****
The soldiers stood looking down at the pile of rope. Allen had knotted together what they had, making knots every five feet or so. He double-checked his work, knowing that if anyone fell, it would be because he hadn't done his shit properly. They had four lengths of rope among them, all of the lightweight, nylon variety.
"Help me test this," Allen said to Brown. He was confident in his work, but his conscience wouldn't let him pronounce the rope ready until it had been tested. He supposed he would have to be the first one down, just in case the knots came undone. At least then, he'd have only himself to blame for his death.
Together, Brown and Allen pulled on the rope testing its strength. It wouldn't replicate the reality of supporting a soldier's full weight, but it would give him a little more confidence.
"You guys gonna jump rope or what?" Epps asked.
"Show us some of that double-dutch shit like you got in the hood," Whiteside said.
Brown shot him the finger.
"Is it good?" Brown asked as they checked the last length of rope.
"Good enough for now, but we'll see." Allen wrapped the length of rope around one of the posts of the metal guardrail that paralleled the highway. He tied it tight, pulling the rope this way and that. He flinched as behind him he heard the little girl cough. The sound of it hurt him; he could only imagine how it felt to Hope.
"How are Mommy and Daddy supposed to find us down there?" D.J. asked in his always curious but quiet voice.
"We'll leave a note," Rudy said reassuringly. "We'll let them know that we're going to hike back up to the highway on the other side. Then they can just follow us along the road."
"They're not coming, dumb-dumb," Hope said. Her face was pale, and dark circles ringed her eyes. She punctuated her words with a wet cough.
"Mommy said…"
"Mommy's dead," Hope interrupted.
"No, she's not," D.J. said defiantly. "Tell her!" he commanded of Rudy.
Allen turned his back on the scene. He didn't want any part of that jazz. He took the coil of rope and threw it over the side of the cliff. He watched it unfurl in the air. He was lucky. It fell straight and true without getting caught on anything. He watched where it fell, peering between the fanning branches of the fur trees that grew tall at the base of the cliff.
Behind him, the boy started crying, a squawking, hitching wail that seemed to echo and reverberate off the rock walls. Allen guessed that Rudy had told them the truth.
"Goddammit," Tejada hissed. "Keep those kids quiet."
"What do you want me to do?" Rudy snapped.
Allen hitched a leg over the guardrail and quickly said, "I'm going down." He couldn't get down the cliff fast enough. He inched over the edge, his feet dangling into nowhere, then he grabbed hold of the rope. It held his weight, and though his brain had known that it would, he still felt good that reality matched up with his brain's analysis.
He slid down the rope, away from the arguing above. Everyone was tense. The road being out was just another complication at the end of another shitty day. The snow, the cold, the girl being sick, and now the boy crying about his dead parents. Fuck, he should just hit the ground and run off on his own and never look back. He'd toyed with the idea a few times over the last few months.
He knew he was not a social person. Sometimes, he figured he would be just fine living in a house all by himself with no one else to talk to. Oh, it would have to be a beautiful location, a place with good sightlines for killing any Annies that reared their ugly faces, but he could get down with a situation like that.
Knot by knot, he descended, toying with the idea of disappearing into the woods when he hit the ground. He was halfway down the rope when the crying stopped. He looked up to see Epps peering over the side, looking down at him, and he knew he would never leave this group. He would never run off to be the old man in the cabin, writing poetry and living of what he killed and gathered in the woods… not until he was the only soldier left.
He was a quarter of the way down when the crying began again. The cliff acted like an amplifier, and the crying echoed over the valley. Damn, that boy had a set of lungs on him. You wouldn't know it to be around him. Most of the time, he was so quiet you'd think he was a mute. Even when he did talk, he did so in hushed tones, like he was always trying to tell you a secret. He wondered if that's how all people would talk in the future, quiet, so they wouldn't attract the dead.
As Allen reached the ground, he noticed the smokestack of a semi-truck off to the west, poking up through a drift of snow. It must have fallen when the road went. When he touched the ground, he heard the tell-tale signs of Annies in the woods, clumsy steps crunching through snow, too loud to be human beings. He wanted to yell up at the soldiers above to not come down, but if he did that, he would be sentencing himself to a cold, lonely death. He
