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“Damn. You’re not even breathing heavy, brother,” Doc said. “You some kind of super man?”
“I eat my spinach,” Jericho said, shaking out his arms. His body felt good. Strong.
“Good thing. There’s a lot of road to cover between here and—Where’d you say you and your cousin were headed?”
“Nebraska. To see our sick aunt,” Jericho repeated.
“Sick aunt. Riiiight,” Doc said. He shook his head as he lowered it to his pillow.
Jericho lay in his own bed and stared at the ceiling. He wondered if the others had made it out of New York okay. If they’d found one another and were now on their way to Bountiful. He wondered about Evie. If she missed him. If she was thinking about him the way he was about her. She’d been pretty insistent on rescuing Sam. After what Jericho had told Evie about Marlowe’s operation, he figured she’d head straight to Hopeful Harbor, and that had him worried. If Sam was there, that meant Shadow Men. The thought of those Shadow Men capturing Evie and Marlowe attaching her to the Eye was unbearable to him. In his memory, he saw Anna Provenza strapped into the machine as she peered into some other dimension, moving from ecstasy to terror. He heard her desperate final screams as the Eye pulled the life from her.
He was getting riled up, and his serum-enhanced body began to respond with a faster heartbeat and heightened senses. He could hear the girls in the next room—“Anyone seen my Madame Walker’s Tetter Salve?” “Here. Just use mine.” He could sense their heartbeats somehow. It frightened him. He felt trapped in his own body. He needed to get rid of some of this wildness inside. Jericho bolted out of bed, down the stairs, and outside, breathing in lungfuls of cool, crisp air. And then he was running off toward the wooded field out back. Under the huff of his own breath, Jericho could hear everything hiding in the night. The slithering of small creatures in the brittle grass. The pecking of birds in the nest. The groaning of spring-hungry trees as their new growth stretched against the confines of the chilly April ground. It was all beautiful to him. His body began to calm. He felt at one with the creatures and the trees and the night.
Light poured through the gaps in the trees. Jericho went a little farther in and saw that there was a log cabin perched on a small bit of hill. The cabin’s two windows glowed yellow, like the eyes of a wolf. Smoke poured from an old stone chimney. It had a strange odor. A garter snake slithered across Jericho’s bare foot, startling him as it ribboned past into the brush. Jericho drew closer. Against the side of the house, rabbit skins hung from nails to dry. The skins still had the heads attached. The dead eyes seemed to follow Jericho.
Jericho couldn’t see into the windows. The glow was far too strong. There was an ax stuck into a tree stump, and a cauldron that he knew from his farm days was used to make lye soap like the kind his mother would sell at market. Jericho remembered accompanying his mother and father a few times in the back of their horse-drawn wagon as they made the journey from their farm in Pennsylvania Dutch Country to Philadelphia. How Jericho had gawked at the buildings and the people in their fine city clothes. How happy he was to return to the farm again.
The cabin door creaked open slowly, but no one emerged. It was as if the cabin were issuing an invitation. Jericho edged closer. Through the narrow opening, he could make out a hearth and the last of a fire burning there. He should go back to the boardinghouse. He should not be out here alone in unknown woods. But he had to know. His acute hearing picked up the splintering of the twigs as the fire consumed them for fuel. The scraping of branches against the windows. And a slurping, like a hungry man finishing his soup.
Jericho stretched out his hand and pressed the door back. His mind took in the room bit by bit: Braided rug. Tall chair, tattered covering. Beside the chair, a man crouched, curved back to the door. He was eating something from the floor. Jericho took a step forward. Behind the chair. Near the cabin wall. The body of a deer, still twitching. Its chest torn open. Flesh peeled back. The man. The man dipping his hands into the cavity. Hands coated in wine-dark blood. Hands pulling up entrails like weeds. The man stopped. Turned his head slowly to face Jericho. His eyes were black as endless night.
“Poor boy,” he said and smiled, and that was when Jericho felt the room swim. He feared that he would faint at the sight of that bloodied mouth. The animal flesh hanging from pointed teeth, draped across the fouled chin.
“Poor boy,” the man said again, in a voice thick with blood. “With no home to call your own. Orphaned again. Who will ever want you?”
If Jericho had been able to speak, he might have said, Stop.
The man hopped forward on his haunches. “He is coming. It is his time now.”
He straightened and Jericho saw that he was tall and muscular, with veiny arms. Blood spilled from his sharp mouth and down the front of his bare chest. “He will come and this nation will tremble and welcome him like a god!” The man’s laugh burbled up from deep in his chest, like some swallowed animal desperate to get out. On the floor, the deer’s legs twitched. “Come. I will give you a home, poor boy. I will tear the flesh from your bones and break those between my teeth.”
The man swiped at Jericho with filthy hands.
Jericho ducked from his grasp. He stumbled backward out of the cabin. And then he turned and ran faster than he ever thought possible into the woods. A fog had come up, turning the woods unfamiliar. Where was the boardinghouse? Where was he? Behind him, the night was alive with every sound imaginable. Birds screamed and lifted from their nests with a great flapping of wings. It hit his ears like a deafening punch. He slipped, fell, and staggered into a run once more.
“Poor boy! Poor boy! Poor boy!” The sound bounced from tree to tree. Jericho could no longer tell if it was only one voice or many. “Poor boy!”
Someone waited at the edge of the foggy woods. The serum punched through Jericho’s veins. If it came to it, he could throw a right hook. His arms ached to do it. The waiting man wore a soldier’s uniform. Jericho slowed with relief. The man turned. Jericho stopped, unable to take another step.
“Hey, kid. How’ve you been?” Sergeant Leonard said. His face was death-mask white. Bruised shadows showed beneath his deep-set eyes.
“You’re dead,” Jericho whispered.
“I’m sorry about what I made you do. I never shoulda made you do it,” Sergeant Leonard said.
Jericho sank to his knees. “You’re not here. I’m dreaming.” Jericho made a fist over and over.
The night sounds had nearly found them.
Sergeant Leonard parted the soupy mist like a curtain. Beyond it was the road, and next to it, the boardinghouse. He was almost there.
“Don’t wander around in the woods, okay, Jericho?”
“You’re not here,” Jericho croaked. Fist. Fist. Fist. Fist.
Sergeant Leonard’s eyes were immeasurably sad. “Sorry, kid. It’s about to get rough,” he said and disappeared into the screeching night.
