Page 28 of Fable for the End of the World

Go where?I want to ask. But my mouth is too dry to speak.

We’ve been so terrified of the Angel that it was too easy to forget the reasons no one leaves Esopus Creek unless they have to. Reasons why the town is surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence. Reasons why if you do leave Esopus Creek—especially alone, at night—there’s a chance you’re never coming back.

Luka and I take a few cautious steps away from the trees, but there’s not much room between us and the now useless car. Eventually I’m standing flush against the side of it, hands clenched into fists, while the rustling sound grows louder and closer.

We’re pressed shoulder to shoulder, and I can feel Luka trembling. His rifle is still lying across the passenger seat. Without turning, he reaches his arm around his back, through the window, and grabs it. The car’s headlights blink off, and there’s only the scant light of the moon, which casts everything in an icy, alien silver. Briefly they blink on and then off again, plunging us into total blackness.

Something launches itself out of the brush and the shadows, but I only catch a glimpse of it. Luka catches my wrist and hauls me around the other side of the car.

“Inesa,run!”

I stumble across the empty road, blood roaring in my ears.Without hesitation, Luka plunges ahead into the woods, dragging me after him, the growling, snarling creature just steps behind.

In the pitch dark, we scramble over tree roots and rocks, branches scraping my cheeks, thorns tearing at my clothes. Luka pulls me along with such relentlessness that I’m afraid he’s going to yank my arm out of its socket. I’m more afraid he’s going to let go. But he doesn’t, and we stumble on through the darkness.

My lungs are burning. I want to say,stop, please, I can’t do this, but my throat is too parched to speak and my tongue feels dry and heavy in my mouth. I don’t know how long it takes, how many steps we’ve put between us and the road, but eventually, the rustling and snarling behind us ceases.

We’ve lost the thing. For now.

Luka’s chest is heaving. He lets go of me and rests his hand against a nearby tree, doubled over. He’s still clutching the rifle in his other hand, but his arm looks limp, trembling like a leaf in the wind.

I’m woozy with the ebbing of adrenaline, and I feel like I’m going to be sick. My vision blurs and sharpens and blurs again. I lean back against the tree trunk, eyes swimming. When I wipe at my budding tears and runny nose, my palm comes away bloody.

It doesn’t seem real. Nothing seems real anymore.

Luka coughs, then straightens up abruptly. He was one of those kids who always seemed to get sick: from the rocking of a raft in the water, from eating food that didn’t quite settle right in his stomach. He’s mostly grown out of it. You’d have to, living in Esopus Creek.But seeing him like this, face pale and slightly green, eyes damp and cracked through with red, he looks like a little boy again.

We stand there in utter silence, while time seems to warp and bend. The sun comes up again, finally. Just the faint glimmer of it over the horizon, dewy and barely yellow. It casts the trees and the grass with a light like honey. It illuminates the sheen of cold sweat on Luka’s brow. It shows me my shaking hands, blood dried into the creases of my palm.

“Where are we?” I ask, at the same time Luka says, “What was that thing?”

The answer to both isI don’t know, so we lapse back into silence.

“Your face,” Luka says quietly, after a moment. “It’s all scratched.”

“Yeah.” I wipe it again. “I must have run into some brush.”

The burgeoning light mottles the forest floor, squeezing between the gaps in the tree canopy. The ground is remarkably dry, mostly dirt instead of moss and the long, bright green grass that I’m used to. The trees are all pines, the lower level of their branches brown and dead because not enough sun or rain can reach them. It gives the forest a sense of bleak strangeness. I feel impossibly far from home.

If the ground were wet, we would’ve left tracks, a path to follow back to the car. But the forest floor is carpeted with dried pine needles. We had to flee so quickly we couldn’t carry anything with us, except Luka’s rifle. No food, no water, not even my tablet. Even though I can’t tell how much time has passed, how much time is left in my Gauntlet, the tracker still pulses like a second heartbeat.

I swallow around the lump in my throat. “We have to get back to the road.”

Luka’s face is hard. I can’t bear to speak aloud the hopelessness of our situation, and neither can he. But then, to my surprise, he reaches into the front pocket of his coat. He takes out Dad’s compass and holds it out on the flat of his palm.

“We have to go north,” he says.

“Is that the way to the car?” I wonder if somehow, he’s managed to keep track.

“I don’t know,” he admits. “But it’s our best chance of getting to safety. Of finding...”

He trails off before he can say it. Invoking Dad’s name is kind of like proclaiming you still believe in Santa Claus. I know some imagined version of Dad still lives in Luka’s head. A version of Dad who’s a hero, who outsmarts the system, who maneuvers out of the restraints that keep the rest of us held down.

But there’s nothing else to believe in, here in the forest, miles away from any semblance of home, with the Angel trailing us and worse things lurking among the dense and shadowy trees. So when Luka points the way, I follow him. Following some dream of our father that might as well be a ghost.

The scenery changes as we walk. The ground becomes hilly, uneven. The trees are at least more familiar, spiky conifers bleeding into deep-green deciduous brush. Lichen ladders up their trunks and bulbous moss grows on their branches. There’s the ever-present sound of rainwater trickling from the leaves.

All of this could let me believe we’re in the woods around Esopus Creek, with our house and the shop close enough to see between the gaps in the trees. But as we stomp through the leaf pulp, my spine is stiff with fear.

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