Forest of Memory (4 page)

I was breaking branches, and I knew I’d be easy to track, but I had the sense that he would have found me easily even if I’d demonstrated impeccable woodcraft. I strained my ears to listen fo r him, but beyond the sound of bracken crackling underfoot and my own labored breathing, I couldn’t make out the sound of anything else moving in the forest. The trickle of water came and went between my footfalls, and I just aimed toward where it was loudest.

I passed a mossy log with a gap under it that was just big enough for a person to hide in. I got this idea that I could make a false trail and double back to hide under it. So I ran on. The idea was that getting to the stream would make it harder to tell that my trail had vanished. In theory. I had read about it, and it certianly seemed to make logical sense, but I didn’t know if that was a literary convention or if streams really were good tools for throwing someone off your scent. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he were going to be smelling my trail. At least, I didn’t think he would.

The angle of the ground pitched down ahead of me, and I crested the top of a little hill. At the bottom was the stream I’d been running toward. It was narrow and had ferns crowding the sides. I slid down the bank and landed with a splash. Heart hammering, I stood in the rushing water and listened. The brook babbled around my ankles, but I heard nothing beyond the water.

“Lizzie?” I pressed my hand to my earbud. “Can you hear me?”

I didn’t really think it was likely yet, and the silence confirmed that I was still in range of whatever he had used to block me. As carefully as I could, I pulled myself up out of the stream, trying not to make it obvious that I was backtracking. I tried to be quiet as I crept back along the path I had torn through the woods. My chest hurt because I kept trying to hold my breath so it didn’t make any noise, hoping I could hear if he was coming toward me. He’d been so silent on the road. I tried to reassure myself that it had been the pavement. I’d heard him make noise as we walked in the woods with the bike, but not when he’d stepped out of the trees.

Clearly, he could be quiet when he needed to be. I tried placing my feet carefully, but even so the leaves rustled and shushed under me as if they were trying to warn me that I was too loud. I could hardly draw air. Every fiber in my body screamed at me to turn around and not walk toward him. I kept going, hoping I could convince him that I was running downstream. I heard crashing in the forest at some distance. I didn’t think it could be him, the noise was so loud. The deer, I decided, had gotten to their feet, at least one of them, and were entering the woods. Was that good or bad?

I had no idea. Wit h luck, he was going to follow them. Without luck, that meant whatever he was doing was finished and he could focus on finding me. I was drenched in sweat by this point as the thermal battery fibers in my clothes utterly failed to keep up with the excess of panicked heat I was generating. Still, I kept going, not hearing anything. It seemed as if the distance from the stream back to the moss-covered log had lengthened while I’d been walking. Any moment, I was sure he would appear in front of me. When I reached the log, I stepped carefully over it, not disturbing the moss, and pushed in from the back into the little hollow beneath it. I shoved leaves in front of me to create a small blind, masking me from view if he was following my trail.

The ground was cool, and the leaves clung to my face. I remember being surprised by how damp it was. That was a relief at first, helping me cool down after my run. The spicy, almost cinnamon aroma of the crushed leaves was soothing as I lay there and waited. What I was hoping, desperately, was that he would either not look for me, or look and give up.

As I lay there, limbs stiffening in the embrace of the earth, I heard a low hum. The slight ticking of gears going around almost blended with the breeze. A bike was on the road. It did not slow as it went past. If I had stayed on the road, would that person have been able to save me? Just having someone else present might have been enough to get me away from him—but I had run into the woods.

The bike didn’t slow, so I assumed the deer were gone. Now I just had to figure out how long I needed to wait to be certain he was gone as well.

My right hand started to fall asleep. Pins and needles prickled in the side of my palm, and I flexed my fingers, trying to keep the circulation going without making a sound.

A twig cracked. I stopped breathing for a moment, absolutely certain I had somehow broken the stick myself. The more horrible and totally obvious idea came next. Another person had broken the stick. He was tracking me. I closed my eyes, as if that would somehow make it harder to find me. In the waiting darkness, I focused on listening for sounds of him. A rustle that wasn’t in time with the breeze. A squelch of a foot on soft leaves. Then a sigh.

It really is amazing how loud a sigh can sound in the forest.

“Come out from under the log, Katya.”

I opened my eyes. With the leaves, I was in a cool, dark shelter of filtered green and brown. A childish part of me wanted to stay still, as if pretending I wasn’t there would make him go away. It was all too clear that my flight down to the creek had not fooled him for a moment. “The cyclist will hear the rifle if you shoot me.”

“That is correct.”

And then he cocked the rifle. The sigh had been bad. The sound of that small, metallic click . . . It couldn’t have echoed—we were in the woods, for crying out loud—but it still reverberates in my mind.

Now, clearly, I’m not dead. Clearly, I came out from under the log. Leaves clung to me. Mud and scratches covered my legs and arms. He stood there, his eyes blank above the mask. The rifle was pointed at my sternum. My memory breaks here.

I don’t remember being shot.

I wish I could give you some poetic langauge about how things grew hazy or how I asked him “Why!?” in an impassioned tone, but that would be bullshit. It turns out that when you are drugged like that, there’s a jump cut in your memory. One minute I was standing in the forest; the next, I was lying on my back in a tent.

Well . . . I say I was lying in a tent. It took me a minute to sort that out. Waking up was confusing. My head was too heavy to lift, and my eye s felt as if they had been filled with sand. I stared at the dappled cloth over me and couldn’t figure out what it was. At first I thought the patterns on the ceiling were moving because I was drunk, but it was just the shadows of leaves. I don’t know how much time passed as I drifted in and out of consciousness, surprised anew each time I awoke. The remnants of the drug kept trying to pull me back down into sleep. In fact, I’m not entirely certain that I didn’t fall asleep again. I remember murmuring to ask Lizzie to keep me awake.

Her silence was baffling. Then, FINALLY, I remembered what had happened.

My eyes opened w ide at the memory of the man aiming the rifle at me. I lay there trying to listen for some sign of him and had to fight to avoid drifting off again. I pushed myself to a sitting position, the tent pitching around me. It was a small space with walls of a synthetic silk compound. He’d set it up between two trees, and the smart fabric had wraped itself around the trunks as additional supports, making something about the size of an old pup tent. The ceiling brushed my hair when I sat up. The interior was filled with the scent of my own sweat and the decay of my breath. The sides of the tent turned in spirals around me. I gripped the thin thermal blanket in both hands and held on until the space steadied.

There were so few things that made sense about the whole experience; I’m not sure why I expected events to suddenly appear orderly and rational now. Holding my head, I listened past the walls of the tent for someone else. I heard nothing, but that was proof of not a thing beyond the fact that he could be exceedingly quiet when he chose to be. For all I knew, he was standing just outside the tent and watching me.

I suppose I should backtrack here to explain that one of the things I noticed when I woke up was that someone had washed me, but that I was wearing the same clothes. The thing I didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and still don’t know was whether or not
anyone
he had undressed me in the process of cleaning the mud from my skin. It was a profoundly creepy thought. Really. I felt more unclean than when I’d had mud all over my body. Lizzie couldn’t tell me. The only thing I had was the report of my own sensations, and they felt profoundly unreliable in that moment. I could barely turn my head without puking from dizziness.

What had the deer felt like when it had awoken? I mean, that rack of antlers must have pulled its head back down even more than my own wanted to droop. My first instinct was to crawl out of the tent and try to stagger away into the woods, but—let’s face it—he had found me easily when I was in full possession of my senses. The smart course was to wait until the rest of the tranquilizer wore off before going out.

The tent flap opened.

I will admit: I jumped and gave a little squeal.

He was kneeling in the dried leaves outside the tent, still with that damned mask over his lower face. I hadn’t heard him AT ALL.

He paused, watching me recover from being startled, and tilted his head. “How do you feel?”

“Bastard.”

He didn’t respond, just waited. I squinted past him, but the light outside the dim interior of the tent dazzled my eyes almost to the point of pain. All I could really see was that we were still in a forest. I presumed it was the same one.

I was wrong, of course, but I wouldn’t know that until later.

I still don’t know how he moved me from a forest outside Salem to one in Washington. I mean, we must have been in a vehicle of some sort, but that’s just one more giant gaping hole in my story. I only promised to tell you what I experienced though, so the things I didn’t . . . well. You can’t blame me for not knowing them, can you?

Anyway, he knelt there, waiting, and I sat there being stubbornly righteous and feeling as if answering any questions would be giving in to my captivity. He didn’t seem particularly put out, but then it’s sort of hard to tell what someone thinks when they have a full face mask on. He passed me a water bottle.

Or rather, he held one out, but I didn’t take it. He shrugged and set it down on the floor of the tent. “You’ll be thirsty. Drink it slowly.”

Then he let the flap fall. I didn’t hear him walk away, but I hadn’t heard him approach the tent either. For all I knew he was right on the other side of the flap, waiting for me to move. It was incredibly maddening. Every breath I took seemed too loud. The air in the tent burned my throat. I put my hands to my head and bent forward, trying to get a grip on myself.

That’s when I noticed, finally, that my earbud was gone. He must have taken it off while I was unconscious.

Which meant that maybe we were somewhere with net access. That gave me a little bit of hope. Not immediately, of course. No, first came yet another sense of being violated and panic about being disconnected. I pawed aside the sleeping roll I’d been on and pushed away everything in the tent, hoping my earbud had just fallen out. As if. The thing was custom molded to my ear canal and wouldn’t even come out when I was swimming. Heck, I’d been surfing and gotten pounded by waves with it in.

No. The answer was that the man had taken it out. I sat in the mess of blankets, my head touching the ceiling of the tent, and slowly rebuilt my thoughts.

First: I wasn’t dead. He’d taken the trouble to tranquilize me and bring me to Washington—well. I mean, at the time, it was still just “somewhere,” but I wasn’t dead. That meant I had some value, some usefulness to him.

Second: He’d taken the earbud, but he hadn’t demanded it when we’d been on the road. That meant something was different about our environment. If I could get my hands on a network-enabled device, maybe I could get help.

Third: None of this was going to happen quickly, so I needed to drink the damn water.

You don’t reall y think of taking charge of your physical needs as a big heroic thing, but at the moment, anything that was under my direct control was a lifeline. The lid cracked, and I remember being relieved that it was a sealed bottle, because that meant he wasn’t trying to poison me. As if there weren’t easier ways to do me in. Trust me, once you start having paranoid thoughts, everything becomes suspicious.

And yes, he was rihgt to warn me to drink it slowly. I was thirsty. Thirstier than I expected to be, which made me wonder how long I had been asleep.

I set the bottle down with half the water still in it and stared at the flap of the tent. He hadn’t told me to stay in the tent, so I pushed the flap aside and crawled out. I had to squint my eyes nearly shut at first. I would have made a crap spy.

I stood up, staggering as my balance went all wonky. Inside the tent, my vision had stabilized, but getting to my feet brought all the symptoms of the tranquilizer back again. The trees spun around me in ways I had previously considered entirely metaphorical. Before I pitched over, he was at my side and had a hand under my elbow, another at the small of my back.

“Easy.” He steadied me, not standing closer than was necessary.

I stared at the ground, wanting to pull away, but knowing that any sudden movement would tip me over. When the ground wasn’t moving quite so much, I released my breath. “Thank you.”

With a quick squeeze of my arm, he nodded and stepped away. “Sorry about that. Sucks to wake up from.”

“Why?”

To his credit, he could have misinterpreted that as a question about the effects of the drug, but he answered the question I had meant to ask. “You ran once already. I’m on a schedule.”

“Running seemed reasonable at the time.”

“I’ll grant that it might have. Does it still?”

“It would help if I knew what you wanted with me.”

“Not me, sweetheart. My bosses.”

“The question still stands.”

He grunted and walked away from me to a small camp chair. The low angle of the light cut under the branches and shone in my eyes. My vision had cleared some, but I still was having trouble focusing, so let me tell you about where we were based on a latrer memory. This one was full of fuzz and twisting shadows from the evening sun.