To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis (13 page)

TWENTY-EIGHT

“We’ve got to get off the bus.” Merr
y whispered in my ear
. “Have your stuff ready and follow me when I get up.”

My whole body clenched. When I tried to turn around in my seat, Merry’s hand stopped me. My heartbeat hurt my chest, and I hugged my pack and scooted closer to Merry. If one of the Judge’s men got on the bus, would he stop us from leaving? Make a scene and try to take me with him? I squeezed my eyes shut to block out bad thoughts and tried to think about doing everything right when Merry gave the signal.

Help me, Daddy.
I whispered it as low as I could.

Merry waited until the bus slowed down at an intersection. When he jumped out of his seat, he pushed me into the aisle in front of him and followed me to the door. I veered into a bank of seats because the bus was still moving, but I ignored the pain in my shoulder and kept going. It was what Merry would do.

The driver looked at us with tired eyes. “Gonna be a rough night to be out there. Sure you want to get off here?”

Merry nodded. “We’re sure.”

I tried not to look at the people on the bus when the driver slid a bar, and the door squeaked open. My feet slipped on mud, but I picked them up and ran beside Merry. While the bus rattled, I pushed my hair out of my eyes and ran as fast as I could. As long as I could stay with Merry, I would be okay. He wouldn’t let anybody take me away from him.

We hurried toward a thick line of trees. Before I got there, I stopped and looked back. The headlights of the bus made spooky shadows on the road. I shuddered.
It’s only your imagination, Silly. There are no ghosts.

When I looked at the bus again, the door was blocked by a man.

He watched me, and I scraped my arm against a tree when I turned to run. With every splat of my feet, I could see the man’s slow, lopsided smile.

The man on the bus worked for the Judge. He was still after me. I just knew it.

I felt Merry’s hand on my shoulder. His voice encouraged me to keep going. He told me I was doing well.

My feet slipped in ruts on the dirt path, and my legs burned inside my wet jeans. My lungs ached from trying to keep up with Merry. He ran next to me, almost like he had night vision power, never missing a step. Every few feet, he told me to hurry. With almost every footfall, puddles sucked at my shoes, and roots tripped me. Once, I fell hard on my knees, and I bit my lips together to keep from crying.

“Hurry up, Em. Keep moving.”

I stood up and brushed mud off my jeans. “I saw the man on the bus, Merry.”

“Yeah. He followed us on. I didn’t want to stay and find out his intentions.”

“He stood in the door when the bus drove off. It was creepy when he waved.”

“All the more reason to stop talking and keep moving. Come on.”

I concentrated all my energy on my Wonder Twin power. When I touched my fists together, I wasn’t tired anymore, because being tired was not grown-up. Adults had to do things, even when they didn’t feel like it, and I was a grown-up now.

Wispy stuff clung to my face and hair, but I didn’t scream. When the top of the grass scratched against my waist, I didn’t even think about the critters that might be there, waiting to bite me. I gritted my teeth and ran around a turn, to find a narrow beach that went down into water. Here and there, picnic tables peeked through the dark.

Merry sat with me on top of one of them. Stars twinkled through the clouds and sparkled on the water. I rested beside him and let my fingers trace the names carved in the wood.

“Is this a lake?” I wasn’t too out of breath.

“Reservoir, I think. We should be able to find a decent campsite around here somewhere.”

“Can we camp here? I’m so tired, Merry.”

“Too public. If that man leaves the bus and loops back, this will be one of the first places he’ll look.”

“How much further do I have to run?” I checked the whine in my voice. “I’ll try to go as far as you say, Merry.”

“Should be around a couple more bends, right over there.”

He waved into the darkness and moved again. He followed a sign to a trail along the shoreline, his head down and his hands in his pockets, like he had something really heavy on his mind.

“What’s wrong, Merry?”

He didn’t answer. Just kept walking into the world beyond the weak starlight. Since the doughnut place, Merry had been acting funny. It wasn’t just the man from the bus. Something else was bothering him. Why did he have to be like every other adult, deciding when I was too little to know things?

I smelled the rain before the first drop fell. It hit me in the right eye. After a few random drops pinged across the top of the picnic table, the sky opened up and buckets of water poured down, even though I could still see a few stars through the clouds. God crying. That’s what Aunt Bertie always said when it rained but the clouds didn’t cover the sky. I sloshed through the mud and shouted into the storm, but it was like the raindrops trapped my voice and forced it into the ground.

Thunder rattled my insides. I ran along the mucky trail to where I last saw Merry. Around a finger of land, I stopped. The lake was swallowed up by thick trees planted in black water. In the weak light, their bottoms looked like fancy skirts that twirled across the dance floor at Cinderella’s ball.

A swamp. No matter how much I thought not-scared things, swamps were the scariest places ever. The water was too black to see the bottom, and stuff hung out of the trees. Sometimes, people went into swamps and were never, ever seen again.

I slipped on wet dirt as I felt my way along the path. Under the big trees, the rain didn’t fall as hard. I wiped more water out of my eyes and looked around me. I stood on a soupy path. Everything smelled rotten. Holding my breath, I slid one foot ahead of the other. Drenched soil sucked at my shoes like a vacuum cleaner.

My eyes hurt from holding back tears, but I blinked fast to keep from crying. I would not be a baby. Not this time. If I was always scared and couldn’t keep up with Merry, how could I expect to find Daddy? I stood taller and swallowed my fear.

The path went up a hill that overlooked the water. With both hands and feet, I grabbed fists full of mud and climbed through a waterfall of ooze. At the top, the tree branches made a ceiling overhead, a tunnel that opened into a clear spot, sort of like an island in the middle of the swamp.

Merry.

He was there, waiting with my tent. It was almost set up.

I was so happy to see him that I ran down the hill, until two yellow eyeballs stopped me. They glowed in the path between Merry and me. When it moved its head and opened its triangle mouth, sharp teeth were everywhere. I stared into the squinty eyes of an alligator. Its tail slashed at the weeds and grasses as it came at me, faster than I thought it could.

I screamed.

Inches from my feet, the gator opened its jaws wide and bellowed. Really, really mad. It was going to eat me. It locked eyes with mine and charged at me, a mouth like scissors the whole way.

I kicked muddy water in its face to keep moving, but it was no use. The alligator was going to eat me. Its stinky breath was already on my skin and its teeth were closer and closer, and it was going to drag me—

Before the gator got its jaws around my foot, strong arms lifted me, and I flew through the air, landing hard in the weeds along the path. When I stopped rolling and got up, Merry circled the alligator with a long stick in one hand.

The gator threw back its head and bellowed before it charged Merry. With a shout, Merry swung the stick and hit the gator in the middle of the head. It stopped for a few seconds, stunned.

He yelled over his shoulder, “Emmaline! Run to the camp! Now!”

But I couldn’t leave Merry to fight the alligator all alone. I would not run away and be a baby. That wasn’t what Daddy or Merry would do.

I slid to my feet and watched, my shirt sticky with mud. The alligator shook its bumpy head and charged Merry again. It hit Merry sideways, knocking him to the ground. When I shouted, the gator started my way, right before Merry rolled over on his knees, the stick still in his hand.

“Eat this, you monster.”

His hand moved quick like lightning and shoved the stick into the gator’s open mouth. It went in so far that most of it disappeared. The gator staggered to one side and made a gurgling noise before sliding into the black water with a loud splash. Merry fell to his back, panting. His jeans were torn at one knee, and his white t-shirt was stained the color of tea.

I ran to him and held his hand while he wheezed. “Thought. You. Were. A goner, Em.”

I reached out my fingers to stroke his greasy blonde hair. “I couldn’t see so good in the rain and the dark, but I found you. And I didn’t cry. Not even when I saw the gator.”

He gripped my arm with his filthy dirty hand. “I’m proud of you.” He struggled to sit up and wipe his muddy face.

“Really? But I couldn’t keep up with you or anything.”

He sighed and stared into the black water. I took his face in my hands and turned his head to me.

“What’s the matter, Merry?”

“What do you mean?”

“Ever since we left the cafe and went to the bus station, you’ve been different. Quiet. Not answering my questions like you usually do. Did I do something wrong?”

“Aw, Em. You didn’t do anything wrong. We’ve just got to keep moving. That’s all.”

I hit his arm with my fist. Hard. “That is
not
all. You’re not telling me something.”

“You’re too young to understand, Em.”

“I’m big enough to be out here in the middle of the night, facing down an alligator. Don’t treat me like a little girl when I’m trying so hard to be big.”

He put his hand on the back of my neck and put his face close to mine. “I read something. In the paper back in Jackson. It changes everything.”

TWENTY-NINE

I watched two turtles on a log in a strip o
f sunlight at th
e edge of the black water. One big. One little. Maybe mother and child. Would the baby turtle feel as bad as I did when it found out its mother was dead?

My cheeks were still hot, and my heart beat so hard it hurt my chest. After crying most of the night, I didn’t think I had any more tears left. Grown-up tears. That’s what I cried.

Merry put more wood on the fire. The wet wood spewed smoke through the trees all the way to heaven.

Was my mother in heaven?

“Your mother is dead, Em. I read it in the paper back at that cafe in Jackson. That’s why I hightailed it out of there and went for the bus.”

“But you won’t tell me how she died.”

“The paper didn’t spell it out. Besides, knowing some things makes a child a grow up too fast. This is one of those things.”

“I have a right to know. She was my mother.”

He pulled me to him and wiped the hair out of my face. “Emmaline. Look at me. If your father thinks it’s all right to tell you someday, then he can. I’ll leave that up to him.”

“What about Aunt Bertie? Is she okay? Did the paper say anything about her? She’s not dead, too, is she?”

My voice cracked at the end. Even though my mother could be mean sometimes, she was still my mother. I loved her even when I hated her.

Aunt Bertie, I just loved. She was everywhere in my heart. If she was dead, I didn’t know what I would do. Tears ran down my face as I thought about the last time I saw her, right after I popped out from under her robe and ran. I shouldn’t have run away. It was all my fault. My mother and Aunt Bertie died because of me.

Merry’s strong arms closed around me, and he held me close while I cried into his stained t-shirt. He rocked me back and forth like a baby, like Daddy used to a long time ago.

A squirrel chattered somewhere, kind of like a scared bird. I leaned into Merry and let all my fears come out: that I would never find Daddy, that the Judge would somehow catch us and do bad things to me, that Merry would leave me, that I would be alone, sucked into the grimy swamp, that I would never see Bertie again.

Merry wiped my face. His fingers were tough. Like old leather. But it made me feel better all the same.

“Em, the paper didn’t say anything about Bertie. The article said your mom didn’t have any family. It didn’t mention you at all.”

“Why won’t you tell me how my mother died? I’m big enough to know.”

“I already told you nobody knows what happened. That was the point of the article. The police are asking the public for clues, because they don’t have any leads about who killed her.”

I pushed away from him to stand up. “But we know what happened to her. We have to tell them, Merry. We have to.”

“Em—”

“The Judge did it. We know he did.”

When I thought about the Judge, he was like the black hole we learned about in science class. Sister Mary Catherine called it a void that sucked up everything in its path. That’s what the Judge did. He took me from Daddy and killed my mother. Who knew what he did with Aunt Bertie. A deep chill ripped through me, mixing with the memory of cigar smoke. There was no way to escape him. In the end, I knew the Judge would take me, too.

Merry took one of my shaking hands and made a sandwich between his palms. “We may know he did it, Em, but we can’t prove it.”

“We can call the number for the police. The one in the paper. We can—”

“We can’t trust the police, Em. He had police with him the other night, remember? They were the ones chasing us. If we called that number, we’d have no way of knowing who might answer.”

“But if they didn’t know it was us—”

“It would be the end, Em. You’d never see your father again.”

“But how can the Judge get away with being so bad? Why can he kill people and chase little girls like me?”

Merry pulled his knees to his chest and watched the turtles splash into the water. “Wilkinson always ruled himself by a different code, one of absolute self-interest. He was like that when I knew him, since the beginning, but he’s gotten meaner, more ruthless, over the years.”

“You talk about the Judge like he’s been around forever.”

“Well, he’s been around long enough to amass a lot of power. To build the empire he always wanted.”

“I don’t understand why he wants me.”

“Em, I don’t know how to describe the world he inhabits. He…….it’s tough to explain.”

“You make him sound super human, like one of the bad guys the Wonder Twins fight.”

“Oh, he’s human, all right. Much as I am. When I look at you, I try to see what he sees.”

“What do you think he sees in me?”

“I don’t know what he sees, and that’s what’s got me worried.”

“Why?”

“Em, it’s too complicated. People like Wilkinson are capable of anything. We’ve got to stay ahead of him. Okay?”

I picked up a stick and threw it into the water. Ripples played with the sunlight and shadows. “But how do I stay ahead of him if he wants to find me, Merry?”

“That’s why we have to keep moving. Keep switching things up so nobody can follow us.”

He stood up and brushed the seat of his jeans. The fire smoked when he kicked dirt onto it. Most of our gear was packed, but Merry picked up the last few things and stuffed them into our backpacks. He shuffled the dirt to scatter leaves over where we’d been. When he finished, he turned to me. “I’m sorry about your mom. About Bertie. I wish I could protect you from everything bad, Em, but I can’t. All I can do is try to get you to your father before Wilkinson and his men find you. On that, I’ll do everything I can. I promise.”

As I closed the space between us and hugged him, I wondered: what made Merry help me? Why was he risking everything to find my daddy? Didn’t he have a home full of people who loved him? I couldn’t understand why he would be in the middle of nowhere with me. But before I could ask him more questions, he started walking.

“Through there about a hundred yards is a boardwalk. If we follow it, there’s a small campground with some showers.”

“With running water and everything?”

“Yes. One for girls and one for boys, with running water and everything. It was abandoned when I went over there about an hour ago. Let’s go and wash up. I’ll meet you outside the ladies when you’re done.”

I looked at his filthy clothes. “You sure do stink, Merry.”

He smiled. “We’re both pretty ripe. I’ll break out a fresh set of clothes for each of us.”

“I want the powder blue corduroys.”

“Done. Hurry up, now. We’ve got some ground to cover today if we want to make a decent campsite before dark.”

I picked up my small backpack and threw it over my shoulder. “How far are we going, Merry?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“On how fast you can trek through this swamp. And what’s beyond it.”

Beyond? I looked around at the fluttering trees and black water and listened to the creaks and groans of the swamp. I didn’t even want to imagine the only thing that could be scarier.

But before I could stop myself, I thought of the Judge. He leaned over the horizon. His meaty hands parted the trees. A cigar blew through the air when he waved. His lips moved around the cigar, but I ran into the bathroom to keep from seeing what he said. When I peeked outside, the forest was thick again. No gaps.

Still, I knew the Judge was out there.

Somewhere.