Foretold (7 page)

I shoulder my backpack and lead the way back to the compound.

The sun is just beginning to break up the mist as we cross the creek. The buildings of the compound hunch in the dust. The first person to see me is Bethany, and she drops to her knees. “Bright. You’re back.”

“Yes,” I reply, and reach out my hands to her. “Everything will be all right, Bethany. I’ve come to make sure you know that.”

She starts to cry as I touch her. Similar responses greet us with every person we pass on our way up the path.

“Bright. You’re here! My prayers have been answered.”

“Bright, have you come back to help us?”

“Bright, I knew you wouldn’t leave us!”

To each of them, I say the same thing: “Gather everyone you can and meet me at the prayer house. I want to talk to you all.”

They shudder with excitement, ecstatic and relieved that someone has come to take charge at last. I look at Sam. “We should have come back days ago. They’re desperate.”

Sam appears pretty desperate himself.

“Never fear,” I say, and my hand finds his across the path. “We’ll do this.
Together
.”

And then Sam shudders, too.

My father’s poor followers. They’ve been so lost without a member of the Child family to lead them. For so long, they’ve listened to my father. Well, I was always his favorite, and I won’t let him down now. I will help them in his absence. I will be someone they can look to in these terrible end times.

Before us, even the door to the prayer house gapes in wonderment at our arrival. Behind me, people are gathering, traipsing after me, the murmurs of their relief and admiration floating in the misty air.

Ahead of us, a figure appears in the doorway of the prayer house, his face puffed almost beyond recognition. No—his face is the same, it’s only the eyes that have changed. The eyes that were once so clear, that shone with a light some called divine. The eyes that were kind and strong and knowing and true.

His eyes are dead.

“Bright.” His mouth moves, and the whisper is in the voice of my father. But his eyes—those eyes!

I stop on the path so quickly that Sam bumps into my back. What is he doing here? My father is in heaven. He’s
supposed
to be in heaven.

Though I recoil from his touch, he grabs my shoulders and pulls me in tight. “You’ve been in heaven for the last few days,” he whispers into my ear.

“No,” I say. “I’ve been out in the woods. I thought you—”

“Just go with it,” he hisses quickly and spins me around to face the crowd. I am surer than ever that something is wrong. My father has never asked me to lie. He’s never had to—why would he, when the truth of the prophecy burned brighter than the sun?

And now, as the last of the mist clears from the ground and I can see clearly the entire compound, and all of the followers gathered before, me, waiting, I know what has happened. It’s the end times, just like my father warned us. And it’s more horrible than I could ever have imagined.

I look at Sam and he’s staring back, as usual, his mouth drawn tight, his eyes aching with pain. He gives a slight nod. This was what he feared to tell me. This was what he’s been scared of, all these days.

I drop the bag from my shoulders as my father’s voice rings out, and reach in to find what I need.

“Bright has returned to us!” he cries. “She has come to bring us good news. She has come to lead the way.” He turns in my direction.

The second his dead eyes meet mine, I shoot.

“Demon.” I spit at the thing that looks like my father. It falls against the steps, choking. The gun is hot in my hands, and righteousness is the inferno in my veins. “Did you think you could trick us? My father is in heaven.”

I think I hear screaming. I can’t be sure.

There are many horrors to face, here at the end of the world.

On the day the angriest man died, his bones cursed the bed they lay in. Inside the box, the bones seethed and growled. And underground they exploded into dust and lay there, dormant, one hundred years
.

From the dust rose a flower. To the flower came a bee. From the bee, a stinger grew, and it dripped with the venom of the bones of the angriest man
.

The bee buzzed around, its yellow jacket glistening, until it came upon an open window. Inside the window was a woman, ripe with child. From the woman came a baby, a boy, who was still and blue, until he was stung by the bee that dripped with the venom of the bones of the angriest man
.

Then the baby roared to life and growled, six long years, until the mother went mad and sent the boy away
.

• • •

This is the story my mother told me in the final days. “That baby is you,” she’d cry, “and this is what you have become!”

“I’m sorry,” I’d growl, but to me it was a whisper.

“You are an evil, bad child. Bad to the
bone
.” Her macramé hair hung in her face. A mole throbbed at her temple.

“Yes,” I said. I pressed my fingers into my evil kneecaps and cursed them.

Today is the anniversary of the death of the bee, and I am free from all ties. No one will miss me, and I am done with this. I am eighteen and wasted, not from any substance, but from life. I don’t care about this foster home, these people who feed me. I don’t call them anything. They put me in the basement because of the growls. They lock the door for fear I am a werewolf.

I sit up in my bed for the last time. My bag is packed and I will go once they unlock the door. There are no choices; there is only one ending to the story of a boy so bad as me.

I make my bed and brush my teeth. Tie my shoes. The shoestrings are dirty and frayed, having lost their aglets long ago. I am bad. I haven’t taken care of my shoes properly. I hear my mother’s screams above the growls and grip my elbows, prodding their evil points. I picture them exploding into dust, which calms me down.

At school the teachers will welcome my absence, for I am disruptive. “Not a
bad
student,” one emphasized on my report card, “he just makes bad choices.” If only the teacher knew the truth. I try to tell him that I
am
bad, that it’s okay to say it, but he, like all the others, takes a nervous step back when I approach. Invariably his eyes dart to the door, his fingers crawl over his desk to grab a pen, a protractor, a book. Anything to use as a weapon, or as protection, against the growls.

I’m angry, they say, echoing my mother. Angry to the core. Or perhaps I have a throat disease, or a nervous disorder, but no one knows what it is. All I know is that they hear things I do not say, see things I do not do, relay stories about me that didn’t happen. But I can only shrug, for I am cursed with venom, formed from ancient angry bone dust.

It didn’t take me long to begin to do the things they accused me of. Why not? The consequences are exactly the same. Being bad is my destiny, and mine alone.

“David?” quavers the voice at the top of the stairs.

I jump, and the motorcycle growl in my throat revs. I didn’t hear the click of the lock on this, my last day. I’m not sure what that means, but it can’t be good. “I’m here,” I say.

Of course you are
, whispers the lock in the door.

“Do you want to come up and say goodbye?” the woman asks.

“No.”

She answers with footsteps moving away.

I stare at my frayed shoelaces, waiting for the usual morning rush above my head to subside. Waiting for the growl in my breath to subside too, but it never does. It’s my punishment for being born dead, which she wanted, then coming to life, which she didn’t. I feel like it’s the bee’s fault. Like I did the right thing in the beginning.

When they are gone I sling my bag over my shoulder and climb the stairs. I don’t look back—who wishes for a final look at nothing? I eat something, but in twenty seconds I’ll be unable to recall what it was. Then I set my house key on the sill and open the door, turning the lock carefully and pulling the door closed behind me. At the end of the driveway I stop and close my eyes, waiting for the growl to lead me.

• • •

In my dreams there’s a girl who growls too, but I know she can’t exist, because the bee died immediately. My mother saw it dead on the floor as the welt swelled on my cheek. She told me, “It took one look at what it stang, and died.”

In third grade, my teacher said that female honeybees die naturally after they sting, which gave me hope. I repeated the angriest man’s story in my head, pausing at
“To the flower came a bee.” A bee. A bee
. I willed it to be “a
female honeybee,”
but the words wouldn’t stick there, no matter how hard I tried to make them.

I pretended many things:

That my growl was the bee inside of me.

That my mother killed the bee trying to save me.

That it really was a female honeybee.

But my daydreams made my growl louder, and after school some jerks stuck me in the janitor’s closet. The mop stared at me, wearing my mother’s hair.
Bad to the bone
, it whispered.
That’s what you are
. I took the mop and smashed all the cans and bottles and bags off the janitor’s shelves and onto the floor, until it smelled like cat litter and butterscotch. The janitor let me out.

The next day I told the story of the angriest man to my teacher. She said she’d never heard of it.

Here in the driveway the growl points me west. I start walking through yards, across Lane Avenue, to the yellow field. Kids used to play freely in the field, but a few years ago somebody put up a fence. I know how to get in, though.

I walk through the tall grass to the trodden path. Milkweed plants beckon with whiter-than-white gluey tips. I stop and pluck a pod from a plant, open it up. Its fine silky hat
sways in the wind like hair under water. The seeds inside aren’t ready yet. I pull them out anyway and throw them to the sky, sending them off unannounced like Charlotte’s daughters in the breeze, away from their mother, their sisters, without a goodbye. I drop the pod on the ground and try to wipe the sticky mess off my fingers. One feathery seed is stuck to me, absorbing evil from my bones. I pull it off and throw it into the air, but it drops straight to the ground, infected.

It growls at me and I growl back. I move on toward the big oak, the center of the universe, if the universe was this field.

The big oak is a maple tree, but what did we know? What did anybody know? Back then kids could overlook strange throat noises for the sake of playing house. I stop at the base of the enormous tree and look up. What remains of my only good summer is a trembling sheet of green-gray clapboard and dangling two-by-fours, working their way loose with the pressure from raindrops. I think about being eight in the tree fort with a strange girl whose name I don’t remember. We played house and I was her good growly dog, protecting our fort from the sixth graders who probably built it.

They were scared of me.

Stop!
My mother would scream whenever I got loud in public.
You’re scaring everyone! You’re driving me crazy!

That tree fort girl—I thought she growled inside too. I told her so.

“No, I don’t,” she said, growling.

“You do,” I said in my kindest growl, not quite a purr.

“I can’t hear it.” She folded her arms over her chest. “Nobody else can see me, you know.”

I was sorry about that for her, but not for me. “I can see you and hear you. That’s better than not.”

Then she went away. I guarded the fort for a while. A few days. But she never came back, and I quit going to the tree fort to wait for my master because it was just too hard, sitting there alone.

Bad dog
, whispers the clapboard.

Ever since that summer, I’ve wanted so much for her to be bad like me. She is the one in my dream.

I wiggle the bottom step with my foot—a rotting two-by-four. It has three rusty nail heads, like eyes and a nose, silent without a mouth. But other steps with more nails hiss against my growl, denying the girl’s existence to my face.

I hang my head, knowing they are right.

A wave of longing ripples through my stomach, down to my private parts, and I stand frozen. Pain wrenches past my evil shield and seeps into my bloodstream, making everything hurt. All I can do is reach out and grip the tree, scraping the hell out of my arms, but at least that feels like something I can control. I close my eyes and press my body into the trunk, my cheek on its wrinkled bark, my chest and groin aching against it.

The old tree groans and ticks in the wind. I growl and groan and tick with it until my face is not my face—it is the tree, and the tree is the girl, and the girl is the antidote for the venom of the stinger on the bee that touched the flower, which grew from the dust of the bones of the angriest man.

But it’s all in my rotten head.

I leave the tree behind and slog through the other half of the knee-high grass to where the field ends, at the railroad tracks, a place where pennies die and no one comes back for them. They glare at me with contempt, abandoned.