The woods were not particularly threatening, as anomalous phenomena went; no one had died in them, gone permanently missing, or suffered more than a sprained ankle. They weren't particularly impressive to look at, either, weedy trees sticking up out of thick scrubby undergrowth, with a handful of ancient oaks with vast branches and broad trunks scattered throughout, and only a half-mile wide at the widest point of their curve around the campus.
Not, in short, the sort of woods anyone should get lost in. People did anyway, or claimed to, taking shortcuts, and finding themselves wandering in circles, or walking along a path endlessly, getting nowhere until they stepped off, often as not finding themselves back where they'd started, with no sign of their own tracks. Every year the new students had to learn to be careful, and a few of the returning students had to re-learn; but they took the woods as a mark of distinction for their college, and did their best to take care of them, staging four clean-up days a year for litter and trash that blew into the edges of the woods.
A gust of rain-scented wind scattered dead leaves and shook the branches of the trees at the edge of the woods; heavy, dark clouds rushed in from the west. Catherine de Belleville eyed the sky and told the young woman she'd been talking to, "Looks like rain, Tricia. Better clear up early."
"It wasn't supposed to rain for hours yet, Professor," Tricia said, pushing a few of her long, ornamented braids behind her ears. Another gust of wind blew over some of the bags of trash, sending them rolling over the lawn, and several students chased after them, laughing. "Well, I'll talk to the others."
Apparently the committee agreed, especially since the already-cool fall day was turning cold. In a few minutes they'd started clearing up, dividing up the small amount of remaining food and clearing off the tables. Catherine collected her video camera and packed it and her still camera away in the bag, then helped break down some of the folding tables; the bags of trash were carried to the dumpster behind the student union, and then the chairs and tables carried back to the storeroom in the basement. Catherine checked them in, noting that nothing was missing or damaged, told Tricia she'd see her in class tomorrow, and went back outside.
She walked over the grass, checking for lost or forgotten items; finding none, she paused, tucked stray strands of brown hair behind her ears, and looked into the woods. From here the lights of the town were smaller and dimmer than they should be, robbed of color and vibrancy, and the noise of the street down the hill behind them was muffled, as if it was coming from a much further distance. The wind was cold and damp, even through her coat, and she turned to hurry for her car before the rain started.
Something flickered at the edge of her vision, faint and pale like smoke; it paced her as she walked, angling closer, and she reached for a sidearm she hadn't carried in years, drawing back her hand when she realized what she was doing. In a half-dozen steps it would be near enough to touch. Five steps. Four. It was human-sized, whatever it was. Three steps. Two. Denser and brighter, like thicker smoke. One.
She reached through cobwebs into the woods, her hands scratched by twigs and dry leaves as she groped blindly through the undergrowth. The figure flickered and dimmed, and she thought she wouldn't touch anything but fog; then her hand brushed a cold, shaking arm. She gripped it firmly and pulled gently, and someone stumbled out of the woods.
The woman's eyes were bruised, her nose and mouth bloody, her jeans torn and dirty, and her dark hair tangled. She was close to Catherine's age, too old to be a student, and no one Catherine recognized among the various employees she'd seen around campus.
"Who are you?" Catherine said, brushing at the cobwebs on her hands. Looking down, she saw not cobwebs but small black feathers that clung just as determinedly. She shuddered and violently brushed her hands clean, plucked the feathers stuck to her sleeves, flung them away into the wind, then scrubbed her hands on her trousers again.
The woman started at the sound, but didn't answer, eyes unable to focus and expression vague. She could walk haltingly though, and Catherine, with a firm grip on her arm, led her to the student union. In the better light, she could see the woman was a bit younger than she'd thought, with black hair and gold-brown skin a few shades lighter than her own; the woman's arms and hands were streaked with bloody scratches and marked with fresh bruises. She got her into an empty lounge, sat her down, and called emergency services.
The rain was sheeting down by the time the paramedics, accompanied by a pair of police officers, arrived. Catherine said she'd seen the woman at the edge of the woods and gone to investigate, that she didn't know her, no, she really had no idea who the woman was, that some of the bruises were probably from falling in the woods, she had no idea why the woman had been in the woods in the first place, there had been no one else, no, really, the woman had been alone, and the last of the students had already left the immediate area. They were still unconvinced by the time the paramedics had finished the initial treatment and gotten the woman onto a stretcher, and demanded she show them where she'd found the woman; they left, still unsatisfied, after the ambulance had taken off.
She ran to her car, glad the last round of expensive repairs had fixed the leaks, and drove home. Xuemei hadn't been home, as attested by a pair of cats proclaiming imminent starvation at the top of their considerable lungs and stampeding for the kitchen as soon as she opened the door; she fed them before going to dry off, change clothes, and let her hair down.
The cameras had caught nothing interesting in the woods on first examination; she moved the pictures and video to her laptop's hard drive to show Xuemei later, then tossed some frozen marinara sauce in a pan to heat on the stove while she worked on research for her dissertation. The sauce was bubbling and she'd made extensive notes despite the assistance of the cats by the time the door slammed.
"Save me from people with business degrees," Xuemei groaned; she put down her dripping umbrella, hung up her coat, and knelt to pet the insistently meowing cats.
"Marinara's thawing," Catherine said. "Are they still convinced they can keep the company running with only two IT people?"
"No, now they think they can do it with only me," Xuemei said, disgusted, and went into the bedroom to change clothes. When she came out, Catherine told her about the woman in the woods.
Xuemei stirred the marinara sauce and filled a pot with water for the pasta. "A shape of smoke or fog, vaguely human. That's how you described your CO."
"Yes."
Two more blocks to the rendevous site, and there was no sign or sound from the other squad. No sign or sound of anyone but themselves, not of the dozens of people known to have been in the area when the Black Zone expanded, not the other squad, not even the looters who were known to have slipped through the barricades. The only thing she clearly saw move were birds, vast clouds of crows, more than would have been normal for an urban area before the Zone took over.
"All electronics still down. Compass apparently functioning. Nothing visible ahead."
Standing still in Black Zones was no less dangerous than moving, and sometimes more so; she chose not to send scouts ahead, and kept the unit together. "We keep moving."
Another half-block and they saw something ahead, someone - a compact woman, in uniform, marching ahead as if this was parade ground and not a dangerous field -
"Ma'am!"
She didn't hear, or couldn't hear, marching ahead of them toward the rendevous, and in another half-block had faded into a vague white shape.
They started to find the other squad immediately after she vanished completely.
She turned on the television news while they ate; a piece on the strange woman was sandwiched between a near-riot at a high school and an accusation of corruption in the provincial government. The woman had taken her daughter out of school for a family gathering, left there late in the afternoon, and disappeared until she appeared in the woods; the child was still missing. Catherine wasn't mentioned at all in the news report, which was just as well. After dinner, she and Xuemei spent an enjoyable evening shredding an astonishingly inaccurate historical melodrama.
In the morning, neither the news nor the newspaper had anything new to say; Xuemei needed the car for the day, so Catherine hurried out earlier than usual to catch the streetcar, warning her she'd be late since she needed to do research at the library. Cecilia Rocha, the other adjunct in the history department, was on the same car; she was currently researching land-women in bronze-age Eiria, and having as much difficulty finding reliable sources as Catherine was on human sacrifice in the First Mexica War; they commiserated over lazy students and research difficulties. Before her Great Wars class she worked on her latest article and went over her notes, hoping her students had actually done the weekend readings this time. After class she had the impression she'd been teaching sleepy cattle again, and wondered why it was so impossible for them to grasp the connections between events; certainly it was complicated, but not quite as difficult as they protested. At least this time they had the events in largely correct order.
She checked her notes for the senior seminar on Black Zones over a hurried lunch. Her students still managed to surprise her occasionally, taking the readings at unusual perspectives and coming up with odd insights and odder questions; a few had provided useful new approaches to some of the problems she was addressing in her dissertation. She glanced at the clock, cleared up and hurried across campus and upstairs to the seminar room, rearranging the chairs around the table.
The fifteen students in the seminar were already talking noisily as they trailed in. Catherine gathered that the missing girl hadn't been found yet, even though some of the clubs had gotten together and gone to look in the woods; the search parties had been separated, as usual, and found themselves back out of the woods quickly, which was unusual.
Tricia dropped her notebook and folders on the table, then hung her coat on a hook. "The woods felt different."
"More awake," Andrea agreed, dropping her backpack on the floor and tossing her coat on a chair; she shook out her short black hair and yawned. "Maybe not awake. More active."
"Something like that," Tricia said, and then, "Busy! They felt busy."
Andrea agreed. "That's it. I hope that little girl's not in there; it was colder in the woods than out of them this morning."
"I certainly hope she's not there," Catherine interjected, and changed the subject back to class before the woods discussion could take over again. "On Friday, we were discussing the initial appearance of the Black Zones and the theories about their origins."
There was a brief shuffling of chairs, books and notes as everyone sat down.
"There were some precursors to Black Zones before the Wars," Tricia said.
Jarod shook shaggy blond hair out of his eyes. "Undocumented alleged ghosts in Heiji don't count."
"The ghost stories predate the Black Zone by decades, Jarod, and other anomalous phenomena picked up in the last few years before it appeared," Tricia responded. "Similar things happened in Aachen."
Andrea, attempting to head off another digression into assorted weirdness, put in hastily, "Heiji and Aachen were both repeatedly bombed in the Wars, and the Black Zones appeared after reconstruction changed the cities quite a bit."
"A lot of parkland was converted to residential areas, and former residential areas to industrial and commercial areas," another student agreed. "Aachen lost almost a quarter of its green space."
"But that doesn't fit Xicahua," Jarod protested. "After the Wars, it gained greenspace and lost population."
Xicahua had been the northernmost city of the Mexica Empire, and their only city on the eastern side of the Border River; once the river had changed nearly a hundred and fifty years ago (there were determined, if mostly unresearched, arguments for that as the first Black Zone), the city had been nearly impossible to hold. Catherine had been assigned there twice on military duty, the second time to investigate the Black Zone; the surviving buildings were still scarred from the fighting in the streets and the resulting fires during the Wars, although the city had never been bombed.
"Eborici lost population too," Tricia pointed out. "But its Black Zone started at Ground Zero, five years after the Bomb."
"But there's no consistent correlation in other cities between war damage and Black Zones," Jarod argued.
"What correlations are there, Jarod?" Catherine asked, pushing the conversation slightly.
"Uhhh ..." he stalled for a minute. "Size - the smallest city with a Black Zone is about 250,000."
"And densely populated, really heavily built up."
"Especially in a short time, like after the war."
"It's good, but not perfect," Catherine said. "The n'Deren capital, Cifcáwin has no Black Zone, though two of their major ports do."
"But Cifcáwin's broken up with little parks and plazas, and those little religious gardens, right?"
"Asherah groves," Catherine corrected. "Yes, that's right. What about other places without Black Zones?"
That led to a considerable argument between the students whose home towns didn't have Black Zones and those that did, shedding somewhat more heat than light; places in this country without Black Zones were overall smaller, less built-up and possessed of more green space, but not absolutely. They were also less likely to have suffered war-related damage, though that was probably more a function of being strategically unimportant.
"There haven't been any new ones since Aachen," Jarod said. "Yet, anyway."
"The Zones just get bigger," Tricia said. "Xicahua's expanded ten years ago."
"Right when Aachen appeared," Andrea said, pushing her favorite theory that Black Zones were all linked, like tectonic faults.
Xicahua's Zone had expanded by a square mile the same day; Catherine had been there, her unit ordered to enter the Zone on an exploratory investigation the next day. The mission had been delayed several days when the Zone expanded, and a new site had to be selected for the monitors' post. Eborici's Zone had expanded that day also; her students, arguing, decided that everywhere but Heiji had expanded and came up with several vehemently defended theories why, and why some of them had expanded a few times since then.
"There's no correlation other than the growth or appearance of other Zones for any given Zone's expansion."
"Well, that's pretty circular. What starts it off?"
"Which takes us back to the central question," Catherine said, glancing at the clock. "What causes Black Zones? We're almost out of time today, so we'll finish the discussion Wednesday. Papers on Black Zone appearances are due Friday at the beginning of class."
"Hey, have the woods always been like this?"
"I guess," Jarod said. "Maybe since the college was founded. But they're not hostile enough to be Black Zones."
Her students straggled out of the classroom, with Jarod and Tricia arguing about the woods; Catherine collected her notes and went back to her office for her remaining office hours. Xuemei wasn't home when she went back for dinner; she sorted the mail, fed the cats, and read her letters over a dinner of soup and toast. One of her correspondents sent her photocopies of Mexica journal articles about their Black Zones; she skimmed over them briefly, but the technical language used would take her some time to translate. She tucked the envelope into her bag anyway, left the other letters on the table to be answered when she got home, and left over the noise and disapproving looks of outraged cats.
The library was crowded with students working on essays and homework, with a low buzz of conversation from group work and shared research; she picked up her requested materials at the desk, borrowed one of the small study rooms, and went to work. A few hours later, just before the library was about to close for the night, she had worked her way through the stack, taken notes until her hands cramped up, and was standing up to stretch when she heard the sirens. She packed up, returned her materials to the desk, and went outside, where a few groups of people were standing around, looking across the lawn to the woods. Cecilia, standing near the road, waved; Catherine joined her and waited for her to finish talking to her husband on her cell phone. More people drifted up, the tone of the voices mostly a slightly wary curiosity.
Four police cars had pulled onto the lawn between the road and the woods, sirens silent but lights flashing. The police were busily setting up blockades, marking off a swath from one bend in the road to the next, about halfway between the woods and the road. A smaller group was standing near the cars, checking their weapons and flashlights, then tested their radios with the others before splitting into pairs and walking into the woods.
Cecilia finished her call just as the six flashlight beams disappeared, not quite at the same time. "There's nothing on the news," she said, as one of the two remaining officers tried her radio and then shouted into the woods. "They didn't know?"
"Apparently not," Catherine said, shaking her head. "I would have thought the locals would know as well as anyone on campus."
The first continued pacing the edge of the woods, clearly not aware it was difficult to see anyone in the woods even in daylight; the second called in on the radio, presumably to headquarters, then glared across the barricades at the relatively small crowd of milling students. Catherine shifted her bag to her other shoulder, crossed the road, and walked up to the barricades.
"What's going on here?"
"Ma'am, go back to the other side of the road. This is a police operation."
"The presence of four police cars certainly gave me that impression," Catherine said dryly. "What kind of operation, who authorized it, and when did you inform anyone on the college staff that it was happening?"
"Ma'am, that's police business. Go back across the road or I'll put you under arrest for interfering in a police operation."
The students had started straggling across the road after her, a few near enough to hear the conversation. When the other officer shouted for them to move back, a few went forward, a few backed off, and the rest sat down where they were. Catherine moved back through the crowd to Cecilia, who shook her head at her.
"You do remember you don't outrank them?"
She laughed. "It's not whether I remember, but whether they do."
"As long as you don't ask me for bail money."
"Hardly," Catherine said. "I can't afford to lose this job any more than you can."
Xuemei reminded her strongly of that when she got home and after that argument, Catherine found herself too restless to do any more research, or to focus even on the mystery novels she'd picked up at the used bookstore. Eventually she wore herself out playing with the cats, and dreamed of marching in darkness with her unit, hearing each set of footsteps drop out in turn. It made her even more irritable before her first cup of coffee in the morning than usual.
The morning news said little new. The woman had been drifting in and out of consciousness, unable to tell police anything, and reports suggested she and her daughter had been at a thrift store near campus on Friday; the woman's mother, reacting to rumors Catherine hadn't heard, adamantly denied that she would have deliberately abandoned the child in the woods. The television news made much of the disappearance thirty years ago of a high school student near the college; Catherine wrote the name down to investigate if she ever had time. The student radio station reported that the police and the child were still missing, and that students with cameras had been threatened; the talk radio station hinted darkly of conspiracies. The streetcar was noisier than usual, with arguments breaking down on class lines as to whether the students or the police were responsible, with a loud man firmly convinced this was somehow a plot by the military for some unexplained reason; she and Cecilia stood in the back of the car and listened, bemused.
Cecilia shook her head once they got off and climbed the hill up to the campus. "Somebody'd want credit for this."
"More likely to pin the blame on someone else," Catherine said. It wasn't impossible the Army would have taken an interest in the woods, for much the same reasons she'd applied for the adjunct position, but this would be appallingly sloppy work. "Though I'd be very surprised if this wasn't being very closely watched."
"Same here." Cecilia whistled when they reached the top of the hill. "Will you look at that?"
Students still crowded the area, their sleeping bags and portable chairs tossed everywhere with no sense of order, completely blocking the road and taking up some of the lawn between the road and the student union. Some had coolers full of food and drinks; a few, impressively, were even attempting, or pretending, to study in the chaos. The college radio station had set up a remote station as close to the police lines as they could manage, and the local media had reporters circling like sharks. At least the national media hadn't descended yet.
"Quite a turnout," Catherine said, and made her way through the crowd. "I wonder how many students intend to skip their morning classes?"
As it turned out, about a third of her sophomore Early Mexica Empire class skipped, and most of the rest proved to have neither done the readings nor the weekend essay. Instead they confused rulers and events centuries apart, neglected to consider the importance of geography, and repeatedly attempted to derail the class with arguments about human sacrifice. By the end of class, she thought they preferred being confused; if the mid-term exam didn't cure them of that, nothing would. After class she had office hours, essays to mark, and research to do, and heard bits and pieces as she worked until sunset. The police hadn't returned, the students found themselves out of the woods almost as fast as they went in, and there were reporters everywhere.
The woods were a dark wall behind the crowd, the trees starkly outlined against the sky seeming larger than they were, and in front of them the police cars seemed small and tawdry; the wind was strong and cold. A crow called somewhere, near the edge of the woods, and was answered by a second, and then a third. Catherine's back spasmed and she searched the sky and the woods as more crows called, until she couldn't count the number, until they sounded as loud as the crows of Xicahua.
The crows circled overhead, their calls threatening and mocking at once, tatters of something hanging from their talons.
Crows burst out of the woods, blotting out the last of the sunset, shrieking hoarsely, and hurled themselves at the crowd. Students and police alike screamed and shouted, their voices crushed under the weight of crow calls, running or ducking, falling on the ground and trying to cover their heads. Catherine threw herself flat on the ground just before the birds swept past her, the wind turning colder in their wake.
They dove suddenly, screaming. The tatters in their talons were fresh meat that slapped against skin and clothes and hair, leaving bloody greasy smudges and a hot coppery stink.
The sound of crows changed as they swept back toward the woods and Catherine risked raising herself up enough to look around. On her right a young man sobbed into the grass, and on her left a young police officer lay curled on her side with her hands over her head, blood soaking her uniform. Catherine dropped flat as the crows surged at the crowd again, pain flaring in her back.
She barely recognized her own voice when she shouted for retreat, shouted again because she didn't think anyone could hear her, and the squad began to move, raggedly at first, then faster; she grabbed the uniform belt of the two soldiers nearest her and shouted for the others to do the same, repeating it until she saw them grabbing on.
Branches at the edge of the woods swayed in a wind more violent than the one she could feel. Leaves blew up into the air, even the ones right in front of her face, swirling into human-sized clouds and collapsing. The crows dove at them from above the woods, crying hoarsely, and Catherine dropped flat again, cringing at the sudden pain in her scalp.
They ran, just on this side of complete panic, holding to the straight path they'd followed in. The crows attacked in earnest with claws and beaks, aiming for eyes and joints, and the weak flesh of the cheeks. A thin, frayed piece of meat fell and tangled in her hair, over her face, blood dripping into her eye. The crows swept up in cheated rage as they ran out of the Black Zone, into the outpost. The three soldiers in the lead of the retreat had been blinded.
The crows flew up again and dove down into the woods, vanishing completely. Their triumphant voices faded as they disappeared, until only the sobbing and moans of the injured could be heard.
Catherine got up stiffly, her back in agony, and dug frantically at her hair, knocking it down as she searched for the meat stuck in it, rubbing at her eyes to get the blood out. Blood smeared her hands, making her rub harder, until the smell of trees and mud and the sound of sobbing penetrated the shock. She blinked, and blinked again, trying to restore her vision, hoping that the swaying branches and swirling leaves at the edge of the woods were a product of blurry vision. Some of the students were getting up, some still shuddering on the ground, and nearby two police officers lay still, their uniforms ripped and bloody.
Tricia was getting slowly to her feet nearby, her face streaked with tears and mud; she stared in horror at Catherine. "P-professor, your back, it's, it's - "
It hurt like hell where her shirt was stuck to raw wounds. "Call emergency services, Tricia," her voice less shaky than she felt, and more sharply when Tricia continued to stare at her, mouth working soundlessly, "Call emergency services!"
Tricia started and nodded, fumbled her cell phone from its holster, punching the numbers with shaking hands. Catherine moved and knelt awkwardly, barely able to move her back, checking for pulses on the nearest officers; it was thready and rapid, but there, and she pushed herself painfully to her feet.
"Help me get them away from the woods!" she said, to two shocked and shivering students, and they moved stiffly and awkwardly to help, only half-aware of what they were doing.
More students joined them, helping each other and the police away from the woods. No one spoke except to get through to emergency services, and in the silence the cries of pain and sobs were frighteningly loud. The branches rattled and the leaves rustled at the edge of the woods, and no one stayed as close as the road. On the lawn near the student union, the wounded were laid out on sleeping bags and blankets that were instantly ruined by blood.
The leaves blew out of the restless woods in whirlwinds, taller and broader than a human, spilling onto the road in drifts. Catherine, watching, backed away, step by step, from the shapes she thought she saw in the swirling leaves until she walked into a student, who yelped and staggered away from her, collapsing onto the ground. The whirlwinds slowed when they hit the road, shrinking and weakening, and when the first ambulance roared up the road with sirens blaring, there were only drifts of dead leaves across the road.
The woods stretched nearly to the road, from the bottom of the hill past the bend and beyond, and in the small space between trees and concrete was a carpet of wildflowers.
Copr. ©2007 Sara A. Keating.