I never thought I’d be taking over for Evelyn again, but here we are.
This is Daniel, and right off the bat, I will say that my coworker is doing about as well as can be imagined. She’s sleeping beside me, curled up in a chair meant for hospital visitors, the kind that squeaks if you even just think about moving. She’s in pain, but very much alive. We both are. How it ended up this way is a long story, but I’m skipping none of the details.
Finn kept true to his word. Days after Elijah had appeared and the fog made a mess of things at the station, the stress had slowed to a normal speed of ‘mellow weirdness’, and we began to see him returning to drop off deliveries and keep an eye on things. I remembered the relief on Evelyn’s face as she passed her keys over to him, finally feeling the weight of their presence lift as Finn took our responsibilities for the weekend. This was the first day off she had ever had since starting, unless being arrested counts as a vacation. No matter how many times she had stepped outside before this moment, this was the only time she actually seemed lighter in spirit as soon as her feet hit the ground.
“Where are you staying tonight?” I asked her, hoping the question wasn’t invasive. Luckily, she didn’t seem phased by it as she reached around to pat her back pockets, checking for her wallet for the tenth time.
“I’ve got enough for a motel. The one down by the main road. It’ll put me close enough to the shops to find some kind of dress to wear.”
I laughed. “I thought we agreed on matching tuxedos?”
Evelyn snorted when she laughed, climbing into the passenger seat of my car. Her eyes wandered down to the floor and I noticed the way she tried to be subtle about avoiding a few granola bar wrappers left abandoned, melted underneath her feet. I probably should have cleaned things up.
“If I can find two in both of our sizes, I’ll let you know.” She leaned back in her seat, buckling in and giving the tower one last look out the window before the wheels crunched through gravel. “Can you drop me off at Parker Street? Next to the old motel?”
I glanced in the rearview mirror, getting one last look at our workplace before the main road came into view. I had left so many times before, but it took me this long to realize that Evelyn had never actually left with me.
“Sure you don’t want to eat first? I’ll buy you lunch.” I asked as I scratched my face, the stubble reminding me to shave before tomorrow.
Evelyn was visibly thinking it over, her lips scrunched to one side of her face. “Maybe tomorrow before the wedding. I kind of just want to take a nap right now.”
I didn’t push, and she didn’t need any excuse. She deserved some time to herself that wasn’t spent in the broadcast tower, sleeping in a real bed even if it was covered in a few mysterious stains. “Alright,” I told her, distracted by the annoying blink of my turn signal as we entered town. “I’ll pick you up at noon, how’s that sound?”
The rest of the ride was quiet, brief, and with a few small intervals of actual comment when there was something worth talking about. Now and again, Evelyn would point out an old store that had shut down or tell me about which houses her elementary school friends used to live in before she moved away. As much as she said she hated this place, the freedom of leaving the radio tower seemed to awaken an appreciation for it.
The car was put in park, still running in silence. Evelyn unbuckled herself from her seat, nothing but her wallet and the clothes on her back to take with her. She still wore a clumsy smile, freckled cheeks pulled in a grin as her hand fell on my shoulder with a hard clap.
“Call me before you pick me up, okay? I sleep through alarms.”
“I’ll do that,” I assured her. “Now go get some rest. And a shower. See if they’ve got a free hair brush you can steal.”
She bit her tongue as she stuck it out at me, eyes squinting and nose crinkled. The annoyed expression didn’t last though, and I was lucky enough to get a small glimpse of a smile before she shut the car door, tripped over the curb, and straightened up again on her way to the motel entrance while giving one last pat to her back pocket to check for her wallet.
I spent that night the way I spend a lot of nights. That is to say, not doing much at all before falling into bed. I thought for a split second about texting Evelyn, asking if she’s doing alright, before remembering that she’s safer now than she ever was. I’ll admit that there are many times when I sit awake at night and wonder why the hell we still bother going back. Thinking about her set up in the motel, both of us free from the broadcast station, made me ponder how we’d get away with just … leaving. It would be easy, wouldn’t it? It would take hardly any effort at all to just get in the car and drive, dividing our money to get as far as we could and sleeping in the back seat if we had to. But somehow it still felt wrong. To give up a burden we chose would just push it onto someone else who didn't even ask for it. I don’t claim to be a perfect person, but I don’t think either of us are that heartless.
As I laid down in bed, putting my phone next to me on a charger, I was about to close my eyes before I saw the glow of the screen light up and the motion of vibration. It was after eleven o’clock and I half-expected it to be some spam email, but was surprised and amused to see three messages from Evelyn:
“Holy shit they have REAL COFFEE in the machine!!!!”“Not ducking gasoline!!”
“*fucking not ducking. Autocorrect can suck my ass.”
I snorted, eyes squinting in the bright light of a screen in a pure dark room as I texted her back.
“Save it for the A.M. and go to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
And she did. At noon, just as I promised, I stopped by the motel just as she walked out, a department store bag full of wrinkled clothes in one hand. I tried hard not to audibly laugh as she approached the car. She had found a dress to wear, which was simple yet attractive, but the part that made me chuckle was that she still had a pair of dirty old boots on beneath the knee-length skirt. That aside, she looked neater than I had ever seen her before, somewhat rested and with her hair down and combed properly. It looked like she made some small attempt at makeup on her eyes, but there were patches of red skin near her temples and cheeks as if she had rubbed it off and tried several times to put it back on. Still, she looked good. She looked different.
“Hey, Danny. Look at you! We’re going to be the fanciest assholes at the diner.” That was the first thing she said to me, and at that point, I knew that the change of appearance did not change the person. I was glad of that.
“You look nice for a change too.” I complimented. “And here I thought you’d find a tuxedo.”
Evelyn smirked, buckling herself in. “I was going to buy one but I didn’t want to outshine you. Besides, I can’t tie a tie.”
I glanced down at the blue tie at my collar, pinching the top of it and pulling it off the shirt in one motion. It was a clip-on, which I put back in place instantly. “Me either.”
Once we arrived at the diner, which was the only place to eat in town, I felt fully immersed in the culture of ‘small town paranoia’. I hadn’t lived here long enough to experience the feeling of being a local, but from the glares of townsfolk sitting at the bar, I got the distinct feeling I never would.
Evelyn was being very precious with her coffee cup, doing her best not to spill it on her dress. As we waited for our orders, she glanced around but specifically avoided looking at any one person for too long. In towns like these, everyone knew one another. Everyone knew who moved in, who left, who came back, and who got into trouble. She quickly brought her attention back to me, resting an elbow on the table with her hand cupping her chin.
“What’s the bride’s name?” She asked. Goddammit, I felt like an idiot then. I had mentioned her to my family, but never even thought to introduce them the other way around.
“Her name’s Adriana. She’s sweet, you’ll like her.” I hummed for a second, trying to think of who else she might meet. “You’ll get to meet my parents, aunts, uncles … grandma only speaks Spanish but you’ll meet her too.”
Evelyn nodded. “Don’t try chatting with grandma, got it.”
“Oh, no, she’ll still talk to you for an hour whether or not you understand her.” I actually made Evelyn laugh that time. A real laugh.
We saw people come and go through the diner, tables filling and emptying and filling again. We talked the whole time about anything other than work or the woods. She asked where I went to college, where I grew up, where I’ve worked. We bonded over shared stories of crummy retail job woes and our weirdest former roommates, then complained about how bad the nachos were while simultaneously trying to get one another to eat an entire hot pepper in one bite. It was almost two-thirty and we were fifteen photos into a mobile album of my parents’ dogs when we realized we weren’t alone anymore.
A group passed by, made of four older men all dressed eerily identically in denim and trucker hats. The last one passed us, his eyes peering from Evelyn’s face to mine with a frown hidden somewhere in a bushy gray beard. He stopped, took two steps back to stand next to our table, and spoke to us.
“I know you two.” His voice was a dry old croak. “Heard ya’ over the radio.”
Evelyn’s gaze darted from him to me as the most uncomfortable smile stretched across her face, more like a grimace than anything else. “Hey, thanks, glad to hear someone actually listens--”
“It won’t do any good.” He interrupted, shutting her up in an instant. “Nothin’ will stop it. We’ve been tryin’ for decades, you’ll be tryin’ forever. … Tryin’ as long as you last.”
It’s amazing how quickly everything seemed to dim, like the life had been sucked out of the room and the happy conversation meant nothing anymore. Evelyn was silent, I was silent, and the man took that moment to draw in a slow, deep breath. Then he tapped the front of his cap and nodded in farewell, saying only one thing: “Good luck.”
As unpleasant as that was, perhaps the distraction was a good thing. It was getting into mid-afternoon now and we had a bit of a drive to get to the wedding, but Evelyn didn’t seem to mind the prospect of getting out of the village limits for a day. After getting in the car and passing by the last tiny corner store before the stretch of road began, the easy feeling was coming back. We rolled down the windows to feel the breeze in the mountains, keeping the radio off the whole way.
It really was a wasteland. As soon as we left the town and rounded the mountain range that separated our little piece of civilization from the rest of the world, there was nothing to see for miles. A small rest stop with one gas pump flew by, the inside of the building dark and the door practically hanging on one hinge. After that, there was the endless expanse of forest, which was quite honestly an even less pleasant sight. All the way there, I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone spotted strange things on this side of the wood.
The sooner all traces of that town disappeared, the better. Evelyn was talkative, but in a nervous sort of way, asking if I thought my family would like her or if they’d try to get her to drink any champagne. “Don’t worry,” I assured as we pulled up to the building, several familiar faces making their way in. “I’ll make sure you stick to orange juice tonight.”
…
It was oddly refreshing to sit through the ceremony, not only because it was nice to see family and loved ones, but because it was a big reminder of how things still went on as normal with the rest of the world. My cousin and her new husband looked happy. The children attending were whispering and being quickly shushed by their parents. My grandmother was loudly crying in joy from the front row, which made Evelyn snort with laughter even though I could see a trace of her own heartfelt smile. None of that reminded me of the woods or the radio tower. None of it scared me. The normal world was still there, and it wasn’t as far away as I thought it was.
The reception was a whirlwind. My family was naturally loud, talkative, and energetic, but all of that seemed to hit us like a brick wall when we arrived at the post-ceremony celebration. I watched Evelyn’s face become blank and stunned, caught in the headlights the moment the door opened and we were bombarded by at least five different people. Everyone wanted to know who she was, where I’d been, and as my coworker was getting her third hug from a great aunt who assumed that she was my significant other, we made the decision that it was time to sit down before we were ambushed any further.
“Your family is sweet.” She said once she had a second to sit and take a breath. I laughed, knowing what she meant by “sweet”.
“Sorry, I know they’re a bit much. I only told them good things about you.”
“Really?” She had that shit-eating grin again. “Did you tell them about my terribly crude language and all the highly infectious diseases I’m carrying?”
“Oh yeah, and I warned them about the smell too.”
She punched me in the shoulder and we had a good laugh before my mother decided to make an appearance at last, recognizing Evelyn by association. At first, it looked like my poor coworker was about to have an allergic reaction to the sheer amount of hugs she had been receiving, but eventually the socially exhausted smile was mingling with a real, genuine one. I left them to chat for a moment, came back with a drink for myself and, just as I had promised, passed a cup of orange juice over to Evelyn. I’m not one to take back a promise.
Before we left for the night, I learned a few things. I learned that I’m not the biggest fan of champagne, that jokingly calling Evelyn 'La Llorona' is a quick way to get smacked by my grandmother, and that neither of us have any rhythm for dancing. She graced me with one slow dance near the end of the night, stepping on my toes at least a dozen times. I didn’t complain. We both left with a smile, and every sore toe and scuffed shoe was worth that.
The drive back to town was a long one, but it started on the right foot. We laughed about a few particular family members after a few drinks, joked about terrible dancing. It was one of those moments where I realized that Evelyn and I were actually friends. However, things felt different the moment we realized where we were headed, driving down the winding stretch of dark, forested road. It wasn’t until the mountain range came into view beside us that the full weight of our return began to eat away at the glow of a somewhat casual evening.
“I don’t want to go back yet.” Evelyn said, faced away from me as she stared out the passenger’s seat window. “Not until morning, at least.”
If I had my way, we wouldn’t have to go back at all. “You wanna crash at my place? You can have the bed.”
She actually seemed to consider it for a moment, sitting stiff in her chair and looking out the windshield, at the rear-view mirror … anywhere but at my face. After a moment of silence, she cocked her head to the side with a sudden idea just as I turned the car to enter town.
“Let’s go to my place,” she said. I was perplexed, but too curious of what she had planned to say 'no'.
We passed the apartments, the residential district, the shops. I was driving slow, expecting her to tell me to stop or take a turn at any given road, but she didn’t. She waited until we were driving by the old elementary school to point out my window at a small stone driveway near the park.
“Here. Let’s pull in here.”
I did as she said, parking the car right in front of the playground where the children would play during school. It was empty, as to be expected, and behind the swings and slides was an upward hill that met with the thick, dreary treeline.
Evelyn gave me a look, eyebrows raised, nudging her head towards her door as she unbuckled herself. At the time, I didn’t understand why we were there, but she was so confident that it was where we were supposed to be. She got out of the car, stretching her legs after the long drive, and I followed right behind her.
“So…” I started, hands in the pockets of my black dress pants. “This is …?”
“My last residence.” Evelyn stated it without hesitance, as if it was common knowledge. “I went to school here as a kid for a few years before we moved. When Jenny and I moved back and I ended up losing a place to stay, I slept underneath the slide for a little while. So this is it. This is my place.”
She passed underneath the monkey bars, lifting a hand to tap the metal above her head. I, on the other hand, had to duck to get underneath it, all the while trying to think of a response. The playground looked used and well-loved, years of rust covering the equipment and the colorful paint chipping. The swing-set made the most chilling sound as the chains rattled in a light breeze.
I looked at the slide, which was made of yellow plastic and faded in the middle from years of use. Underneath was simply wood chips, as well as a few stray pieces of trash from children and probably adults who had been hanging out after school. It didn’t look like the best place to sleep.
“I’m … sorry.” How else should I have reacted?
“Shit, don’t say you’re sorry.” She laughed as she grabbed a swing-set chain, propping one boot-clad foot on the seat and instantly making herself taller as she slowly swayed back and forth. “Just … ask if the wood chips ever poked my ass. Make a joke about it. It doesn’t have to be awkward anymore, Danny.”
Alright. I decided it wouldn’t be awkward anymore. I gave her an embarrassed smile, sitting down in the swing beside her own, and wondered when she decided to start calling me ‘Danny’.
Evelyn plopped her heels back down in the wood chips to properly take a seat on the swing, using one foot to slowly tip forward and back. We were both facing the woods, a feeling that brought me discomfort and I could only imagine it did the same for her.
“Finn told you about the abductions, right?” She asked, and I nodded. “He said the kids were being lured into the woods outside the school. You think he meant right here?”
A chill went up my spine and I chuckled an awkward, reluctant sort of laugh. “Oh god, don’t say that. At least wait until we leave to put that image in my head.”
Evelyn made a spooky ‘wooo’ noise and wiggled her fingers at me. This was how she did things. This was how we both did things. If we were scared and uncomfortable, we had to laugh or else we would go mad.
We were swinging next to one another in silence for a few minutes before eventually Evelyn began to slow, her foot nearly motionless on the ground and no longer propelling her forward. I noticed the way she sat perfectly still, eyes stuck on the wood chips between her feet.
“The wedding was nice.” she said, a touch of sorrow in her tone. “Thanks a lot for inviting me.”
“Oh, of course. Well, technically my mom invited you, but --”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t have gone if you didn’t say I could go with you.” She was sitting still now, looking at me instead of at the ground. There was a sad, comfortless expression on her face, as if the fake smile she wore caused her physical pain. I didn’t know what to say to make it better. “You know, I hoped I’d be going to Jenny’s wedding someday. Maybe be a bridesmaid, help her get ready, go to some stupid party with all her other girlfriends that I would complain about for weeks.” There was that joyless chuckle again. “...I feel bad for Elijah though.”
I had stopped swinging and leaned my head against one chain. “I feel bad for him too,” I said. “Even if he tried to break my nose.”
Here we were again, in a situation that wasn’t funny, still chuckling about it. Though to be honest, the moment I got out of my car and ended up getting punched in the face was rather hilarious in hindsight.
Evelyn kicked at the ground, pushing herself back to start swinging again. She leaned back to look up at the sky, and when I copied her and did the same, I found it surprisingly dizzying. The stars were bright on a clear evening, out here away from the lights in town and far from any big cities.
“You can usually see Mars this time of year.” She said, pointing up. But the hunt for the red planet was cut abruptly short. We both heard the sound of footsteps through dry grass and leaves: small ones, moving quick and clumsily. Evelyn straightened up while I stood with eyes squinted into the treeline, expecting to see some normal or abnormal creature crawling out from the brush. What we saw instead was a figure, small and quick, hidden in shadow and on its way towards the woods. It was a child, a little boy dressed in red pajamas, and we both watched him make those final steps into the forest towards something tall and obscured in the shadow of the trees.
I thought Evelyn was going to fall off of the swing, her legs landing pigeon-toed as she rushed to stand up. This was exactly what we feared.
“Did you see him?” She asked, but she didn’t need to. I was already on my feet and ready to follow. “Was he following something?... Goddammit, Dan.”
She wasn’t swearing at me, but rather, her exasperation came from a place of concern. Neither of us waited around to discuss what we were going to do, but we somehow agreed in silence that the only option was to catch up with the boy before there was no chance of ever finding him again in one piece.
I got to the top of the hill before her, but stopped to grab her arm and pull her the rest of the way. Though out of breath, she was the first to rush ahead and pass the treeline that separated our safe, normal world from one that was wild and unpredictable. In the darkness of misshapen blobs of shadow where it was difficult to tell the difference between a bush and an animal, our eyes were in constant search of a flash of red, a bit of movement, or the glow of eyes.
The forest echoed our steps. I could no longer tell what sounds were coming from us and what sounds were coming from him, but twice Evelyn stopped in her tracks and grabbed my elbow as we kept still. I felt my own heartbeat, pulsing out of control. Distantly, I heard the sound of small, clumsy footsteps, sometimes running and sometimes walking. Evelyn heard it better than I did, holding up two fingers: two sets of feet. We didn't wait around before speeding through the upward tilt of the hill.
“Where the hell did he go?” Evelyn grabbed a tree, panting for breath and turning to look behind us. I could no longer see the entrance to the woods and there was no telling how far we had gone. I couldn’t have even told you the direction we were facing after making so many turns. When we found the boy, then we would worry about what to do next. He was so young, so small … I knew neither of us could live with ourselves if we were the last ones to see him alive but refused to do anything.
“I don’t see him anymore.” I told her, legs stiff as we soldiered on at a slower pace. We had both kept our voices to whispers, but we were already lost and in plain view - there was no point in staying hidden anymore. “Hey! Little boy! We’re here to help you! Where are you?”
A small group of bats tittered and squeaked above as they abandoned the tree beside us, while in the bushes, the rustling of rodents moved further away. It left the forest in an eerie silence for several seconds, before Evelyn perked up and pointed a finger past me.
“I heard crying.” She said. “In that direction.”
The constant, dull ring in my ears drowned out the noise almost completely, but when I paid close attention, I could make out some suggestion of a high-pitched, uneven sound. It was the sobs and hiccups of a child, moving further away from us until I could no longer pick it up. But Evelyn could. She seemed to realize this, as she took the lead and guided us both through a section of close-growing pines that scratched at my neck as we pushed their branches aside.
We were running full speed when we noticed a flash of red up above. It was on the ground, crumbled up in a heap. My heart sank, hoping and praying that the only red stain in my vision was the color of his pajamas. As we grew closer, we noticed him moving, rocking back and forth. He was sitting on the ground, hunched over and pounding little fists into the dirt.
“Hey, hey, hey, don’t move. It’s okay.” Evelyn dropped down to the boy’s level. He looked alarmed to see us at first, his tear-streaked, red face ready to burst into terrified wails until he realized he was looking at two very ordinary humans. He didn’t say anything, but it made my stomach sick with dread to see him crawling towards my coworker and I as if looking for someone to comfort him. He had to be no older than three. Shit, this kid was hardly big enough to upgrade from a crib. This tiny thing could have been dead, and the sight of that is something I don’t think I would ever recover from.
“Let’s start walking. We’ll either find our way back or we’ll see the radio tower, one or the other.” I offered a hand at Evelyn’s elbow while she preoccupied herself in picking up the boy, who seemed more than willing to cling to her rather than walking on his own.
“Shit, he’s shaking like a leaf.” She told me. I almost commented that maybe she shouldn’t cuss around a three year old, but it wasn’t the time or place for that.
“Lyn, have you been keeping track of how many turns we’ve made?”
She grumbled at my question. “No. I haven’t. And I can’t see a damn thi--”
She was silenced, jumping with a start as the tree branches behind her cracked and snapped as if something moved very quickly through them. For only a second, I saw a dark shape taller than myself, but it appeared and disappeared through dense shadow in an instant. She backed towards me, holding the little boy tighter as he whined and hid his face in her shoulder.
“Walk faster. Walk faster.” She was taking quick steps, trying not to jostle the child in her arms while keeping her head turning in every direction. The look of panic on her face was one I had only seen once before. It was the same face she wore the night the power went out, but this time, we were in enemy territory without a generator. They were already here and looking for us, fog or no fog.
“No!” We heard a shrill voice. It was the boy in the red pajamas, pointed behind us. “No, no!”
We stopped, one last crunch from both of our feet bringing silence around us. And then, another crunch, and another, moving agonizingly slow. I hated to turn, but we had no choice. My mouth was dry and my heart was racing as I glanced over my shoulder, seeing a figure standing perfectly still a few yards away with a blank, wooden stare pointed in our direction. His face was gone, or rather, it was covered. His head was encased in tree roots and his clothes were torn to reveal a skeletal cavity with vines and bark twisting into his hollowed-out body. He creaked when he moved like a brittle tree being blown in the wind, swaying on the spot. I had a fleeting thought that perhaps if we stayed quiet and still, the blind creature wouldn't know we were here.
But then I blinked, and he was closer. The sound of twigs snapping followed as he took long, huge strides towards us on legs that creaked like wooden planks every time he bent his knees. He made no sound and had no voice, as if the human inside of the mask had been eaten away entirely. The boy screamed and Evelyn and I both began to run, her speed impaired by the weight in her arms. She was screaming at me, yelling many words I couldn’t make out but a few that I could. Most of them were exclaimed swear words, but I distinctly heard one sentence: “don’t look back”.
I didn’t, but my mistake was when I chose to watch her instead of watching where I was going. My feet hit the edge of a thorn bush, and I was more startled by the impact than actually injured. It was enough to falter my steps, and in that moment, my upper body was moving forward faster than my legs were. I began to stumble, stuck in place, and the final impact that I felt before hitting the ground would be the last clear thing I fully remembered.
There was a blur of activity. Before my head hit the forest floor, a sharp pain sent a surge through my back. A heavy weight was pressed in the center of my body, spine aching as I tried to rise onto my knees only to be pushed back down by the back of my head. I remembered the smell of leather and mud, the feel of hard rubber kicking the side of my head. Twigs wrapped around my shoulders, but they weren’t twigs at all. They were wooden hands, flipping my body over until I saw the sky and the silhouette of the tree-faced man disappearing into the trees after cracking his boot down into the middle of my chest. My sight was becoming nothing but a blur, seconds stolen away as everything above me moved faster than it did in real life.
I heard the little boy crying. I heard Evelyn yelling at the top of her lungs. One moment, I was looking at the stars, and the next I was looking at her face as she pulled me by the sleeves of my shirt, trying to drag me through the dirt with the boy clinging to her hip.
“Danny, you have to get up!” Her voice was distorted, sometimes quiet and sometimes loud and shrill. “Dan please.”
I felt the grip of her arms as she attempted to lift me, but I couldn’t move. My head felt heavy, my arms felt non-existent, and consciousness was there and then gone with every passing second.
A few moments were lost from me, but what remained of my awareness was brought back by a scream. Evelyn was telling the boy to run, her voice a dry crackle, and in an instant the warmth of her hold was torn away as she was ripped from the ground upwards. I couldn’t blink. I couldn’t even move my head. I could only watch the towering man, his wooden face featureless but his posture predatory, as he held her in the air by her throat.
I was incapable of making a sound as the creature’s free hand rubbed her forehead, her hair, pulling it out of her face to inspect the look of terror that she wore. The only thing I could do was watch in silence, struggling to breathe, while her flails turned into desperate kicks for freedom.
The creature traced lines on her face with a long, sharp claw. That moment was so agonizingly slow, before one finger found the top of her eyelid and pushed it upwards, revealing a frantic, darting eye. Every single part of me wished that I couldn’t see this, but more than that, I wished I could do something. Even in the blur, there was no mistaking the choking scream that tore through her throat, the sound of sharp edges digging into soft skin, and the color of blood dripping onto the grass and dirt below us.
And she cried. She cried a wail that hurt more than anything else to hear. I watched the monster drop her into a huddled mess on the ground, where she moved and writhed in any attempt to get away. One hand covered her face but in the darkness, I could see blood seeping through her shaking fingers. She crawled on her knees and one elbow, one visible eye open wide in shock while the root-faced man held his own hand up to his chest, putting a mass of blood and flesh into his body cavity as if it were a pocket. The entire time, Evelyn never stopped whimpering and gasping for breath in sheer panic.
I blinked, and the creature was gone. I blinked again, and a dark shadow loomed over me, swaying and glaring down as if looking for signs of life. I watched it tilt its head upwards, and from beneath its chin, a single human eye was staring down at me. I only saw it for a split second, and then the smell of leather and the pain of impact against the side of my head sent everything into cold, quiet darkness.
Like being in a dream, nothing was linear and nothing was altogether there. I no longer heard Evelyn’s sobs, but I heard the distant voice of a man. Was it far away, or was I not entirely in my head anymore? My sparse hearing picked up the pop of gunshots, then the sound of a screech and frantic steps, then all I registered was pain in my chest and neck as I was dragged immobile through the grass. I opened my eyes for only a second to see heavy black boots and a pair of denim jeans above me, then the limp, auburn strands of hair from a body hanging over a broad shoulder. The next time I closed my eyes, it must have been for a good, long while.
…
I didn’t wake up until two days later. I heard the beeps of machines, smelled the sharp scent of disinfectant, heard distant muffled voices. It was a chore to open my eyes, and even when I did, there was nothing but a blur of white in my vision until I gained the awareness to blink. Underneath me was a stiff, but warm mattress, and my fingers touched the smoothness of wires and cords.
I was looking up at a hospital ceiling, lying in a white bed. I glanced down at my body and saw the bandages peeking out from the neck of the blue paper smock I had been dressed in. Tightness around my head suggested my forehead had been wrapped as well. Before I had a chance to ask what day it was out into the open room, a quiet voice greeted me from my bedside.
“Can you hear me?”
“Yes.” My tongue and throat were dry, which I would have expected once I realized I had been asleep for two days. I turned my head and saw her sitting in the seat beside me, curled with her knees up and her head leaning on the arm of the chair. It was Evelyn, a paper bracelet on her wrist, wearing a hospital gown two sizes too big and looking at me with one tired eye and the other covered by a large white bandage.
“Evelyn, what day i--”
“It’s Wednesday.” She said. “...It’s good to see you, Danny.”
I could say the same. My final thoughts before being plunged into a near-comatose state were the bitter realizations that we all could have been dead. The idea crossed my mind for one dreary second that perhaps we were.
“Where’s the little boy?” I asked her, which she answered after taking a heavy breath and exhaling a sigh.
“He’s okay.” Her words washed me with relief. “He’s okay … Finn found us. Chased the thing away and called the police. But the boy wasn’t hurt and is home with his family now.”
I was suddenly caught by the impulse to reach out my hand, and did it before even thinking it over. Evelyn looked at my open palm for a moment before resting her head on one hand and holding mine in the other, our arms creating a chain between us.
“Can they fix it?” I asked her. “...Your eye.”
It was a stupid question, but she didn’t tell me that. She just shook her head and spoke in a hoarse croak, frown pulling at her lips. “He took it. The whole thing.”
“Fuck...” I looked for the right words, but there weren’t any. “Evelyn. I’m so sorry.”
She had no witty jokes this time, no sassing, no crude humor. Evelyn’s ‘Evelyn-ness’ was faded. As we looked at one another across the way with our heads both flat to the side, I was remembering this moment as it happened before.
She was lying next to me on the floor of the radio station. My ears were stinging, her voice was far away. It was my first day on the job when I saw her mouth the words:
“Wanna sleep on an actual mattress?”
This time, I was the one to say it. I watched her stone cold expression change as a stiff lip began to quiver, and after a moment of silent hesitation, she nodded her head. Our hands slipped away from one another as she pushed herself out of the chair, where I saw for the first time how many bruises littered her shoulders and neck. I gritted my teeth with stiff discomfort in an attempt to move over a few inches, but it was enough for her. My coworker, who once upon a time wouldn’t even shake my hand, crawled into the bed beside me and laid her head on my shoulder without a single word. Her hand, spotted with freckles and fingernails bit down to the quick, rested on my chest where my pulse was steady and warm.
This is Daniel Esperanza from 104.6 F.M., and I’m lying here hoping this is the last blood sacrifice either of us will ever have to make.
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Credits
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