Breadcrumbs For The Nasties (Book 1): Megan Page 3

  “Can you run?” His voice was like charcoal, like clanking stones. When I didn’t answer he asked again, emphasizing every word. “Can. You. Run?”

  I nodded.

  “Then do it.” With one hand he lifted me to my feet. “Follow me. Stay close and you stay alive.”

  I did.

  For at least an hour, we moved through the forest, faint whispers of moonlight our only guide. He was hurried but cautious, careful with every step. I’m not sure why I kept so close to him, gripping the fabric of his shirt with one hand and tucking myself into his side. I probably shouldn’t have followed so blindly. In hindsight, I suppose it was a silly thing to do.

  I was becoming quite good at silly things.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know what else to do or where to go. My surroundings were a dead maze of shredded bark and fog. Nothing seemed familiar and everything seemed the same. Father had rarely let me drift from the safety of the road, especially not at night and certainly never so deep into the forest. The forest belonged to the nasties and the night was when they fed. The forest wasn’t safe.

  Half an hour into the trip, my legs were sore, knees on fire, every step like trudging through broken glass. When I tried to take a break, my traveling companion snatched me by the arm. “Can’t stop. Not yet.”

  When I started to cry, he told me to stop. When I tried to ask him a question, he told me bluntly to shut up. When I eventually crumpled to the ground, unable to go any farther, he forced me back to my feet. “Can’t stop, kid.”

  The moon was directly overhead when we came upon a small shack in the woods, old, barely holding together. A substantial breeze could have toppled it, a single howler would have reduced it to splinters. The moment we were inside, I looked for a closet. When I found one, I crawled inside and closed the door behind.

  It opened a moment later. “What the hell are you doing?” My blue-eyed companion was still staring at me, wide-eyed, confused. His eyes never moved. His expression never changed. I wasn’t sure he knew how to blink. “I need you to watch the back door.”

  “Wha…? I-I don—don—”

  He snatched me by the wrist, dragged me into the open. “Going to be a long night. We’re in the middle of the forest, exposed here. Sleeping won’t work. No time for sleep.”

  “B-but I-I don’t know…” I wasn’t sure what he was suggesting. I needed to be in the closet. It was dark, we were in the middle of the forest, and I felt naked without the closet. The closet was safe.

  He kneeled down, putting us on the same level. My teeth clattered, dry eyes aching to produce tears. His hands grabbed hold of my biceps, pressed them to my torso, and squeezed. For a moment, the shivering stopped.

  He motioned to a partially boarded window on the opposite end of the tiny enclosure. “Stay by the window near the back. That’s all you have to do. Just keep your eyes open. If you see anything, you come to me. I’m right over there, right at the window beside the door. I’m not going anywhere. Can you do that?”

  I nodded.

  It was a lie.

  My new friend nodded back. He retrieved a knife from his belt, placed it in my hand, and wrapped my fingers around the handle before nudging me in the direction of the window. The steel weapon felt massive, cold, and heavy, stained with flakes of dirt, blood, and unspecified filth. As I approached my post, I reminded myself to breathe. I felt dizzy. Every step was a struggle, inhaling an exercise. Through the cracks in the wood haphazardly nailed to the window frame, I watched the forest, gazing through the black and the trees, listening to my heart pound, sweaty hands struggling to hold my weapon. I’ll never forget that night. For as long as I live, I’ll never forget that night. Though my blue-eyed savior was just twenty feet away, it might as well have been miles. For the first time in my life I was alone, really alone. For the first time in my life, my safety was my own. Every breeze held the promise of disaster, every falling leaf the end of days. The forest became a living thing, angry and hungry, ugly-mouthed, a monster with its full attention settled squarely on me.

  Wherever I was, there was no going back. Whatever happened was going to happen. There was no stopping it. I no longer had a say. When something deep in the belly of the shadows moaned, howled and announced its presence to any and all. I gripped the knife in my hand so tight that my knuckles turned white.

  I was already becoming whoever I was destined to become.

  4.

  It was dawn when my new friend informed me we needed to leave. “They had too much on their plates to deal with putting a search party on us last night…different story this morning. We need to move.”

  I’d surprised myself the night before. I managed to stay awake until the morning. It took so long for the day to arrive. Minutes felt like hours, hours like days, the dark forest unrelenting and the sun a tardy visitor. My eyes were heavy. My arms were sore, legs weak, fingers shivering around the handle of the knife, frozen sweat clinging to my forehead. I thought I would die; all night long, I honestly believed it. It was a fact. It was simply a matter of time. And yet, despite my fears, nothing attacked. The forest groaned and screamed, but never made good on the threats. When my head began to dip from exhaustion, I glanced in the direction of my bearded companion. He didn’t move, not once, a stoic silhouette against the moonlight from the window, cut from stone and tethered to the floor, an unyielding protector. I suppose, in some ways, he terrified me more than anything lurking outside.

  Not long after the sun rose, we were again trudging through the woods, moving farther from the compound with every step, farther from Father. I wanted to say something, tried on more than one occasion. When I opened my mouth, nothing emerged, second thoughts and regrets too prevalent to overcome. Instead, I kept my mouth shut and my head down. I followed.

  Around midday we emerged from the trees and came across a stretch of road. I’d never been so happy to see the road. It felt familiar, felt like home. When night approached, we took refuge in a shattered husk of a house deep in the belly of a hundred others exactly the same. I’d stayed in similar places for the whole of my life, shells of a past I only vaguely remembered, forgotten memories of a world I’d never know.

  My parents rarely talked about their life before the end, before I was born. On the rare occasions they did, it was with a heavy heart. They wanted to forget the past. That much was obvious. Reliving it, even momentarily and even in their heads, made that impossible. I was born in the aftermath of whatever happened, whatever transformed the world to cinder and ash. I was a product of this place. Its dust and its monsters were mine. It was all I knew, all I’d ever know.

  My dreams had always been nightmares.

  That night Blueeyes let me sleep, not that he had any choice in the matter. I was done for. My eyes refused to stay open. I couldn’t lift my arms. He told me it was okay. He claimed we were safe among the ruins outside the forest, safer from howlers anyway. The gimps were another story entirely. Gimps seemed to love the ruins, plodding aimlessly from broken building to collapsing husk, limp-necked and dead-eyed. I’d only seen a few of them up close at that point in my life, sunken faces of rotted flesh, eyes like filthy water, cloudy and not quite there. The gimps were slow. When they weren’t in packs, they were mostly easy to escape, and when they were in packs, you could smell them coming a mile away.

  I slept in the open, a closet just a few feet away. Blueeyes told me I should keep close, that the closet would only make things harder if we needed to leave in a hurry. I suppose it made sense.

  In the morning I found him staring out the window, knife in one hand, expression as steady as ever. I don’t think he slept. As far as I knew, he never had. It took me a while to work up the courage to tell him I was hungry. He fed me immediately, cracking open a can of something he’d discovered in the ruins overnight. It tasted awful. Everything always tasted awful.

  I didn’t let him know what I thought of it.

  Instead, we sat in silence looking at the floor, staring at the walls,
looking everywhere but at each other. In a strange way, he seemed as scared of me as I was of him. Nibbling at the pile of greenish-yellow glop, I would steal momentary glances, watching him through the spaces in my dangling hair. He moved from the windows to the doors, pacing back and forth, occasionally leaning his head outside to scan the exterior. He wasn’t a huge man; larger than my father, but not a mountain like Scarface or as tall as the Bloodboots. Even then, I noticed the hint of sadness in his eyes. He tried his best to hide it and mostly succeeded, but I noticed. I was good at noticing things, even then, details others missed. Father once told me it was my gift.

  Blueeyes was sad. He was hurting. It was subtle, just below the surface, painted into the wrinkles on his forehead and the lines beneath his eyes. Father had the sadness too. And mother. They all did. When Blueeyes removed his jacket, I saw the scars for the first time, so many scars. They covered his arms, long and short, dark and light, like cracks in the pavement, crumbled stone, eventually disappearing beneath the sleeve of his shirt and the hem of his collar. Some of them resembled bite marks, but I knew that was impossible. When he noticed me staring, I looked away.

  When I was done eating, he told me we had to keep moving, said something about another, much safer housing development further down the road. He mentioned seeing gimp tracks on the next block over, told me it was only a matter of time before they forgot where they were headed in the first place and circled back in search of something familiar.

  I wasn’t crazy about the idea. I let him know. “We have to go back to the compound.”

  I don’t know why I said it. It spit from my lips without hesitation or warning. Once it was out, there was no putting it back.

  “What?” He was eyeing me from across the room, hands at his sides, eyes narrowed and mouth hanging open.

  “W-we have…” I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t breathe. When my lower lip started to quiver, I bit it, turned away. I couldn’t look at him and say what I needed to say. Looking at him was impossible. “M-my fath-father. We have to go back. My father…my f-father is in there, in the compound. We have to go back.”

  There was no hesitation in his response. “We’re not going back.”

  Nor was there in mine. “We have to go back.”

  Why wouldn’t I shut up? I needed to shut up. I kept saying things I knew I shouldn’t say, things he didn’t want to hear. I closed my eyes and lowered my head, trying to control my breathing, half expecting to feel his knife in my back. I still couldn’t turn around. If I’d turned around, I never would have said what I needed to say.

  Again there was a pause. He sighed before he finally spoke. I remember the sigh. The sigh might as well have been a scream. “Your father is dead.”

  A knife in the back would have been less painful. Tiny hands coiled into tiny fists so tight my fingernails dug into the flesh of my palms. My jaw tightened, chest heaved, and nostrils flared. I spun around, charged at him with my head lowered and arms raised. “Shut up! Shut up! You don’t know anything! You don’t know!”

  I slammed into him at full speed, collided with his chest, arms swinging, teeth bared, screaming at the top of my lungs. “You don’t know anything! I don’t know you! You don’t know my father and I don’t know you!” When he caught my fists, I kicked his legs. When he trapped my legs, I swung my fists. When I couldn’t use either, I gave him a head butt to the chest. He shoved me backward, pinning me against a nearby wall. I bit his arm.

  “Stop it! Damn it, stop it!”

  I was like a tornado, an eighty-pound bundle of pent-up rage and exposed nerves. Every time he thought he had me under control, I wiggled loose. The moment my fists were free, I punched. I hammered his chest and his neck, kicked him in the shins and kneed him in the groin. I didn’t care. He didn’t have any right to say what he said, even less of a right to say it the way he’d said it. None of it made sense anyway. Why was he helping me? Why did he care? Who was he? He was no one. He was nothing, a liar. I wanted him to take it back. I wanted him to go away. I never wanted to see his stupid face or his ugly blue eyes again! I didn’t want to be in that broken down house with him, and I regretted accepting his food. I wanted to be back on the road with Mother and Father. I wanted my closet back. I hated him. In that moment, I hated him more than I’d hated anything.

  When the glass in the partially boarded window on the opposite end of the room unexpectedly shattered, I stopped screaming, he stopped holding—everything stopped.

  Blueeyes immediately retrieved the knife from his belt and growled under his breath. “Shit.”

  A rotted arm snapped through the newly broken glass, twisted fingers pawing at the air. A head of sunken cavities and peeling flesh leaned into the room. A gimp. The creature sniffed the air like a dog searching for a scent. Its milky eyes settled in our direction, its mouth opened, rotting teeth clinging to nonexistent gums, upper lip quivering. The moment it realized what it was looking at, it screamed. I’d never heard one of them scream—so human, and yet so not. The wall beside the window shook and the head of another gimp leaned in. Something slammed into the back door, knocking loose rusted hinges. The window across from us exploded inward, tossing shards of glass onto my feet. They were all around us. We were surrounded.

  Blueeyes snatched me by the wrist, nearly pulling my arm from the socket, dragging me toward the stairs. “ Move! Now!”

  It happened so quickly. In a matter of seconds the room was packed with gimps, mindlessly jockeying for position, shoving and screaming, moaning like injured animals. It was awful, a sea of filth and madness. At least ten pairs of distant eyes locked onto us as we hustled upstairs, aged wood cracking with every step. Jaws snapped at air, limbs like twisted wire flailing in every direction. Blueeyes pulled me into the first open doorway, slammed the door behind him, and wedged his back against it. The room was small, littered with bits of debris, a broken bed and leftover junk from what used to be a desk wedged in the corner. The windows were boarded tight.

  There was no way out.

  The weight of the gimp horde pounded against the door, knocking Blueeyes forward before he dropped his shoulder and slammed his full weight against it once again. I could hear their fingers, so many fingers clawing at the wood, peeling paint and tearing scraps of their own flesh in the process.

  The monsters were filling the area outside the room, packed tight and getting tighter, beating against the single piece of wood separating them from their meal. Blueeyes was struggling to keep it closed. The next time it opened, a gimp hand found its way inside, snatched his shirt. Without hesitation, he swung his knife upward, through the decayed forearm of the creature, snapping rotted bone and spraying blood across the floor.

  With his free hand, he pointed across the room. “The window! Pry those boards from the window!”

  I tried. I really did try. I wrapped my fingers around the wood and pulled. I put my foot on the wall and used it for leverage. I hit them with my shoulder and punched them with my hands. When none of that worked, I wiped the tears from my face and tried it all again. They wouldn’t budge. No matter what I did or how hard I did it, they wouldn’t move. The moaning was getting louder. Wood cracked, splinters sprayed. Two dead fingers wormed their way through a crack and peeled a bit of the door away. They were tearing it apart. Blueeyes slipped, and fell, and landed on his rear, struggling to keep the creatures at bay. It was only a matter of time. One of their heads smashed into the partially open door and bit down. Bloody teeth popped from its mouth. Blueeyes put his knife in the space between its eyes. The creature’s decayed skull folded inward, pus and chunks of meat squishing from inside. I turned my head, dropped to my knees, closed my eyes, and put my hands over my ears. I couldn’t listen anymore. It was too much. It was happening too fast.

  Blueeyes screamed at me. “The closet!” I barely heard him over the noise. He screamed again. “Damn it! Look at me!”

  When I finally looked up, he was on his knees, shoulder pressed to the door, boots sliding a
gainst the wooden floor. At least ten gimp arms twitched like spider legs at the joint. One of them was pulling at his jacket while another had a handful of his hair. Stabbing at the wiggling appendages, face peppered with blood, Blueeyes pointed at a door on the far end of the room. “The closet! Get in the closet and close the door! Do not come out until I tell you!”

  I moved without hesitation, so fast I tripped. Instead of trying to stand, I crawled. All I could see was the closet. I’d never moved so fast in my life, and never with such purpose. In that moment, I didn’t care about Blueeyes. I didn’t care that I was leaving him to face a horde of gimps. I didn’t care if he lived or died. I didn’t care about anything. When I reached the closet door, I opened it, slid inside and pressed myself against the back wall.

  It was black in there, pitch black.

  Outside my little black safe haven, things were anything but safe. Wood tore and splintered. Something crashed. Blueeyes screamed. He wasn’t hurt, wasn’t in pain. It wasn’t that kind of scream. It was more like a battle cry, an angry wail. Feet trampled into the room, so many of them, all at once. A body hit the floor. Another hit the wall. Something collapsed. Glass shattered. The floor was shaking, walls creaking. Coat hangers flopped loose from the bar above me, raining down onto my head. In no time at all, the groans became louder, more vicious. The voice of Blueeyes melded into the fold, intermixed with everything awful until it was one and the same. I’m not sure how long I sat in that closet with my knees to my chest, shivering, biting my arm to keep from screaming. It felt like forever.

  Eventually, it all stopped. Everything always stops.

  When it was quiet again, I pulled my arm from my mouth. I had bitten down so hard that I’d drawn blood. Believe it or not, until that very moment, I’d never seen my own blood.

  “Come on out.”

  It took me a full minute after hearing his voice to crack the closet door and peek out; even then, I barely worked up the nerve. Blueeyes was in the center of the room, head down, hands and arms covered in blood, face turned crimson. Around him were gimp corpses—so many corpses. Their bodies were like fallen branches, jumbled, unnatural things bent in unnatural ways. Less than a foot away from the closet the severed head of one of the creatures wobbled unevenly, dead eyes swaying back and forth in a pool of blood, staring right at me. Blueeyes lifted the hem of his shirt, wrapped it around the hand holding his knife, and used it to wipe away the blood. He didn’t look at me, not once.