“Carol,” Roz said, her voice loud, but clear and calm. “Grab my hands. I can’t get any closer to you without falling in.”
Carol tried, jumping a little inside the pit, but her reach fell far short of Roz’s. Roz inched forward a little farther, but the branches underneath her started to snap and crack. She scooted backward quickly and then sat back on her heels. Her expression was frantic, nearly panicked, and Fiona realized then that Roz, for once, needed help.
Fiona checked behind her on the ground and spotted what she needed in seconds. A large branch, almost as thick as the trunk of a small tree, had fallen on the ground nearby. It had been buried on one end by mud and other debris, but it pulled out of the ground with a solid yank.
Seeing her struggle with it, Roz leapt to her feet and moved to help, and the two of them knelt, far from the edge of the pit, and started sliding the branch toward Carol. Carol didn’t need to be told what to do. She waited until it was nearly in her face and then grabbed two smaller branches sticking out of the sides. Roz moved slightly in front of Fiona to grip their end of the branch, and the two of them moved backward together, hauling Carol out of the hole and back onto solid ground.
Fiona collapsed backward, a startling, piercing pain shooting through her lower back and tailbone, and watched as Sarah pulled Carol into a close hug. She and Roz stayed where they were, panting, Jill hovering a few feet away.
“Are you okay? Are you okay?” Sarah kept repeating, kissing Carol all over.
Carol was crying, still clinging to her wife, but she managed to shake her head.
“What’s wrong?”
“My ankle,” Carol said, sobbing. “I think it’s broken. I landed on some rocks and branches down in the pit.”
She was also scraped up, bloody scratches on her arms and face mixing with the dirt and pine needles on her skin and in her hair.
“Let me see,” Roz said, pushing Sarah, not too gently, to the side. She picked up the ankle Carol indicated, and Carol cried out, throwing her head back.
“Sorry. I need to get this boot off to see better.” Roz looked back at Fiona and Sarah, and Fiona moved forward, grabbing Carol’s shoulder. She lifted her chin at Sarah to suggest she do the same on her side. Sarah paled considerably, but she nodded, putting her hand on Carol’s right arm. Carol’s instinct would be to try to stop Roz, and they needed to hold her back.
Using her utility knife, Roz cut the laces off Carol’s left boot and then spread the edges of the boot as far as she could. Finally, she slipped the boot off. As predicted, Carol tried to sit forward to stop her, but Fiona and Sarah managed to hold her back. Carol shrieked again and then collapsed backward, but Fiona managed to stop her from hitting her head. She’d passed out.
“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Roz said. She pulled Carol’s sock off, and Fiona had to look away, gagging. Sarah’s ankle was twisted, misshapen, the skin purple and torn. Even with no experience of any kind of medicine, Fiona could tell it was broken.
“Oh, Jesus,” Sarah said, sounding nearly breathless. “Oh, my good God.”
“How did that even happen?” Jill asked. “The hole’s not that deep.”
“She said something about rocks down inside there,” Fiona said.
Jill inched closer to the hole, peering inside it as best as she could from a safe distance. “There’s something down there, all right. Big, loose stones and thick branches. She must have landed hard when she fell in and twisted her foot or something. Couldn’t be more than six or seven feet deep.”
“Quiet,” Roz said. “Let me think for a second.”
“Who would do something like this?” Sarah asked. “Who would dig that pit out here, right on the trail?”
“Shhhh!” Roz said, her patience clearly breaking. “I need to think, but first I need to splint this ankle. I have some first-aid stuff in my pack, but nothing for something like this.” She looked at Fiona. “Go find some sticks—six of them, about this long and this thick.” She indicated the size with her hands. “If you can’t find anything like that in five minutes, make something with a pocketknife. Jill, come with me to the backpacks. Sarah, stay here with Carol, and don’t let her move. If she wakes up, try to keep her calm. We’ll all be back as soon as we can.”
The three of them scattered, Fiona racing into the woods almost as fast as she’d run here. She needed to find the sticks before Roz returned. They had to stabilize that ankle, or Carol would be in excruciating pain. Even stabilized, it was going to hurt terribly. Fiona expected they would get used to her screaming long before they got her out of these woods.
She was bent close to ground, her eyes glued to the dirt, searching for the wood they needed for the splint. She’d found several pieces thick and long enough but needed at least three more. She started moving some of the leaves and brush aside as she walked, and if she hadn’t been doing that, she would have walked right into the bear trap. It was buried slightly, with leaves and pine needles, but she saw the jagged metal teeth mere seconds before she stepped on it. She froze, her foot still in the air, and managed to take a wary step backward. She jerked around, visually sweeping the area behind her. More traps were here—three or four she could see, which meant likely more she couldn’t. Each had a pressure plate in the center which, when depressed, would make the trap snap onto whatever had triggered it, clamping those jagged teeth into an ankle. While they’d been placed slightly to left of the trail, it would have been easy to stumble into them if you were, like she was, searching for something in the woods.
A scream started rising to her lips, but her terror was deep enough that it stuck in her throat. A high-pitched, whistling moan escaped her lips. She stopped herself from running away, knowing suddenly, instinctively, that if she did, she would run into something else. She froze, peering around wildly before choosing her path backward, moving with mincing steps as she scooted around the traps. Once clear, she walked back toward camp, starting to shake and tremble when she was safe. She almost tripped again but caught herself, grabbing another tree and hugging it fiercely to keep herself from going down.
“What are you doing?” Roz asked, making her jump.
She pointed a shaky finger. “Traps. Bear traps. I almost stepped on them.”
Roz’s eyes opened wide, and she walked over to them. Fiona almost called out a warning, terrified she would miss one and step on it, but Roz stopped long before she reached the traps, peering down at them from a safe distance. She turned and walked back and held out a hand.
“Come on. We all need to get back to Carol as quickly as possible. We don’t know what else is out here, and we can’t deal with it now.”
Fiona took her hand without thinking, letting the taller woman lead her back to Sarah and Carol, both still down on the ground. Sarah had put Carol’s head in her lap. Carol was awake again, her pale face pinched and tear-stained. Jill returned with three first-aid kits, which she opened in front of Roz. She pulled out all the Ace bandages from kits and ripped open a little astringent cloth.
“Did you find the sticks we need?” Roz asked her, kneeling next to Carol’s ankle.
Fiona had managed to cling to them despite her earlier terror and held them out. “Only four.”
“I need two more. Here, take this,” she pulled her Leatherman out of her pocket and tossed it, “and make a couple more from that branch we used to pull her out of the hole.”
Fiona set to her task, using the little saw on the Leatherman to cut off two of the secondary branches from the bigger one. She handed them to Roz and watched as Roz prepared the splint. Roz motioned Jill forward, and Jill scooted next to her, her face pale and lips quivering.
“Carol,” Roz said, voice low and calm, “I’m not going to lie to you. This is going to hurt like hell. But we need to do this so we can move you back to camp. Also, it will hurt less once it’s stable.”
Carol nodded, tears still leaking from her eyes, and Sarah squeezed one of her hands. Roz made eye contact with Sarah and Fiona,
and Fiona knelt to help hold Carol down again.
“Jill, I need you to help hand me things. We’re going to wipe the skin with the astringent, just in case the flesh is broken. Then we’ll wrap it once and wrap it a second time with the splint wood to hold it in place.”
Jill swallowed and nodded.
“Everyone—try to stay calm. I’ll do this as quickly and carefully as I can, but Carol, you yell all you need to, okay?”
“Okay.”
Carol bucked backward the second Roz touched her, and it was all Fiona and Sarah could do to hold her in place. Jill grabbed the second foot to keep her from kicking out at Roz, and Carol screamed again in a loud, peeling shriek. The next thirty seconds stretched into eternity, Fiona using all her strength to help. When Carol collapsed into unconsciousness again, she almost collapsed on top of her. Everyone was panting, but Roz worked with her usual efficiency, wrapping the entire ankle once to protect the skin, then walking through the next step with Jill, who positioned the sticks—two on each side, one on front and back—as Roz wrapped them into the next layer. A final layer of bandage was tied on, and the splint looked solid, stable.
Everyone sat back, breathing heavily. As Fiona looked around, she could see equal levels of exhaustion in the way everyone held themselves. Shoulders drooped, faces were tight and pinched, everyone filthy and drenched in sweat and dirt.
“Here,” Jill said, handing her an alcohol wipe from the first-aid kit. “Use that on your face.”
“What? Why?” Fiona asked. She touched her cheek, and her fingers came away sticky with slightly congealed blood.
“You must have cut yourself when we were running,” Roz explained. “Here, let me help you.”
Roz scooted closer, resting on the balls of her feet, and took the little towelette out of the package. She leaned closer, her breath warm on Fiona’s face, and then touched her face with the cloth. Fiona gasped, reeling back, and then bit her tongue and let Roz work on her, leaning onto her bandaged hands to give her leverage. The towelette was soon entirely red, and Roz had to use two little butterfly bandages to pull the two sides of her cut together.
“You’re going to have a gnarly scar there, I think,” Roz said, smiling as she sat back.
“That’s okay. Scars are cool.”
“And badass,” Jill added.
She stood, and she and Roz helped Fiona to her feet.
“You’ll want to put some Neosporin on it later,” Roz said.
“We’ll do no such thing,” Sarah said, leaping to her feet. Her voice was dark and low. “We’re getting the fuck out of here this second.”
Everyone stared at her, surprised.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Jill asked. “I don’t know about you, Sarah, but I’m dead on my feet here. No way I can hike out of here tonight.”
“Of course you would say that,” Sarah said, stepping toward Jill, fists clenched. “You’re the one that got us into this mess in the first place.”
“How is this my fault?” Jill asked. “I didn’t booby-trap the damn camp, for Christ’s sake.”
“We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. We should have turned around this morning.”
“Carol wanted to keep going, too, you know.”
“Don’t you bring her into this!” Sarah said, taking another step forward.
“Ladies, please calm down,” Roz said, moving forward. She held a hand toward each of them, and Fiona was reminded of Carol doing the same thing this morning with Roz and Jill.
“Fuck, no, I won’t calm down!” Sarah shrieked. “This is all your fault, Jill!”
“You can’t seriously believe that,” Jill said. Her anger had deflated, her expression soft with disbelief.
“You’re damn right, I do!”
Jill reacted as if slapped, taking a step backward and away. Her eyes darted from Fiona, to Roz, to Sarah, and down to Carol on the ground.
“You all believe her?” Jill asked, her voice trembling.
When no one spoke up, Jill burst into tears, turning away from them and sobbing into her hands. Fiona was initially shocked. She’d seen her friend cry perhaps five times in all their long friendship—twice over breakups, the others for deaths. Her surprise lasted long enough that she hesitated too long to comfort her. Jill stopped sobbing almost as quickly as she started. She spun around, clearly furious with hurt and pain.
“How dare you put this on me, Sarah? How dare any of you? This isn’t my fault, goddamn it!”
“Jill,” Fiona said.
“Can it!” Jill said. “You’ve been on me all day! I don’t need to hear any more from you.”
With that, she stormed away, leaving the three of them standing there, staring at each other.
Fiona moved to follow her, but Roz grabbed her arm, shaking her head.
“Don’t. Give her a few minutes. We need to take Carol back to camp, anyway. That should give Jill a few minutes to calm down. And anyway, I think she needs the time to accept the facts.”
“I’m not staying here a second longer,” Sarah said. “Someone is trying to kill us, or had the two of you forgotten?”
Sarah pointed up into the trees. She and Roz looked up, and an overwhelming horror swept through her. There, up on three trees around the pit, were the same symbols they’d seen carved into yesterday’s campsite.
Chapter Eight
As the light began to die out of the day, Sarah finally accepted that, despite everything, they would be spending another night here in the woods. Fiona and Roz hadn’t even needed to convince her. In the end, Carol had done most of the work, and not by arguing. She was clearly exhausted, and her exhaustion seemed to make Sarah recognize her own.
She, Roz, and Fiona managed to carry Carol back to camp, using a crude litter made from a tarp. Carol promptly fell asleep, and Sarah and Roz had searched the camp carefully for traps. They discovered another patch of bear traps, this one on the path to the latrine, but the camp itself, as far as they could tell, was completely clear.
While they’d searched, Fiona had talked Jill into helping her set up the tents. Jill wasn’t speaking at all at that point, but she hadn’t hesitated to help, moving on to getting the dinner things ready once the tents were up.
Everyone ended up eating another cold meal, all of them too exhausted to whip up the energy for anything else, everyone silent except for Carol’s occasional groans of pain. Jill wouldn’t look at anyone, her eyes downcast, face pale. Fiona wanted to offer her something, some absolution or forgiveness, but she was so tired she couldn’t think of anything to say. Time would help, but maybe Roz was right. Maybe she needed to feel this way.
Finally, long before full dark, everyone helped Carol into her sleeping bag before they all went to their own tents and collapsed.
Fiona and Jill were woken several times by screaming in the night. Carol would pass out or fall asleep for an hour or two, only to wake everyone again with her cries. Fiona could hear Sarah soothing her from twenty feet away, her voice low and unintelligible, and Carol’s whimpers would gradually quiet and then cease again. Fiona would be tense for a long time after that, finally drifting off into an exhausted sleep before, almost as soon as she closed her eyes, it would start all over again.
Startled awake by screams for the fifth or sixth time, Fiona finally gave up and started getting out of her sleeping bag. A dim light filtered through the tent walls, which meant that dawn was finally here.
“Where are you going?” Jill asked, blinking sleepily.
Fiona met her eyes and frowned. “I can’t take it anymore. If I don’t get out of here and walk around a little, I’m going to lose my mind. I barely slept.”
Jill snatched her wrist, squeezing it painfully. “Don’t leave me. Not until I go back to sleep. Please, Fiona. I can’t stay in here alone.”
Fiona’s stomach dropped with dread. Besides Carol’s injuries, Jill’s fear and shame were possibly the worst part of all this. Always brave, always confrontational and
brusque, the very definition of confidence, this diminished, frightened version of her friend was more terrifying than Fiona would ever have believed.
She relaxed a little and patted Jill’s shoulder through her sleeping bag. “Okay, Jill. I’ll stay for a little while. Close your eyes. Carol will quiet down again soon.”
Almost as if she’d willed it to happen, Fiona could hear Sarah again, soothing her wife, and Carol’s whimpers and groans once again subsided.
Jill’s grip gradually relaxed a few minutes later, and her face lost some of its tightness as she drifted off. Still, even sleeping, she appeared troubled, upset. They’d all been too tired to do much of anything last night, and Jill’s face was filthy with dirt and sweat. Fiona brushed a lock of sweaty blond hair off her face and rubbed her shoulder again, lightly. A deep and powerful tenderness swept through her, and tears prickled at the corners of her eyes. Her own exhaustion was making her sentimental and overly emotional, but she suddenly felt closer to Jill than she had in a long time. A fierce, almost angry protectiveness clenched at her heart, and remarkably, for a few minutes, she was no longer afraid. She would do everything to protect her friends. They were going to make it through this.
By the time she finally crawled out of the tent, leaving a sleeping Jill behind, the sunrise had already turned to a weak daylight, and the camp seemed almost bright in the early morning sunshine. She zipped up the tent as quietly as she could behind her and bent to lace her boots. Her body was screaming with aches and pains, and she limped stiffly toward Roz, who was already up and fully dressed. One look at her face, and Fiona could tell she’d either skipped sleep altogether, or had gotten very little. That confident strength seemed dim, weakened somehow, her tanned face drawn and pale.
“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Roz said, gesturing at the two little camp stoves she’d set up. “I was trying to be quiet, hoping everyone could sleep in a little to give you some extra energy.”
“What about you? Don’t you need sleep, too?”
Roz gave her a wan smile. “I’m okay. I’ll be okay. I couldn’t really sleep.”
From the Woods Page 9
