The Woods Are Dark

feet.

Her dad had dug a hole, off behind the camp. A “latrine,” he called it. Neala had been there several times, but not at night.

She wandered far into the dark woods, searching for the latrine. She couldn’t find it. Finally, she gave up and squatted beside a birch tree. Relieved, she headed back for camp. She thought she knew just where it was. But she walked and walked. When she came to a strange, moonlit pasture, she knew she was lost. She called for Mom and Dad. She called for Betty. Nobody came.

That’s when it hit her: the awful fear of being alone and helpless in the night. She wandered the pasture, blind with tears, wailing her anguish, hoping they would hear and come for her.

But what if someone else heard, and not her parents? One of those bogeymen Dad talked about at the campfire? Or the awful Windigo? Or a witch like the one that tried to eat Hansel and Gretel?

Covering her mouth to stop the squalling, she ran from the pasture. In the woods, she ran as fast as she could, not daring to look back because something horrible might be chasing her. Roots tripped her. Webs stuck to her bare skin. Switches whipped her. But she kept running until she broke into another clearing and saw the moonlit car.

Their car.

They’d left it behind, and hiked a long way before making camp. She wasn’t sure why.

The doors were locked, so she crawled underneath the car. The grass beneath it was dry. She lay there, safely hidden, and shivered through the night.

In the morning, when Dad found her, he cried. They both cried, because everything had turned out all right, after all.

And they lived happily ever after, Neala thought, until four men and a boy put the girl into a pickup truck and drove her to a secret place in the woods, and…

The truck stopped.

Robbins and Shaw climbed out. “You wait here,” Shaw told his son.

The man at Neala’s feet jumped over the tailgate, and unlatched it. The gate swung down with a groan and clank. He grabbed Neala’s ankles and pulled. She slid along the metal floor.

Timmy, crawling at her head, reached down suddenly and tore open her blouse. She tried to knock him away with her one free hand, but he was too quick. He squeezed her breasts as if he wanted to rip them off. Neala cried out. Her fist caught him in the face so hard it hurt her knuckles, and he fell backward, crying.

Then she was on her feet behind the truck, Sherri at her side.

“Are you all right?” Sherri asked.

“Shut up,” Shaw said.

“Let’s go,” said Robbins. His grip on Neala’s arm was firm, but not painful like that of the other man.

They walked to the front of the truck. The driver had left the headlights on. The beams lit a path through a clearing, a clearing not too different from the one where Neala had wandered, lost, as a child—though that was two thousand miles away, and twenty years ago.

After a distance, the downward-slanting head beams seemed to bury themselves. The field ahead lay in darkness.

“Why the hell didn’t you park closer?” Shaw whispered to the driver.

“Shut up.”

“Man, they’re probably all around us.”

“They don’t attack delivery parties,” said the man on Neala’s right.

“Always a first time, Phillips.”

“I wouldn’t sweat it.”

“I still don’t see why he had to park so goddamn far away.”

“I felt like it,” the driver said. “How about shutting your face?”

Ahead, a line of six trees stood in the clearing. Neala stared at them. They were tall and thin-trunked. Their high branches, reaching into the moonlight were bare of leaves.

They shouldn’t be bare, not in summer. They should be full, their leaves fluttering in the breeze.

The trees are dead, Neala realized.

Six dead trees all in a row.

“No,” she said.

“It’s all right,” Robbins whispered.

“No, don’t take us there. Please.” She tried to hold back but the men thrust her forward.

“Just take it easy,” Robbins said.

“Please! They’re dead! I don’t want to go there. Please!”

Pain stunned her right leg as Phillips shot a knee into it. “Now hold it down, sister,” he said.

“You okay?” Robbins asked.

“No!”

“Christ, Phillips.”

“You’ve really got it bad, pal. You better watch yourself.”

“Everybody shut up,” the driver snapped.

Under the tree, they stopped.

“Lean back,” Robbins said.

“I don’t…”

Phillips shoved Neala. Her back and head hit the trunk. Phillips held her while Shaw and the driver pushed Sherri against the same tree. She heard a rattle of handcuffs. Then the driver grabbed her right arm, pulled it backward, and snapped the bracelet into place. Craning her neck, she saw that it was now cuffed to Sherri.

They stood back-to-back, hands joined, the trunk of the tree between them.

“That does it,” said the driver. He reached to his throat where something hung on a chain. He raised it to his mouth. A whistle. He blew a long, shrill note that pierced the night like the cry of a terrible bird. Then the whistle dropped from his lips. “Let’s haul ass,” he said.

Three of the men ran. The one called Robbins backed away, shaking his head. “Sorry,” he muttered. Turning, he followed the others in their race to the pickup truck. Their sprinting forms flicked through the headlights. Then they disappeared behind the brightness. Neala heard doors bump shut, heard the tailgate bang into place. The engine rumbled to life. The head beams swung sideways and away. For a while, the red taillights jiggled. Then they vanished. “Hope the fuckers rot in hell,” Sherri said.

CHAPTER SIX

The pickup stopped in front of Robbins’s house, and he jumped to the pavement.

“Take it easy,” Shaw said, trying to make up for his earlier behavior.

“You too,” Robbins said.

Timmy sat quietly beside his father.

“Say good night to Mr. Robbins,” Shaw told him.

“Night,” Timmy muttered.

“Yeah.”

The truck pulled away. Robbins unlatched his front gate. He crossed the lawn toward his dark house, and sat on the porch stairs. Folding his arms over his knees, he stared at the ground.

Damn it, there was just something about that one woman—the smaller one. He’d been making delivery runs for years, ever since he turned sixteen, and he’d never felt like this before.

He’d never felt this way about any woman. Sure, there were a few he liked well enough, and some who claimed to love him. He could take his pick, whenever he got an urge to hit the sheets. But none like this.

This woman was different. Just to sit close to her, to hold her hand, to talk with her quietly through the night…

By morning, she would be dead.