You'll Thank Me for This

by Nina Siegal

  Then all of them were talking at the same time again, arguing about whether or not they could build a fire. Karin was totally amazed. These ghouls were so creepy, but then the one on the right was like a little kid who had never had a campfire before.

  “It’s not so hard,” Karin offered. “I can show you all how to do it. It’s pretty easy. I have a tinder kit in my backpack, if you’d let me…” She was starting to be hopeful that she might be able to get her stuff back.

  One of them, who looked a little bit older, pushed her way to the front of the group. “Jesus, you’re all wet. You got drenched in the rain.” She turned back to the others. “She must be cold. We could go across the stream,” she said, turning back to Karin, “and you can make your fire there. Anyway, you better stay here with us until the morning. It’s not safe for you to be out here.”

  Some of the other ghouls suddenly seemed all happy. “Yeah, you better stay with us,” said another one, and then they were all nodding, except the hag.

  The thought of staying with these ghouls, these zombies, these vampires, was crazy, but her dad had said that staying wet when the temperature drops is one way to get sick. “It’s really pretty easy to make a fire if you have enough kindling,” she said.

  And that was how Karin got the ghouls to go out in their garbage-bag raincoats to look for twigs in the forest across the stream from their compound. Since there was a lot of damp wood and brush, she had to show them how to pick kindling from underneath a top layer of logs and leaves. They only let her get her tinder kit after they’d dumped her backpack out onto the dirt, and the tinder was totally soaked. She couldn’t use it. But she managed to find a dead birch tree that was still partly standing, and she peeled away the outer bark to find some dry bits inside that were perfect for tinder. Then she used the magnesium rod from her kit. It wasn’t like doing it from flint and stone, but still, they were impressed.

  Once she’d got it going, she added the sort of damp twigs, which caught pretty well too. Then they all gathered around it. It was almost like a dropping, but with everyone wearing weird, ugly masks. She wasn’t totally sure they wouldn’t push her into the fire and burn her alive—but she did manage to relax just a little. Sparks flew into the night sky. The smell was comforting, and the crackling sound it made reminded her of all the campfires she’d ever made with the Scouts and with her dad. Her clothes even started to dry. Could she really stay and spend a night here? It was pretty clear they weren’t going to return her stuff. What if she wanted to leave? Would they let her?

  Chapter 14

  Spooked

  Okay, there had to be a hundred good reasons why Martijn would have all this material on Pieter, right? Well, at least one workable reason. That was all there needed to be: one reasonable explanation.

  Maybe it was connected to this so-called friendship they’d had that she was never privy to, Martijn as an invisible man in her life all along. Could it be that his interest in her went far beyond her and to Pieter—or rather, somehow through Pieter? Or was she going a little bit mad now, trying to get this all figured out in her head? There had to be a simpler explanation.

  She should just ask Martijn what it was all about, shouldn’t she? After all, they were married, husband and wife. They were supposed to trust each other and talk things out. She should ask him about things before she jumped to conclusions. She owed him the respect of asking, right?

  Grace paced. First she paced in Martijn’s attic office. Then she climbed down the ladder, with the intention of going to her room. Next she paced up and down the hallway between the bedroom and the bathroom. She pulled at strands of her hair; she stared at herself in the mirror, as if that would provide answers. She became so tangled up in her head that she screamed into the toilet.

  Okay, she would do two things. First, she would pack. Because she had to get out of here. No matter what was going on with this, she was truly frightened of Martijn. Who was he? And had he ever loved her?

  She would pick up Karin from the dropping and then she’d take her to a hotel for a few days and they would figure out whatever the hell was going on from there. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe they would have a brief vacation, enjoy a few museums, and come home and everything would be all right, normal.

  The other thing she would do was call Martijn, because that was what a non-hysterical, non-bewildered person would do when they came across confusing information. They would ask in a calm, reasonable way: “Hey, what’s all this about?” Yes, that was what she would do too, because she was calm and reasonable. And she would make that call just as soon as she found herself to be in a calm enough state to make the call. She would. First, though, she would pack.

  It was hard to know what to pack when your head wasn’t attached to your body. Grace’s head seemed to be floating above her, like a kind of drone, looking down on her life, taking inventory, and trying to make sense of it all. She was just a single piece in a giant puzzle, and the pieces were scattered all over the place.

  Martijn was her husband, the man she shared a bed with every night, and whom she kissed on the lips and told about her day and shared the details of her daughter’s life. Her home, this house, was a place where she filled wooden bowls with fresh fruit for everyone to eat, where she made sure that each child’s bed had the same matching, paisley-patterned bedsheets that were non-offensive to any age group, and a yoga nook where there were soft meditation cushions and brass chimes and sculptures of Buddha in case anyone ever felt they needed a time-out.

  And yet it was also a place where, upstairs, in a private chamber at the top of the house that she was strictly forbidden to enter, her husband held a collection of information about her former, murdered husband that suggested—perhaps only circumstantially, certainly only circumstantially so far—that, in the extreme worst-case scenario, he was some kind of secret agent or operative or Syrian government spy who had been tracking her husband’s movements. And what if she was right about any of this crazy absurdity? Could he have been involved in Pieter’s death?

  No, it couldn’t be true. None of it could be true. It simply didn’t make any sense. Oh, how he would laugh at what she was imagining! How he would hold his belly and laugh at the hilarity of it all. Yes, of course he would be just a little bit irked that she had gone through his stuff and drawn conclusions based on some random bits of information. But he would be sensible about it.

  Grace started grabbing clothes off the hangers in her closet and just stuffing them into a suitcase lying on her bed. It didn’t matter what she brought with her, as long as it would serve as clothing. Then she went over to her bureau and seized handfuls of underwear and socks from the top drawer, remembering to take a pair of pajamas and the small box of her mother’s pearls hidden in the back. One after another, she yanked out the drawers and pulled out jeans, pants, shirts, sweaters, and just threw them into her suitcase.

  Grace had a fleeting sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. What if her suspicions would prove to be correct? That was the most chilling prospect.

  There was enough in this suitcase. She zipped up one side and then tried to zip it closed all the way. There was too much in there, though, and it wouldn’t quite shut. She got up on the bed and sat on the top of it and forced the suitcase to close, and now it did, and she zipped it up while sitting on top. Then she pressed his number and waited. The phone rang only three times before he picked up.

  “Honey?” he said. Already that relaxed her. “I’m surprised to hear from you.”

  Grace let out a soft giggle, a girlish habit of hers that she couldn’t shake. She laughed whenever she was nervous. “Yeah, I know. I didn’t think we’d need to talk till you were back tomorrow, but something came up.”

  “You missed me?” Martijn said hopefully.

  Grace, so ready to be assuaged, took this as a comfort.

  And then, more formally and brusquely, “What’s up?”

  Grace was still sitting on the suitcase, bouncing ever so slightly.
“Um,” she said, and then there was a long pause. “I went into your office. Please don’t be mad. I know you really like to have your own private space, and I respect that. I was just hoping to clean it up while you were gone. I was going to surprise you by making it really tidy for when you came back. Wow, it really did need a vacuum, honey.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line. All she heard was breathing, deep and long inhales and exhales, that almost sounded like he was not actually paying attention, like he was hauling something over there. Like he was dragging something across the ground.

  “Sorry, come again?” he said.

  He had not been listening. She repeated herself, nearly word for word, trying to sound even more cheerful and nonchalant than before. “Hm, that’s thoughtful of you,” said Martijn, sounding like he wasn’t exactly buying her act but willing to go along with it for the sake of—something. “I can clean it myself if I want it tidier.” He paused. “But I appreciate the sentiment.”

  They were both silent for a moment. How far were they going to extend this particular theatrical performance? If he was trying to hide something, he would probably start feeling worried right now, right?

  “I just kind of got curious and I found something—well, I found something I thought was surprising…” There was really no way to make it sound like she had stumbled on this material. Oh, why had she called him? She should have just waited until he came home and asked him about it then.

  “Oh, you found something that is concerning to you?” he said calmly. At the same time, however, he seemed to be breathing heavily on the other end of the line. It was as if he was engaged in some kind of sporting activity while talking. “Listen, Grace, I never said you couldn’t go up there. I’m sure we can discuss whatever you found. But could it wait until I’m back home?”

  Martijn made a strange and sudden kind of outburst on the line that sounded like a grunt—“Ugh!”—as if he was throwing something heavy, like a big suitcase maybe, into a car.

  “What are you doing over there?” she asked.

  “Oh, just”—he paused, grunting again—“setting up a tent.”

  He made a series of loud groans on the other end of the line, which gave her the impression that he was digging something, but actually they might even have been sexual noises. “Am I interrupting you?” she asked, trying to keep the sarcasm out of her tone, not sure if she had succeeded.

  “Not at all,” he said. “But this may not be the best time to talk. We’re trying to set up camp. Is there something else?”

  Grace couldn’t hear any background noise, no sounds of anyone else talking. Who was the “we” he was referring to? If he was with the other Scout leaders, they were probably all separately doing their own thing, apart from one another, in the great outdoors. She pressed the phone closer to her ear.

  “And your computer was on and open,” she lied. “I was trying to Google something and I ended up opening some photo files. I guess I was just curious what kinds of things you’re looking at when you’re up there, and…”

  “Nothing to be curious about,” he said, and she could hear a scold in his voice. Yes, this had been crossing a line. She knew that, even if she was downplaying it. “Any man needs his space, you know. I just need a place where I can sit and smoke a cigar and not be bothered.”

  Ah, the cigars. Maybe that was all it was, actually. A place where he could go and secretly smoke.

  “I didn’t even know you were smoking cigars,” she said, trying not to sound priggish.

  “Well,” he said. “A man does need to have a few secrets.” He laughed. Then he blurted out, “Ugh, whoo,” as if he was moving furniture around.

  “What is going on over there? Is it really hard to set up the tents?”

  “No, I’m done with that,” he said. “Firewood.”

  Then there was the sound of something heavy falling, and if Grace could trust her ears, she heard another voice, vaguely in the background. Not someone talking but more like a woman sighing. “Oh,” she said. “With the other supervisors, I guess.”

  Could he be having an affair? Could it be that simple after all? Could it all come down to that?

  “Whew,” he said, now sounding like he was trying to catch his breath. “Big logs. Grace, listen,” he added, speaking rather sternly. “I’ll need to call you back. This is a much larger conversation. I’ll call you back once we’re settled in.”

  Chapter 15

  Midnight Raid

  If there was one skill Karin had learned from her father, it was how to, as he put it, “move like a ghost.” He said the key to it was to try to stay loose. When your body gets stiff, you’re likely to make weird movements that send you off-balance and make you trip. So then you might be able to be quiet for a while and then you suddenly tumble to the ground. He had done this moving like a ghost to blend into the background as a war photographer. Now she needed to do it to make sure she could get away from this ghoul camp.

  As the rain was gently pattering on the green tarp that covered them in their makeshift den, and they seemed to be slumbering in their ponchos, right there in the dirt, she decided to make her move. A few hours had probably already passed since they found her by the tree, and the Scouts and her leaders must be wondering where on earth she had gone to. She hoped they might be looking for her already, but she somehow doubted they’d be near here.

  It was hard for her to orient herself, but she didn’t bother to look for her compass again. If it had still been in her backpack, it was now somewhere in the mud, where they had dumped out her backpack hours ago. They’d taken her tinder kit, mess kit, and of course her knife, and complained that she had only a euro and twenty-five cents of money, and no pills. They’d eaten the candy bars and emergency food supplies she’d brought with her, and left her extra set of dry clothes, including her favorite T-shirt, in a heap in the mud. Ghouls or vampires or whatever, they were definitely creeps.

  If it seemed at first like they might help her, it soon became clear that they were wholly uninterested in anything but themselves.

  The one who spoke to her the most, the leader with the acrid breath and the translucent skin, after dumping the contents of her backpack on the ground, had announced that she could stay the night but she’d better not expect them to feed her. She had watched as they pried open tin cans filled with something that looked alarmingly like dog food—Karin really hoped it wasn’t, but she couldn’t read labels in the dark—and hadn’t felt the least bit hungry anyway. Eventually, she had thought, she would be back with the Scouts and they would give her hot dogs and fries with mayonnaise. Nothing in the world had seemed more delicious, at that moment, than the thought of that. But first, she’d had to wait a long time for them all to fall asleep.

  Karin decided she would just leave her backpack where it was and make a break for it. All her extra clothes had gotten dirty anyway, and they’d eaten all her food. The only thing she thought she wanted was the backpack itself, which her mom had bought for her at the start of secondary school that year. Since it had a zebra print, she thought maybe she could spot it in the dark.

  She was half crouching, half standing when there was a sudden noise behind her and Karin turned. Nothing. Someone had shifted in their sleep maybe? Then she tried to stand up a little more, and she heard the noise again. Was it coming from under the tarp, or outside? Was someone awake in here, or was there something to fear out there?

  Karin could feel her chest start to constrict and her breathing get shorter. Stay loose, she told herself. Stay relaxed. Don’t trip. There was the sound again: something rustling, something moving, something…walking. Oh no…

  Whatever it was, she didn’t want to wait to find out. And at any second, because of the noise it was making, the others would wake up and see her standing there, getting ready to go. She had to “be decisive,” as her father would say.

  In an instant, Karin made up her mind to run. As soon as she did, all hell seemed to break loos
e. Suddenly there were flashlights everywhere and bodies surrounding the tarp. Not the people who had taken her captive but other people, from outside the camp, wearing different clothes, a flash of something that looked like a shield, and shouting obscenities: “Get the fuck up!” “Move your asses!” “We know what’s going on here!”

  Karin was already running when she heard the others waking up and screaming in response. Then she was running faster, as fast as her legs could take her. She heard the sound of something popping, like fireworks on New Year’s Eve. Could it be guns? Was someone shooting? She didn’t wait to find out or look back; she just kept running, leaping, driving through the woods to get as far away from there as possible. She was only a kid! Who would be firing a gun at her?

  She whipped through the forest, the wet leaves of the trees smacking into her face, the branches scratching her shoulders and chest, jabbing at her sometimes so she had to fend them off like arrows. She smashed through the foliage, forearms raised in front of her face to guard off more attacks; she nearly got a twig in her eye but managed to bat it out of her face just seconds before it gouged her. Breathing heavily and using every ounce of her energy, she dodged and ducked and kept her legs moving as fast as she could, propelled forward by terror.

  At long last, when she felt her breathing becoming too difficult and bile rising in the back of her throat, she stopped. Putting her hands against the trunk of a wide tree, she dropped her head and tried to suck air into her lungs. She could feel her legs trembling underneath her and her knees throbbing. Tears came pouring out of her eyes uncontrollably as she heaved in air—as much as she could swallow. She coughed and spit. Then she listened.

  Nothing. No sound of anyone coming after her. No pop-pop firecracker sound in the distance. No sound at all, except the rustle of leaves. She had gotten away. No one had come after her. No one had followed her through the woods. She was alone.