The Woods Are Always Watching

by Stephanie Perkins

  She had shot him above his heart. Yet here he was, moving better than her and breathing easier than Neena, carrying a rucksack as though everything were normal. It made her question whether he was a man at all. Maybe he was something more. Something less. Something that could not be killed.

  Willie was staring back at her, his eyes solid darkness as he slowly set down the bag. “You’re still alive.”

  Josie’s muscles went taut. “So are you.”

  Lyman held out the shotgun to Willie. “I told you I had everything under control.” He sounded prideful and eager to show off his captures. “You remember Josie. And this one is”—his rangy frame snapped toward Neena—“hell, you still haven’t said.”

  Neena screwed her mouth shut.

  Willie grunted as he took the gun, the only indication that he was in any pain. Though he had the same accent as Lyman, his voice was deeper and measured. “Her name is Neena.”

  Neena startled against Josie, and Josie’s shame reignited for having told him about her. Then again . . . Lyman had known about Josie. She and Neena had both been trapped in the same impossible position. This wasn’t their fault. None of this was their fault.

  The men were the only ones to blame.

  Lyman glanced at the sack and then back up at Willie. “You were leaving?” He seemed hurt. “I told you I’d get her. I told you! Hell, I got both of them.”

  Willie ignored this, denying Lyman the praise he obviously wanted. “You’ll have to dig it out.” He gestured to his shoulder wound.

  “Nuh-uh. No way. You need a hospital.”

  “No hospitals.”

  “Ugh.” Lyman’s nose wrinkled as his head turned aside. “Did you piss yourself?”

  “Bitch threw it on me.” Willie’s voice tightened. Another indication of pain.

  Josie knew about pain. Her left foot was barely attached, her right hand had been blown off, and she had hobbled miles through the craggy darkness. Countless times she’d fallen, but she was still standing up. For a moment, she felt triumphant. Pain meant Willie was human. But the reassurance vanished quickly. Because if she could still perform remarkable acts, then surely he could still perform unspeakable acts.

  “Tend to the fire,” Willie said, “then get this shit out.”

  It was an order, and he kept close watch over the girls as Lyman collected dry brush from a pile they couldn’t see behind the shelter. The shelter wasn’t big enough for the men to actually live out here, but the amount of work required to build it revealed that they had spent a lot of time at this campsite. This was a place they revisited.

  The proximity of Willie’s lecherous flesh was frightening. Lyman reappeared and hefted a large branch into the fire. The heat rose. Orange tongues licked at the night, revealing the ground to be littered with dozens of empty beer bottles. Firelight flickered and reflected on the brown glass like hazard warnings.

  Neena trembled against Josie. Her gaze had locked onto something at the edge of the clearing. Josie craned her neck and felt the rest of her blood drain from her body. A long and misshapen lump was now visible underneath the dark boughs. It was a woman, dead and cast aside like another scrap of garbage. A portent of their own future.

  Willie broke down his gun. The girls jumped at the noise, and the spent shells popped out, hitting the ground at Josie’s feet beside a discarded bottle cap. She squinted down. Scarcely able to make it out, she was chilled to discover that the bottle cap was red with tiny white stars inside a blue X—Cataloochee Light. The same brand studding the trail that she and Neena had followed.

  It didn’t matter that they were inside a national forest. This forest belonged to these men. This was their territory. They hadn’t just stumbled across her and Neena and made a split-second decision to abduct them. It hadn’t even started with a chance encounter with the now-dead woman—or the man that Neena had found. Willie and Lyman had entered these woods with the explicit purpose of hunting for victims.

  Lyman dropped another load of fuel into the fire. The flames hissed and sparked, startling Josie again, spiking her pain and making her cry out.

  A depraved thrill rippled across Willie’s face. An instinctive reaction of pleasure at her suffering. He dug into a pocket. Produced two new shells. Reloaded. His eyes remained fixed on her with feral intensity. The wind was cold, but he didn’t seem to feel it. His body radiated heat. He was a predator, and he belonged in this forest.

  He was going to shoot her.

  But then he didn’t. The distance between them closed in two heavy, steady steps. The full carnage of his injuries sharpened into focus. His repugnant breath made her stomach heave. With a feverish grimace, he grabbed her. His bulbous nose mashed into her cheek, and his sloppy lips opened against her recoiling mouth.

  * * *

  • • •

  Josie tasted rotting gums, brown teeth, rancid tongue. She saw a ragged mother—angry from abuse, mean from alcohol and hard drugs—who liked to humiliate him. Called him names and made him watch when she was with her johns. He was filthy and unwashed and carried a bad odor. Kids bullied him. Teachers were repelled.

  When he was six, his mother briefly married, claiming the man was his real father. He believed it back then, but he wasn’t so sure now, even if they did share a name. William would take beatings from his wife, turn his rage inward, and then unleash it upon Willie. He once hit Willie in the head with the butt of a shotgun, the same one Willie carried to this day. Willie was knocked clean out for eleven hours before his mother’s pimp drove him to the hospital. A dead kid would be bad for business.

  Willie hated William because William was weak. But William’s father—Willie’s granddaddy—owned a tire shop, and, for a few good years, he took Willie out into the woods. Taught him how to drink and hunt. But when William was put away for armed robbery, Willie never saw him or his granddaddy again.

  Willie’s rap sheet for petty crimes grew rapidly. He did the seventh grade twice and dropped out in ninth. At least the food in juvie was warm. When he was sixteen, he raped a child in the neighborhood. She told on him—she’d said she wouldn’t—and that got him sent to adult prison. They beat the shit out of him there, cracked his skull, and he vowed that he’d never get caught again. The girls would never again be alive to talk.

  * * *

  • • •

  The full putrid sense of him overwhelmed Josie, which stunned her voluntary reactions into immobility. But one involuntary reaction remained. She vomited.

  Fury threatened to burst Neena’s lungs. “Get off her!” If she shoved Willie away, Josie would fall. She would never let Josie fall again. “Get off her!”

  Lyman howled with laughter. “I told you, you gotta brush them nasty teeth.”

  Willie let go. His expression never changed, even as his hand wiped the puke off his face. But he grunted in brutal satisfaction. “Shut up and tie them,” he said. With straining effort, he took a seat on one of the stumps that faced the fire.

  Shock and sickness dribbled down Josie’s chin.

  “Josie?” Neena tried to say it gently, but her voice was too hoarse. She pulled the sleeve of her hoodie down over her hand and used it to swab Josie clean.

  Lyman disappeared into the shelter. It emanated a menacing aura of masculine purpose, and Neena wondered how she had ever hoped it could belong to anyone else. The scattered equipment inside thunked and clanged as he rooted around, searching for something. Glimpses of metal and glass and shiny plastic caught in the firelight. The materials gleamed as if the objects were new and expensive. Neena couldn’t imagine either of these men being able to afford gear like this. Who had the camping equipment originally belonged to?

  The ransacked yellow-gold tent. The footsteps in the fog.

  Thunderstruck, she realized one of them had returned to the scene of their crime for a supply run. How many times had they done this? How ma
ny people had they murdered out here?

  Lyman emerged with a length of polypropylene rope draped over a shoulder. He aimed the rifle at Neena’s chest. “Over there.” His head jerked toward a pair of trees behind the corpse.

  Neena shivered but didn’t budge.

  Willie hocked and spit. The glob of phlegm landed on the toe of Lyman’s right boot. “You never could make a bitch heel.”

  “Move,” Lyman bellowed, in the natural transfer of human embarrassment: humiliation into anger into revenge on someone weaker. His rank body shoved between the girls, and he grabbed Josie from underneath the armpit of her good arm. The girls cried out as they were ripped away from each other.

  His boot rammed into Neena, forcing her to stumble forward.

  He dragged Josie. Leg scrabbling to keep up, she slid and fell. He hauled her across the ground. The pain was so extraordinary that she could no longer see or hear, only feel. She screamed, screeched, wailed. Lyman pushed her against a tree and then shoved her down into a sitting position, legs splayed out and arms at her sides. Using the hunting knife from the sheath on his belt, he cut the rope into two lengths and then held out the longer one to Neena.

  “Wrap this around her, good and tight,” he said.

  Forced to obey, Neena wrapped it around and around, lashing Josie to the tree by her midsection. In Josie’s condition, this was enough to secure her. Josie’s screams weakened into gasps. And yet, through her pain, Josie sensed a purposeful slack in the binding. Somehow she held still enough so as not to give away the deception.

  “Now.” Lyman gestured with the rifle to the other tree. “Sit.”

  The second tree was younger and had less girth, so he was able to tie Neena’s hands all the way behind her back, around the trunk. Picking up a third piece of rope that had been discarded nearby, he used it to bind her feet together in front of her.

  He returned to Josie and tugged on the knot. His tongue clucked with reproach. “Well, that ain’t gonna hold nobody.”

  Josie’s hope shriveled. As Lyman began to unwork the binding, Neena released a macabre rasp. Josie understood that Neena’s muscles were straining to exhale. The rope fell loose. Jolted by inspiration, Josie took a deep breath and expanded her rib cage as far as possible. Lyman tightened the binding. Josie held. He yanked and tightened. Josie quivered and held. Finally satisfied, he stood and picked up his rifle.

  She exhaled, and the rope loosened—a titch.

  He swaggered back around to gloat down at them. “My, my.” His thin tongue licked his chapped lips. “Don’t you two look pretty? Gonna have some fun with you.”

  “Stop fooling around,” Willie yelled in a mushy garble.

  Lyman’s features screwed together like a child being berated by his father. He ironed them out quickly, aware of his spectators, but new wrinkles ironed themselves into the wrong places. The structure of his face turned demented. “Don’t go nowhere, okay?” He barked twice with laughter—what an original joke, what a comedian—before striding away.

  No doubt the rope around Neena’s ankles had been previously used to bind the woman. Death had seeped into its strands. She felt it touching her, infecting her. She turned her head to look at Josie and rest against the tree. Dried blood in the bark, scratches in the trunk, and ruts in the earth further warned of a shared history with the dead woman. Her body was close, only a few feet away. Neena was close to Josie, too. If they weren’t bound to immovable trees, they could have reached out and held hands.

  “Are you okay?” she whispered, as Josie whispered, “Can you breathe?”

  “Zip your lips, or I’ll shoot one of you right now and make the other bury the body,” Lyman hollered.

  “It’s in the—” Willie said.

  “I know where it is.” Lyman stormed past him and back into the shelter. He returned only a moment later, having fetched a small red box with a big white cross.

  The first-aid kit infuriated Neena. They had no qualms about committing murder, yet they were still fearful of their own mortality. The corpse held a dark gravity that pulled her eyes again. Since she had last seen it, the body had entered into the stages of rigor mortis. The facial muscles appeared especially stiff and rigid, but no part of the body looked flexible anymore. Moonlight bounced off the bruised and battered skin. Neena wished that she could button up the woman’s shirt to give her back some of her dignity.

  Lyman took back Willie’s shotgun and rested it out of the way, against the shelter. Then he set down his own gun at his feet before revealing a pair of tweezers.

  Willie gave a derisive grunt. “You’ve gotta cut the shot out. An X over each one and then dig them out.”

  Lyman’s brow furrowed, but he unsheathed his hunting knife. The huge blade glinted in the crackling light. He offered out a rectangular glass bottle—something stronger than beer—to Willie, who swigged and returned it. Lyman poured the liquor over the knife and then, with a wincing head shake, poured it over the open wounds.

  Willie’s scowl contorted into a huffing and lunatic grimace.

  “You sure about this?” Lyman asked, handing the bottle back to Willie.

  Willie swilled the remnants and then tossed the empty at the body. The bottle smacked the woman’s thigh before thumping to the ground. Shining liquid droplets clung to his beard. “Just do it already.”

  Lyman’s shoulders seemed to brace against an anticipated blow as he made the first incision. None came. His shoulders drooped with relief, and the surgery proceeded.

  Slice, slice, dig.

  The tools fumbled to reach each embedded shot. One by one, pellets dropped onto the forest floor. Sweat glistened on Lyman’s forehead, and dark rivulets of fresh blood caught the light as they eked out pathways through Willie’s chest hair.

  Perhaps to maintain a tough appearance—or perhaps because he actually was that tough—Willie’s cavernous gaze returned to the girls. “Morgan Shea Sullivan.” His head inclined toward the body that lay between them. “Thought you should be introduced, since you’re gonna have a lot in common.”

  Lyman chimed in. “That’s what her driver’s license said. We ain’t stupid enough to take them, because that’s evidence, but we always look.”

  “What was her boyfriend’s name?” Though they came out in a croak, Neena’s words were clear. “The man in the tent?”

  Lyman snorted. “Now, that I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Goddammit,” Willie snarled as Lyman’s hand slipped.

  Cowed, Lyman finished digging out his current target. The shot dropped glumly to the ground with the others before his voice shored up with false bravado. “The guys are disposable, see. We ain’t got no use for them.”

  The girls knew what use would come before their deaths. The taste of sick still contaminated Josie’s mouth. It made her feel just as disposable.

  Who was Morgan? Who had she been? Because of the similarities in their names and ages, Josie couldn’t help but think of Win’s girlfriend. Though new to backpacking, Meegan had taken to it enthusiastically. Josie had been angry to share her brother’s attention, angry that it meant he spent even more time away from home. But Meegan had always been kind to Josie. She’d even encouraged Josie to join them.

  Morgan’s boyfriend was dead, too. Josie didn’t know what Neena had seen, and she blocked out the gruesome possibilities. Imagining Win in his place was more than she could bear. Win and Meegan had always seemed so much older than her, but now she understood how young they actually were. They still had their whole lives ahead of them. Morgan and her boyfriend had none. Josie considered the boy with the deep voice and the girl with the milkmaid braid that they’d seen within their first hours on the trail, also so similar in age, and how close they’d come to being here instead. All of them walking through this same wilderness. All of it left to chance.

  “How many?” Josie asked quietly. Just loud e
nough for them to hear.

  Willie sneered. “We’ve been hunting these woods a long time. And we’ll be here a long time after you’re gone.”

  “Been here a long time,” Lyman parroted.

  “Others”—Willie winced as a pellet sludged from his skin—“they didn’t tell nobody where they was going. Families and police think they’re just missing persons. They don’t know where to look.”

  “Our parents know where to look,” Neena said. “They know exactly where we are.”

  Willie smirked. “But they don’t know where you’re gonna be. And it ain’t here.”

  “Where?” Josie asked. The men were bragging and trying to frighten them. This was wholly unnecessary because she and Neena had been locked in a state of terror for hours. However, if they did manage to get out of these woods alive, Josie wanted to be able to tell the authorities where they could find the other victims.

  She also wanted to keep the men distracted while her hand stretched for something inside her pocket.

  Relishing his captive audience, Willie surprised her by answering the question. “There are other sinkholes. Caves. Places where a body can drop and never be found.”

  Josie flashed back to the bottom of the sinkhole. Rocks and soil and branches dumped heavily onto her body, burying her, gravediggers filling their grave. Desperately, her fingers fished for the object inside her jeans pocket. Maybe she was only imagining the slight pressure. Maybe it had fallen out.

  “You hear about those murders up in Hot Springs?” Lyman asked.

  Willie hissed and shoved Lyman away with his good arm.

  “I’m helping, you damn jackass.”

  “Help better,” Willie said, settling back again.

  After a sullen interlude, Lyman continued, “That story was big. Three dead hikers and a missing boyfriend. We was worried that one got out of control, but the dumb cops”—he laughed, and the sound was tight and jittery like a rodent—“they blamed the boyfriend. He had a record—possession or some shit—so they pinned it on him. But he’s dead, too. He gave us a chase, so we had to dump his body someplace else.”