Lester tries the phone again. He knows it’s ridiculous, but for a moment, he can’t help but wonder if more than water damage makes it dark. “The ley lines.”
“You said they must have a charge.”
“It was just a guess. I don’t know anything.”
Cliff lifts his hands and tugs tentatively at his shirt. The blood has seeped into his jeans. He tries to pull at the glass but loses his grip, throwing back his head and stifling a cry.
“Can I do anything to help?” Lester says.
Cliff nods. “I want it out of me.”
“I don’t know if we should.”
“I want it out.”
Lester says, “Okay,” and pulls down his sleeve, wrapping his hand in it, so that he has a better grip. He pinches down on the dagger of glass—and it slides out with an oozing splurt of blood.
Cliff’s scream eases into a sigh as he loses consciousness. His body slackens. Something gray and purple inflates out of the wound, a distended piece of intestine.
Lester tosses the glass aside and then reaches for Cliff, as though he might tuck his guts back inside him, but his hands pause. Close enough that he can feel the heat coming off the big man’s body. There’s nothing to be done. “Todd?” he says.
His friend is down by the water, staring out at the plane. More of it is visible than before, due to the shifting tide. “Todd?” Lester says again, and when he gets no response, he approaches and squeezes his shoulder. “Todd …”
Todd looks up, only half-focused, and says, in a ghost of a voice, “They’re not coming.”
“No.” It’s hard to say the word, because it’s an admission of death. His friend is dead. A part of him wants to say, I told you so, and, I knew this would happen, and, We never should have come here, but that part of him—the stage mom, his friends call it—feels like it expired in the crash as well. Worrying will do him no good out here.
“I left them behind,” Todd says. “Josh wouldn’t have left me.”
Lester flinches as he imagines Josh and Michelle out there—their bodies gray-skinned and aquariumed by the plane—but then his focus shifts. Beyond their glazed expressions. Beyond the fish nibbling at their flesh. To the luggage at the rear of the cabin.
“That’s exactly what we need,” Lester says. “What we left behind.”
“What do you mean?”
“The first aid kit. The water filter. Sleeping bags. Food. It’s all out there.” Their only hope of surviving.
“But,” Todd says, his face creasing, “they’re out there too. I can’t.”
“Josh always said this day was coming. You can only stick your head in the lion’s mouth so many times …”
“He did say that. But I never believed him.”
Lester holds out a hand and hoists his friend up and they stand side by side, wavering for a moment, before Lester speaks. He’s surprised by the calm certainty of his voice. “The tide’s going out. I’m too exhausted to fight the current. I think if we wait a little longer, we might be able hike out there. Okay?”
Todd nods until it looks like his head might fall off. “Okay.”
Michelle is in charge. That’s what she keeps telling herself. These are her employees. They came here because of her. She is going to get them out of here. Because she is in charge.
But the words, no matter how many times they loop through her head, won’t cement into a feeling. She has no control, no confidence. Her breathing comes in fierce pants. She paces in short circles and balls her fists so tightly her nails cut into her palms.
“Let’s go,” Josh says, and she hates him for it. She hates him for not acting panicked or bothered in the slightest. He seems—impossibly—happy. He can’t be having fun, can he? Is that the beginning of a smile curling his mouth? What once attracted her to him—his fatal glamour—now infuriates her. “Let’s go,” he says again.
“Where? Where are we going to go, Josh? We’re trapped.”
He adjusts the GoPro camera still mounted on his shoulder. “Let’s go and let’s find our friends.”
“Stop worrying about how this is going to play online. Stop pretending. Stop acting like a hero.”
“Just settle down, Michelle.” He reaches out a hand. “We’re going to be fine.”
“Don’t say that! Fear is the right response.”
She ceases pacing and looks at his hand now. Not so different from the one she extended to him when he was floating in Lake Superior. She felt so confident then. Relishing the look of surprise on his face. And now? She thought she had hoisted him out of trouble—but in fact he’s dragged her into it.
“My buddies might be hurt,” he says, “and if so, I want to help them. I know they’re worried about me. About us. Probably think we’re dead. I’d like to cure them of that feeling sooner than later.”
“Your friends,” she says. She still won’t take his hand, but allows him to step closer to her, because her mind has locked in on a realization. “Lester’s got the satellite phone.” At this her breathing settles completely and she neatens her ponytail and runs her hands along her sodden windbreaker as if to iron the wrinkles from it. As long as Lester has the satellite phone, they’ll be fine. She’ll escape this place. She’ll be in her hotel by this evening, ordering room service, soaking in a hot bath, watching HGTV. Who cares if this area never gets mapped? Nature is trying to tell her something: No one should ever come here.
She speaks with a calm directive. “Let’s find your friends and call the office and let them know what happened. We’ve gotten ourselves into some trouble, but everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to be okay.” She ignores his hand and plunges into the woods, the gapped shadows between the trees, knowing that he’ll follow, because she is in charge, dammit.
Todd doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to move, doesn’t want to do anything but watch Lester make a fire. The high he experienced earlier has given way to a subterranean low. He feels unplugged, out of order, blank. Sometimes he goes to this bar packed with retro games like Pac-Man and Space Invaders and Street Fighter II, and after a pitcher or two, he starts to get sloppy, forgets the right commands, fails to level up. TILT. That’s the term gamers use. He’s there now. He’s tilting.
Lester doesn’t ask him for help when he arranges some browned pine needles and old man’s beard moss and broken branches into a short tepee. He sparks a match. The pine needles crackle. The moss smokes. He blows softly and the flame licks its way up the wood. He feeds the fire until it is waist-high. Then he strips and tells Todd to do the same. Lester wrings the water from their clothes and holds them near the flames and when they dress again they’re smoke-scented.
All this time the tide pulls back, then pulls back some more, revealing barnacle-crusted rocks and clumpy wigs of seaweed. And mud. A long stretch of mud that reaches toward the plane, which is now half-visible.
“How are you feeling, buddy?” he says and Todd says, “Tilting.”
When Lester says he doesn’t understand, Todd says, “I know I’m supposed to feel sad, and maybe that will come later. But it’s like there’s no room for it. Because I’m feeling fully fucked. You know what I mean?”
Lester tells him it’s time—before the tide shifts—and though Todd would prefer to stare into the nothingness of the flames, he follows his friend. They don’t make it far. Their feet, and then their calves, sink and squelch into muddy, clinging pockets. Up to his knees, Todd says, “This shit is like wet concrete.”
Lester pivots and slowly returns the way he came, and when Todd asks where he’s going, Lester says, “I’m the idea man, aren’t I? I’ve got an idea.”
Todd tries to follow him, but can’t. The mud holds him. He makes a desperate lunge for a boulder that rises out of the muck. He ends up falling, with mud up to his neck, clinging to him. With difficulty he drags himself out and says, “This is hopeless, man.” Lester marches toward the woods. Before he follows, Todd wipes the mud from his arms and kicks and stomps it fr
om his feet. “This is one hundred percent not fun, not cool.”
He finds Lester before a tree—yanking at a thickly needled branch.
“What are you doing?”
“Engineering.”
The branch cracks, but not cleanly. A few more hard pulls and it comes apart with a sinewy peel of bark. He tosses it to the ground. Several branches thickly reach from the central shaft, so that it looks like a small tree in itself. He steps on top of it, tests his weight. “Can I have your boot?”
“Why?”
“I’m the smart one, remember? Do what I say.”
It’s reassuring to Todd, being told what to do, but Lester is normally the kindest among them. Now his expression has gone severe and his voice is clipped. “Give it to me,” he says and gestures impatiently and Todd plops down and rips off his boot. Lester fingers through the mud and undoes the laces and zips them out and uses them to bind his own foot to the branch.
When he finishes, he hoists up his leg to show off what looks like a kind of snowshoe. “Understand? Help me find another in a size ten.”
Now Todd gets it. He wanders among the trees, browsing for another suitable branch. But he finds something else instead.
“Lester,” he says, at first quietly and then: “Lester!”
His friend sees what he sees. A face. Carved into the trunk of the tree. So that it appears like a jack-o’-lantern or scarecrow. The eyes and nose and mouth and fangs gashed into the bark, as if roughly hatcheted.
There’s more than one. There’s two. No, five. No, eight. A crowd of them. The monstrous totems edge the shoreline.
Todd reaches out to touch the mouth of one, and then pulls back his hand as if bitten. “What does it mean?”
“That we’re not alone.”
Sound hushes and light dims when Josh enters the forest, the trees rising around him like pillars in a shadowy cathedral. That’s how the island feels to him, like a sacred space, holy ground. He feels—increasingly, with every minute—he has been brought here on a kind of pilgrimage. The ground is carpeted with pine needles, and his feet whisper across it.
She doesn’t feel the same way. She obviously hates this place. He can hear it in her voice and he can see it in her body, the way she stalks more than walks ahead of him, as they push through the underbrush and hurdle over logs. She swings her arms wildly at the mosquitoes that swarm them with a tremulous whine. “Remember when you said I ought to see this place as more than a picture?” She smacks another mosquito, and another. “Well, here I am—and it sucks.”
What she doesn’t understand is that this is good for her. He can’t say that, of course. But it really is the best possible thing that could have happened. She has spent her whole life in a fluorescent-lit globe of comfort. They don’t worship at the same altar. Her god blows. He’s glad to see her scared.
A strange bird calls out. A two-toned whistle that Josh barely acknowledges, because Michelle has fallen to her knees. At first he thinks she’s tripped—and hurries to check on her—but then he sees her kneeling by a stream and cupping her hands to pull up a drink. “Don’t.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“You said we could die out here—and you’re right. We could. If, for example, you get giardia. Death by shitting is not a good way to go. Do you agree?”
Her eyes widen. Water dribbles down her chin.
He nods upstream. “Only drink from the source of a spring.”
He thinks about telling her not to worry—she’s probably fine—but he likes how she falls in line beside him as they pick their way along the stream. Fifty yards later, they come to the headwater. The spring pours from a hole in the side of a short, rocky hill. The opening is a little smaller than a culvert. Something an adult could barely force themselves through.
Josh scoops a slurping drink. “It’s fine.” He nods for her to do the same. “Go on. It’s good. It’s safe.”
She reaches her hands for the gushing water—and right then the water goes red. A violent red. As if they’ve tapped some artery in the earth. It fills her hands. Stains them. Just as she’s about to take a sip. She startles and gasps and whimpers and tries to shake off the water, wipes her palms against her thighs. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
And then, just as suddenly, the water goes clear again.
The sun eases toward the horizon. Shadows lengthen. Todd remains on the shore while Lester duckwalks forward, both his feet now bound to pine boughs. “Here we go,” Lester says and Todd says, “You can do this, man.”
Lester messily skates out onto the mud, his arms wide to keep his balance. Then he goes stiff, as if he’s heard something.
“What’s the matter?” Todd says. “What is it?” He glances over his shoulder at the trees—with their leering faces—as if they might have tentacled closer by their roots. He doesn’t want to join Lester, but he doesn’t like standing here either. The feeling of waiting and watching sickens him.
Lester digs into his pocket and holds out the phone to Todd. “You better take this. Just in case.”
“Shit, you scared me. I thought …” But Todd isn’t sure what he thought. He eases into mud up to his ankles and snatches the phone away. “You start to sink, you turn around. You hear me, Lest?”
“I hear you.”
“Josh is the one who’s supposed to do this kind of thing.”
Lester says, “Who’s the mom now?” and slops forward.
Todd lets his arms rise and fall hopelessly. “I’m just feeling like …” What? That this place is going to gobble them up?
Out on the mudflats, Lester waddles and shimmies forward, while on the shore, Todd checks the phone. He shakes out the water, digs some grain from the receiver, blows on the charger port. Then presses the power button. It glimmers on. “Come on, baby. Yeah, baby, baby.” The home screen loads. “Hell yes.”
A chime sounds. As if in response, another sound comes. From the woods behind him. A whistle. Short and high, then long and low.
He spins around and takes in the line of face-carved trees. One is particularly frightening. It has a big black hollow at its bottom. Like a yawning mouth. Two giant, sap-crusted eyes are carved over it.
He thinks he sees—or does he?—a flutter of movement inside the hollow. He takes a few creeping steps forward and squints his eyes to focus better and tucks the phone into his pocket. He steps closer. Then closer still. The darkness of the hollow is grave, as if some section of the night has been carved away and stored here.
He crouches down toward the tree. And then—in a blurred frenzy—he is dragged into the tree. Into the hole. Gone.
Lester closes in on the plane, now splashing through puddles of water. The mud is looser out here, more mucusy. A funk comes off it. His thighs burn. He breathes heavily from the exertion. He squints at the half-sunken plane—the windows splintered and mucked over—worried about what he might find inside.
If he were to look closer, maybe he’d see the reflection of the shore behind him. The movement there would be hazy, indistinct, but he would be able to tell that something was coming. People? Or wraiths? Or beasts? Three of them? Five? Emerging from the shadows of the forest and starting down the rocky beach. They approach the alcove where Cliff rests. They could be anyone. Or anything.
But Lester doesn’t know this, just as he doesn’t know that Cliff’s eyes are half-lidded with nausea and exhaustion, that he’s alive and awake, but barely able to lift his head at their approach. Lester doesn’t know that when their shadows fall over the big man, his face goes through a series of quick transformations, ranging from hopeless pain to muddled confusion to bald fear.
Something slashes at him then. A blurred claw. Or skeletal hand. It’s impossible to make sense of except as a threat. Three gashes open on Cliff’s face, his cheek unzippered, one of his eyes suddenly slit.
No, Lester doesn’t see any of this, but he hears the scream—and tries to twist around. “Todd? Cliff?” But his bound feet are entrenched in the mud and he l
oses his balance and one of the branches snaps beneath him. The loose foot instantly sinks, and he collapses onto his side. “Help!” he says as the mud sucks at him, lipping him greedily. He flounders, trying to stay upright, and the other foot comes loose from its purchase. He sags lower and lower, past his knees, his waist, up to his chest. “Help!”
He throws out his arms out as if to tread water. The mud bubbles and plops and slurps. “Help,” he says. “Please!”
Then something splats nearby. Close enough that he can see the crater. He’s barely able to process this—a rock, someone has thrown a rock—when another whizzes past his ear. Then another, another, another, dimpling the mud all around him. He can’t see anything. He’s too low. And sweat and grime bother his vision. But he can feel the rock that strikes his cheek. A flap of skin opens and throbs. His mouth tries to form around a word, but fails, and he screams instead.
He continues to sink as the stones hail all around him. One strikes the elbow of his pleading arm. Another his knuckle. Another his collarbone. He is struck in the shoulder, the ear, the eyebrow.
Sometimes the rocks come in quick succession. Other times they are interrupted by a long wait, as if someone is cruising the shore for the perfect grenade.
Lester’s face is angled toward the sky and the mud tugs at his jaw and he focuses on an osprey overhead. It pounds its wings, carrying a fish that struggles in its talons.
The air purples, a twilight gloom. Michelle looks over her shoulder constantly as she and Josh tromp through the woods but stay close to the shore. Every tree seems to reach for them with its branches, to claw and grab. She swats at mosquitoes with an almost syncopated beat. They cloud around her but seem to ignore Josh.
He keeps telling her not to worry, but then she sees him crack a thick dead branch off a tree. He tests its weight and swings it like a club—then uses it as a walking stick. He gives her a just-in-case look. So Michelle grabs a stick of her own. Maybe he is scared after all. Maybe he’s just better at swallowing it down.
“Iron can stain water red,” he says. “There might be iron deposits here.”
Suicide Woods Page 16
