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31 – A Prayer of Keeping Quiet

He could barely see the gaps in the trees that denoted the other driveways, leading to the other set-back houses.  He couldn’t see a single light on anywhere.

He also couldn’t hear anything except the occasional rustle of leaves, crickets, and the very soft tread of his boots on the pavement.  That was good, but it was also unsettling in an instinctive, irrational way.  The mind expects to hear the sounds of exurban life, and the absence of it seems…wrong.

The earlier map recce pointed to a natural exit point, down the road and around the corner.  A large gap between an oversized house done in a disgusting pale yellow, and a much more tasteful colonial that wasn’t unlike his own.  The lots were large enough that he could slip between them, through the dense trees, without coming close to either yard.

Walking through the woods would be an experience, he already knew.  Even with real night-vision optics, the shadows were all wrong—they gave a false impression of obstacles and contours.  Broken terrain like an old overgrown forest was about the worst possible place to rely on them.

The space between the houses was a natural exit point from the neighborhood, but there was no break in the trees and brush, no path to follow.  He stepped carefully off the road and knelt there in the grass, just listening.  He was about to be loud and he wanted to know if there was anyone around to hear him.  There didn’t seem to be.

And then he remembered the soft creak of the floorboard in his foyer, and his immediate conclusion that it was someone or something being very quiet.

After that thought, he decided to lay up there for an extra minute or two just to be sure.

Nothing.  Not a single sound that he hadn’t been listening to for the last fifteen or twenty minutes.  He rose carefully.

This patch of woods wasn’t especially thick by his standards, but it was dark and the ground was uneven.  He didn’t have a prayer of keeping quiet when he couldn’t clearly see the ground, so he resorted to moving slowly and cautiously.  Each step resulted in a crunch or a brush or a scuff, muted because of the dampness but louder than he liked to move in the woods.

It was slow going.  This area was old-growth, but there was a development ahead that had been carved out of the forest, and the trees were younger and different.  The transition was less abrupt than he expected, and it wasn’t until he saw how densely and regularly the houses were situated that he knew exactly where he was.

The edge of the development was a dead-straight line that pointed directly at the state road.  He hugged it, sometimes only a few trees between him and someone’s yard.  It probably didn’t matter, he reasoned.  It was still pitch black and more or less silent.

I wonder if you’re safer at night, he suddenly thought, stepping carefully over a small fallen log.  What if it’s so dark you can’t see the thing?

A dozen more steps, and he ducked carefully under a low branch.

Are you going to be the genius who tests that?

A few more steps.  He felt a large rock under his boot and adjusted accordingly.  “Nope,” he mouthed, not vocalizing the word.

The line was easy to follow now.  The houses ringing the country club were on his right, and the newer homes on his left.  The trees were more sparse on the left, the yards smaller and the houses closer.  He could see the silhouettes of both houses if he looked left and right, and it occurred to him how close they really were.  Especially considering what the ones to the right cost, with their panoramic views of the fairways.

From his study of the map, he knew there were two houses back-to-back with swimming pools in the rear.  On the long, slow walk through the trees, he was starting to doubt he’d be able to find the pools.  He still hadn’t seen a single light, though there was something north of him—a faint orange glow where the clouds were less broken.  He naively assumed he’d be able to see the pools from the tree line, but now he was doubtful.

By the time he got closer to where he thought he’d have to start checking back yards, it was a moot point.  The pre-dawn sky had brightened just a little, enough to clearly show the break in the trees ahead where the road cut through it, perpendicular to him.  The sky was still dark, but the goggles amplified the subtle brightening of the eastern sky.

He stopped right at the edge of the road, half behind a pine tree growing out of the sandy shoulder.  He lowered himself to one knee slowly, his legs already aching more than he expected.  Not enough to be bothersome, but an annoyance.  He’d worn a kneepad this time, because he expected to be spending a lot of time just like this, kneeling and half-concealed.

He looked up the road, and then down it—carefully, repeating his earlier method of closing his eyes before moving his head.

It was dark.  Extremely dark, darker than he’d anticipated.  Being able to see in the dark, he well knew, was always an enormous advantage.  The irony was that when that had been much more important to him, it was never this dark.  The moon always seemed to be up and there were rarely ever trees around.

Tonight there was no moon that he could see.  No moon, and no lights except for that diffuse glow that might have been the sun starting to rise.  He’d barely heard a thing, too, not even a deer or a coyote—just the crickets and the sounds of him crashing through the brush.  The sprawling pine forest and the neighborhoods that dotted it could have been entirely empty.  Of everything, human or not.

Kneeling there in the sand and the dead pine needles, he could have been the last person on earth.