by Rory Power
I clap my hand over my mouth, muffle the whimper that slips out of me. No. No, no, no. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. We’re gonna make it, she said. She promised.
Maybe it’s not her, I think wildly. Or maybe they knocked her out and she’s alive in there, waiting for me to save her. I can’t give up until I know.
“This would be easier with a third, you know,” Taylor says as they set the body bag down among the reeds. It’s not moving. Whoever’s inside isn’t moving, and I can’t let myself think about what that means.
“Oh?” says Welch. “And who are you going to ask? Carson’s a pain in the ass, and Hetty’s not an option.”
But before I have a chance to wonder what that means, Taylor says, “How’s she working out?”
I go rigid. This is it. If Welch knows I’m on to her, everything’s over. My life here, this new thing with Reese that I’m nervous to name.
Welch just shrugs. “Well enough,” she says, and I muffle a shaky sigh of relief. “But not well enough for this.”
“What about Julia, then?” Taylor says.
“I’d rather not.” For a moment Welch sounds as young as she is. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”
Taylor lets out a laugh. “If you don’t like Carson, Julia doesn’t like you.”
“I missed you out there,” Welch says. She turns off the flashlight, shoves it into her jacket pocket. I watch her pause to spit out a mouthful of what must be blood. “It’s not the same without you.”
“I can do more good this way,” Taylor says. I want to shake her for it. There’s nothing good about this. “After what happened to Mary…She deserved better, you know? They all do.”
Mary, Taylor’s girlfriend, who went vicious and wild like the animals. Taylor was the one who had to kill her, and the rumor was it broke her. But now I know it didn’t. It just made her into something worse.
Welch steps back to the body bag, and for a second she stops there, hands on her hips, looking down at it. Moonlight skittering off the ocean, throwing her face into shadow, and I can’t make out her expression, but there’s a slump to her shoulders, almost like defeat.
“I really thought we’d got it right this time,” she says at last. “You know? She seemed like she was okay.”
“Well,” Taylor says, “evidently she wasn’t.”
I knew, of course I knew, the body bag motionless in the grass, but it’s something else hearing it out loud. The pines around me hemming in, closer and closer, and Taylor joking like it doesn’t matter, like she hasn’t just torn the whole world down. Reese pulls me against her chest, holds me tight. It’s the only thing keeping me together.
“All right,” Welch says. “Let’s finish up.”
They pick up the body and Reese grips my hand as we watch them carry it into the house. Pain shoots up the inside of my arm, a sparking and twitch, and I try to pull away until I realize it’s me, holding on to her so tightly her scaled fingers have cut deep into my skin.
“Come on,” Reese says, her voice cajoling in my ear. “She’s alive, right? She’s Byatt. She gets through everything.”
I nod, but there’s somebody in that body bag, and I don’t know how much longer I can do this. How much longer I can keep hope burning in my heart.
I lose sight of Welch and Taylor as the house swallows them up, and then I catch a sliver of Welch’s face through the gaps in the walls, the beam of the flashlight bouncing off the white bark of the birch.
“Let’s put her down,” Welch says, “before my arm falls off.”
I bite my lip to keep myself from calling out. Her. This is real.
“Where are they?” says Taylor. She must mean whoever was on the other end of that walkie call.
“They’ll pick her up,” Welch says. “We can leave her here.”
“What about—”
There’s a fizzing sound, and then the house bursts with red. Through the holes torn in the wall I can see Welch holding a flare, the bloodlight harsh and sparkling. “This should keep the animals back,” she says. I shift to one side to get a good look as she wedges the flare into the branches of the birch.
I hear Taylor’s voice from inside the house. “Is that it, then?”
A pause, and I squint into the dark. Welch is facing the birch, peering at something on its trunk. She’s quiet for a beat too long, and then she turns back to where Taylor must be standing.
“That’s it,” she says. “Let’s get back.”
“Wait,” Reese whispers, like she knows I’m only a few seconds away from dashing into the house and tearing open the body bag. “Just a little longer.”
Welch comes tramping out of the house, with Taylor close behind. Taylor looks like she’s about to be sick, and against my will I feel a pang of pity. Maybe she didn’t ask for this. But then neither did I.
They head off down the path, and I track their flashlight beam through the trees. Smaller and fainter, until I can’t see it anymore. I stand up, branches cracking underfoot. I don’t wait for Reese, just snatch up the shotgun and make a break for it across the reeds. I don’t know how long we have before the others show up. I won’t lose my chance.
Into the red light of the house. There’s the body bag, tucked at the base of the birch, black plastic and rubber. I stop short, the shotgun falling to the ground.
This is it. The end, or something starting.
Carefully, I step around the edge of the body bag and kneel down next to it. Think of the last time I saw Byatt, how I bent over her just like this. How she looked at me like she needed me.
Please, I think, and I reach for the zipper.
The plastic peeling back. The zipper catching, my hands shaking, and there, there—pale, sallow skin, ink-dipped fingers, and curling red hair.
Mona.
A sob shatters out of me. I pitch forward onto my hands, gasping. It’s not her. Not her not her not her.
“Hetty?”
Reese comes up behind me, lays a hand on my back. I close my eye. My whole body trembling with relief, and I think if I stood up, my legs might collapse under me.
“It’s Mona,” I say. As sorry as I am, I can’t hold back a smile, and I don’t want to.
“Shit,” Reese says. “Where the hell is Byatt, then?”
She crouches down next to me and starts zipping Mona back up. But I’m not watching Mona’s bloated face disappear. No, I’m looking at something else. There, on the trunk of the birch tree, where Welch was looking before she left.
I stand up, step over Mona’s body. The bark is curling, light from the flare casting long strange shadows, but I can see it. Carved faint and unsteady, but I recognize it. BW. Byatt Winsor.
“She was here,” I say. It’s the best thing in the world, relief sweet and soothing. “Look. She was here, and she was alive.”
I wait for Reese to tell me I’m wrong, to remind me how things usually go, but she doesn’t. Just rests her chin on my shoulder, her cheek tilted against mine. The birch bark is smooth, and my fingers leave trails of blood behind from where Reese’s silver hand punctured my skin.
“Do you think she misses us?” I say. I’m aching for it, for the day I’ll hear Byatt tell me she wanted to come home as much as I wanted to find her.
A moment, and then Reese steps away from me, into the shadows. I turn to face her. Of course she misses us—that’s all Reese has to say. But she only looks at me and doesn’t say a word.
I raise my eyebrows. “What?”
The flare light catches on the curve of her mouth as she smiles. “You don’t really want an answer to that question.”
“No, come on.” Maybe I’m goading her. But I can’t stand the way she’s looking at me, like she knows something I don’t. “Say it.”
“I just…I guess you know a different Byatt than I do,�
�� Reese says, shoving her hands into her pockets. “Because I’m not sure she ever missed anything in her life.”
“We’re her best friends, Reese.” I blink back the sudden sting of tears, feel them catch and freeze on my eyelashes. She can’t be right. What has all this been for if Byatt doesn’t want to come back to us? “Her best friends. Don’t you think that matters to her?”
“Well,” Reese says, and there’s an edge to her voice, a warning, “let’s not pretend. It was the two of you and then me, and that’s fine. Because people are messy and that’s how it goes. But let’s not pretend.”
Shame curdling quick, because she’s right, and I hate that I’m proud of it, proud of how much closer I got to Byatt than she ever did. But I’ll never tell her that. “I think it’s pretty selfish of you,” I say instead, “to be pissed about that when Byatt is God knows where, suffering through God knows what.”
“I’m not pissed.” She shrugs. “It’s just true. That’s all.”
I should never have brought her. I should have known she wouldn’t understand. “Why are you even here?” I snap. Around us, the patchwork walls of the house pressing in, the birch looming, Byatt’s initials traced in blood. “Why did you come at all?”
Reese doesn’t answer. But I can hear it all the same. Everything about her—the sorrow buried in her eyes, the tightness of her mouth—all of it screaming the same thing:
For you, Hetty.
It’s too much. I can’t even say I never asked her to, because I did—I did, over and over again. I’m doing this for Byatt, and Reese is doing this for me.
Fuck.
“I need some air,” I say.
I stumble out the back of the house into what used to be a small square of yard. Around me, Raxter Irises, their stems crumpling underfoot, and I think of the vases full of them that we kept everywhere at school, their petals blackening as they fell, of the dried bouquet tucked up among the pictures on the mantelpiece of the Harker house. Her parents’ wedding bouquet, Reese told me that first day we visited. Even after her mom left and they cleared out all the pictures, she kept that.
Was it really so clear to her? That it was me and Byatt first, and her second? Even with how badly I’ve always wanted Reese closer, that didn’t change the fact that Byatt was the one who waited for me at breakfast every morning. Byatt was the one who cut my hair and showed me which side to part it on. Byatt was the one who put the bones in my body.
I drop down onto the porch, cradle my numb hands to my mouth, and breathe the feeling back into them. Byatt is what matters right now. She’s the only thing. Soon the people on the other end of the walkie will show up to collect Mona. Wherever they take her, that’s where Byatt will be. And I’ll find a way to get there.
I’m expecting Camp Nash, where the Navy and the CDC are headquartered. And it turns my stomach to think of Byatt taken off Raxter. I never knew her off the island. The closest I ever got to it was that day on the ferry across from the mainland, when I first saw her, sea laid out behind her, and Raxter on the horizon, her hair unfurling in the wind. When I find her on the mainland, will she still be my Byatt?
A noise from inside the house. I leap to my feet, grab the shotgun. Somebody’s talking, somebody who isn’t Reese.
I barrel into the house. Nobody here but us.
“You heard that?” Reese says, and I nod.
“Welch coming back, maybe? Or someone from Camp Nash?”
“It sounded different,” she says. “Familiar. I don’t know.”
“There.” I point out through the shattered walls into the trees, where something else is moving, coming our way. The shape of a man.
CHAPTER 14
I raise the shotgun. Too dark to see a face, but there’s something familiar about the build of him, something that stays my finger on the trigger.
“Hello?” I call.
No answer, but he’s closer now, almost to the house. I can imagine it as he steps up onto the porch. The shape of him warped by the old glass in the windows at Raxter. The sound of his voice over the hum of a lawn mower. And then he’s through the doorway, a soft creak as he crosses the surviving floorboards, and he’s lifting his head and there’s a tear in his shirt and a cut on his cheek, but I know him. Even in the dark, I’d know him anywhere.
“Dad?” Reese breathes.
It’s Mr. Harker.
Until he eases into the red glow of the flare light, and it isn’t anymore.
“Oh God.” My voice sounds strange, muffled and far away. “Reese, Reese, I’m so sorry.”
Because it’s his face, and it’s his body, but I don’t think anything else is left. His skin bleached and pulling, his mouth sprouting roots. Branches burrowing in ears and under fingernails and slinking down his arms. And unblinking, eyes still his, pupils blown wide as he watches us.
More than a year out here, alone with the Tox. What did we expect?
“No,” Reese is saying. I grab hold of her arm, haul her back a few steps. She’s barely on her feet, and she stumbles, collapses to her knees. “No, no, Dad.”
But he’s not here anymore. “We have to go,” I say. “Come on, Reese. Now.”
He looks at me, cocks his head as he opens his mouth, takes a long, rattling breath. Black, splitting teeth, and a nest of green at the back of his throat. The air musty and sour, so pungent I can taste it.
I lift the shotgun, get ready to aim, but Reese shoves me away, looks up at me with a feral light in her eyes. Behind her, Mr. Harker advancing, step by step, vines unspooling from his mouth.
“Don’t you dare,” she says, and her voice breaks open, raw underneath.
“Please,” I say. “We have to run.”
It’s too late. A vine writhes up Reese’s legs, along her spine, and another curls around her arm, jerks it back. A cry, and a crack of bone. Her right shoulder pops, hangs wrong in its socket.
I lunge for her, grab my knife from my belt. Slash once, twice, at the vines holding her. Mr. Harker shrieks, rears back and drags her with him.
“Hetty!” Reese yells.
The shotgun. But when I fire into the heart of him, it makes no difference. He only roars and pulls tighter on Reese’s arm, winds a vine around her throat and starts to squeeze.
I could run. I could save myself and get back past the fence, back to the house. All I’ve got is my knife now. And what good is that against Mr. Harker?
But there’s no choice to make. I break for him. Duck the thickest vine as it swings around, feel the thorns rip down my back, and there he is. I crash into him, and we tumble to the ground. Dirt in my mouth, the scrape of bark against my skin. My knife knocked from my hand, and I scramble for it across the damp earth.
A vine locks around my ankle, yanks me onto my back. I graze my knife with my fingers, but it’s too far—I can’t—and he’s pulling me away.
“Reese,” I call. “Get it!”
But I can’t find her, can’t see anything but the looming dark as Mr. Harker bears down and his bruised hands, spongy with rot, close around my throat. I thrash, try to throw him off me, and his grip only tightens. Branches snake around my waist, holding me down. And one slithers up my neck, wrenches a scream from me as it hooks around my jaw and pries my mouth open.
It’s bitter on my tongue, and I’m choking, scrabbling at Mr. Harker’s bloated face. His skin peels off like strips of paper, gathering under my nails, soft and pulpy.
“Hey!” I hear Reese yell. For an instant the pressure lessens, before Reese’s silver hand flashes above, the knife deep in his shoulder, and she slams into her dad, sends him reeling back onto the ground.
“Quick,” I say. “Pin him.” But Reese is just looking at him, her mouth open. She’s no use, not anymore.
I throw myself down, trap Mr. Harker’s ribs between my knees and pin him to the ground. He roars,
muscles straining, and he’s looking at me, I know he is. Me and Reese’s dad, face-to-face.
I cry out as his body surges up. The bristle and spray of branches, thorns scoring a gash down my arm. I get a good grip on my knife. Pull it out of his shoulder and plunge it into his chest, flesh splitting and rising like foam. Bile bubbles up between my lips, trickles down my chin as I work the blade, widen the rip in his skin.
“Don’t,” Reese cries from behind me.
But I can’t listen. It’s not him anymore. I lean hard, brace my hand on his elbow as I wedge the knife deeper and deeper and start to lever it up. There’s a heart to all this. There has to be.
Blackened blood weeping down over my fingers, knife blade duller than I thought, but I’ve got a seam opening in him, and he’s getting weaker. Smaller roots are snapping, breaking away. At last I rip the knife out, toss it aside and dig through his shredded skin.
He’s rotting from the inside out. Tissue mottled with mold, the smell so sour and stinging that my eye is watering. Something scuttles up my jacket sleeve, first one and then another, and another, and in the red light of the flare I make out the gleam of a hundred wingback beetles crawling out of the wound.
I choke back a yell, and before I can move, a vine slinks up my back and knots around my neck. Squeezing tighter and tighter, splinters jabbing sharp, pain spilling across me in waves. But he’s weak now, blood pouring out of him. I grip the vine and break it in two. Fling myself back at him, his face pulling apart as his mouth opens wider and wider.
I shove my hand deep into his chest again, bear down with my whole body until I hit what I think is bone. But a glimmer of the flare light, and they’re not bones. They’re branches, spindled ribs curving and cresting. I hook my fingers underneath them. Wedge my knee under his chin and pull, inch by inch.
Until finally. A snap. And inside his rib cage, I see it. A beating heart, glossed in blood. Built from the earth, from the bristle of pine, and inside, there is something else, something more, something living. I don’t think twice. Just claw at it with both hands, and it comes screaming out with a wet tear.
