“If he’s here,” Benjamin put in sharply.
“He’s here,” Kaitlyn insisted. “And he’d want some kind of roof over his head.”
“Unless…” All eyes turned to Alice, who whimpered, “Unless he knew we’d think of that. Ben, you said he left something in your head. Maybe it goes both ways. Maybe he already knows where we’re going to look.”
“Well, he knows now,” Kaitlyn muttered.
“Goddammit!” Ben’s fist lashed out sideways, struck the side door of the station wagon with a metallic thud. “We can’t win. That’s all there is to it. We look one place, he moves to the other. End of story.” He pressed his palms to his eyes and sucked cold air through his teeth. “Christ—what are we even talking about? I mean, what are we even doing?”
“Keeping our heads, hopefully,” Kaitlyn retorted, but her voice was so low nobody seemed to hear, nobody but Riley, who shifted her gaze from face to face with a fascination that was approaching frenzy. Alice and Benjamin both began talking at once again, their voices rising over each other like a deck of cards being shuffled together, and Riley felt her cheeks pull up, felt cold air against her grinning teeth. Hot smoke compressed and eddied in her stomach; the grip of the shadow tightened, pulling her closer…
“He can’t be in two places at once,” she heard herself say, and when the others looked incredulously in her direction she repeated herself as though they hadn’t heard. “I mean—yes, of course he can. But not in the way I’m meaning. Not in the way that matters.”
A moment passed. Realization dawned on Kaitlyn’s face first. “Oh, no. No-no-no…”
“Oh, what now?” Benjamin growled, slapping at his arms against the cold.
Kaitlyn’s pale face kaleidoscoped from horror to indignation, then back to a duller terror as she fixed him with her gaze. “She wants us—”
“It’s the only way,” Riley cut in serenely.
“—to split up.” Kaitlyn wrapped her arms around herself, casting a glance back at the unlit windows of the cabin. “You know why this is a bad idea, don’t you?” she said, seeming to address nobody in particular. “You know what happens next.”
“Yeah,” Benjamin answered, shivering. “Either we freeze to death or we starve. Look, I’m not that psyched to go Scooby Doo out here anymore than you are—but I don’t hear anybody else throwing out other options. So unless you’ve got a brighter idea, I say let’s try it while the sun’s still climbing. None of us brought up much winter gear … especially you, Kait.”
“You’re an idiot,” came the reply. But the words were heatless. She looked at Benjamin like he was a blood-fat mosquito splashed across her windshield, but only for an instant. Her gaze soon wandered away, staring out among the trees, looking almost resigned.
“Two teams of two, then,” she said at last. “We…we’ll have to be even more careful, now, only one group can go armed, after all. That means you stay in eyesight of each other at all times, but you don’t get close. Ten feet minimum…and for the love of God, don’t touch each other. If you see anything—my body-snatching ex-boyfriend, for example—you call it in first. And check in every ten minutes for as long as you’ve got signal.”
“I’ll go with Kaitlyn…” Riley began to say, but Alice paled and shook her head.
“No—I’ll go with Kaity,” she argued sharply. “It’s my fault he’s here, and it’s my fault we don’t have the car anymore. I’ve gotta do something to … to make up for that.”
Heat like a column of molten rock—Riley looked to Benjamin, feeling an objection rising in him, but instead, to her great shock, his face seemed to droop as a cold, cloudy breath hissed through his lips.
“Whatever,” he murmured after a pause. “Uh … Stay sharp out there, then.”
He turned back towards the cabin porch, squaring his broad shoulders, with his back to the rest of the group. “I’m going to put some clothes on,” he said. “And maybe eat something. Then Riley and me can hike up to the cabin. It’s better if we take that side of things—I can lead us there.”
And with that, he picked his way barefoot across the gravel lot and disappeared through the cabin’s ajar front door, moving slowly, his shoulder muscles rolling under the bathrobe in fluid rhythms. Riley cocked her head, watching him. A flash of scalding hatred simmered quickly away, leaving behind a film of curiosity that gleamed so bright it was nearly blinding.
Instinct took hold. She followed Benjamin inside, leading the others. Their bodies filled their stomachs, fuel against the cold, eaten in thin silence. He wouldn’t look at her, at Alice—his eyes remained downcast and half-lidded, lost in toast and oatmeal—and Alice would only look at Kaitlyn. Only once did his gaze lift, and then it was only to fix her, Riley, with a look as alien as the unblinking eye roosting in her bones. A smile touched her lips; the fire in her blazed contentedly.
There’s your face, Benji-Boy.
Time took a wiggle—suddenly Kaitlyn and Alice were gone, and she was outside, trudging through thick fallen pine needles, listening to the dry crunch of Benjamin’s footsteps off to her right as they threaded between the pine trees. He’d put on a sleek black pea coat with fake gray fur lining the hood, but not before he’d slipped a poofy green down-lined parka over her shoulders, muttering something about the wind through his teeth. She’d felt loved in that moment, wriggling under that brief and gentle touch—again she wished she could pin the sensation down under glass, peel back layer after layer until she could study what twitched beneath the tingling of her skin… Now the cabin had dropped away behind them, disappearing into the brown-and-gray maze of bark-stripped trees, and Riley found herself wondering how well he really knew these woods, though the thought came and went with all the heat of a lightbulb flicking on behind a closed door.
They had been walking perhaps ten minutes. Benjamin had not spoken once, not since the front lot; his directions to her were grunts and pointed gloved fingers, always up the next rolling hill, always south or south-west, and he had stayed a dutiful ten feet from her, his face perpetually hidden by the ruff of his hood or by some leaning tree-trunk. At the twenty-minute mark, Riley gave up trying to catch his eye and occupied herself slapping the cold out of her arms, marveling at the sensation of her frosty breath whooshing in and out of aching lungs. The fact that her arms and legs were moving without her ordering them was no concern; the voice of the shadow had explained everything in a tone as thick and clear as amber.
It was true, she wasn’t in control. But she had lost nothing.
She had never been in control.
With her limbs and lungs and blinking eyes on autopilot, it left Riley’s mind free to cruise: back through the sloping forest she wandered, until her imagination gazed down upon Alice and Kaitlyn picking their way down into a dry creek bed. Perhaps there was some slick mud at the bottom, or fresh winter ice—ice, yes, and Alice had descended first, offering a strong mittened hand to Kaitlyn to steady her down the steep slope. Their hands clasped only briefly, but Riley could feel the spark traversing flesh, and she thought of Alice’s fingers combing through Kaitlyn’s dark hair, the fingertips tapping along her slender shoulders, and all at once an upwelling of such confusion and rage surged in her like a great dark thunderhead that she began to shake almost violently, and when she looked down at her own trembling right hand she could have sworn that for the briefest instant the fist was clenched around a hank of curly auburn hair and caked in drying blood…
And then, out of an open blue sky: “It’s you. Isn’t it.”
Benjamin’s crunching footsteps had stopped only a few paces off, just beyond a slender pine tree. The top half of his face was obscured by a sheaf of brown, low-hanging needles, and his visible jaw was twisted up into a peculiar half-smile that still showed both tooth and gum.
“You’re him, aren’t you?” he asked. “You’re Lutz.”
Then, even before the shadow in her bones could move within her, he laughed forcefully, appearing around the tree with his
hand pressed flat to his cheek.
“I just wanted to see what you’d say,” he told her. “To see if you’d react. But I guess there really is no way to tell, is there?”
Riley felt her mouth kink up in bemusement, which she hid behind a cough into a curled fist. The furnace in her guts, which had sent up showers of ember-motes mere seconds prior, cooled as quickly as though it had been doused.
“Sure seems that way,” she replied, wiping a trickle of mucus off her top lip. “But now you’ve got me curious. What would you have done? If I’d said ‘yes’ just now—just outed myself. Right here in the woods. What was your master plan after that?”
Benjamin scowled. “I keep thinking about that,” he said with a shrug. “But I guess there’s really nothing either of us could do, is there? At least, not until we catch up with the others.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Riley said. “Picture this: I’m Lutzed, and I grab hold of you. Then you’re Lutzed, but I’m free. Nothing changes. We still both know where the danger is.”
“Pure stalemate.” Ben’s gaze turned wry, clouded by apprehension. “Unless you’re not trying to contaminate me at all,” he pondered. “Maybe Kait’s right. Maybe you brought me out here to kill me.”
Laughter bubbled in Riley’s chest—she could feel it tickle, like pins pushing through a thick blanket. “That is what Kaitlyn said, isn’t it?” she replied. Then, off Benjamin’s look: “Oh, please. I’d need the rifle for that. I’ve seen you without your shirt—it’d be like hunting big game, I imagine. What’s your thing, protein shakes? Multivitamins?”
Benjamin chuckled mirthlessly at this, the sound of it like stone sliding on stone. “Then maybe we’ve got it reversed. You Lutz me, and Lutz uses my body to kill you. Maybe I bash your head in with a rock. Or strangle you. Or…”
He paled suddenly, turning the color of a fish’s underbelly scales. He turned his face away into the hood of his coat, and his hand, which had drifted back to rest against the trunk of the skinny pine, picked frantically at the flaking brown bark.
Riley’s pocket buzzed, Alice checking in:
ALL CLEAR HERE SO FAR. SEE ANYTHING?
“Or what, Benjamin?” Riley asked, slipping the smartphone back into her pocket—and the other Riley, the Riley lying submerged under the deep, heavy warmth, mouthed the question as though it were a line in a movie she knew by heart. “I mean, Christ—is that what you’ve been thinking about?”
But Benjamin said nothing, only ground a handful of bark to powder in his fist.
“That’s what you’re afraid of,” Riley persisted. “Isn’t it. That he’ll use you again…”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“…to get at us…”
“Riley, stop…”
“To get at Kaitlyn.”
“He’s already done it once.”
Five words that sounded like five blows from a fist.
Benjamin sighed—the force of it seemed to rattle his eaves, shuddering him like an abandoned barn. “I…can’t get it out of my head,” he continued in a smaller voice than Riley had expected. She crept closer, bending forward to hear. “The look on her face when the lights came on. I see Kait, holding that gun, and her shoulders are shaking but the barrel’s steady as a fucking iron rail, you know? And I’m on the floor, and it’s all blood everywhere—I’m looking up at her through this film of blood, but her eyes are still eggshell white. Eyes like drawings of eyes. And there’s Alice, coming in behind her, and I don’t even have to see her face to know what she’s going to think. I can see how scared Kait is. I can feel it. Her terror’s like moisture in the air. In that moment, you know, I thought I’d really done it. That I’d tried to…”
His voice choked off with a sudden squeak, like a faucet tightened all the way. Riley was a yard off now—she could stretch out, touch him with her fingertips.
“I thought she was going to pull the trigger then,” he concluded, staring past her into the dense trees. “And I wanted her to.”
Riley frowned, cocking her head, feeling her long hair slide across her forehead and cheeks, the bonfire inside her shocked down to hot coals for the moment. “Well, all right then,” she said. “Do you feel that way now?”
Benjamin wrinkled his nose, joggling his glasses. “Who cares? It’s too late. She saw everything. As if I hadn’t been a bastard all weekend anyhow.”
He straightened, looking into Riley’s face with clear eyes. If he’d noticed how close she’d come, he didn’t show any sign of discomfort. “I think she feels like she owes me love,” he murmured. “That’s how her brain moves—like that’s the price of whatever I’m doing for her, somehow. But this’ll snap her out of that for sure. Did you notice that when I was saying all those horrible things last night, nobody batted an eye? Nobody thought, oh, Ben’s sure acting strange, I wonder what his damage is? And now if we ever get back to school, any time she’ll touch me, all she’ll see is the freeze-frame of me climbing on top of her best friend in a dark bedroom. It’ll always be in the back of her head: Maybe I am that kind of person. Maybe it wasn’t all Lutz, after all. Maybe I just hate Kait that much.”
They were face to face now, so close Riley could smell sleep still on his breath. Alice buzzed in again, the phone’s vibration insistent against her thigh:
EARTH TO RILEY – PLEASE CHECK IN, LET US KNOW YOURE OK
“She cares about Kaitlyn a whole lot, doesn’t she,” she said.
Ben looked at her strangely. “Oh, you picked up on that, did you?” he said. “You didn’t know her before—it’s like she’s got some kind of grip on Alice. I really think if she told Alice to jump off a bridge, there’d be no hesitation at all. Just the sound of a splash, off-screen. I can’t even picture Kait in a room alone without her now. And now that she’s here, it’s rubbing off on me—whatever it is. Look, I don’t hate her, you know, or at least … I don’t know what it is about her, but I–I hate who I am around her. But I can’t stop myself. I say things, do things … things I wouldn’t—”
Riley rolled her eyes and cut him off with a frustrated slash of her hand. “And how does Kaitlyn feel about her?” she demanded.
But for the moment, Benjamin said nothing. His eyes were closed behind his glasses now, but Riley could see the bulge of his eyeballs moving under the thin membrane of each lid.
“They were close when they were kids, weren’t they?”
Benjamin nodded, angling his face towards the forest floor.
“Yeah… Since they were twelve. They lived next door from each other. She told me Kait’s parents weren’t home a lot, so they spent most of their time in Alice’s house. Sleepovers, stuff like that. Park picnics. Whatever girls that age like, I dunno. It always made me feel weird when she talked about it. There’s this one Halloween party she always comes back to—”
“Halloween, huh?” Riley tilted her head sagely, casting a glance over Benjamin’s shoulder. They had been coming down a steep hill, and the sun was resting on the crest, skewered by the silhouettes of toothpick pines. Her jaw ached for a cigarette; her hand moved unconsciously, shaking one out of the box while the other produced her Zippo lighter.
“Take it from somebody who knows,” she told him, taking a heavy drag once the cigarette was lit and in her mouth. “Girl friendships at that age, they get crazy intense. There’s a word in Japanese for it, I think—God help me if I can remember it. But it’s like an addiction. It changes your whole brain chemistry around. Your friendship becomes a little marriage, almost. Like there’s nobody else on the planet that matters.”
She paused, searching his face with the intensity of a scientist. “Some people,” she continued, blowing smoke in his direction, “even mistake it for being in love.”
Benjamin’s jaw tightened. “I wish you wouldn’t say that.”
But there was no surprise in his voice.
Alice again, three messages in a row, frantic now:
RILEY ARE YOU OKAY? WE’RE WORRIED ABOUT YOU
WE’RE GOING BACK – MEET US AT THE CABIN ASAP
WAS THAT A CAR HORN?
“Is that Alice texting in?” Benjamin asked.
Riley ignored the question and stepped back, half-turning away from the sun. “Listen to me—you love her, don’t you?” Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him nod his head. “Why did you think I wanted to search with Kaitlyn instead of with you? You’re a good guy, Benjamin, and Alice knows it. She’s a smart girl, give her some credit. Whatever happened this weekend, she’ll forgive you for. It’ll take a couple of weeks, but she’ll get over it. I guarantee you that.”
Then she turned her head, hiding behind the sweep of her hair a grin that mocked all other human smiles. Ember rolled over ember in her belly, and when she opened her mouth her words tasted like hot, dry ashes spilling from her tongue.
“But she won’t ever forgive you for not being Kait Brecker.”
Benjamin made no sound—Riley longed to turn, to savor the phantom agony no doubt crawling hand-over-claw across his features. She was keenly aware of him, a sharp presence trembling in her wake like a shadow cast on the surface of a pool. But there was something happening inside her. The nicotine calm had already opened the sponge-holes of her brain, but now a secondary release was hitting her hard: it was like fists gripping every nerve ending in her body, and they were loosening their grip, finger by finger. There was a wave of intense sensation, neither pleasure nor pain—and then the bonfire blazing in her belly whipped away in the end, to hot coals, to ash, and then to nothing.
For a mere instant, Riley broke gasping to the surface.
“But you can’t listen to me,” she said, whirling to find him crouched against a raised root, his head in his hands. It was a struggle to form words; the world still seemed half-real, her movements sluggish and juddering as though in a dream. But she had to fight through. She had to warn him. She had to come through. “Benjamin, I didn’t know what I was saying…”
“Stop talking,” he mumbled, his voice sticky with mucus.
The Unwelcome Page 15
