The Forest of Hands and Teeth

by Carrie Ryan

  We come to two more breaks in the narrow path during the heat of the day, each time randomly choosing which direction to take. Just as the light shifts, causing distances to blur, Harry, who has been walking ahead, suddenly stops.

  “It's a dead end,” he says.

  “What?” Cass yells. Her voice has a note of hysteria in it and she steps around Harry to see for herself. She begins to bang against the section of fence that ends the path, and she reminds me of the Unconsecrated, always wanting what is on the other side.

  Finally, Travis goes to her and wraps her in his arms. He tells her to shush and he rocks her slowly and Harry steps behind her and lays a hand on her shoulder. Together they try to ease Cass's shuddering sobs. Even Argos trots to her side, leaning against her legs and licking her hand. She clutches at Travis; I can see how her fingers sink into the flesh of his shoulder by the collar of his shirt, and I cannot help but watch with a sense of jealousy, a small pebble like possession in the pit of my stomach.

  “Useless,” Cass mutters. “Everything. We've lost everything. My father and mother … my sister …” She struggles to breathe and I see tears in Travis's and Harry's eyes. “Gone,” she goes on. “All gone. Dead. And we …” She shudders again, her whole body shaking. “We … the path, oh God …” Her words slip into wails. Travis pulls her closer and runs his hand over her hair to comfort her.

  The back of my throat stings and I feel my stomach heaving, but nothing comes up and no one notices. I want to rip Cass from his arms, but instead I step around where Beth has curled up on the ground and take a few steps down the path to get away. I try to take deep breaths but my body still thrums. I know their pain. I understand it, I have lived with that kind of regret. I know I should feel sympathy, I know we are in this as one. But I can't stop the heat, the rage from curling in my stomach.

  “We should just stay here for the night,” Jed calls out. “I'm not sure Beth can go farther today.” I wait for him to tell them why, as he promised. To tell them she is infected. But instead he says, “She's been so desolate after the loss of their parents.”

  I throw my hands up and start to stomp away but Jed catches up with me before I get out of earshot of the group.

  “It's no use,” he tells me and whether he means Travis or Harry or Beth or the path I don't know. I only know that I am full of anger at everything that's happened. It feels like lightning shooting through my body, this fury.

  I cannot help but laugh, the sound of it raw in my throat. “You want to talk about what is of no use, Jed?” I ask, because I want to lash out and he's the closest. “What about keeping your little secret about Beth?” I say this loudly, meaning for everyone to hear it, and as I intended both Travis and Harry look up at me when I mention their sister's name.

  Suddenly, I feel a profound need to hurt Travis as he stands with his arm around Cass, her fingers possessive around his wrist like a Binding rope. For making me want him so fiercely and for not coming to claim me before my last night with Harry. For not coming before everything grew so complicated and ugly.

  “Tell them, Jed,” I say, my eyes still locked on Travis's questioning gaze. “You promised you would. Tell them how Beth is already dead. Tell them how you refuse to kill her. How you endanger us all.”

  I don't move as I see Jed's hand coming toward my face, as I feel the burn of it across my cheek. I don't even flinch or raise my hand to squelch the sting.

  It's easy to see that Travis still doesn't understand what is going on. Beth, hearing her name, wakes up. Noticing that we are all staring at her, she sits up quickly, the shawl slipping from her shoulder and exposing the festering wound underneath.

  Harry shrieks like an injured animal and falls to his knees, crawling to his sister. Travis just stands and stares at me as I feel my body flare with heat. Already I despise myself, shame flooding through me, drowning me. I turn and run back down the path.

  But at least I know that Travis now hurts as much as I do.

  I wander along the various paths, leaving piles of rocks or twigs each time I come to a branch in the path so that I can retrace my steps back. I wish I could find something helpful— something to bring back as an offering to make amends and prove that we are going in the right direction. That we won't wander the Forest until we die of starvation or dehydration.

  But I find nothing—just the endless path filled with brambles and overgrown grass. Dead brown vines trail through the links in the fences with buds that may have once held flowers but now hang limp and desiccated.

  Eventually, I find myself back at the first break in the path, and I sit and stare into the woods. It's quiet here, the Unconsecrated not having risen at the sound of my steps.

  “Gabrielle?” I ask the silence. At first my voice is tentative but then I grow bolder. “Gabrielle!” I shout. Soon enough I hear the sound of an animal charging through the underbrush, and then her bright red vest breaks from the trees and she throws herself against the fence. It's not her name she responds to, but my existence. She does not come because I call her, but because she craves me. Because she is mindless and hungry and knows nothing else but desire for human flesh.

  She seems a little slower, as though her body is tearing itself apart in the effort to sustain so much energy. Still, she thrusts her fingers at me through the links in the fence, her mouth grinding against the metal in case I step too close.

  I think about slipping a finger through the fence and into her mouth. Letting her consume me and infect me. Being done with the path and the longing that's too painful to bear.

  I think about my mother out there in the Forest somewhere and how maybe I could find her if I was Unconsecrated. I have always wondered if there is any spark of recognition between the Unconsecrated—if it is like a feral animal that understands something so deep and true as love.

  I reach out and press my finger against the nail of her pinky, the only finger that is not bent and broken from trying to rip through the fence.

  “Who are you?” I ask. Her eyes are now scratched and a milky blue and I know that she does not see me.

  Tears drip down my cheeks, splatter on my shirt. “Is it easier on the other side?” I ask her, still tracing her pinky with my own fingers. She tries to grab my hand, but hers is too mangled for such dexterity.

  She's barely taller than I am, with a similar build. In another time we could have been mistaken for sisters, though her nose, once long and straight, is now crooked with the bone piercing through at the bridge.

  “I'm sorry,” I tell her.

  So badly do I want to believe that she can hear me. That she can understand. But she keeps clawing and as the sun slides down the sky, I continue to cry heavy tears.

  I am just turning to leave her, wiping my hand under my nose, when something gleams from the grass where the two paths come together. I squint my eyes and turn my head but I don't see it again, and so I walk over to where the fence splits and kick at the ground.

  I hear a tiny little clink and I drop to my knees, using my tear-damp fingers to pry through the grass until I find it. Wired to the bottom links is a small metal bar just like the ones that hung over the levers to the gate. This one is just to the right of the split, less than a hand's length down the path.

  Like the other metal bars, this one is inscribed. I rub my fingers over it, dislodging dirt. I can feel the ridge of each letter: XXIX.

  Out of curiosity I scrabble down the other branch of the path and push away the thick overgrown weeds to find another bar with similar letters: XXIII.

  I rock back on my heels until I fall with a thud and am sitting. Just like the gates, these paths are marked—they are not random.

  Almost afraid that I might be seeing things or making them up, I jump to my feet and run to the next split in the path, my body screaming for air by the time I get there. I slide to my knees and dig through the grass and dirt until I find two more small metal bars, one marking each path. Again with similar letters: VII, IV.

 
I close my eyes and try to figure out the pattern to the letters. Try to figure out what they are telling me. What they have in common. But my heart beats too fast, my blood flows through my body with such speed, such excitement, that I can't concentrate.

  My fingers shake as I rub them over the letters again and again and again. I think back to the window where Gabrielle wrote her name and clear in my mind are the letters she wrote underneath: XIV. The letters have to be some sort of code, the metal bars some sort of markers.

  And yet I still cannot figure it all out. I cannot piece it all together. I grit my teeth in frustration and toss dirt back over the bar I've been examining. Burying it back in the underbrush.

  As the sun hovers on the tips of the trees and my skin stings from its slow burn, I walk back to our camp at the dead end, running the letters through my head over and over again.

  Every time I come to the same conclusion: there's a connection between the letters and Gabrielle. The letters will lead me to her. Will solve the mystery of who she is and maybe even where she's from.

  She was trying to tell me something when she wrote those letters in the mist of her breath on the window. And I have no choice but to accede to her message.

  I tap my fingers across my lips as I think. I burst with the need to tell everyone about this discovery. To explain to them that we now have a direction of some sort. A purpose.

  I trip down the path, racing past the little piles of stones I set out to mark the way back to the others, pausing only to search for the little bars, the path markers. Each time I rub my fingers over the engraved letters I can't help but laugh.

  And I'm still reeling with joy and laughter when I turn the corner in the path and find Cass sitting, Jacob asleep on his side a few feet away, his little body clutching Argos like a memory of life before the breach.

  “Beth is dead,” she says, not even bothering to look up at me. “They are digging her grave. I didn't want Jacob to see them decapitate her. He has seen too much already.”

  Grief rolls over me, the joy of my discovery leaching from my bones. I never said good-bye. I was not there.

  I did nothing in her final hours but cause her pain.

  “I should go help,” I say. My voice feels strained, and it hurts as it leaves my throat. Already the tears are climbing from my eyes again, slipping down my cheeks.

  She reaches out a hand and grasps my ankle as I try to pass. “No,” she says.

  I let my legs collapse under me until I am huddled next to her. “I'm sorry,” I say. Apologizing again, as if these are the only words I am allowed to speak anymore.

  She nods. Her expression is so grave, so serious. It isn't the Cass I have ever known, the one who was nothing but sunshine and light. Who was always carefree and happy. I ache seeing the darkness creep into her spirit, taking hold of her.

  I drop my head between my knees, cup my hands over the back of my neck. Suddenly, finding little scraps of metal with letters on them seems useless. It's as if the world has opened its maw. Has brought reality back down upon us, to remind us of how unfair our life is. How useless it is to try to exist when surrounded by nothing but death. Unceasing, determined death.

  A cloud dims the sun, throwing the world around us dark and cold. The wind lifts through the trees a bit; the leaves flash their white undersides. The taste of rain coats my tongue and in the distance I can hear the soft low moans of the downed Unconsecrated who rise to find us. Who heard my steps and smell my stench.

  I decide not to tell them about the letters. Not to give them that hope. I don't want to see Cass fall apart again, don't want to carry the burden of their expectations.

  What if the letters mean nothing? What if the path leads nowhere? What if we figure out the puzzle, what if we suddenly expect an end and we don't find one? It's enough that I know the paths are marked, enough that I know to look for Gabrielle's letters.

  I wonder if maybe all paths lead to the Unconsecrated. If it's a fate that none of us can ever escape—as certain as death. I wonder if maybe I was right as a child, that there can be no such place as the ocean, no place too large to be untouched by the Return.

  After Beth is buried Harry and Travis come back down the path to where Cass and I sit in silence, watching Jacob nap with Argos, his bony shoulders rising and falling hypnotically. Harry announces that the plan is to retrace our steps while there is still a trace of light and camp at the last split in the fence, where the path is wider.

  I let them go without me. Instead, I slip back toward the dead end and find Jed standing next to a mound of dirt. I can see the weight of his grief in the slump of his shoulders, the way his hands hang so limply by his sides as if there is no life left in them.

  “It was the one in red that got her,” Jed says, his eyes fixed on the dirt that's even now settling into his dead wife's flesh. “She was too fast. Too much. Beth was …” He swallows. Stays silent.

  “Beth was pregnant again,” he finally says. His voice cracks as he says this and I hesitate before walking to his side, before slipping his arm around my shoulder so that I can bear some of his grief.

  For a moment I fear he'll rebuff me. But then he sags against me. I am the only thing holding him standing and I finally feel as if we are brother and sister again. The bonds forged when we were children too tight to break.

  “Jed,” I say. And then I pause and take a deep breath. Afraid of harming the moment. “What happened to Beth? How did she get infected?”

  A pebble slips down the mound of dirt at his feet and he releases me, bending down to pick it up. He rubs it between his finger and thumb. “We were on our way to the Cathedral,” he says. “We were going to tell Sister Tabitha that Beth was pregnant so that she could be blessed with the other mothers at the final Vows ceremony.”

  My cheeks burn at the memory of what was to occur our final day.

  He squints into the Forest. “We heard the siren and tucked ourselves into an empty cottage. I was trying to secure it when you ran by with Harry. I watched as you ran to the path and I realized that you had the right idea. That the path was the only way to survive. And I was so afraid for you, Mary.

  “But Beth”—he shakes his head as he remembers—”she didn't want to go down the path. She was too terrified. She wanted to go to the platforms. Where she knew it would be safe. Just like we had always been told. She didn't understand what I was saying when I tried to tell her that the path was safe. That I had been down it before with the Guardians, securing it.”

  He hoists his hand back as if to throw the pebble into the Forest but stops at the last moment. “I'm the one who pulled her along behind me. I'm the one who pulled her to the path when it started raining. I thought that if we waited until it got dark … that maybe we would be able to sneak past them all. We weren't but a few lengths from the cottage when the Fast One grabbed her. I thought the rain would help throw them off. Would give us the time we needed to make it. But not the Fast One. With the confusion of everyone screaming and yelling and fighting… I couldn't hear her coming. I pried her off Beth. And God help me, I threw her at another living person, hoping to keep Beth safe.”

  I wrap my arms around my body, imagining what it must have been like for Jed. Imagining being responsible for the person I loved most becoming infected.

  “There was nothing we could do then.” His voice is soft. Defeated. “The people on the platforms next to the cottage— the people we have known our whole life—they saw Beth get attacked. And they started to shoot arrows at her. They tried to kill her and so we couldn't go back. And the blood from her bite drew the slow Unconsecrated. We barely made it to the gate as it was.”

  He fights to control his breathing, to contain his sobs, and I want nothing more than to cradle him to me. To wipe away his pain and misery like a mother with a son.

  But I do not. I stand at the edge of Beth's grave and stare out into the Forest and wonder how it is that we are never truly prepared for death. How we can be always surrounded by it,
reminded of it, knowing that one mistake can lead to infection. And yet when it comes we are not ready. We still have too many regrets.

  “I had no choice,” he finally says, as if asking me for absolution. “I couldn't let her become one of them. Couldn't bear to think of her in the Forest.”

  “I know,” I tell him, thinking about our mother and the choice she made, the choice I let her make.

  “It was the hardest thing I have ever done.”

  “I know,” I say again, at a loss for what else to tell him.

  Jed nods, squeezes my shoulder and walks up the path to rejoin the others, who are setting up camp. I stay behind, contemplating my lie to Jed.

  Because I do not accept the hand of God; I do not believe in divine intervention or predestination. I cannot believe that our paths are pre-chosen and that our lives have no will. That there is no such thing as choice.

  The next morning the sun doesn't so much rise as seep around us, the air thick and heavy with moisture that coats our skin with sweat. Even though we must push on this morning, no one has made a move to leave the little clearing where we spent the last night. Cass takes a small sip from one of the water bladders and passes it along. It feels empty in my hands.

  It has been three days since the breach. We are angry and terrified and miserable.

  “We should go back,” Cass says.

  Next to me Harry lets out a breath as if he's been holding it. Argos lies next to me, his head on my knee, his ribs protruding like waterbars as I slide my hand down his side. His tail thumps lethargically in the dirt.

  “We don't have enough water to keep wandering aimlessly like this,” Cass continues. “We can't live without water and we can't hope to keep going and just pray that it rains again.”

  The day has barely begun and already I feel as though I could wring enough sweat out of my shirt to fill one of the water bladders.