by J. Round
It was a path I’d trod many times during my short span on the island. Trees, shrubs and vegetation lined each side, subtly directing you down towards the water.
Carrying too much speed, I slid across the gravel, righting myself just before the edge. Turning and running towards Carver would be counter-productive considering it was uphill, so I kept heading down the hill towards the ocean.
The path snaked around a corner. I caught the light of my pursuer swing past me to the side, which meant they were still some way up the hill and yet to round the corner. I knew the path opened up a little just before the rat’s nest. I’d be hard to pick it out in the dark. The trees rose up either side to more or less channel unsuspecting students into the pit, and that was it.
Now with purpose, perspiration edged its way across my brow before being cooled by the night air. My heart was frantic. My head thudded along in rhythm, my senses alert.
I glanced back and saw my pursuer was gaining rapidly, perhaps no more than thirty yards behind me, crashing through the edge of the trees. I knew what I had to do and summoned my burning legs to push harder.
Sound drifted further back and the ground between us lengthened until all I could hear were distant, nonchalant noises and the sound of my own breathing cutting through the night.
It wasn’t far now. The path narrowed. I flung myself to the trees on the right, twenty feet or so away from wide, circular mouth of the rat’s nest. I pressed myself up against the body of a tree trunk as my chest expanded and contracted.
It seemed like hours passed before I heard heavy boots stamping down the track. Above, the moon wasn’t much more than a thin stain in the sky, which meant little light. If you didn’t know the hole was there, it would be almost impossible to avoid it.
A sheet of lightning broke out over the horizon, flashing everything into pin-sharp focus just as the figure was about to plunge into the nest’s depths. They pulled up just in time, teetering on the edge.
I made my move. I leapt out from the tree, arms locked in front, and pushed them hard in the small of the back with a double palm strike.
And there it was. A gasp, like air escaping a bag, a rush of wind as they fell and a sickening crunch below. Like the cracking of twigs. But I knew as well as anyone there were no twigs to be found at the bottom of that hole.
Silence.
Forty-nine percent of me didn’t want to look down there, but morbid curiosity won out. It was too dark and far too quiet for anything to be alive, and given that, I was thankful the searchlight had gone out.
I stared down and began to question whether there was really a bottom to the whole thing at all or if it was just some Journey to the Center of the Earth sinkhole full of proto-human apes and arachnids.
I wondered if all this rain was collecting down there, slowly pooling around the body. Drowning on land in some God-forsaken shithole wouldn’t be the best way to go, but I reminded myself it was me or him, him or us, maybe all of us, or some other grammatically defunct justification.
It was then I noticed a sheet of paper on the ground to my left, presumably from the soldier. I picked it up, wet and soggy, holding it towards the sky.
It was a map of the school, schematics, with the same foreign characters as I’d seen on the one on floor in the girls’ dorm. I let go, watching it float down into the hole.
I stood there for a while. Truthfully, it may have been that the humanness in me wanted to hear some sound filter its way to the top. At least then I would not have made the transition to murderer. I would not be crossing River Styx with a heavy conscience weighing the boat down into the waters. I would not drown.
Bloody Ms. Pearson. I could not shake her from my memory. In my head night gave way to day and once again I was staring at the mess in its entirety. The glass was broken, her body was broken on the grass outside the classroom, but her eyes bore into my soul, smashing it into something completely unfamiliar.
I saw Mom in the same position, a rosy bloom expanding from her torso, her hand reaching out to me but her eyes empty – gone. I couldn’t put her face together. I was starting to forget what it looked like. How could I not remember her? My own mother.
It all coagulated together, the rat’s nest and my memories, until I couldn’t be sure that I was staring into the rat’s nest, hell or some metaphysical portal into myself.
A puddle collected on the ground in front of me where whoever-it-was had stood. In-between the square mesas created by boot print were canals of black water. A sheet of lightning rolled its way across the ocean and suddenly it was like looking into a mirror. I didn’t see myself. I saw a monster.
Spooked, I turned toward Carver. I didn’t quite know what I expected to see, but it was just as I’d left it – a giant, stony headstone on the hill.
I stood there against the elements watching it and waiting for light. I imagined Logan in there, cold on the floor. Alone.
I made up my mind. I would go back. I had to be sure it was really him and not some mirror-image doppelganger do-gooder who had the real Logan locked away. Screw the others. Clearly they weren’t about to shoot me anytime soon. I was the God-damn President’s daughter.
Everything seemed green and glassy at that moment. Treetops shivered with a fresh gust of wind, heaven itself groaned and new rain began to fall, but I was going back to Carver. I was going back to school, to see my Logan.
#
The door to the side room was open and unguarded, or at least as far as I could tell. Entering the school, I closed it gently behind me, where it continued to tap against the doorframe in a woody Morse code.
I was thankful to be inside again, even if it was an extended march to the gallows. The jacket had kept my upper half proportionately dry to the bottom, yet every step I took was followed by an extended patch of water. Each looked like a Rorschachian ink-blot, liquid patterns expanding outward in accordance with the rise and fall of the floor. There was no sign of anyone else. For all intents and purposes I was alone.
I stepped into the smaller, adjoining room Logan had been taken into. It was dark, but I could see well enough. My fears were confirmed. Logan’s body was there, face down on the floor. He looked longer and unnaturally pale bar the blood pooled around it. His jacket had been hastily thrown over his head, the source of it all. His shoes and socks were missing.
I turned to the corner as nausea rose up. It came so quickly I was forced to abandon all stealth. I focused on the join from the floor to the wall until it subsided, breathing long and deep. I wouldn’t turn around again. There was nothing more to see.
Is this what you have become? I told myself. You’re standing in a corner with your hands on your hips awaiting Death. Why not roll out the red carpet?
I thought of the man I’d just pushed into the hole. I was violent. I was not normal. The judge had said so herself. I needed help, but no one here would ever be able to mold me back to normality. But what if I was drawn here for this very moment, to take the fight to them?
These people were responsible for the disappearance. They were behind it, surely. They’d taken everyone away and for some reason, me, they’d come back. They’d worked out who I was.
Fuck them. If they wanted me, they were going to have to work for it. One in the hole, one with a hole in his head. That left the goon who killed Logan and the ringleader – two on one. I’d had worse odds than that before and come out kicking. This would be a walk in the park.
Standing there, willing myself into action, I felt like a pseudo-surrogate lover. Logan had been ripped from my arms. I would never see him again. I should have been thankful then for the time we had shared together. I could still feel him on my lips, they burned with it, but all I could consider was what had been taken away. I pictured him angling his body above me. “Am I hurting you?” No. “Are you okay?” Yes.
That’s not reality, I told myself. That’s a twelve-dollar ticket down at the Paragon and a lap full of popcorn. That’s a one-hundred-and-seventy-page slab of chick-lit l
eft on the kitchen table. That’s not what really happens or, at least, that’s not what happens to me. That’s not what we will experience together.
This angered me. I was angered.
Amazingly, the knife was still in place. I reached around and fished it out. The handle caught on the fleshy pre-bum of my lower back. I liked the feeling.
I turned the knife in my hand. Logan’s body reflected in the blade, and I retched again.
My head spun. I knelt, concentrating only on a small fissure in the floor. I was conscious of a new feeling. It was my old friend Anger and his BFF Clarity.
I’d go to them. I’d walk these halls until I was close enough to bury this knife into their bodies. Calculated – That’s what they called it. That’s what I would do. That’s what I would be.
#
I moved into the dining hall and was all but a shadow. I stayed low and rolled my feet from front to back, which had the desired effect of muting my movement.
I saw the body of the fallen soldier, the one who had shot at us in the sick bay. His gun was gone.
My breathing had slowed, but it felt like my whole body was beating. I tucked my sodden hair down the back of my dress more so to make full use of my peripheral vision than anything else. I felt it gather between my shoulder blades as I moved, wet and reptilian.
There was a green haze, a borealis. It was making it increasingly harder to see as I walked through the auditorium. Some presence passed in front of me and I bent back to jab at it with the knife. Something grabbed me from behind, loosely around my waist, so I drew the knife around and back, slashing, but there was nothing there.
I kept walking and they kept appearing. Each corner or crevice hid new horrors. They’d contorted their bodies into the walls. The only giveaway was the beady green eyes glued to their head.
I panicked and ran through the auditorium. Seats slid past me left and right until I was through the door next to the stage, standing in the limbo between haunt and habitation.
I checked every room in the hall as I passed. Each time I’d expect someone to be standing there, but there were just beds and boxes in black, form only to be found from the half-light that had filtered through the breaches in curtains or windows.
One of them was in the next room. I rushed at their body and forced the knife through. It connected with something solid instead of the dough and flesh I’d imagined before the lamp and the shirt that was slung around it slid from the blade and fell to the floor, the bulb breaking.
Thunder covered up the aberration. I felt impossibly stupid. I’d failed this simple test. Turning to face the door, I expected another one of them to be there at my back, but the space was empty.
For a split second the coward in me surfaced. There were beds, cupboards. They wouldn’t find me until light, whereupon they’d promptly vanish with the darkness or start to dissolve in the sun. They didn’t have time to check everywhere.
I saw Logan in my mind. The blood that once filled his lips, those lips that locked with mine hours ago, was now flowing out onto the floor and with it the life we might have had together. I couldn’t contain the rage. It surged through me so fast I was little more than a puppet to the intoxicating rush of chemicals telling me to make violent amends.
I moved back out and into the bathrooms. I didn’t stop to look in the mirrors in fear what I would see would be a deeply fragmented version of my former self. Instead, I looked to the walls and their dirty white, but they held little clue where to find the others. A toilet remained on a constant loop, hissing at me as I carefully closed the door and exited.
Outside, in the hall, things were still green, but blacker than before, and it became harder to keep myself free of walls that were continually closing in.
One of them appeared. They were standing right in front of me. I slashed at them wildly, but again, the knife went right through into air. I kept at it until something connected. I saw sparks, which struck me as odd. They don’t have flesh, I thought. They’re robots. Dandy.
Then they were gone, the ghost robots.
There was a strong sense of déjà vu as I walked through the dorm halls. It wasn’t that the surroundings looked familiar, because they did, but more so the feeling of viewing them alone – again. I questioned whether the last few days even existed at all or if I had just returned from the beach to find a building without bodies, a school without students. Any second I expected Logan to walk around the corner and duck away from the hockey stick.
What was different was the rain. It was comforting. Each droplet snipped away at the silence. It was like turning a TV on in the background, even if the only thing on was a rice fight.
I’d lost where I was, largely because everything seemed so damned similar in the dark. I knew I was in one of the dorms, but as I looked into the rooms they were full of shapes, not objects, and everything became unisex under the blanket of night.
I reached the end of the hall, turned the corner. As I went to start up the stairs, I thought better of it and slumped down next to the wall. My head hurt from spinning around, and my legs had become leaden weights attached to my body. It was nice to just sit and be still.
I noted I was in a prime position. There was a wall directly behind and in front of me, so that was covered, and everything to the left and the right I could see in my peripheral vision. Besides, if someone was coming down the stairs I was bound to hear them first. There was the door at the end of the hall in front of me and just to my right, probably locked.
I twirled the knife around in my hand, but grew tired of it quickly. Instead, I stared at the door at the end of the hall. Compared to the rest of Carver it was almost an afterthought. It was cheap and tacky. Some of the paint had peeled off the sides and bottom. They should have left it plain wood. Wood and stone go together. Paint and stone do not.
My inspection turned to the doorknob. I flinched because I thought it was turning, but there was something else. There was a reflection in it, one of them. A solitary figure was trapped inside it. They couldn’t see me, though. I was around the corner. I was night.
They were coming. They were real. My eyes didn’t move from the doorknob. Shifting them might have given me away. I needed to be a rock until they were right there. Then I could strike. I wouldn’t bring up the knife until the last second.
I counted and pictured sheep jumping over fences.
Forty sheep and they were right there upon me.
Teenagers don’t use the rational part of their brain, you know. I read that somewhere. It’s just all emotion bubbling away up there.
I tapped into it. Rationality was far gone. It had been replaced by revenge. I wasn’t even shaking any more.
I stood quickly when they were about to stumble on my position. I spun, faced them and plunged in the knife. I pushed it in, as far as it would go, into their gut. It was tough, like trying to push a pin through leather. I instantly felt something warm flow out around the blade and over their poncho.
This one had no green discs for eyes, but in the tri-axis of holes the eyes and mouth twisted, at first defeated and then something else. Balaclava or not, I could tell their face was scrunching up in bewilderment, a toddler that had just had its favorite toy removed.
Then there was the pain.
The pupils seemed bigger, even in the dark, impossibly large, and they stared at me like an ever-widening abyss. There was a gasp, but it turned to a gurgle.
The action and the thrust had put something into motion. I started to panic. With great effort I pulled the blade out and let it drop fall to the floor. Upturned, it bore a red-tinged reflection of myself. What I see there glinting in the metal wasn’t human.
I looked to my hands only to discover mud had blended with blood, impossible to tell one from the other. It was all dark, black, as if I’d reached into pure evil.
The figure stood there, hands holding the wound. It spoke one word, and my heart froze.
Logan.
13. RECONSTRUCTION<
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All I could say was ‘no’ for the longest time. I said it over and over, quickly and quietly, as a mother would a naughty child, but the only person I was attempting to scald was myself.
Shaking, Logan pulled off the balaclava, revealing a sweat-logged face scrunched up in a muddle of pain. His eyes were wide with surprise.
He said my name, my true name, his lips barely parting.
You were supposed to leave impaled objects inside the body. I remembered that. I looked down and the knife was still there on the ground, bloody and black. Next to it was a large gun, a rifle. I hadn’t even noticed him drop it.
I started to evaluate the situation. I pulled Logan down into a seated position against the wall. It didn’t take much effort; he had already started slumping downwards of his own accord. I leaned in close, trying to avoid the wound that was already discharging some sort of dark, mucilaginous liquid I could only assume was blood.
“Press here,” he huffed, grabbing my hand and forcing it onto the wound. “Add as much pressure – as you can. We’ve got to stop – the bleeding.”
‘We’ – It sounded odd. I assumed he was trying to share some of the blame and alleviate the guilt that might very well cripple me to unconsciousness if I gave it the time – something of which was now of the essence. I still, however, felt solely responsible for this whole fucked-up mess.
His hands cupped mine, my palms pushing downwards on his abdomen unsteadily. I felt hot blood run out over my fingers.
Every time Logan spoke almost every word was followed by a breathy intake. “I – think – you missed – major organs. We’ve got to – get – out of sight.”
“I’m so sor–” I started, but he put a finger to my lips, closed his eyes and shook his head.
“It’s not – your fault. That room.”
He was gesturing with his eyes at one of the dorm rooms directly across from us.
“Can you stand?” I asked, trying to maintain composure, but my voice shaky. Fresh tears fell.
Logan looked up, saw the concern pooling in my eyes and nodded once.
