Target Practice

  Target Practice

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  Buckley Township, Michigan, 1954

  The forest was quiet. Not the quiet of actual peace, actual stillness; the quiet that follows a sharply indrawn breath, hesitant and fragile and easily broken. No bushes rustled. No frickens sang. It was a rare moment of absolute calm—at least until the blonde blur broke through the blueberry bushes, running hell-bent for the border.

  Alice covered the uneven ground with a sprinter’s speed and a resident’s confidence, her feet finding the safe space between twisting roots and gaping holes. No one else in the county could have run that wood that fast, and that was swell and all, but it was going to be a small comfort if she still wasn’t fast enough. Because that was the thing about speed: it was always relative. She could be the fastest runner in the whole damn state, and it wasn’t going to help her if the thing she’d woken in the woods turned out to be a hair’s-breadth faster.

  She could hear it gaining. It wasn’t bothering to dodge or go around obstacles, no, it was ploughing straight through them, letting size and a heavily armored hide carry it through branch and briar alike.

  I am going to be eaten alive by something I can’t name and didn’t even see that clearly, and the first words Mama says to me when I get to Heaven are gonna be bad ones, she thought nonsensically. It felt like there wasn’t any air getting to her brain anymore, on account of she was running so hard her lungs ached. Not as badly as her legs, though. Those felt like they were going to drop clean off, and to hell with the rest of her.

  The beast kept gaining. Alice kept running. Light was filtering through the tree line up ahead, marking the blessed end of the wood. She’d be even faster on flat ground, and depending on where she came out, she might even have a convenient house to hide behind. It would be better if she didn’t lead whatever was chasing her into a group of campers or something, but honestly, if she did, they would probably be better armed than she was. Nobody with any sense went into the woods without at least a BB gun to their name.

  Too bad no one had ever accused her of having any sense. She’d been carrying her second-best hatchet—and she was never going to see that again, having dropped it somewhere between the scream and the sprint—and six knives, all of which had already been thrown. No guns. Not even a slingshot. Her father didn’t want her getting too comfortable with firearms, which struck her as just short of “her father didn’t want to have any living children.” He seemed to think that being poorly armed would keep her from going looking for trouble. Sometimes she wasn’t sure her father had ever actually met her.

  Alice hit the edge of the wood, somehow unsurprised to see the Parrish Place looming up ahead of her like an invitation to expand her horizons to include even more terrible ideas. She could still hear the thing behind her. Apparently, it didn’t care where the wood ended. She had woken it—she had stepped on it—and it was going to eat her for her crimes. Placing two fingers in her mouth, she took as deep a breath as her aching lungs would allow and whistled shrilly.

  Please be home, please be home, please be home, she chanted silently, as she ran straight for the porch.

  She was almost there when the back door opened, and she was treated to the sight of Thomas Price in his undershirt, expression cycling rapidly from confusion to surprise to outright fear.

  “Run!” he shouted.

  Normally, Alice would have shouted something back, probably to the effect that she was already running, and if he didn’t think she was doing it right, she’d be happy to trade places with him. Under the circumstances, she was happier saving her breath and angling for the back porch stairs. If she could just get to the house, she would be…well, not necessarily safe, but at least better equipped not to have her head bitten off by a thing from the deep woods.

  Alice ran. The beast gained. Thomas pulled something out of the waistband of his slacks, taking careful aim. His finger was well clear of the trigger, and for good reason: at least for the moment, any shot he wanted to fire would need to travel straight through Alice to get the thing behind her.

  She wasn’t going to reach the steps. There was only one option left, and while it was a lousy one, it was better than nothing. “Now!” she shouted, as loudly as she could, and hit the dirt, landing hard enough that she felt the knees of her jeans give way. There wasn’t time to dwell on the pain: she could hear the beast closing in.

  Thomas fired. Three times in quick succession, each shot loud enough to block out the rest of the world. The beast yelped. The sound was surprisingly high and shrill for something that large, and was followed by the sound of hooves thundering away. Alice resisted the urge to roll over and look. She needed to keep herself out of the line of fire until Thomas gave the all-clear, and not think too hard about the fact that she was trusting her life to a man who still swore his allegiance to the Covenant of St. George. She liked Mr. Price, honest she did, but sometimes it was hard to forget that they were supposed to be on different sides.

  Footsteps approached, and then Thomas asked, in a mild, puzzled tone, “Miss Healy, why did you just lead a giant hog to my back door?”

  “Hog?” Alice pushed herself off the ground, wincing as the motion drove the dirt deeper into her skinned palms. She quickly reviewed what little she’d seen before she’d turned and run, and brightened. “Aw, Grandma’s going to be tickled pink. She’s been saying for years that there were dire boars in the woods around here, but we’ve never actually managed to find one before today.”

  “You’re not answering my question,” said Thomas. He sounded less angry than puzzled, like he honestly couldn’t figure out why she would have done such a thing. “Why did you lead the, ah, dire boar to my back door? Oh dear lord, that rhymes. I’m transforming into a children’s book.”

  “Too bad ‘damp’ doesn’t actually rhyme with ‘swamp,’ or you’d have a best-seller on your hands,” said Alice. “According to Grandma, there aren’t any native pigs in North America, but there are lots of pigs imported by stupid people who really liked bacon, and some of them got loose.”

  “Including, presumably, the ancestor of your dire boar, which you led to my back door, for reasons you still have not bothered to take the time to properly explain.” Thomas stuffed the gun back into his waistband. “Are you hurt?”

  “Only from falling down,” said Alice. She looked down at the shredded knees of her pants and grimaced. “Also going to get a hiding when I get home, I guess. I wasn’t supposed to be in the woods. But piggy didn’t catch up with me, if that’s what you’re asking. He was pretty fast. I was just a little bit faster.”

  “You wouldn’t have been for long,” said Thomas grimly. Unlike Alice, he had seen the thing that was pursuing her: had seen how close its tusks had been to her shoulders when he opened fire and drove it back. “I don’t think you appreciate how narrow a miss that was.”

  “See there? You’ve answered your own question.” Alice looked up and smiled brightly at him. “I wasn’t exactly aiming to bring you a giant pig as a houseguest, but when I came out of the woods I saw your house, and I figured you’d be better suited to deal with it than I was, on account of I sort of ran out of weapons while I was still in the woods.”

  Thomas was silent. It wasn’t a matter of not knowing what to say. It was more an issue of not knowing which of the many conflicting things he should say first, beginning with “you could have been killed” and moving from there into a long litany of words that he was reasonably sure he wasn’t supposed to say in front of the teenage granddaughter of Alexander Healy.

  Alice took Thomas’s silence as an opportunity to dust herself off and smooth her hair back into a semblance of order. Most of the things she knew about her mother came from
her father, whose stories were always sanitized and saintly, her grandmother, who tried to present her dearly departed daughter-in-law in the best light possible, and the mice. According to the mice, much of Fran’s wisdom had related to her hair. “Good hair can cover for a multitude of sins, including a thorough dousing of ichor,” was one of the main pieces of Aeslin wisdom she had absorbed.

  And the thing was, they—and by extension, Fran—were right. If she kept her hair nicely combed and shiny, people were more inclined to believe her when she said she was running because she was late for class, or that the blood on her clothes was really strawberry juice. If she let herself get scruffy, the world turned suspicious. If she kept herself clean and neat, she could get away with almost anything.

  Finishing with her hair, she looked back to Thomas, intending to thank him for keeping her from being pig-food. Then she froze. The rush of adrenaline that had propelled her out of the wood had faded, leaving her hollowed-out and shaky, and for the first time, she really realized what he was wearing—or wasn’t wearing, as might be more accurate. His undershirt left both his arms exposed, revealing the tattoos that ran from his shoulders all the way down to his wrists in a swirl of colors and unfamiliar shapes. The tattoos continued across the front of his chest, going right up to the edge of where they would be hidden by a standard men’s shirt. Alice suddenly found it difficult to breathe.

  “Miss Healy?” Thomas sounded concerned. “Are you all right?”

  No, you’re naked, she thought nonsensically. Cheeks flaring red, she said, “I should go. I’m not supposed to be here. My father doesn’t like it. I, uh…thank you. For your help. With the dire boar. I’m going to tell Grandma about it. She may come here. Looking. For it, I mean, not at you, not that there’s anything wrong with looking at oh God I almost said that out loud thank you again good-bye!”

  She turned and bolted for the road, leaving Thomas blinking quizzically after her.

  “I had expected her to at least ask how the tailypo was doing,” he said to himself. Then he turned and walked back up the porch stairs to the house. If he was going to be chasing a giant hog around the woods, he was going to do it in better shoes.

  Distances traveled in the woods didn’t always translate well to the world outside them. They curved around Buckley Township like a great hand, broken only where the trees had been cleared for housing or to let the roads scythe through. It was possible to walk for hours and travel less than half a mile. It was equally, paradoxically possible to spend twenty minutes in the woods and come out entirely on the other side of town. Alice sometimes suspected the trees of having a mind of their own. It always seemed like the days when she needed to stay close to home were the ones where she came out the farthest away.

  This day…it was a Sunday, which meant church in the morning, to keep up appearances, followed by her father vanishing off to the library to do his paperwork for the week. He never stayed gone for more than a few hours. It had seemed like plenty long enough to go for a walk in the woods and clear her head, but that was before she’d wound up being chased by a dire boar and ripping the knees out of a pair of practically-new pants. Coming out all the way over by the Parrish Place was just icing on the cake of how much trouble she was in.

  Normally, she would have cut through the woods to make the trip home faster. Normally, she wasn’t unarmed and painfully aware of the giant pig that was lurking somewhere out there, wounded and angry. Could pigs hold a grudge? She didn’t want to find out the hard, getting devoured way. So she trudged down the road and across the fields between her and home, hoping all the while that she would somehow have beaten the odds and have time to get herself cleaned up before her father came back from the library.

  Hope died as she started up the driveway and saw her father’s car—a battered jalopy of a thing, but it ran more smoothly than the family truck, which was sometimes what mattered—parked in the shadow of the barn. She was busted. Well, if she was going to her own execution, she was going to go proudly. Squaring her shoulders and slicking back her hair with the palm of her hand, she walked straight for the front porch, up the steps, and through the door.

  As she had expected, her father was waiting in the foyer. He didn’t rise, just looked at her with a puzzled, wounded expression on his face, like he couldn’t understand how this was happening. “Oh, Alice,” he said. “What am I going to do with you?”

  “Give me a gun and let Grandma teach me how to use it better, so I don’t come home late anymore,” she replied. She was already in trouble. There was no point in playing innocent now.

  Jonathan’s face hardened, puzzlement fading into anger. “You know better than to ask me for that. Where were you? What have you done to your clothes?”

  “I went for a walk in the woods, Daddy,” she said. “I got a little turned around and wound up going further than I’d planned to, or I would have been home before you were. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “You didn’t mean to worry me,” he echoed. “Well, you did, Alice. What’s more, the way you say that makes me suspect that this wasn’t the first time you disobeyed me in this manner. Have you been going to the woods often?”

  Alice paused for a moment. The thought of lying was tempting—more tempting than it should have been, for someone who at least tried to be a good girl. But what had being good ever gotten her? Just lectures and shame and hiding herself away. She took a deep breath, and said, “Just about every day. After school, when I don’t have too much homework, and after dinner, when I do. Twice a day on the weekends. Sally Duffy hasn’t been my friend for almost three years, not since the igneous scorpions ate her dog. So every time I’ve said I was going to a sleepover at her place, I spent the night in the woods. The frickens aren’t afraid of me anymore, Daddy. They keep singing even when I’m sitting in the tree with them.”

  Silence fell, leaden and heavy, as Jonathan stared at her. Then, in a cold, choked-off voice, he said, “Go to your room.”

  “But Daddy—”

  “I said go to your room.”

  Alice took a quick breath, fighting the urge to burst into tears, and turned to silently run for the stairs. There was nothing delicate about the way she pounded up them. The slamming of her bedroom door followed a few seconds later.

  Jonathan dropped his head into his hands and sat there, not moving, for several minutes. Finally, he lowered his hands, and said, “I know you’re there, Father. Did you have something to say?”

  “I’m not sure you’ll listen,” said Alexander. “You can be a little pig-headed where Alice is concerned.”

  “Pig—she’s my daughter.” Jonathan twisted without rising. Alexander was leaning up against the doorway, a rag slung over one shoulder and a flensing knife in his right hand. He looked like a butcher on his way to work. It couldn’t have been a greater contrast to his tight-laced son, who was still dressed for the public, from his carefully shined shoes to his high-buttoned shirt. “I am not pig-headed. I’m a concerned father who wants what’s best for his little girl.”

  “Is what’s best for her getting eaten alive by something nasty from the swamp? Because that’s what you’re setting her up for. You won’t let her learn to shoot. You barely let her learn how to do field dressings. You’re keeping her unprepared for the world.”

  “Because that’s not the world I want for her!” Jonathan rose, only half-aware that he was shouting. “When are you and Mother going to realize that? She’s my little girl. She needs a normal life, friends, hobbies. She should be mooning over boys at the soda shop and making me reach for the shotgun, not asking for a shotgun of her own!”

  “But if she did those things, she wouldn’t be Alice,” said Alexander. “She’s her mother’s daughter as much as she’s yours, and it’s not like we’ve given her a ‘normal’ upbringing. Her best friend is her former babysitter, and Mary’s been dead a long time now. The mice tell her about Fran every chance they get. The only way that girl would have had a shot at normal
was if you’d whisked her off the day we buried her mother—and even then, the mice would have tracked her down. Or Mary would have. One way or another, she would have found out who she was.”

  “So you’re saying that she never had a chance,” said Jonathan. “I refuse to believe that. You’re the one who wouldn’t let me leave with her after Fran died. Should I blame you, then? Should I sit by the door waiting for the sheriff to arrive, hat in hand, and tell me that they’ve identified my daughter’s body by a shoe?”

  “No,” said Alexander patiently. “You should give her a gun. You should trust her. She’s smarter than you give her credit for, and more invested in her own safety. She’d be long dead, if that wasn’t the case.”

  “Unbelievable.” Jonathan shook his head. “She’s your granddaughter. Don’t you want her to be safe?”

  “More than anything,” said Alexander. “That’s why you need to let go of your expectations for who she’s going to be, and trust who she actually is. If you don’t, you’re going to lose her, whether she lives or not. The choice is yours, son. I hope you’re smart enough to make the right one.”

  Alexander turned and walked back down the hall before Jonathan could settle on a reply.

  Enid was in the kitchen, preparing a chicken for dinner, when Alexander entered the room. He didn’t say hello to her; just stalked past, wrenched open the icebox, and removed a bottle of root beer, which he carried, wordlessly, to the table. He sat, knocking the lid off against the edge of the napkin holder. Enid watched all this in silence. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to say anything, she cleared her throat.

  “Are you planning to be like this through dinner tonight? Because I was going to roast the chicken, but I suppose there’s room for both of us to stew.”

  There was a long pause. Alexander slowly turned to look at her. “That pun was horrific,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “There should be a law.”