Beggars and Choosers

The woods were cool and sweet-smelling, so thick overhead that the floor wasn’t much overgrown. We stepped, us, on pine needles that sent up their clean smell. White birches, slim as Lizzie, rustled. Under the trees moss grew dark green, and in the su

“Pretty,” Doug said, so quiet that a rabbit upwind didn’t even twitch its long ears.

Toward noon, the trees got skimpier and the underbrush thicker. I smelled blackberries somewheres, which made me think of A

“Gotta … sit down, me,” Doug said.

I looked at him, me, and my skin turned cold. He was pale as the birch bark, his eyelids fluttering like two hummingbirds. He dropped the rifle, him, and it went off — old fool had the safety off. The bullet buried itself in a tree trunk. Doug clutched his chest and fell over. I’d been so busy, me, enjoying air and flowers and I ain’t even seen he was having a heart attack.

“Sit down! Sit down!” I eased him onto a patch of some kind of ground cover, all shiny green leaves. Doug lay on his side, him, breathing hard: whoooo, whoooo. His right hand batted the air but I knew, me, that his eyes didn’t see nothing. They were wild.

“Lay quiet, Doug. Don’t move, you! I’ll go get help, me, I’ll make them bring the medunit…”

Whoooo, whoooo, whoooo… then the breathing noises stopped.

I thought: He’s gone. But his bony old chest still rose and fell, just shallow and quiet now. His eyes glazed.

“I’ll bring the medunit!” I said again, turned, and nearly fell myself, me. Staring at me from not ten feet away was a rabid coon.

Once you seen a animal gone rabid, you don’t never forget it. I could see, me, the separate specks of foam around the coon’s mouth. Sunlight from between the trees sparkled on the specks like they was glass. The coon bared its teeth, it, and hissed at me, a sound like I never heard no coon make. Its hindquarters shook. It was near the end.

I raised Doug’s rifle, me, knowing that if it come for me there was no way I was going to be fast enough.

The coon twitched and lunged. I jerked up the rifle, me, but I never even got it to shoulder height. A beam of light shot out from some place behind me, only it wasn’t light but something else like light. And the coon flipped over backwards, it, in mid-lunge and crashed to the ground dead.

I turned around, me, very slow. And if I seen one of A

A girl stood there, her, a short girl with a big head and dark hair tied back with a red ribbon. She wore stupid clothes for the woods: white shorts, thin white shirt, open sandals, just like we didn’t have no deer ticks or blackflies or snakes. The girl looked at me somber. After a minute she said, “Are you all right?”

“Y-yes, ma’am. But Doug Kane there — I think his heart. . .”

She walked over to Doug, her, knelt, and felt his pulse. She looked up at me. “I want you to do something, please. Drop this on the dead raccoon, right on top of the body.” She handed me a smooth gray disk the size of a coin. I remember coins, me.

She kept on looking at me, not even blinking, and so I did it. I just turned my back, me, on her and Doug both, and did it. Why? A

The gray disk hit the coon’s damp fur and stuck. It shimmered, it, and in a second that coon was cased in a clear shell that went right down to the ground and, it turned out, sliced through an inch underground. Maybe Y-energy, maybe not. A leaf blew against the shell and slid right off. I touched the shell. I don’t know, me, where I got the nerve. The shell was hard as foamcast.

Made out of nothing.

When I turned back the girl was putting something, her, in her shorts pocket, and Doug’s eyes were coming clear. He gasped, him.

“Don’t move him yet,” the girl said, still not smiling. She didn’t look like she smiled much. “Go get help. He’ll be safe until you get back.”

“Who are you, ma’am?” It came out squeaky. “What did you do to him, you?”

“I gave him some medicine. The same injection the medunit would have given him. But he needs a stretcher to be carried back to your town. Go get help, Mr. Washington.”

I took a step, me, right toward her. She stood up. She didn’t seem afraid, her — just went on looking at me with those eyes with no smile. After seeing the coon, it came to me that she had a shell, too. Not hard like the coon’s, and maybe not away from her body neither. Maybe close on it like a clear glove. But that was why she was out in the woods in shorts and flimsy sandals, and why she wasn’t bit up, her, by no blackflies, and why she wasn’t afraid of me.

I said, “You… you’re from Eden, ain’t you? It’s really here someplace, in these woods, it’s really here…”

She got a fu

“Go get help, Mr. Washington. Your friend needs it.” She stopped, her. “And please tell the townspeople … as little as you feel you can.”

“But, ma’am—”

“Uuuhhhmmmm,” Doug moaned, not like he was in pain, him, but like he was dreaming.

I stumbled back to East Oleanta as fast as I could, me, puffing until I thought we’d have two heart attacks for the medunit. Just beyond the scooter track I met Jack Sawicki and Krystal Mandor, hot and sweaty, them, straggling back to town. I told them, me, about old man Kane’s collapse. They had to make me start over twice. Jack set off, him, by the sun — he’s maybe the only other good woodsman East Oleanta’s got. Krystal ran, her, for the med-unit and more help. I sat down, me, to catch my breath. The sun was hot and blinding on the open field, the lake sparkled down past town, and I couldn’t find no balance no place in my mind.

Maybe I never did. Nothing ever looked the same to me after that day.

The medunit found Doug Kane easy enough, skimming above the brush on its gravsensors, smelling me and Doug’s trail in the air. Four men followed, them, and they carried Kane home. He breathed easy. That night near everybody else in town gathered, us, in the cafe. There was dancing and accusing and yelling and a party. Nobody had shot no raccoons, but Eddie Rollins shot a deer and Ben Radisson shot Paulie Cenverno. Paulie wasn’t hurt bad, him, just a graze on the arm, and the medunit fixed him right up. I went to see Doug Kane, me.

He didn’t remember no girl in the woods. I asked him, me, while he lay on his plastisynth sleeping platform, propped up on extra pillows and covered with an embroidered blanket like the one A

She must of just picked up the whole shell, her, safe as houses, and just walked off with it.

The only person I told, me, was A