Steps by Eric Trant Read Free Book Online Page B

dripping from his eyes. He was cold, thirsty, and shivering from the fever. When he tried to stand, the forest shimmered and threw him to the ground, all of it a blurry mess as if he were underwater.
    Coy lay in the leaves until the stars spun above him. It had been daylight a breath before. Hunger and thirst raged hotter inside him. He stood and found a knife in his hand. The knife had a name, but he could not remember it. The only name he remembered was his, and he angled his head skyward and screamed, “Coy!” He yelled it over and over until his throat grew slick, and when he finished, breathless, he took measure of his surroundings and decided he must be on some sort of road. He was on a mountain, because to his left the trees lifted up and away from him on a dark slope, while on the right the road dropped off with the steep angle of a playground slide.
    Coy shuffled to the edge and stared down. A wave of vertigo swept over him. He grabbed a tree to steady himself. With his eyes downcast, he saw bare feet, legs, arms, and chest. He pressed the flat of the knife against the underside of his forearm until the flesh parted between his fingers. Squeezing, he sensed nothing, as if his skin were rubber, and he cut a thin bloodline along the length of it, no more than a raking briar-scratch, but enough that it marked a dark trail from his wrist to the crook of his elbow.
    He focused his eyes on the slope and touched the knife tip to his tongue. The metallic tang of the blade overwhelmed the blood there. Through the trees, down the mountainside, a clearing opened up. Across the clearing he spied dark objects spaced evenly apart, some of them with pinprick lights which from this distance twinkled almost imperceptibly. Farther out, brighter lights swept across the ground, swiveled, disappeared, and reappeared in a mesmerizing display that reminded Coy of a twirling dance of lightening bugs.
    He leaned forward, held to a tree, and slid down the slope. The trees swallowed the lights as his vantage point lowered to their level, and when the ground evened out, he pushed ahead in a straight line toward the lights. He held onto the knife as he stumbled, fell, regained his balance, and fell again. The ground felt slick as ice. Eventually the trees thinned, became underbrush, and he pressed through until he stood beneath the stars in an otherwise open field.
    He heard rumbling and the clanking of machinery in a steady rhythm, far off and faint, the tune to which the lights danced. For a while he listened, and then he stumbled across the field to the dark objects he had spotted from the hillside.
    They were tents, roped to the ground with trenches dug around each of them, spaced evenly apart like pieces on a chessboard, about the distance of twenty yards. He pressed an ear to the canvas and heard nothing. As he listened, the bright light reappeared. He sat, closed his eyes, and let it consume him.
    When the light subsided, he felt scorched by its heat. His eyes burned from the fever pressing against the inside of his skull. His breath came in ragged bursts. His body shook from exhaustion and hunger, and he suddenly could think of nothing more than eating.
    There must be food in the tent, and so he cut the canvas and slid inside. Without a light, the darkness was absolute. He touched an object at his feet, and his hands identified a cot with a sleeping bag and pillow on top of it. He felt beneath the cot and found a metal box and a large sack full of soft things, which felt like clothing or other inedibles. His hands passed over a stack of plastic-wrapped boxes, and when he put one of the boxes to his nose he smelled only dirt and vinyl. He found a plastic cup and bowl, two metal objects that he recognized as ammunition clips, a pair of boots, a toothbrush, soap, a book.
    He had been wrong. There was no food here, but it was dark, and the clanking of engines lulled his buzzing head into a gentle hum. Coy felt around the cot until he found