Wings to the Kingdom

Off to our right and across the road—in the middle of the field by the sound of it—someone came to attention. After a hesitation he came forward a few feet in our direction. Dana released my hand, and I thought she might do something stupid out of impulse; so I reached into my front pocket and pulled out the first thing I found—a tube of lip balm—and I cast it into the woods behind us. It knocked loud against a tree and fell to the ground, rolling to a stop in the underbrush.



Our stalker froze again; then he surged forward, tearing his legs through the grass. He chased the bait at a full-on charge, and that was our cue.



I could barely make out the edge of the road down to my left, trailing it in the dark by the slight texture change between grass and pavement. I saw it best in my peripheral vision, if I stared down hard at the road beneath us.



Dana wanted to run, but I held her back. She was wearing hard-heeled shoes, and if she wasn’t careful, they would clatter. For a few seconds we could enjoy the cover of our pursuer’s headlong rush, but he’d slow down when he hit the trees.



“Tiptoes,” I told her.



She seemed to understand, shifting her weight to the balls of her feet as she stepped.



We couldn’t go too fast. We could barely see a thing, and the road was not perfectly even. The first skip or stumble and we’d be discovered.



My chest hurt, and my head was starting to hurt too, from all the fruitless squinting and staring into the diaphanous white darkness. Dana was dragging, and crying quietly. Somewhere behind us, sooner or later, a man with a gun was going to figure out he’d been duped; and his confusion might not last long enough for us to get far enough away to call ourselves safe.



But hope propelled me forward. I hoped I wasn’t bleeding anymore, and I hoped that Dana could hold herself together just a little longer. I hoped that Benny and Jamie were okay. I hoped that the road wasn’t as long as I was afraid it was, and that we weren’t as far back in the park as I believed we were.



But lacking anything more concrete than hope, we pushed on—one foot in front of the other, shoving ourselves through the fog towards safety, wherever that might lie.



Behind us, he hit the trees and kept hunting, firing off at least two shots, maybe three. I’d quit counting once I heard him reloading. It wouldn’t do us any good to play the odds of his barrel.



“Faster now,” I said, pulling her, where before I’d been pushing her. Not too hard, not too fast, or I’d make her fall—but faster, all the same.



The road began to curve, and we followed it, panting with fright and exhaustion. Adrenaline pushed us far, but after a point our bodies objected to the abuse. My own sense of light-headedness was surely due in part to the bleeding, and the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if Dana hadn’t been hit too. Maybe I’d misunderstood her earlier observation, and it wasn’t her husband she’d been talking about.



“Faster,” I said again anyway, because straggling would get us killed. “Faster.”



Clumsy thrashing and a spat of swearing announced that the gunman was having a hard time in the trees. Good, I thought. Let him get lost. We were sticking to the road.



Around us the ghastly pale air swirled and writhed, parting to let us through and closing behind us. Under different circumstances I might have found it soothing or interesting, but given the situation, I found it inconvenient and downright terrifying.



I lifted my eyes up off the road for a moment and saw that we were not alone. Beside us and behind us new shapes appeared, curious and confused. Soldiers, officers, horses. A woman in a plain dress with a cinched waist. A black man. A boy with a drum. Next, next, next—all in rapid succession. Maybe a crowd, maybe only a dozen of them. It was hard to tell when I was concentrating in so many directions at once.



They weren’t reaching or grasping, threatening or screaming. They were only curious. They crowded in, swarming us as we ran.



I ignored them. They weren’t our problem right then.



I didn’t know if Dana could see them or not, but if she could, she didn’t say anything. She let me haul her along without objection, and with only the occasional faltering step.



Then a more familiar face reared out of the haze—I was almost coming to think of him as a friend, or at least a friendly acquaintance. The slight-figured Confederate boy held out an arm in the universal signal to stop.



I complied, jerking Dana against my chest in an impromptu hug to halt her as quickly and quietly as possible.



The soldier folded all of his fingers except for one into a fist, and he held that one up to his lips. Another symbol, universal. Easy to understand across a thousand miles or a hundred years. So too was Dana’s responsive nod. She did see them, then. I decided to be glad for it. I decided that it would be easier if she saw them too, so I didn’t have to explain.



When we weren’t moving we could hear better, and now that we’d been stopped in our proverbial tracks, we could tell that maybe the swisher had gotten the idea he’d been had by the lip balm.



He was coming again. Not as fast as we were, and when we quit moving he quit too, for a few seconds. But he was behind us, closer than before. No longer swinging his arms at the tree trunks in the fog.



This way.



The ghost moved his lips with enough exaggeration that I could read them. He pointed, and waved.



Follow.



He was directing us off the road, into the woods—the same course that I’d prayed would get our mad swisher lost. But the mad swisher didn’t have anyone showing him the way, not so far as I knew.



Dana was already tugging at my wrist, wanting to obey. Wanting to follow.



Well, she was the professional here. I was just an amateur with a correctly tuned ghost receiver.



And since I was out of ideas, I let the others take the reins. I wasn’t even sure that the road we were on did lead out of the park—I only figured it might. But the dead definitely knew their way around better than I did.



We took simultaneous deep breaths and took off after the ghost, more noisily than I would have preferred, but with enough speed to possibly make up for the lapse in silence.



We fled faster. He followed faster.



But we had a good lead on him by then, and we had someone leading us. We reached the tree line in moments, and we dove on through the trunks. It was one thing to run around in the dark on an open stretch of road, but another thing entirely to navigate a woody obstacle course. Our progress slowed considerably, but again, we had a guide, and we had a lead.



Of course, our pursuer had a gun.



He fired it again, enough times to empty the thing. He was forced to stop long enough to jam a hand into his pockets and grab more ammunition, and we made good use of that time.



There were enough tree trunks between us and him that he didn’t have much hope of hitting us, and we liked that. We wanted to extend that buffer as deep as we possibly could, so we kept going, tagging after our indefatigable leader as he whipped around the trees. Dana and I clung to each other still, yanking one another to the left, to the right, around and past and over—pulling each other’s skin until we left red marks, digging in until we left scratches, anything but letting go.



Eventually we could no longer hear the determined footsteps dashing haphazardly along in our wake, but we didn’t feel too relieved about evading him yet. Our guide was still pulling us farther into the park, and we kept after him.



Finally, the ache at my collarbone and the waning of my adrenaline had worn me down enough that I needed to call for a time out. Apparently that perpendicular hand signal is not as universal as a finger to the mouth, but the ghost caught on quick.



“Time out,” I gasped, not too loud. “Time out. Can’t run anymore. For a minute. Give me a minute.”



Dana agreed. “Wait. Just wait. Oh God, we left Tripp.”



“Tripp’s dead,” I said, with less tact than I might have scrounged up otherwise.



“I know,” she said, and I thought she might start crying again, but she didn’t. “I can’t believe I ran off and left him.”



“We couldn’t have carried him, you know. And,” I added, not meaning to sound so harsh, “he wouldn’t have wanted you to stay and get killed. You know that, right?”



She wiped at her face with her forearm. Maybe she was crying again. She was hiding it well, if that was the case. I didn’t hear a squeak or a sniffle. “Yeah. He would want me to run.”



“Definitely,” I panted.



Our guide obliged us, stopping to wait. He didn’t look impatient or hurried at all anymore. The sense of urgency was gone. Assuming his goal had been to see us away to relative safety, this mission could be regarded as a success.



He approached us with something like idle inquisitiveness putting out a hand to me like he wanted to shake hello.



I lifted mine, unsure of what he intended or desired.



His hand went through mine, more or less, giving me a tiny twinge of a chill where what used to be his flesh met mine. He moved his fingers around mine as if trying to touch them. If he was trying to achieve some literal, physical impact, he failed.



“I don’t think it will work with her,” Dana said, sounding almost normal.



“What?” I asked, but the ghost clearly understood.



He turned his attention to her and offered the same hand.



Dana took it, and drew it forward. The ghost fell into her, a drifting, soft collision wherein Dana absorbed the spirit completely and easily. She had done this before.



She blinked, hard.



A few of the others had caught up to us by then—a black woman with a white bundle of something like laundry on her head, two of the enlisted men, and one of the officers. It was too dark to distinguish their uniforms. It was too foggy to tell them apart too well; but even as I remembered and noticed again the fog, it retreated.



Not everywhere, but around us the wall of white backed away, clearing us a patch—a small circle—and giving us room to see one another better.



“She’s cold,” Dana said, in a voice that was perfectly ordinary. It didn’t sound like it belonged to anyone else at all, not the way they portray it in books and movies. It sounded like Dana.

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