Missy, the Nephew, and the Cave

The best hood on the lot is the Bronco's, because it's flat enough to stand on and nobody has stripped it yet. I climb up and put my hands on my hips the way Major Falcon does in issue seventeen, right before he flies off the moon base to save Comet Joe. Missy is on the ground looking up at me. She isn't supposed to be the villain, but I let her be the villain because she said so.

"You have to say your line," I say.

"I already said it."

"You said the wrong line. You have to say 'Not this time, Falcon' and then I say 'Not any time, Doctor Reversal' and then we fight."

She rolls her eyes and says the line the wrong way on purpose. I say mine anyway, because it is my turn to pick and she picked the last three times, and I have been saving Doctor Reversal for a whole week. I jump off the hood and land in the grass, and my knee stings where I hit it on the wheel arch, but that isn't part of the scene.

I bounce off a stack of tires and swing an invisible cape around, and Missy fires her ray gun. I dodge it. Rachel says dodging is footwork, not luck. I put my foot the right way like she showed me. We do the whole first act, and I have three more acts written down on a page in the back of my binder, and I have a big reversal at the end.

"This is boring," Missy says.

I stop with my foot in the air. "It isn't boring. We haven't even done Act Two."

"It's still boring." She sits on a milk crate and swings her legs. "I found something better."

I keep my mouth shut because I am trying to remember what boring means when she uses it. It usually means she won't play anymore. She won't talk to me for a few days like she's punishing me.

"What did you find?" I ask.

"A cave, not far, past the fence, in the trees. My dad went that way last week, and I went behind him and saw it. It's mine because I found it."

“Yours? How can a cave be yours? It's a cave."

“It's mine, because I said it's mine. It's like we learned in school with explorers. You claim it and it's yours. I want to go there. You should go with me. Just us two.”

I climb back onto the Bronco. “Aunt Michelle isn't going to let me go, and your dad won't take us.”

“We're going on our own.”

"We can't go past the fence."

"I already said we’re going." She skipped in the front of the Bronco like she was playing hopscotch by herself.

"You can say we are going, but no one will let us."

She kicked a little rock across the gravel. "I'm going tomorrow before it's light out. Sean sleeps on watch. Everybody knows Sean sleeps on watch. My dad said Sean shouldn't even be on watch, and Jaime said everyone has to take a turn."

I sit down on the hood so my legs hang off. I can see the whole junkyard from here: the main house, the row of cars, the tarp over the supplies, and the watchtower with Dante's hat brim just showing over the rail. I try to see it the way it would look if she went out and I stayed in and something happened. The picture stays behind my eyes. I get my binder out of my back pocket and my colored pencils.

"What are you doing?" she says.

"Making the plan," I say. "We leave at four-thirty. Sean falls asleep by four. We come back before people are up."

“That's so early. I don't wake up until seven. But fine, if that's what you want to do.”

She looks at me for a second and doesn't say anything, which for Missy is like getting a thank-you card. Then she says, "Bring a flashlight. It's dark."

"That's no sweat," I say, and I write flashlight at the top of the list.

*

Four twenty-nine on my digital watch. Aunt Michelle's door is closed, and the light under it is off. I stand in the hall in my socks with my school bag against my leg, and I think about knocking. Then I think about how she had to get me antibiotics last week for a chest cold, and she got a scratch on her arm. I should tell her, but I don't want to bother her for one more thing. And Missy would get put on restriction, and Missy is the only other kid, and if she is on restriction I am alone with the grown-ups. I don't knock. I turn back into my room and pick up my bag.

I put on my boots by the door where I always put them so nobody trips at night. Then I go through the bag one more time in the order the plan says.

The flashlight has fresh batteries from last week. The small first aid kit with the tape and the antiseptic goes in the side pocket so it stays dry. My pliers, the yellow-handled ones that only I use because I am the fence guy, go in next. Two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, peanut butter, one for me and one for Missy, only I am not going to tell her the second one is hers in case she doesn't want it. And Volume Two of Earth Saviors, Collector's Edition, that I already read four times. I don’t need on this mission, but I want it in the bag because Major Falcon carries a copy of the Federation Charter in his belt for luck.

The plan itself is folded twice at the bottom, colored pencil on yellow lined paper, and the top says CAVE MISSION with the numbers going down the side.

I go out the side door and hold the handle with two fingers to close it quiet.

The junkyard is a different place at night. The stacked cars look bigger. The gravel is louder under my boots than it is in the daytime, and I try to step on the flat parts. I go around behind the main house, and Missy is already there, in a black hoodie with the hood up, holding her flashlight so it points at the ground.

"This is the one," she says, pointing at the piece of gate the Forrest Rats messed up. There is a big bent flap in the chain-link where they came through, and everybody knows about it.

"Don't use that one," I say. I keep my voice low. "Follow me."

I take her along the fence, past the tires, to the corner where the fence dips down behind the pile of alternators. There is a place near the ground where the wire has come away from the post, and if you push it you can crawl through. It has been on my list to fix for two weeks.

Missy goes first because she goes first at everything. I go through after her, and my bag catches on the wire, and I have to back up and try again. It scrapes my arm, and it doesn't bleed much.

The watchtower is twenty feet away. Sean's hat is low over his face. I can hear him breathing from here. We walk past the base of the tower on the balls of our feet. Missy makes a face at me for stepping loud, and then we are in the trees.

*

The trees are darker than I thought they would be. My flashlight makes a circle on the ground about as big as a dinner plate. Missy's flashlight bobs ahead of me because she does not point it at the ground. She points it wherever she is looking, which is the forest, the sky, plants, and everywhere else.

"You have to be quiet," I say.

"I am being quiet."

"You’re stepping on sticks."

"You’re stepping on sticks too. You sound like a big dog."

"You’re stepping on the loud ones."

She stops and turns around. Her face in the flashlight is white and looks the way it gets when a game changes from her rules to somebody else's. "You are not the boss of me."

I know that. I’ve known since she came to the group. She is nine, and I am eight, and she says the year like she outranks me. And she found the cave. And when I try to be the boss it’s because I know something she doesn't know, and the thing I know is from the day with Rachel, when I did what I did and my hands would not stop, and I don't have the words for that day out here on a trail in the dark, so I only have half of the argument to fight with.

"Just be quieter," I say.

"You just be quieter."

I stand there with the flashlight in my hand. I guess I lost the argument, and we start walking again, and after that I stop telling her about the sticks.

The path is not really a path. It’s a place where deer walked enough times that the pine needles are pressed down. Missy is ahead. My circle of light finds something at the edge of the trail, and I stop.

It is a deer, or the front half of one. There is a line in the dirt going off into the trees where the back half went. There are no pine needles that have fallen over the drag mark yet. The smell is like the meat drawer at my mother's, in the summer, when the light in the fridge burned out, and nobody knew for two days.

Missy is fifteen feet ahead, and she is looking straight ahead. She keeps walking. I look at the deer for another second, and then I move my flashlight beam off it and keep walking too.

A little farther on, Missy stops and takes off her backpack and sits down on a rock. She takes out a sandwich in a paper towel and takes a big break.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Eating a sandwich.” She says it like she's annoyed with me.

I have two sandwiches in my bag. One of them is for her. I keep the bag zipped. I could eat the other one, but the plan says food is for the way back, and if I eat mine now and she doesn’t eat hers, then it’s unfair. I keep the bag zipped. I stand near her while she chews. She swallows, stands up, puts the paper towel in her hoodie pocket, and wipes her hands on a napkin that she throws and a bush.

We start walking again. I pick up the napkin and put it in my pocket to throw away back at the junkyard.

*

Missy stops walking maybe twenty feet from where the trees thin out. There’s a dark place under a leaning rock, and the dark place is a mouth in the hillside. It looks small.

Something old and white is on the ground in front of it. I put the flashlight on it. It is bones, in a pile, cleaned off, with the pieces mixed up like the box of chicken bones Uncle Jaime saves for stock. Only these are bigger, and they are not chicken. Something ate all the meat off them a long time ago.

"Come on," Missy says, and she moves toward the mouth of the cave.

I don't move. "Your dad went past this."

"He didn't go in it."

"How do you know?"

"Because he heard something in it, and he told me to stay away."

She says it the way she says the number of pairs of earrings she owns. Her chin is up. Her flashlight stays pointed at the mouth of the cave the whole time.

I put my hand on the strap of my bag, squeeze it once, and let go. My leg bounces, and I can't stop it.

"If there’s something in there, we shouldn't be here. Nobody should be here."

My mouth is dry when I say it, dry the way it was the day with Rachel and Aunt Michelle, when my hands did what they did.

"You're being a baby," she says.

I look at the bones, then at the mouth of the cave, and I go with her, because if I don't, she goes alone.

The cave is not shallow. From outside it looks small, but three steps in the roof lowers, the walls tighten, and the floor drops. There’s more cave.

The smell hits me at the second step, all at once. It’s the smell of the cooler at the lake, the one we forgot in the trunk after the trip. It’s also the smell of the thing that got under the garage the summer before I started school and stayed there for a week. I don’t know what a person calls the smell. I know where I smelled it.

"It stinks," Missy whispers.

"I know."

I keep my flashlight beam on the floor in front of my boots, because Uncle Jaime says you don't wave a light around in a place you don't know. You look at where your feet are going, and you move slow. So I look at my feet. Missy looks at her feet too, because her flashlight is doing the same thing mine is, for a change.

We go in about ten more steps, and the smell gets worse. Missy stops.

"What's back there?" she says.

"I don't know."

"Point your light at it."

I raise my flashlight.

The beam finds a foot first, and I don’t know it’s a foot until my brain catches up with my eyes. I move the beam a little more, and there’s a whole person against the far wall, sitting up with their back to the rock and their head down like they’re asleep. Their skin is gray the way the underside of a fish is gray. Their hands rest on their knees.

"That's one," I say, out loud, because I am counting.

I move the beam and find another one on the other side, on its side, with its arm folded under its head like a pillow.

"That's two."

The third one is closer. My beam gets to it, and its skin is not gray. Its skin is dark red and shiny on the mouth and down the front of its shirt, and its shirt used to be blue. Its eyes are open. This one is awake.

"That's three, Missy."

The third one comes up onto its hands and knees.

*

I don’t remember turning around. I remember Missy's flashlight on my face for a second, and then we’re both running for the mouth of the cave. We’re running the same speed, because she’s holding onto the back of my jacket.

The thing behind us is fast for something that’s trying to remember how to stand up. Its feet slap the cave floor, and I don’t look back. Missy is faster than it because she is nine, and I am faster because I am in front of her, and neither of us is stronger than it.

We come out of the mouth of the cave into the trees, and it comes out five steps behind us and one step to the right. It’s not on a person the way it was. It’s on all four. It looks wrong on all four. Its shoulder is above its head, and its head is turned sideways. It growls and gurgles like it threw up, but I don't look back.

Missy screams. I have never heard her scream like that before. It’s a loud, flat noise, and it’s right in my ear. Her legs go out, and she goes down hard on her back in the pine needles. Her hand never let go of me, and I almost go down with her. Her flashlight goes flying, and I step on it.

“It's got me!”

I turn and see two bony hands gripping her sneaker.

I don’t know what I’m doing when I take my bag off. My bag is off, and the zipper is open, and I’m on my knees next to her. I pull out my pliers because I couldn't take a gun out from the inventory room, and this is a tool and a weapon. Something inside the bag splits, and I hear the wax paper of a sandwich hit the dirt. The folded yellow paper of the plan slides out into the pine needles.

Missy is kicking, and the sneaker slips off. Her heel comes out first, and then the toes, and then the whole shoe is in its hand. Missy is on her back looking at her foot in her sock, and I hit the thing on the wrist with the pliers as hard as I can hit anything.

The wrist does not break. Its face is close to me now. Its head turns the way an owl's head turns, and its jaw comes open. I hit it in the mouth with the pliers, and one of its teeth cracks off. I hit it in the mouth again, and I’m making a noise I didn’t know I could make. It falls back off Missy's foot, and I am too close, and it is coming at me instead.

I don’t know how long it goes on because I don’t know anything except pliers and its shirt and my own arms.

Then Missy is there. She has a rock in both hands and brings the rock down on its head with all of the weight in her body. There’s a wet sound, like dropping a watermelon. She does it again, and there is a different sound, and its arms go slack.

She stands up. Her sock is muddy.

"My shoe is ruined," she says and looks at her foot.

I am on the ground, shaking. She steps on her heel with her toes in the air and says a bad word.

Something in the dark of the cave behind us moves, but it’s not close yet.

"We have to go," I say.

"I know that," Missy says, and she starts walking.

I grab my flashlight and her flashlight. I pick up my book bag, but the zipper is stuck, and the fabric is ripped. The plan is in the pine needles with the second sandwich. Missy isn't waiting for me, so I run after her, leaving my things there.

*

Missy walks on the outside edge of her sock foot. The pine needles hide the rocks. There are old bones on the ground too. She doesn’t say anything about her foot but she keeps wincing. I keep my hands to myself. Offering my shoulder would just be one more thing she got to say no to.

We cover the quarter mile faster than we came out. My bag has one strap now, and I hold it against my chest. The pliers are gone. The first aid kit is still in the side pocket. Volume Two is at the bottom under the flashlight.

I want to ask if she's okay, but I don't want to say a word. She has that look like she's annoyed, and it's better not to say anything to her when she's like this.

The trees end, and there is the fence. The watchtower is above the fence. Sean is supposed to be in it, asleep or otherwise. Nobody is in it. The little rail at the top is bare against the sky, and there is no hat.

I stop walking. I stand at the tree line and look at the empty tower.

"Somebody has to be told," I say.

"Don't be a tattletale."

She says it the way she said don't be a baby, and the way she said don't be the boss of me on the trail.

I hold the wire back for her at my gap, and she goes through first because she goes first at everything. I go after her. My arm is scraped in the same place it was scraped last time. It does not bleed much this time either.

Behind the water barrels, there’s a place where nobody can see us from the main building because the barrels are stacked wrong. I take her there and sit her down on a crate. I put my flashlight on the ground, so it shines up, and I take her foot in my hand.

I do it in the order Allison did. First, I look at it for anything sharp still in it, and I do not find anything, so I pour a little water on it from the bottle in the side pocket. I wipe it with the clean part of a gauze pad, and then I put the antiseptic on it. She hisses through her teeth once and does not pull her foot back. I put a folded piece of gauze over the two torn places on the ball of her foot, and I tape it with three pieces of white tape because Allison used three.

"I think I know where I can get you new sneakers," I say. "The place we went for the batteries had a whole shelf of them. Mostly grown-up, but there were kid ones on the end."

"Don't worry about it," she says. "I have other pairs, better ones."

I close the first aid kit and put it back in the side pocket.

"I'm gonna go," she says, and she stands up and walks away without looking back.

The sky is coming up gray behind the eastern stack of cars. Somewhere in the yard I can hear water running, which is Jaime at the pump, which he does first thing. I can hear a door open at the main house. I stand behind the barrels for another minute and I go through what I have left.

The bag has the first aid kit, the flashlight, and Volume Two. The pliers are in the cave. The plan is in the pine needles. I don’t want to go back to get them.

I get my gloves out of the bin outside the trailer where they always go. I get the wire from the wire spool by the workshop door. I go to the gap. I put my hand on the chain-link and start to weave.