The Reckoning

Fifty yards ahead of Molly, the remaining man froze in place. The brothers were children of the mine fields. They knew them with the same dread and familiarity the Dark Ages had known hell. One step more, forward, backward, or to the side, and the man knew he might be maimed or killed. He stood there as if his very soul was at risk. And for him, it was. Samnang had told her that to die away from home, away from burial rites and family, meant wandering for eternity.

For a full minute, the young man didn’t move. Covered in mud, anonymous to her, he was like a tar baby with a rifle stuck in his hand. Next to him, rising higher than his head, a naga bared its stone fangs.

The man groaned. It wasn’t a word, just a noise escaping his lungs, the start of grief.

“Stay where you are, Molly.”

Duncan started out to her slowly with a stick in his hand, touching gravel and leaves as if reading braille, scanning all around his feet for trip wires or metal buds or any evidence of mines.

He took hours, it seemed. Molly didn’t move. The lone brother didn’t move. She kept her eyes away from the man hanging in the tree.

Molly felt heavy, and yet light, magnificently light. Released. Anointed, in a way. She had been spared, but more important, she had seen. That was the crux of it.

As a photographer and a journalist, she had made a living from catching the meta-moments. In an article on a day in the life of an emergency room, she’d captured birth, suffering, and the still toes of a traffic fatality, and thought she’d seen it all, and in a sense she had, through her glass lens. No glass this time. No mirrors.

She stood obediently. Duncan was coming for her. He was almost here.

Once again, as in the bamboo thicket and when she had descended from the tree, Duncan laid claim to her. He was taking her back from the jaws of this place.

Beyond his shoulder, one of those giant god heads was smiling across the water, eyes closed but aware, deep in his dream of them. That was probably all she needed to know. They were figments of a stone imagination. And yet she wondered at it all. There was Samnang’s cosmic stream, but then there were the day-to-day riddles, like land mines where there had been none before.

“How could this happen?” she asked.

“The soldiers,” said Duncan. “Thirty years ago. They must have laid them.”

“But we drove in this way. And now look.”

“Chance,” he said. “The robots of destiny. Like they say, mines are infinite war.”

“No. Someone placed them here for us.” She was utterly certain about that.

Duncan corrected her. “For someone like us. The soldiers were guarding themselves.”

“It’s like we’re not being allowed to leave,” she said.

“Don’t say that,” said Duncan.

“They were laid to keep us here.”

“Not so loud,” he said.

That frightened her. He wasn’t disagreeing. It came to her. “Luke?” she said.

“Not now, Molly. One thing at a time.”

“What about him?” The tar baby.

“I’ll go for him next.”

35.

It all might have worked as Duncan said. He would have led Molly to the forest and returned for the final brother. But an animal began to cry. It started as a tiny, thin keening, and Molly was sure it was some macabre birdsong.

Then she realized it was coming from the corpse skewered on the tree. The mine had lopped away his lower legs. His arms were broken at the elbows. But even with the spike of the branch punched through his chest, what remained of him was not yet dead. There he hung, above the water.

The cry rose an octave. It was awful. He didn’t seem to take a breath. Like some inelegant jungle bird up there, he rustled his wings weakly, whistling a one-note song. The rain spoiled her make-believe. The mud was being washed away. She could see the red meat underneath.

The man on the road appealed to his brother. He reached up. They were only twenty feet apart, separated by the span of air and water. The dying brother gave no sign of recognition. His cry went on.

Thunder shook the pond. It came up through the mineral vein carved into the shape of the road.

The wind howled and skipped across the canopy’s surface, and the branch moved. The impaled man rocked in space. His brother laid down his rifle and knelt before the carcass in the tree, hands pressed together.

Molly could barely breathe. The man shuffled forward on his knees, unnerved by the death song, drawn to it.

“He’ll never last,” Duncan said. Did he mean that living corpse or his brother?

“Don’t move,” he said to her. “Do you hear me?”

Stay with me, she thought. But he was Duncan, the savior. “Yes,” she said.

Off he went, twig in hand, calling to the young man. The brother had entered a trance. He took no notice of Duncan scolding and commanding him. Duncan advanced by inches, touching the road, testing the fabric.

The part of a man continued singing from the tree, a grotesque siren drawing his brother to wreck himself, too.

Duncan refused to hurry. He tested each fallen leaf on the road, turning them with the tip of his stick. He skirted a patch of dirt and stepped over random pebbles.

There didn’t seem to be any possible place to hide a mine out there. The road was all of a single piece, carved flat from a volcanic extrusion. Olivine, she guessed, keying on the color of the word. What a photo. Like the devil whispering in her ear.

Duncan reached the rifle and stooped to take it. They would need that, she thought. The summer stretched before them, her forest idyll after all. They would subsist on fruit and nuts, and meat brought down from the trees.

The brother was almost to the water’s edge. There his knee touched the mine.

There was nothing flashy or pyrotechnic about the explosion, a sharp blast smaller than the heavy booming that had thrown the truck. Mostly it was a matter of dust. As the air cleared, Molly saw that the brother was gone. He had been pitched into the devouring water, though she hadn’t actually seen that.

Duncan was standing in place, looking off across the pond. He turned to her, and his chest seemed to be smoking, though that could have been the rain driving against him. The rifle was missing from his hands, and his twig was only a few inches long now. He started back to her, more quickly on the return, his path memorized.

Molly saw the wound gradually.

Her T-shirt with the mountain-bike wheels was bleeding.

Oh, Molly, she thought. Amazed, she plucked at the wet cloth and found a small hole through the spokes of one wheel. She lifted her shirt, and the hole went through her bra. She pried it open and looked inside at the top of her white, freckled flesh, and blood welled up where the shrapnel had entered her. The wicked thing was in there somewhere. But suddenly she didn’t want to know more. She let the shirt drop down again. Later.

“Molly?” She heard the anguish in his voice.

She managed to ask him first. “Are you all right?”

Miraculously, the shrapnel had missed him. The gods were protecting one of them anyway. “You need to lie down,” he said.

“No,” she said. “While I’m still on my feet, take me home.” To camp, she meant to say. Suddenly her legs quit on her. She sank to sitting. The red blood blanched to Barbie pink as it fanned lower across her wet shirt. There was no pain, really. She just had a need to sit.

She looked out over the green water. Lily pads the size of doormats floated on the surface. Raindrops pattered the glass. That horrible birdsong had stopped. Thank God.