Disappearance at Devil's Rock Read online

  “Did you wash your face?” Mom won’t meet his eyes. She talks down to the pillows. “You need to shower first thing tomorrow.”

  Josh says, “Yes. Okay, I will, Mom.” He changes into a clean T-shirt and shorts, turning away from Mom as he does so, embarrassed by the baby fat that softens his chest and stomach. He shimmies past her and climbs into bed. The wooden frame creaks as he adjusts his position, turning away, lying on his side, facing the wall. He’s exhausted from trying to read silent adult faces and keep eye contact. “You’ll wake me if anyone calls about Tommy, right?”

  “Yes. Of course. Try to get some sleep.”

  Her saying that and the way she says it, to his back or into his back, threatens to make him cry again. He says, “Can you stay in here with me for a little while?”

  “Just a little while.” She rubs his back. Her hand is light but distracted.

  There’s no way he’s going to fall asleep. He’s never felt more awake in his life. He’ll pretend he’s asleep eventually.

  Mom turns off the lamp and continues rubbing his back. Black clouds form and dance in his vision as he stares at the wall a foot or so from his face. She says, “Oh, Josh, what happened out there?”

  “I don’t know, Mom. I really don’t.” He blinks hard, balls the blanket up next to his mouth. Josh has been friends with Tommy since the summer before first grade. They met at the Ash Street playground, the one with a play area covered in wood chips that found a way to worm inside your sneakers. Josh’s mom and the other moms whispered about a boy shyly going about the serious business of climbing the play structure shaped like a pirate ship. He still remembers how carefully the boy turned the pirate wheel and swept errant wood chips off the captain’s deck with his feet. The moms called this boy the Boy Without a Father, and Josh wanted to know his story, wanted to know how that could possibly happen, because everyone had a mom and dad, right? Mom said she didn’t know how that had happened, but it sure was sad. She encouraged Josh to go play with the Boy Without a Father because he really needed a good friend, a good friend like Josh.

  Josh doesn’t dare imagine where the Boy Without a Father is now.

  Mom says, matter-of-factly, that if no one hears from or finds Tommy by early morning they’ll all help search the park.

  Josh doesn’t want to go back to the park ever again. He wants to close his eyes and make everything like it was earlier in the summer.

  It was late June. The day after the day after their last day of seventh grade. Josh and Luis rode their bikes up and down the Griffins’ long driveway, jousting with Josh’s replica sword and pickax from the video game Minecraft as they passed each other. That got boring fast, and it was too hot to shoot hoops. They sat on a shady patch of grass that outlined the driveway and checked for messages in Snapchat and Instagram.

  Tommy pulled into Josh’s driveway riding his black, dinged up mountain bike one-handed. He kept the bike seat as low as it would go, so his knees practically knocked into his chin as he pedaled. Tufts of dark brown hair stuck out of the ear holes of his helmet, and his bangs hung over his eyes. Tommy hopped off the bike without stopping and stuck the landing between Luis and Josh with a gangly, on-the-verge-of-disaster-at-all-times athleticism that only he seemed to possess. He put his long, skinny arms around their shoulders and said, “What’s up?” His bike continued on a wobbly ghost ride and crashed into the front bushes.

  Josh said, “My mom will stab you in the eye if she saw that.” He was half-joking, and he checked to see if Mom was watching them through the bay window.

  Luis: “Stabby stab stab!”

  Tommy said, “Catchphrase,” and tried to twist Luis’s arm into a chicken wing, which then became a wrestling match on the front lawn.

  Tommy was taller, stronger, more physically mature. Of the three boys, he was the only one with a dusting of teen acne and a voice that had fully dropped into a voice-crack-free lower register. Luis was hunger-strike thin, the shortest kid in their grade, and so he still looked and, with his high-pitched voice, sounded like a fifth grader. The usual jokes and taunts from the boys at Ames Middle School were a daily trial, and he was instantly labeled “adorable” by the older girls, and the meaner of that crew would pinch his cheeks and muss up his black hair as though they were patting a puppy.

  Outsized as he was by Tommy, Luis was tenacious and didn’t quit, didn’t ever quit. He weaved himself between Tommy’s legs and timbered him to the ground.

  Tommy laughed and shouted, “Bruh! Bruh! Get off! You’re twisting my knee!” Tommy’s “bruh” was an affected accent on bro.

  Luis shouted, “Get some!” stood up, and thumped his robin-sized chest with both hands.

  Tommy groaned and complained about the pain as he overexaggerated a ruinous limp toward his bike, its front tire stuck in the bushes like the sword in the stone.

  Josh pulled out a map of Borderland State Park from his back pocket. He said, “Yo, shit-stains, I got the map.”

  Luis and Tommy started singing the “I’m the map” song from Dora the Explorer. Josh pointed to a dark green blob labeled Split Rock and told them that was where they were going to hang out. On the way they would use previously unexplored trails, which was a bonus because they wouldn’t be as crowded as the main walkways.

  Luis said that Split Rock was too far away, and one of the trails they’d have to take was called Granite Hills Trail, which meant it was superrocky, which meant they’d have to walk their bikes half the time, which would take forever and result in general suckage and ass-pain for all involved. Tommy and Josh ignored his protests. Luis was a contrarian if a proposed activity or idea wasn’t his originally, and he’d complain long and loud to be on record as having complained. To Luis’s credit, he was never a told-you-so guy and he wouldn’t revisit his earlier objections even if he did turn out to be on the right side of history. Not to his credit: After the fact, Luis often enthusiastically co-opted the ideas he’d initially rejected.

  Josh grabbed his blue backpack full of Gatorades and granola bars from the base of the basketball stanchion. The boys walked their bikes through Josh’s backyard and into the thick woods abutting the Griffin property. Last summer the boys had worked hard cutting a skinny path through the brush that lead into the southwest section of Borderland State Park and to its Western Trail. Normally, they’d follow the Western Trail back toward the main entrance and ride to the Pond Walk, which circled the Upper and Lower Leech Ponds, and from there take other well-worn paths designated as easier hiking or mountain bike trails. Today, they followed the Western Trail deeper into the northern, more rugged, and less traveled section of the park in search of Split Rock.

  As the Western Trail gave way to the French Trail, Luis’s prophecy was realized. The terrain became hilly and craggy, full of knotty, python-thick tree roots, jagged rocks, and boulders the size of small cars. They had to walk their bikes. They weren’t good enough or strong enough riders, and with the exception of Josh’s bike, they didn’t have high-end mountain bikes built for such expert-level terrain. Tommy’s bike was a beater his mom bought on Craigslist; only the rear brakes worked correctly. Luis’s bike was a cheap knockoff from a generic sporting goods box store.

  French Trail became the Northwest Trail, and the going was even rougher. Walking their bikes over minimountains was tiring, time consuming, and at times near impossible, and they had to carry their bikes over the steepest and rockiest sections. They briefly considered ditching their bikes and continuing on to Split Rock by foot, but they were afraid that even out here, deep in the middle of the woods, their bikes could still be messed with or stolen. As middle schoolers they lived in fear of being bullied and harassed by high schoolers who could be lurking around any bend in the trail.

  They pressed onward. They had to backtrack on the Northwest Trail when they missed the not-very-well-marked right turn onto the lower loop of the Granite Hills Trail. Announcing that he was sweating his balls off and sick of walking his bike, Tommy tried riding
for a stretch in the lowest gear he had, and he crashed almost instantly. His rear tire got pinched between two rocks, and he was tossed from his bike, skidding hands and knees first at the bottom of a small slope. He popped up quickly and said, “I’m good. No brain damage.” He had a couple of raspberries on his knees. He wiped and checked his palms repeatedly as he breathed harshly through clenched teeth.

  Luis laughed, said, “Dude. You okay?”

  Tommy nodded as he walked his bike next to Josh. Josh could tell that Tommy was really hurting. His face was red and he blinked quickly like he did when he was trying not to cry.

  Finally, they came upon the Split Rock trail sign. Two feet tall, planted in the middle of the path like a wayward garden gnome, the wooden sign was painted brown with carved, white lettering. A short walk later, they arrived at a wooden plank bridge that lay on top of a swampy patch, and it emptied them at the base of Split Rock.

  Tommy: “This has got to be it, right?”

  Josh said, “Yeah. This is it,” and if his words lacked enthusiasm it wasn’t because Split Rock was disappointing, but to acknowledge how hard their journey had been.

  They sloughed off their helmets and dumped their bikes on the pine-needle-covered ground. Tommy set his bike loose on another ghost ride that ended as they usually did, with a metal-scraping and tire-spinning crash.

  Split Rock was an impressive, glacial boulder; twenty feet tall, sixty feet at its widest. Calved neatly in half on its north side, there was a three-foot-wide crevasse through to the boulder’s center. The boulder was a giant cake that had a thin piece cut out of it. The boys rushed inside the split and took turns taking pictures and videos of each other shouting, “Hardcore parkour!” and “American Ninja Warrior” while trying to spider-climb up to the top. Josh and Luis weren’t strong enough, and they couldn’t get leverage with one foot pressed flat against each wall, and they barely got a few feet off the ground before sliding back down. Tommy must’ve still been sore from his bike crash, because his legs started to shake, and he gave up climbing after getting maybe six feet up.

  They walked around to the south side of Split Rock, where some of the boulder had collapsed and crumbled away. They quickly found a path over those broken and moss-covered rocks and scrambled to the top of the boulder, which was flat enough to walk around on without any worries of sliding or falling off. They were high above the forest floor, no doubt, but not up enough to see over the trees of the thick, surrounding woods.

  Josh said, “Think anyone can hear us up here?” They hadn’t passed any other bikers or hikers along the way.

  “Don’t know.” Then Luis yelled, “Seven!”

  Tommy said, “Catchphrase.”

  Luis: “All set. No one can hear us.”

  A thin crack in the rock lead away from the big split to an eight-foot-tall tree that had somehow sprouted up through the middle of the boulder. It was dead now; sun-bleached gray, petrified, its surface stone-like in appearance. The trunk was sinewy, twisted, and pocked with knots and the stubby, sharpened bases of long-ago broken branches. The tree tapered and thinned to a spear-like point.

  Tommy: “Whoa. Sick tree.”

  Josh: “Looks like a weird statue.”

  Tommy: “Like something out of the Nether.” The Nether was the underworld or Hell of Minecraft, a shared-world video game the boys had been playing together, off and on, since fifth grade. Tommy wasn’t the best player of the three but he watched the most YouTube Minecraft tutorials and Let’s Play videos. Tommy had even set up and run his own white-listed (which meant private) server for the three of them to use.

  They walked the perimeter edge of Split Rock, faked pushing each other off the impressive sheer drops to the jagged rocks below, reached out to the still-living trees that had grown around the contours of the boulder, and leaped back and forth over the split. Josh’s stomach tightened every time he jumped over the crevasse and he felt that empty space opening up below him.

  Josh hung his backpack on one of the weird tree’s jagged branch stubs. He passed out the drinks and granola bars. His first sip was too greedy, and he spilled the red drink all over his white Ames Basketball shirt from two winters ago. When Josh had first played town ball as a fourth grader, he had been the quickest kid out there and easily made the town’s travel team. Three years later he was cut. He was by no means fat, but he had gained weight in his middle and hadn’t gotten much taller, not like Tommy had, and he certainly had not gotten any faster or any better at basketball. Too many other kids had passed him by athletically and skill-wise. Josh couldn’t keep his dribble anymore and couldn’t stop anyone else from scoring. Although he’d experienced plenty of other indignities as part of the daily horror of middle school, getting cut from the travel team was the most devastating.

  Josh said, “Shit, shit, shit,” and stood up, trying to keep the spilled red drink from dripping down onto his shorts and legs.

  Luis: “You need a straw or a sippy cup?”

  Tommy: “Chirps!”

  Josh: “I’m gonna be all sticky. Bugs will be all over me now.”

  Tommy: “Just like Alyssa, right?” A smile flickered, aimed at his sneakers. It was so Tommy, typically unsure of himself, like he was testing out the put-down.

  Josh said, doing his best Tommy-speak impersonation, “Whoa, chirps, bruh!”

  Luis: “He wishes.” He checked his phone. “Only one bar out here.”

  Josh: “No porn for you then.”

  Tommy: “Fap, fap, fap.”

  Luis: “I can still Snapchat your mom.” He mimed taking a picture of his crotch.

  Josh: “She wouldn’t see anything.”

  Tommy downed his bottle and put the empty back in Josh’s pack. He said, “This is it. This is the perfect spot, boys.” He dragged out the z sound at the end of boys. “I’m claiming it. Could totally survive the zombie apocalypse right here.”

  Luis: “Too late. Josh was already attacked by the zombie tree.”

  Josh gargled and fell back against the dead tree.

  Tommy: “Okay. Zombie contingency plans. Let’s hear ’em.”

  Tommy and his zombies. Tommy freely admitted that he was a total scaredy-cat, refusing to watch zombie/horror movies and television shows or read the comics or play the gruesome video games. Still, all he wanted to talk about lately was zombies: how they could really happen and then how to survive the coming zombie apocalypse. He’d even made Josh and Luis read some blog articles and watch a video about some weird fungus in the South American jungle that takes over an ant’s brain and how it could potentially spread to humans. In the spring, during a depressing discussion of environmental issues and overpopulation of humans and the challenge of feeding everyone on earth, their science teacher, Mrs. Ryan, had said that bugs would likely become our largest food source. Tommy—who usually didn’t speak much in school, stayed hidden under his bangs—had stammered through a question: what would happen to someone if they ate a zombie ant infected with the brain fungus? He’d slunk deep into his chair after, embarrassed at the room full of giggles. Mrs. Ryan had said that while she didn’t know much about that particular fungus, she was sure eating the ant wasn’t a vector for the fungal infection, at least not in humans. Later that night, while online with Josh and doing battle with the sillier subspecies of Minecraft zombies (the zombie pigmen), he’d said Mrs. Ryan didn’t really know and he was still convinced that human zombies could happen via the ant brain fungus.

  Luis: “Keep it simple. Fortify my house. Move all supplies up to the second floor and knock out the staircase. Then use a ladder and pull it up behind me when I was up on the second floor. Boom, zombie proof.”

  Tommy: “I like it, but what about emergency escape routes? And if you have to bolt, carrying supplies down a ladder would suck.”

  Luis: “Could chuck stuff out the window and jump down after them.”

  Tommy: “You’re such a hardo.” A hardo was someone who tried too hard to act tough or smart or cool. “No
way, you jump and hurt your ankle and you might as well be a bucket of chum.”

  Luis: “Chum this.”

  Tommy: “I’d use Split Rock.”

  Luis: “You can’t live on this rock.”

  Tommy: “No, but it could be, like, an extra holdout, or a—a safety station. Build a shelter or even set up a little tent here or something so you can come here in case your house or whatever gets overrun, or you need to hide from the noninfected for a few days.”

  Josh: “I’d be at the mall.”

  Luis: “Nah. No good. First place zombies go is the mall. Good for supplies, but you have to get in and get out, quick. See Dawn of the Dead.” Luis, unlike Tommy and Josh, had watched every horror movie they’d ever heard of with his older sisters. “Tommy, you seen it yet?”

  Tommy shakes his head no.

  Luis groans. “Jesus, you’re such a movie wuss. Just watch it. There’s a zombie that looks totally like you in it. I mean, it’s the seventies version of you. So weird. You have to see it. Even if you don’t see the whole movie, YouTube that zombie.”

  Tommy: “YouTube search what? Tommy zombie? Luis is a dick?”

  Luis: “That’s a different movie.”

  Josh: “Hey. A school would be good place to hide, fight off zombies. Lots of supplies there.”

  Tommy: “It’s okay. But you can’t stay there all the time. You keep a bunch of small bases, right? Spread out the supplies. Don’t rely too much on one place. Living inside a fortress, that’s a mistake. You need more than one place. I’d make this rock one of my bases. Definitely. It’s up high like your stairless house, and you could hear and see the zombies coming from like a mile away.”