Chapter Text
Barkovitch was screaming.
“Fuck, shut up, fuck,” groaned Parker. He knuckled into his eyes to stop the ache there, walking blindly forward. Stars blinked; tears budded. He called him a dumb bitch and a cocksucker for good measure. It felt like Barkovitch had been screaming nonstop for the last four days anyhow, on and on, voice long and high out of his skinny chest. Parker had grown real tired of it.
At once, Barkovitch stopped. Everything in the world went silent with him. This made Parker stop moving, too, before he could catch himself on the warning.
WARNING, FORTY EIGHT, WARNING.
But no warning came. His knees ached fiercely at even the possibility they had ceased walking. He opened his eyes. His feet, the lumps of insensate carrion that had become welded to the bottoms of his calves, were somehow smarter than his vision: no asphalt! they were already shouting gleefully, before his eyes had time to blink a message to his brain. No motherfucking asphalt!
Trees. Dirt, bushes, roots and shit. He was in the woods.
He could’ve been in any woods, anywhere at all in the world, but he knew he was still in Maine because he’d learned to hate these god-damned trees, stationary beside the road. Knew their smug, leaning shape.
He squeezed fists and hissed. His hands, they stung. The grass– he was delivered of an image like a blow to the head, of grass. Of running quickly towards it on the roadside. The golden, flat blades had come up and cut his hands like baitknives. He remembered, suddenly. Boys around him, to his right and left, in front and behind, fanning outwards through it like prey animals crashing through prairie. Too fast to yell or even talk to each other, holding one single shared breath together as they flew away.
Barkovitch was making convulsive sounds that sounded a lot like laughter. Parker turned to gawk.
“God damn!” he was whooping. “God damn!” He was real worked up. Lathered. Parker could see the whites of his eyes under the brim of his stupid rain hat before he bent nearly double over his arms around his middle.
There was something on his sleeve, black, splattered. Parker thought, blood, then he thought, oil. He remembered the halftrack gone screwy and wounded. He remembered the muscular lunge of putting on a burst of speed to grab up a carbine. Mowing the soldier down with a spray of bullets that leapt up easily from the nose of the gun when his finger fit naturally to the trigger. Then the second, the one perched on top of the halftrack he’d been eyeing for hours, the smug little dumb rotten kingly fuckhead. He killed him, too, fast. Red-ripped spray up his chest. The other boys– for a second, he thought they were all too half-dead to act, staring at him with their drawn faces and reddened eyes, and he was fucked, and they were going to gutshot him (that word bounced around the back of his head often since Olson’s ticket the previous night, or was it the night before that, gutshot gutshot), but then they weren’t and they didn’t.
Big, slow, sweet Garraty was the first to shout. It was just Olson’s name and his voice broke on it. Parker remembered feeling surprised at that, though. He hadn’t expected it to be him.
“Where’re the rest?” he asked Barkovitch, who was still bent. Parker thought he saw a pearly strand of saliva extend down from beneath the rain hat and slowly reach to touch the earth, then break.
Barkovitch horked a laugh at the ground. “I don’t fuckin’ know, man.”
Another image: the gun thrown down on the road with a clattering, metallic sound. Horror. Horror was heavy in his heart, higher than even the adrenaline of fighting back. It was a drum thudding in him.
Parker asked him again, more urgently: where were the rest of them.
“I said, I don’t fuckin’ know, Parker, shit.”
Them: Stebbins and Garraty and McVries and Art Baker and anyone else alive on planet earth besides fucking Barkovitch and himself. If they were even actually alive. It felt possible that they weren’t. Art Baker. His brain lurched at that name.
Parker remembered Baker– number 6, a number so small and early it seemed somehow soft to Parker– held up by a rough hand around the bicep. A human shield. A diversion while the soldier was fumbling for something. But Baker was so skinny he made no real kind of shield at all, Parker had thought. You could shoot the breeze right through him.
Parker had– he had–
“C’mon, man,” Barkovitch was saying, he was upright again, incandescent with crazy. “We gotta get out of here.”
Parker blinked and breathed.
“I said move, sonny,” Barkovitch spat. His hand was a tight claw that Parker hardly felt.
Barkovitch– fucking Barkovitch was pulling him along, pulling him forward, into those hateful trees.
Parker’s feet, which had gotten real good at marching ahead in front of him without thinking about one hundred miles ago, went.