You Can't Escape

You Can't Escape 

by Graham Swanson 

    Renea walked in boots that came apart in the snow. The street to the outskirts in the howling cold beat apart

her zipper and pockets. Just another day with her friends in tow. None of them went to school that day.

The temperature dropped from 40 degrees to negative 10 overnight, but they left their homes. A huge

secret awaited them. 

    “It’s just a fence.” Randolph said, pointing to the woods, a tarp with him.

    “What’s on the other side?" Renea asked

    “More woods.” One of the other boys remarked. 

    “No, no.” Randolph held a crumbling map with letters and calligraphy of an unrecognizable language. “It’s where they used to carry out human sacrifice.” 

    Once they got into the snow covered woods the wind felt remote. With all the wind blocked, and no leaves, the sky seemed to bring brightness to the snow around them. Already frost formed on the corners of Renea’s mouth. The others shivered too. Ever since they were kids they had heard rumors of cave fires and shadows lurking in the woods to perform strange magic. They knew stories of strange creatures that once walked the land, and how what is now dry and vast was once under a black ocean. Great heaping glaciers of black ice whose waters brought immortal powers to predators. They never saw enough to believe the stories of old hermits, and their families disregarded the lore as gossip shared by the local homeless and the mentally ill. 

    In a strange way the path in the woods waited for them. No snow covered it, and no debris blocked the way forward. As they went along the sound of highway and town receded into the silence of winter. Some squirrels jumped around the branches, then a little ways down they heard the cry of a hawk, then the snarl of something they could not identify. Just as the snow seemed to dissipate into a mist that covered their waists, the group of friends came to a fence. High, and protected by a coil of razor wire. On the other side they saw a tablet and other strange formations unnatural for geometry. 

    Randolph went first. He really wanted to impress Renea with his bravery and adventurous, and he felt like he was doing that as he scaled the fence. The razors on top flopped as the metal links shook. He hurled the tarp over the razor coils, and pulled himself over. He was nimble enough to reach around the razors, saddle the fence, but as he began to pull his leg over the tarp ripped and a razor bit into his flesh. It sliced right into the meat of his leg muscles, the part that flexes anytime a human runs. He yelped because he felt a pinch, then when the metal sank deeper into his flesh, he howled in pain. He tried to pull his leg back but the coil only wrapped tighter around his leg and when he tried to pull away, six or seven blades cut into his leg all at once. The pain was too much, and he hung there screaming as blood dripped down his leg, down his face, down the frosty chain links, to the snow below. 

    Randolph’s friends panicked and ran away. They took the path back to town, but when they looked back, the mist had covered the woods, and snow cover filled in the moist lane where a path once lay for them. They told their parents nothing of what had happened or what they had set out to do. When people began to realize that he was missing, the town organized a search. They found his detached leg, still in the clutches of razor wire. The metal razors bite clear through to the bone. The way the leg hung there when they found it, like something tried to pull it loose, but only got more tangled in the crown of blades. 

    At night Renea could hear his screams. She looked to the woods and heard his deep voice breaking into boyish yelps, and the pulse of metal. Each dream brought nightmares of his body writhing in pain, withering away, being picked at by the animals. She told an adult about the stress and the nightmares. The adult she talked to was none other than the local shaman who lived in a trailer and sold rugs.  She gave the girl a special crystal rock to swallow if she was in danger. 

    The family of Randolph receive bad news. They didn’t find the rest of their oldest son, and they couldn’t determine how he died. 

    “ Because he had his leg ripped off!” 

    “It’s that damn fence! Why is it in the woods? Why did the city put it there?”

    “It’s actually private property. That land belongs to the Montsan family.”

    The Montsans. In the past, when sea creatures walked the land, they had gold, prestige, wine, and slaves. Since then they devolved into beggars, robbers, meth cooks, and recluses. No one even knew if they were still around because their once beautiful home had almost collapsed on itself the last snow fall they had. The known home dwellers were in state prison at the time for kidnapping and selling children to unknown men and women on the internet. 

    More rumors began about how the Montsans killed the boy themselves and then covered it up. Renea still heard him scream in the woods, so she took a flashlight and went into the woods one night. The metal links echoed in the silence of the woods. She heard Randolph call on her. The mist and path opened up for once more. 

    The coils of the razor turned blue in the moonlight. She saw naked shadows of people on the other side. One, legless, eyeless, no light in his face, but pale and glowing, she did not mistake. Yet he didn’t make words, he just reached out to her with a frail arm, the flesh in his hands blue with veins. She began scaling the fence but stopped at the first wire. It bent around and began slicing into her wrist. She let go, fell from the fence, laid in the snow bleeding as the shadows enveloped her, but from the other side. They passed through the fence like vapor, then began wrapping coils around her ankles. 

    The cut went deep. It just didn’t nick her flesh, it sliced back and forth twenty times and turned the flesh below her hand into ribbons. She hurried through the cold, feeling heavy coils wrapped around her ankles grow tighter, then finally snap tight. The blade bit the tendons of her ankles clean off. The tendon in the back of her foot was completely severed. With one strong tug, he felt the boot and flesh peel off one foot, and the entire other foot came off next. The pain became too strong, so she swallowed the Shaman’s rock. 

    By morning she arrived back in town, crawling on her face, her coat soiled, and her entire face frozen under a mask of frost. A trail of blood followed her and she finally passed out on the highway. When she awoke in the hospital she could still use one foot, but the other turned up later. When she got home she found it wrapped in razor wire on her bed. 

    At night she tried to sleep, tried to dream of escaping the curse and its tendrils, tried to dream of good things but behind every dream lay a dark reality. One dreams of food when they are starved and one dreams of safety when they are besieged. Even though the damage healed, she still felt those cold blades against her skin. She felt them around her ankle. She felt them around her wrists. She felt them around her neck and chest. 

    One day she hopped on her crutches and went to the Montsan Estate. A Caretaker emerged from the cellar. He explained that no one lived in the mansion and that she should go. The Caretaker took her by the hand, not to lead her out, but to show her the scar on her wrist. 

“He knows you're here.”  The Caretaker’s mood changed as he took his hat off.

“Please, is there anyone who can help me?”

“There’s one relative left around. Probably lives in a box down by the river. If anyone knows about him its going to be a family member.”  The Caretaker went back down into the cellar. 

Renea hobbled around the edge of the river where people often leave behind campfires or tents. She hobbled among wreckage cast out from storms and damage. Tubs, car wheels, a bike. Plastic bags drifted in the wind. She stopped when she saw a floating lantern by a tent.

There she found a man with long arms covered in needle scars, greasy, underweight, ungroomed, riddled with sores and blisters. He picked at visible festers on the surface of his skin with a knife. He heard her steps and hurried into his truck. He only came out after seeing the scars on her wrists.

"Please, don't hide. These scars came from the razor wire on Montsan land."

"How did you know about that?" He peeked out of the hole by the broken zipper.

The Forgotten started a fire and sat her down with him. 

“It already touched you.” 

“How do I get it off?”

“You don’t. It gets tighter and tighter.” The Forgotten showed her his scars around his neck. “Once I touched a blade, it was too late.”

“So I should go back and let it kill me?”

“No, he doesn’t want us to die, he wants us to live!” 

The Forgotten unraveled his sleeves and held his own scared wrists into the light of the fire. He looked off in the direction of the tablet and stones and when the wind blew he became ill. He tremble and coughed until he fell from his cooler seat. He gagged up foam but pulled himself up, reaching into his mouth, his fingers sliding down his throat. He made the sounds a broken valve makes until he pulled out his fist, and blade by blade he reeled 25 links of razor wire.

"See? I live." The Forgotten wiped the blood from his mouth, smiled at Renea.

That night while Renea stayed up all night listening to the clamor of chains and metal, the vagrant went into the woods. He took a coil of razor wire, and walked back to town. The caretaker sat in his car. Every day he reached down for his smokes in the cup holder. Today he found no smoke, only a fistful of razor wire. 

    Elsewhere, where the crackheads hang out behind the dumpsters at the gas station, they sat down on a pallet only to yelp in pain. They jumped up, ripped the trash bags apart, and found coils of razor wire inside. 

Laughter and joy became panic. The shadows of woods wandered the outskirts and gazed on through the windows. The razor wire around the Montsan house glistened as the lights of the mansion came on. For the first time in centuries, a virgin had taken to the guardian demon of their cursed bloodline. With her blood on the rock, the satisfied razors turned back into dry fetters from fallen trees. The high fence rattled with pleasure, bones and hair and birds and squirrels once flying free now caught in its snares. The Monstan tower room loomed over the hills and small town. Shadows emerged from the ground, their flesh and blood restored, and they entered the house. 

To this day, anyone who tries to escape this town is stopped by a fence of razor wire. They are later found in pieces scattered along the fence in the woods.