Broken Things (5 page)

He wished he had his own cell phone. He could call them up
and find out when they were coming back. They didn’t even trust him with
theirs, though. What could they have forgotten? If there were important things
that they hadn’t brought, it had to mean they’d come back. They hadn’t brought
any books, but that was okay. They didn’t bring the portable movie player, and
they hadn’t let him bring his portable game unit. He’d tried to sneak it, but
they had found it and made him leave it in his room. Their definition of
camping didn’t match his. They shouldn’t be making rules for camping if they
weren’t going to stay. If he had to spend it by himself, then he should’ve been
allowed to do whatever he wanted to. He doubted that they had ever gone camping
before either.

He gazed up at the mountains. They encircled him in every
direction. Mountains had always been distant things, breaking up the horizon
whenever you got out of the city, but had always been so far away. Once he
thought he could walk to them, if he was so inclined, but this had been an
awfully long drive, and it made the notion of walking seem silly. They’d given
him a stash of granola bars and fruit snacks for the drive up, all of which
were now gone. He’d eaten all of them within the first half hour of the drive.
There would be more in some of the food bags. He should eat them now and make
them go back for more when they returned.

He should climb a mountain while his parents were away. They
wouldn’t let him when they got back. They didn’t like him climbing stuff,
especially his mother. She always thought he was going to break something.

But he was already broken. He pushed the thought away.

From the top of a mountain, would he be able to see his
house? Maybe at least he could see the city. Maybe he would also be able to see
when his family came back. It didn’t look too steep. He thought about it for a
bit until he decided he was still hungry and instead dug through the grocery
bag until he found more fruit snacks.  

He had to do anything other than think about how long his
family had been gone already. He wouldn’t worry. And they would never know that
every once in a while he’d go into the tent and cry.

It became dark much earlier than he felt it should. The day
passed by with him rummaging through the food (and eventually finding the junk
food snacks) and watching the road. Could his dad find his way back here again?
He’d taken a side road, and he knew his dad was smart, but that didn’t mean he
still couldn’t get lost. He’d seen other people here, back at the lake. Some of
those people had to be camping. Maybe they’d come by eventually. He could hike
to the lake tomorrow maybe, and then one of them could give him a ride home. Or
if his parents were coming back, he could just camp there with the other
people, just for safety. Even being with strangers would be better than being
alone.

He’d never felt so alone. There had always been a feeling of
someone nearby, if only a house away. He’d heard of people getting lost in the
wilderness. If he tried walking, what would happen? If he followed the road,
would he wind up deeper in the mountains? All of the maps he’d seen of Idaho
showed a lot of wilderness, once you were in it. A lot of wilderness with towns
spread out far and wide. He wouldn’t leave the roads, no matter what.

With the night the mountains and trees transformed into
looming shadows of pure darkness that felt as though they could hide anything.
And though the stars were bright, the mountains hid the moon. He hid in the
tent to await the morning, and somehow managed to find sleep.

2

It crawled, dragging itself down the mountain. Once the earth
gave way beneath its weight and it had tumbled painfully down into the draw
between two ridges. It had never felt so weak. It couldn’t tell how far away
the kid was, but the fear called to it. The emotion, so primal, filled the air,
a conglomeration of sensations that urged it on. Its desiccated flesh tingled
with it. It hadn’t detected fear so great in such a long time. If only its legs
worked. It had grown horribly weak.

It slowly made its way through the trees, over roots and
through the foliage that tried to hold it back. Long grass and brush wrapped
around its wrists. It forced itself on, one arm in front of the other, gripping
rocks and hard earth, grabbing roots and such to drag its broken form ever
closer to its destination.

Reach. Grab. Pull. The fear became thicker, more tangent, as
it drew ever nearer.

3

The chill of the morning permeated the tent. Josh huddled in
his sleeping bag, preserving what warmth he could. The cacophony of nature made
it difficult to sleep. Once he thought he heard something, and he hoped his
parents were back, but he couldn’t bring himself to call out. Where during the
day he suspected bears or wolves, night had brought thoughts of other things,
like monsters. If anything truly horrible existed, it would be here within
these woods. For all he knew, it would be a Sasquatch, and he had no idea if
such a creature had a taste for eating children.

It made his fears back home seem almost silly. Sometimes
he’d been afraid to get up and use the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Being downstairs alone had always felt a little creepy, like another world in
the same house. Even in his bedroom, with his parents but down the hallway, odd
shadows became ghosts, and the trees outside his window became horrific demons.
None of them compared to whatever would lurk here, in the woods. This place
made childhood fears so trivial. When he got home, he’d never be afraid again.
The forest, its potential, it was simply overwhelming. Here the monsters would
be ancient, devoid of humanity, alien in the way they saw the world. People
would be snacks. The tent alone remained his only protection from the unknown.

Despite the cold, despite his fears, eventually his bladder
decided for him. The sun lit his orange tent in strangely opaque neon, a light
only possible with such fabrics. The outside world filled with the sounds of
singing birds and a raucous cacophony of crows. He exited the tent, hoping
beyond hope to see his parents. He pictured his mother fixing pancakes and
sausages on a portable grill, and his dad would be at the campfire, brewing
coffee. Instead he met a barren campsite.

But things were different from the night before. Bags of
food were strewn everywhere, torn open and scattered across the camp. Nothing
looked untouched and only scraps remained, and the wrappings were shredded,
drifting across the ground back and forth with each gust of breeze. He sat down
at the table and found more tears wanting out, but crying no longer brought him
any comfort, only a headache. Worse, beneath the trash, large paw prints were
everywhere. Had it been a bear?  

After emptying his bladder, trying to look everywhere at
once just in case whatever had raided his camp came back, he gathered up what
scraps he could find. The animals had left him with very little. Some granola
bars and fruit snacks were still untouched. They were enough to satisfy the
hunger, if only to remove the edge, and his cooler of soda cans were also
intact. He found a partially eaten bag of bagels and a box of fruit that had been
ignored, and quickly ran them to the tent. He’d have to make them last.

How long would his parents stay away? They had obviously
been fighting, but they couldn’t stay away for more than one night. They should
be back any time. They’d have to come back and fix him breakfast. If only he
could warn them that something had gotten into the food, they could stop
somewhere and bring more. There were small towns before the mountains. They
could stop at any one of those. But if they had to leave again, he would go
with them.

But what if they didn’t come back? The only reason they
wouldn’t return for him would be if something had happened to them. They loved
him and they wouldn’t abandon him. They must’ve wrecked down the road, and with
nobody around, needed help. Perhaps they weren’t that far away!

Josh ran down the road, around the first few bends. As he
ran, he found himself quickly becoming short of breath. His legs suddenly
didn’t want to support him. He stumbled over to rest against a tree as a
strange tingling filled his forehead. The world about him moved in an odd
rocking manner. Though he knew it was only in his eyes it didn’t give him any
comfort, and for a few seconds he felt as though he might vomit. His eyesight
shimmered and his world lost color, bleached out into gray tones. He covered
his eyes and rubbed them, and sat down in the middle of the road, rubbing the
tears away with his fists.

Though he couldn’t measure time, nor did he try, thirty
minutes later his head had cleared enough for him to walk back to the camp. His
vision had cleared a little, but everything still looked a little gray. The
ringing in his ears seemed to get unbearably loud. He crawled back into his
tent and closed his eyes and waited for it to pass.

I don’t want to be sick,
he thought,
what’s wrong
with me?
What little he knew only came from conversations that he
overheard. His parents had spoken of it frequently over the last month, though
never to him. Josh only received reassurances. At first, the conversations were
about him. They worried, wondering how bad the damage was and how much he could
heal (and if he ever pressed, that’s what they’d tell him: “You’ll be fine.”).

He knew that his head didn’t work right since the accident.
He had frequent headaches, and once had a brief nosebleed. The noise in his
head varied in volume. Sometimes it would get so loud he thought his head would
split, while at other times it become so soft that he could hardly hear it. He
realized rather fast that the more physical he got the louder the noise, as
though it strained whatever parts were going bad in his head. Why hadn’t his
dad just let the tech replace them?

There were benefits. For a while he got new things to keep
him entertained, as they tried to help him keep his mind off of the condition.
He didn’t care. It just was, like needing to breathe and eat, and sometimes he
could use it to get a new toy or video game. They let him watch TV all day long
if he wanted to. He just had to stay out of the way. It would’ve been nice to
replace the bike, but the look in his dad’s eyes made him think twice about
bringing
that
up.

As the day went on he felt better, enough so that he felt he
could leave the tent. But the heat of the day made it feel like it was an oven.
Sometimes a breeze would come up strong enough to shake the tent, but it didn’t
provide any comfort from the sun. In the daylight, the only noise beyond the
wind and the water were the birds and bugs, and so many different kinds! He saw
beetles larger than anything they had back at home, in every different color.

The state of the site filled him with despair. If his
parents didn’t come back soon he would starve to death! Or worse, whatever had
eaten all of his food would come back looking for more and eat him! Why would
they leave him alone? They knew he was broken. It wasn’t fair. They were
wasting their time trying to teach him some lesson that made no sense. The
accident hadn’t been his fault. And he didn’t care if they never bought him
another stupid bike. Maybe they wanted him to be afraid. If that was the case,
he wouldn’t let them know. They would never do this to him again. They’d be
lucky to drag him to the mall.

A sudden piercing cry from above made him to look up. High
in the sky an eagle soared, not flapping his wings yet staying aloft as though
it were the most effortless thing in the world. He’d never seen an eagle
before. It soared so high he couldn’t make it out clearly, despite being the
largest bird he’d ever seen. It seemed so much more powerful than other birds,
flying beyond all of the others, as though removed from their lesser concerns.

The eagle could probably see where his parents were, if they
were down the road. It could probably see the city! If only he could get that
high! He needed to climb a mountain. Yet the very thought of climbing made his
mind spin again. He watched the eagle until it too, like his parents,
disappeared beyond the mountains.

4

Three days later Josh’s scraps of food ran out. Dirt and
grime filled the tent from his entering and exiting, and it drew in every
conceivable bug, when unfortunately he’d left the zipper on the flaps open.
Earwigs hid under everything. He’d decided that if his parents weren’t coming
back he would go out to find them. He resolutely stood by his decision that they
wouldn’t have abandoned him. Therefore they had to be in trouble. They must’ve
driven off the edge of the road, or crashed into a tree, or something. It was
the only possible explanation that made sense. Not a single car or truck had
come down the road the entire time.

He spent his days wandering around his small piece of the
wilderness. He spent the most time by the river skipping and throwing rocks,
but he couldn’t see the road, and between his head and the water he wondered if
he could even hear a car if it approached. He wandered through the trees for a
bit, always careful to keep the camp in sight. He found a branch that made a
good sword to fight trees with, threw rocks at a chipmunk until it ran away (he
never hit it), and trekked half-way up a mountain before he’d got bit by a
horsefly, ruining the experience. He even saw a few deer pass by. They stared
at him curiously, and traipsed away, unconcerned by his presence.

He felt things changing in his head though he couldn’t tell what
exactly was happening. Maybe things were slowing down or wobbling. He vowed to
stay true to what he’d told his dad. He would fix himself. There had to be a
way. They hardly ever let him on the tablet computer, but there would be
something on the internet. He’d study and learn what he could do. Too bad there
weren’t computers in the woods, he could’ve got started.