Faces in Time (12 page)

 

 

Leaves and earth crunch beneath his frantic trample through the woods. His lungs strain to suck in the air fast enough while his stomach muscles ache and cramp with every stride. Legs grow heavier and feel more numb, but his hate-fueled facial expression and down-pressing brow refuse to allow his body to give in to capture.

To him, yanking his freedom back from those that have taken it and getting away with it, not being captured, not being wrong, are worth even dying while trying.

While Edmund has lifted weights during every trip to the recreation yard including the week he had a dual bout with bronchitis and tonsillitis, he’s never jogged or run around the yard’s perimeter. He’s always deemed it an inappropriate activity for a leader; a capable leader shouldn’t have to run or rush. A leader’s power should be evidenced in his security, showing he can’t be pushed, intimidated, or worried.

Speed is for those who lack the power to act at their own discretion. Running is a useful ability for a stooge or a hatchet man, not one with the power to command others and make one’s will a reality with no more cause, planning, or provocation than a change in one’s mood. Now, he doesn’t question whether he was wrong; his body aches with it. His wrongness and his anger have always been in direct proportion to each other. And at the moment, both are increasing exponentially.

To the left something scurries through the bushes. Since it is heading in the opposite direction, he assumes it’s not a police hound that has caught up to him.

He knows they can release dogs on an escaped convict and that it is the most effective way to run a prisoner down. That thought has been pricking the back of his head constantly, although he hasn’t seen a single dog during his run. He saw the flickering of a flashlight coming from behind him a little over an hour ago; he knows the police are moving in on him—closer every minute.

He thought he might have heard barking just before he saw the straining end of the flashlight’s beam, but with the pounding of his heart, the loudness of his breath, and the crunching of the ground beneath him, he wasn’t sure of it.

Regardless of whether he heard the bark or if his mind was playing tricks on him, there should be loose dogs, and if there were loose dogs, they’d be upon him already. While he’s thrilled that he doesn’t have vicious canines ripping at his flesh as he struggles to sprint between the trees and the uneven terrain, something about their absence gnaws at him.

Birds shoot out of the branches just ahead of him into the pitch-dark sky. They start out in different directions but regroup to another tree a safer distance away.

His pounding breath and his bombastic heartbeat are the sounds that have taken over his senses, keeping him from paying any mind to how much noise his feet are making as they pummel and displace the foliage, twigs, and earth. The birds’ sudden movement is a sure sign to a vigilant officer that the fleeing criminal is in their vicinity. Edmund tries to listen to his own ruckus as he weaves between trees and strains to land his feet steadily on uneven ground.

Significant noise is coming from his standard issue shoes. So far, his biggest regret in his plan is not having demanded a pair of running shoes from Rutherford.

Disappearing into the wild was his plan from the beginning, believing that any motorized vehicle would likely be detected and caught through an eyewitness, an APB, a roadblock, or a checkpoint.

He had concluded that they’d expect him to escape by the highway, so he saw a hidden getaway route under the seclusion of the oak and cypress trees. He thought it would be slow going with agonizing hunger and fatigue, but he sure didn’t envision a chase through the rough with law enforcement close on his trail. He thought he’d be undetected with the officers looking in all the most likely but wrong places. Now sprinting for his life in the dark wild, a lot of good his best planning has done for him.

They must have discovered Rutherford’s body faster than Edmund imagined.

If he stops to rest, they’ll catch up with him.

The other element he didn’t anticipate was the strain on his ankles from the rugged terrain. But then again, he planned on a marathon-plus jog, not a breathless sprint. Two running shoes would certainly be invaluable now.

His feet still clomp harshly. Not only does he not have the time to slow his pace to keep his step quieter, but he doesn’t have the energy to halt his feet from slamming to the ground. He barely has the strength to continuously pump them into the air.

While the sound of smashing the untrodden earth is spelling out his doom, trampling the untouched, unspoiled ground gives him a strange pleasure. The snap of his foot breaking a freshly fallen branch, the squish of soft foliage, and the crunch of dead, undisturbed, resting leaves stir up the perverse thrill of a deviant carving his jagged initials into a peaceful pattern of society.

A light swings in front of him, breaking the dark outline of the tree branches and the spaces between them. His ears had detected the intrusive buzzing of the whirling blades above, but his panic for escape did not let him internalize what it meant.

Now he can see the shape of the helicopter passing just ahead of him moving from his right toward his left. It moves slowly, scouring the area for any signs of him, the beam swinging steadily back and forth.

He knows he can’t stop or the searchers will grab him from behind, and he can’t plow straight ahead or the helicopter will spot him and keep that light on his moving body until someone brings him down. So, he runs at a hard diagonal mostly to his right while still keeping a forward direction, albeit a sideways one, trying to get to the area that the copter has already passed over.

Unfortunately for him, he knows if the copter is moving this slowly this close to the path that he was taking that they already have his position narrowed down and are inching their pincers closer to squeezing him.

Then it hits him. It hits him hard enough to slow his stride to a near stop.

They know where he’s going.

The dogs. That’s why there are no loose dogs; there are officers ahead of him as well as behind, moving toward him, trapping him in their closing net of trained men behind him, guns, helicopters, and unknown other devices. They won’t let the dogs go after him with their own men just ahead of him in the same vicinity in the dark, dense woods. Potential for grabbing the wrong guy is too high. They must be leashed, tracking his scent and leading the mass of men to him.

Fierce snarling erupts somewhere behind him in the lightless wild.

The dark branches all appear to be limbs of the officers lunging out to stop him and send him back to the bars and bricks of his colorless nightmares of the past year and a quarter. His eyes strain to see anything, but his imagination makes out more shapes than his hindered vision. The nothing terrifies him, and he finally understands the lines:

 

“Darkness there and nothing more.

 

Deep into that darkness peering,

long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams

no mortal ever dared to dream before;”

 

Those lines caused him to fail the first quarter of the eleventh grade, the last that he attended before dropping out and taking his core group of followers with him. Those lines had pushed him to break the windows out of his English teacher’s car.

It wasn’t over the failure, as he prided himself in his refusal to turn in the work demanded of him, but it was over the argument.

Edmund knew every word that his teacher had spouted about the poem’s meaning; he just adamantly disagreed, not believing for a second that darkness could be scarier than something in the darkness. He argued the point for four straight days of class that solid darkness wasn’t scary and no person, barring an idiot, would believe it. He didn’t stop at a detention, an office referral, and a screaming disciplinarian, so he certainly continued his fight onto his test paper. When his failing grade meant he had lost his argument on the exam, he brought it to the teacher’s windshield. He can still see the glass crack and run like a spider web. He broke the windows and the side mirrors too, but the windshield is the one for which he has reserved a special shelf in his memory. All of this flashes in little more than a second, flooding through his mind’s pathways that are slick with fear.

Those same poetic lines still antagonize a grumbled response from Edmund, “Damned Poe.”

As those two words stain the air around him that he desperately wanted to leave untouched, he pivots back in his original direction and sprints wilder and faster than before.

At least two dogs erupt with a volume that shoots a new wave of adrenaline through his body. Edmund runs as if he were on fire, feeling no more of the soreness or fatigue, filled entirely with burning distress.

“Ahead of us! Just ahead of us! Move, move, move!” screams a powerful and determined voice from the darkness behind Edmund.

Branches scratch and sting his face, arms, and chest as he plows into them, dragging their coarse bark and off-shooting limbs across his skin and thin shirt that offers little to no protection. He hears noises that are coming behind him, but he can’t gauge from how far back they are originating.

Every sound to his frazzled mind either belongs to a gargantuan man in a uniform whose fingers are about to slam down on the back of his shoulders or to four paws tearing through the terrain bringing sharp, glistening teeth to his fleshy calves.

The urge to look over his shoulder is tremendous, but he knows it will slow him down. He forces his head straight, trying to see what is coming ahead of him in the dark undergrowth before it threatens to snag his feet. One fall could make his imaginings of what is making the sounds behind him become real and upon his back, and just one of the numerous elements of the undergrowth could send him flying to the ground.

Watching the high branches of the trees ahead of him, he doesn’t see what he is looking for. He still has more distance to cover before the branches will thin out, revealing more of the night sky. His hope begins to slip away, and the embers of his enmity expand and fill the space it leaves.

“He’s coming right at you guys. Head’s up; he’s coming right at you!” screams an out-of-breath voice behind him.

A muted and garbled response comes to the voice behind Edmund. Edmund knows they’re very close to him if he can hear their communications. Animosity takes more space away from his faith in escape.

Suddenly he can see a twinkling between the high branches that he couldn’t a few steps before. A little more sparkling dots emerge between the widening spaces of the ceiling of branches. The fabric of branches grows sparse, and he knows what he was hoping for is just ahead of him. Unfortunately, he is also aware there is a line of officers between him and what he’s dying to reach.

Hope doesn’t regain any territory inside him yet.

The bushes are rocked violently on both sides of Edmund. He immediately has visions of dogs. It could easily be that a nest of nutria rats has been startled by all of the foreign creatures approhing, and noisy ones at that. They’re especially afraid of the dogs. It could be a lucky break if one of the dogs finds the furry rodent to be irresistible and ventures off Edmund’s course to chase it.