No,” I replied quickly, against the image that threatened to return.

“Okay.”  Her response was without detectable disappointment.  She indicated the farm house that now almost flanked us on the other side of the road, and changed the subject.  “Do you think they’re outside Zion’s calling area?”

“Have you heard the name Jensen before?”

“I’m not sure.  Maybe.”

“Then I don’t know.  Maybe.”

“You can’t carry me for another six miles, or however many miles it is,” she noted.

She had a point.  “No, I can’t do that, either,” I agreed.  “So I’ll go as far as I can, then we’ll get help.  When we have to.”

Wuff, wuff, wuff.

“How far is that, do you think?  Sounds like another mile, tops.”

I gave in and set her down in frustration.  But I knew it wouldn’t be six miles before my legs gave out.

She hopped on one foot, using me for a brace.  “You want me to go with you this time?”

I stared up the rutted dirt driveway opposite us toward the hog farm.  “No,” I told her, fearing danger.  “Wait here.  Understand?”

She didn’t try to stop me, although she lifted one hand to finally make a fist.  I walked stiffly toward the corrugated steel building, which was closer and seemed to anticipate me, its smaller door thrown wide, the excited grunting of animals emitting from somewhere inside it.  The soil beneath my feet became darker and heavier with moisture as I approached, and I saw that near the larger padlocked sliding door the consistency approximated that of mud.  Yet it had a weathered, cracked look—as though the pyroclastic flow from a volcano had recently dried into a blasted lunar landscape, and fanned outward from this side of the building.

“Hello?” I called, hands cupped to my mouth.  Then louder toward the house: “Hello!”

Frenzied squeals, and lots of them, seemed to chorus the sole reply to my yelling.  Then I detected a new sound, which was like the whir a small motor makes.  Or like a hornet trapped in a jar, or a radio controlled airplane on a climb.  Or a hand held circular saw, minus the blade guard, in an enclosed pen?

I turned to glance back briefly at Julie, who was lowering herself onto a flat rock to wait for me, her face animated with the discomfort of the effort.  I lifted a finger to say I’d be right back—in just one minute—but she didn’t see it.  Then with a subtle shift of air, the earlier smell returned to me.  I turned back into it, detecting more than just the odor of decay, or of hog shit.  It was a sweaty nauseous stench like that which a compost pile might make if a rabid raccoon had climbed into it and died.

I stepped cautiously through the muck to the edge of the open door, which had an overhang blocking out the sun.  I noticed a trickle of water running out from beneath the larger padlocked sliding door beside me.  Visible just inside the smaller door were the rollers of a gate that fronted the larger entrance.  The screened metal widened on either side into the dim windowless building, and although I squinted into the gloom of the large room, I elected not to enter into full view until my eyes became accustomed to the lack of light.  From where I stood, I had the image of multiple pens laid out in a grid, with the restless oval shapes of dirty gray animals merging behind the tubular sectioned steel with the avidity of sharks nearing a feeding frenzy.  Not only could I sense their hunger, but the coppery scent of blood seemed to tinge the stagnant air.  Something that was not quite masked by the stronger smells.

Still holding to the edge of the sliding entrance door, I felt along the wall nearest me for a light switch.  My hand met an electrical switch box.  Its lever was down, so I flipped it upward.  There was a sharp click as the spring inside shot its electrical contact home.  But the silver half moons of light fixtures retreating into the blackness along the ceiling still did not come to life.  There was no juice for them.  So now I suspected that the motor sound coming to me from the other side of the pens was a generator of sorts.

But for what purpose?

Both curiosity and my newfound fear of farm houses figured into my decision—if decision it was—to investigate.  I also wanted to get out of the light, away from where I was framed in the door.  Squinting, I reluctantly moved forward, cautious and intently listening.  My feet clumped the muck they’d picked up outside onto the wet concrete floor, and I paused six feet to the side of the door, staring into the vague distance illuminated by the narrow halo of sunlight next to me.  Out of that rectangle of light myself, I could see the hogs in the pens nearest me much more clearly.  They were strangely animated, wild creatures, yet surprisingly quiet for all their agitation and the obvious aggression they demonstrated to each other in passing.  Still, the combined sound was loud enough—a steady rumble of grunts, brays, and shrieks—and I guessed there must be hundreds in total here, although I couldn’t see to the other side of the building because it was too dark over there.  Dark, and oddly ominous.

“Hello!” I called out again, somehow hoping not to hear a reply this time.  But no flashlight beam was focused on me, and no human voice asked my business.

I had almost turned away when I smelled exhaust fumes, which had mingled with the other odors.  The generator engine was firing erratically, now, on the last of its gasoline.  Against my better judgment, if only to get a shadowy glimpse of the thing, I tread closer through occasional puddles of water, pinching my nose and ignoring the panicked motion behind the iron bars of the holding pens.

“Anybody here?  Mister Jensen?”

At the very edge of the light I came to an intersection amid the grid of pens, and thought I saw the generator some thirty feet ahead, and also what resembled a thick hose snaking out from another piece of equipment.  A pump?  There was something else there, too.  Beyond it, and also outside of the pens.

Something moving.

Dropping my hand from my nose, I smelled the acrid odor of blood again, only stronger now.  Much stronger.

“Hey!  Are you okay?”

The generator finally coughed and died.  Then a movement again.  The shape on the floor shifted.  I could make out a shoe.  I edged closer still, my eyes wide but unable to distinguish the form—or forms—that hunkered there, apparently injured.

“I’m coming, okay?” I confirmed.  This was more to myself than to the shadows, and perhaps to validate my own intentions, or to bolster my courage.  Then I considered what might have been the cause of injury.  And a word popped into my brain, as from the dark depths of a Magic 8-Ball.

Electrocution.

I looked down.  I could barely see my own feet, but by moving them slightly I could tell that I was standing in a puddle here.  The puddles were behind me, and in front of me.  Yes, I decided.  That had to be it.  That would explain it.  Electrocution.  An electrical short in the generator while farmer Jensen kneeled in water, maybe touching one of the metal bars that honeycombed the holding facility.  Although it didn’t explain the scent of blood.

Or did it?

It is so easy to get into trouble.  You walk right into it, one small step at a time.  Curiosity is what reels you in, slowly taking up the slack on the invisible line which has hooked you.  You come in willingly, against all the warnings, until it’s too late.  Then comes the snap and the net.