Black River Falls by Jeff Hirsch(5)

The rest of the kids on Lucy’s Promise had similar stories. Families that fell apart when the memories that bound them together were gone. Parents who died in the chaos of the sixteenth. Parents of kids who never got infected and left the Quarantine Zone to keep it that way. Some of them just couldn’t stand living with all the other infected down in Black River. You remember that animated Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer movie we used to watch when we were little? The one with the Island of Misfit Toys? I guess that’s what the sixteenth had turned them into. Misfit toys. Lucy’s Promise was their island.

“What’s going on, Ben?” I asked.

He scrunched up his face, still not looking at me. At first I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, but then I got a dry little whisper.

“Isaac and Eliot say there are ghosts.”

“What? Where?”

Benny pointed his chin toward the trail that led to Black River.

“In all those houses down there,” he said. “And up here too. In the trees and stuff. They say if you’re not careful, the ghosts’ll reach out and—”

“Isaac and Eliot were teasing.” I made a mental note to have Greer give them a talking-to. A vigorous one. “There aren’t any ghosts.”

He gave me a deeply skeptical look. “How do you know?”

“Because I know.”

“But, well, what if I get lost? Or somebody grabs me, or they make me go back to that shelter—”

“Do you think any of us would let somebody grab you?” I said. “Or let you go back to that place?”

His forehead wrinkled as he considered it, but clearly he wasn’t convinced. I checked behind me and found the trail deserted. The rest of the group was already past the first turn. I squatted down so I could look Benny in the eye.

“You know, when I was your age, I had nightmares a lot.”

Benny cocked his head. “You did?”

“Oh yeah. Bad ones, too. They’d wake me up in the middle of the night, and then I’d be too scared to go back to sleep. And since I shared a room with my big brother, that meant he couldn’t go back to sleep either. So he came up with this thing to help me get over being scared.”

“I’m not—”

“No, I know. You’re not scared. But still . . . you wanna try it?”

The way Benny looked at me it was clear that every atom in his body was primed for some kind of trick. But in the end, he nodded.

“What’s the happiest thing you can remember?”

The question took him by surprise, but then he thought about it for a second and said it was one day last month when he and DeShaun—the camp’s other seven-year-old and Benny’s best friend—were walking through the woods and found a bird’s nest. It was small, he said, the size of two hands cupped together, made out of twigs and leaves and bits of plastic. Each of the four eggs inside it, snow white and speckled with blue, was hardly larger than his thumb. Benny said that he and DeShaun stood there for the longest time, not saying anything, just staring at those tiny eggs until it was like they were the biggest things in the whole world.

“Okay,” I said. “Now, close your eyes.”

He did.

“I want you to see those eggs again,” I said. “Not like you’re looking at a picture, but like they’re really there in front of you. Do you see them?”

Benny nodded slowly.

“Now I want you to feel how warm the sun is on your skin and how the pollen tickles your nose. Now smell the honeysuckle and the dogwoods and that musty smell that comes from all those old decaying leaves on the ground. I bet there are birds up in the trees too, right?”

Benny nodded again.

“You can hear them singing and DeShaun’s breathing beside you and your own heartbeat.”

Benny’s shoulders relaxed and his mouth fell open, his bottom lip fluttering in and out as he breathed. It was almost as if he were on the edge of sleep.

“Open your eyes.”

When he did, they were steady and bright. Calm.

“No matter what happens, no matter what you see, that moment is locked up inside you. So if you ever get scared, that’s where you go. Deal?”

He nodded solemnly, never taking his eyes off mine. “But nothing bad’s going to happen, right?”

I raised my hand. “I swear. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

It was as if the chains holding him back snapped. He went shooting off after the others, kicking up a cloud of dust as he went. I knelt there in the quiet of the camp, staring at the trail and thinking about walking the streets of Black River for the first time in eight months. It had to have been eighty degrees that day, but I felt as if I’d swallowed a bucket full of ice.

Once Benny was out of sight, I went back to my own campsite. I dropped to my knees and hunted around inside my tent until I found what I was looking for: a T-shirt–wrapped bundle hidden under my sleeping bag.

From time to time we traded with the other groups that were scattered throughout the woods and hills surrounding Lucy’s Promise. Not long after I moved up to the mountain, I sought out one of them, and swapped almost everything I had for the one thing I wanted.

I unfolded the T-shirt. Inside was a six-inch hunting knife with a leather-wrapped handle. All along the top of the blade there were these rat’s teeth serrations, the kind you’d use to saw through thick branches. The cutting edge itself was so sharp it seemed to hum.