Dark Eden

by Patrick Carman

  Can you believe our parents are making us do this?

  I shook my head no, I couldn’t believe it. But the question had been around too long, and the answer didn’t connect. I looked like an idiot.

  “Are you feeling okay?” she asked, her eyes crinkling into crow’s feet.

  “Yeah,” I managed. “I’m fine. How are you?”

  Oh my God, what a moron. My face was burning up. My tongue felt like sandpaper.

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head just enough that her black ponytail swished back and forth. “Doesn’t this whole thing seem a little weird? I don’t even know these people.”

  This was nice, as if she and I were us and everyone else was them. If only my throat wasn’t tightening up. I felt as if I was sucking a chocolate milkshake through a swizzle stick.

  “You’re sure you’re okay, right?” she asked again, leaning away from me as if I might throw up on her blue sweatshirt at any moment. And then it happened, the thing I’d feared would happen. My mind seized on a thought: I couldn’t be the only one in this van who knew at least something about what was going down. Was everyone looking at me while I struggled to catch my breath? Everyone in this van was sick, sick with fear or something worse.

  What’s wrong with Will Besting? Hey, everyone, look at him. No, seriously. Look at him!

  I kept telling myself to calm down, I knew better, everything was fine. These people had never met me, and I’d never met them. They’d never even met each other, so they weren’t a clique I couldn’t be a part of. I knew them better than they knew themselves. I knew their secrets and their fears. I knew they were just as messed up as I was.

  If Dr. Stevens or my parents thought for one second I was going anywhere with any of them, they were sorely mistaken.

  I’d sooner swim in a pond full of piranhas.

  I stared out the window of the van after that, imagining my brother, Keith, in my room going toe-to-toe with robots. I’d be gone a week, and when I returned, the long line of high-score holders that ran down the home screen wouldn’t say

  WILL

  WILL

  WILL

  and more WILL.

  And they wouldn’t all say KEITH either, because that’s not the way it works. Bloodthirsty younger brothers are smarter than that. All ten slots would be filled, straight down the screen.

  GOOD

  LUCK

  BEATING

  ME

  NOW

  KEITH!

  KEITH!

  KEITH!

  KEITH!

  KEITH!

  I should have locked my door and crawled out the window so he couldn’t touch my stuff.

  The van turned off the main highway onto a country road, and Dr. Stevens started talking. She told us we were heading into the mountains now and began reeling off instructions. This had the effect of shutting up everyone as she droned on about how we were all going to get to know each other, how great it was all going to be.

  “I want each of you to think about this week as the beginning of the end,” she instructed, turning onto a gravel road. “The end of the weight you’ve carried around for too long. Lean on each other, get to know one another. And let the process take its course.”

  I was getting my first look at these people after having heard their voices for weeks on end. There was Connor Bloom, a big guy with a crew cut, the kind of athlete that dominated where brute force was a key asset on the field. Alex Chow’s facade didn’t fit the stereotypical brainy type—he was more GQ than I’d expected, but I knew better. Alex was smarter than all of us put together. He just preferred we didn’t know it. Ben Dugan was both skinny and short, a condition that lowered his confidence where girls were concerned. But I liked him right off because he didn’t have that short-guy quality of being in your face all the time. Avery Varone was dark haired and pretty and quiet; Kate Hollander was blond and beautiful and overbearing—both matching pretty much what I’d expected. And Marisa Sorrento was everything I’d hoped for: a sweet smile, perfect skin, nervous but in control. And, importantly, she didn’t seem entirely out of my reach. If I had the guts to ask her out, it felt possible that she wouldn’t laugh in my face.

  We would drive four miles on the gravel road, where I would hear the crunching sound of our wheels crushing rocks. I knew this. I had seen the map taking up space in the folder marked THE 7. After that, two more miles on a dirt road lined with random trails shooting off into the woods. On the map the trails had reminded me of the roots on a huge weed I’d pulled in my own backyard a week before. Four miles down a gravel road, two miles down a weedy-looking dirt road, and farther still. What would I feel if I were these people? I knew how far we had to go and what we’d find when we got there, but no one else did. There was a stillness in the group until we reached a locked gate across the road and Dr. Stevens got out of the van and opened it.

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” someone said, and everyone laughed nervously.

  It was a girl Kate Hollander, sitting in the passenger seat next to Dr. Stevens. She was unapproachable for mere mortals, which made what I knew about her seem untrue. If I hadn’t heard her say certain things, I’d have categorized them as lies about a popular girl told by her enemies behind her back.

  We drove another half mile, descending steeply into a thick forest of trees. The road was a washboard, jarring me so violently that my teeth chattered. I glanced at Marisa, who was staring out the window like everyone else. I wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder and tell her this was all going to be okay, but I knew better. She’d lost interest in me like all the rest. I was a ghost to these people.

  The road came to an end, and Dr. Stevens turned the van around, pointing it back up the steep road. The van doors were thrown open and everyone got out, strapping on backpacks bursting with provisions.

  “Stay to the right, it’s less than a mile,” Dr. Stevens said. She was standing before us, one hand still on the door handle as if it was a life preserver.

  Ben Dugan, who was a head shorter than I was, turned ashen.

  “You’re not coming with us?”

  I expected the rest of the group to laugh. Under different circumstances I’m sure they would have; but they were just as attached to Dr. Stevens as Ben was, and we were standing in the middle of nowhere. None of us wanted to forge the path alone.

  “This is the beginning of the end of your problems. Right here, right now,” Dr. Stevens said. She looked at the ground and drew in a sharp breath, then her eyes were on me, pooling with tears. “You’ll have to learn to trust one another.”

  “Lord of the Flies,” Kate said, putting an arm around Connor Bloom, the biggest guy in the group. “You and me to the end.”

  I knew it wasn’t going to be like that; but all the same, allegiances were being made. The weak were already being set aside.

  Dr. Stevens opened the van door and got in, staring at us through the open window.

  “I can’t fix you, but he can. A cure is waiting for each of you down that path.”

  And then, just like that, she was gone and we were alone.

  “No signal, that’s just great.”

  Ben Dugan was holding his cell phone over his head, squinting into the sun, hoping for a lifeline out of the wilderness.

  “Anyone not on Sprint?” Connor asked, scratching his short-cropped hair with the back of his knuckles and waving his phone around, trying to lure in a signal (or maybe a lightning bolt, it was hard to tell).

  “We haven’t had any service for an hour,” said Marisa. “Where have you guys been?”

  No patience for dumb boys, I thought. Noted.

  Everyone had switched to taking pictures in the absence of text messages flying back and forth about a wild adventure they were on. Better to at least have something to post online when it was all over than to arrive on Facebook with nothing to show for a week off the grid. Doing nothing was out of the question. They had to be doing something, better still if it was ter
ribly interesting.

  As we walked, I looked overhead from my position at the back of the line in search of the sun but couldn’t find it. Tall trees full of green needles crowded the sky. We wound back and forth through deep forest, and a pair of crows cawed angrily, following us at a distance.

  The path was wide enough for two people to walk side by side, and when we’d begun, it was Kate and Connor at the front. Ben Dugan had fallen into step with Alex Chow, the two of them already acting as if they’d known each other a long time. Marisa walked beside the quietest of us all, the one I’d been most curious about, the one named Avery. She’d been in a bunch of foster homes during the past few years, and wasn’t doing so well in the one she was in when we departed, either. Marisa drifted back and fell into step at my side as I took a deep breath, the smell of pine and dirt kicked up on the path filling my lungs.

  “Wow, she’s quiet,” Marisa whispered in my direction. “Kind of like you.”

  I imagined me and Avery in a room, the blistering two-word conversation that would occur.

  Hi, she would say.

  Hi, I would say back.

  A morbid silence would settle in, and we’d stare at our shoes.

  Afternoon had arrived, and a late September heat was building as Marisa peeled off her sweatshirt.

  “It’s the same for you, right?” Marisa said, the two of us falling behind the group seven or eight steps. “You’ve never met any of them?”

  I glanced at her red T-shirt and tried to read the words written in black letters across her chest but failed. The angle was all wrong.

  “I don’t know them,” I said. Strictly speaking, this was a lie, but what else was I going to say? Actually, I know everything there is to know about all of these people, including you.

  I tried once more to read the words on her shirt, and my eyes fell on her bare arm, which didn’t look very different from a deep California tan I’d seen a thousand times before.

  “Alex is cute,” she said. “Too bad he’s gay.”

  “Really?” I said, the word out of my mouth so quickly I couldn’t take it back. I was having a conversation with her, or something like one.

  “Sure he is. He spent four or five hours shopping at REI, loading up for this thing. Nobody looks that good unless they really work at it.”

  I didn’t exactly see how this added up to anything more than preparedness, or maybe some kind of OCD, but what did I know?

  “Where do you go to school?” she asked me. “What grade are you in? Let me guess: junior, private school, very exclusive.”

  Wrong on all three counts, but I nodded yes. The truth? Homeschooled, technically a junior, but I’d been fast about my business so I was already doing freshman college courses online. The exclusive part, on second thought, was truer than she knew. I was a school of one.

  I made a last attempt to glimpse the words on her shirt, and this time she noticed.

  “Whatever,” she said; and, just like that, she was taking two steps to my one, the distance between us growing by the second.

  Was it my persistent glances at her curvy chest that bothered her, or was it my wordless nod of yes to her questions? Either way, I’d blown it.

  “Wait,” I said before she caught up to the rest. She turned, back-peddling away, and I finally saw the words on her shirt.

  I WANNA BE ADORED.

  That can be arranged, I thought. A good line if only I could have said it out loud, or possibly a really bad one she’d heard a hundred times already. I knew there was more to the message on the shirt then met the eye, and I wanted to say so; but my mouth turned as dry as dust on the path as she stopped and waited for me to catch up. I walked toward her, and it felt as if the world was tilting in my favor, if only for a split second.

  “What is it, Will? What do you want?”

  I wanted to say, My dad drives a delivery truck, my mom does alterations, I like your shirt, I don’t go to school. But I didn’t. The closer I got, the more nervous I felt. My mind drew a blank, and I stared off into the trees.

  Marisa shook her head and started up the path until she caught up with Avery, where the two of them walked in silence. I hooked my thumbs behind the straps of my backpack and followed, watching the heels of their shoes kick up dust.

  Everyone arrived at the fork in the path, gathering like a flock of ducklings behind Kate and Connor.

  “Come on, hurry up,” Ben yelled back at me, and the pack of six moved on toward the right. I coasted farther back because I knew we were getting close. Pretty soon the path would end and I’d miss my chance. Marisa offered one more fleeting look over her shoulder, our eyes meeting, and then she was gone.

  They were all of them gone, and I was alone at the fork, listening as their voices mingled with the wind in the trees and grew softer.

  After a time, I couldn’t hear them at all.

  The path to the left could hardly be called a trail at all. Everything in the wild of the forest seemed to cave in on itself the deeper I went, leaving little more than a bead of dirt running a line through thick underbrush. The trees remained, swaying ominously over my head; and there were crows, more of them now, watching my every move like sentries on a castle wall. I sensed a clearing to my right and left the trail altogether, hoping to catch a glimpse of the other six.

  Crawling along the floor of the woods was easy enough, like making a tunnel in a cornfield, and before I knew it I’d come to the very edge. I didn’t dare poke my head out of the thicket; I didn’t need to. I could see what lay before me through the crush of undergrowth just fine: a hidden place, rising unexpectedly out of the dirt. I knew what it was. I had the map from the folder marked THE 7.

  Fort Eden.

  The place sent a chill of dread down my spine from the moment I saw it. Low slung to the ground, made entirely of concrete slabs crawling with moss and vines. My first impression was of a massive casket left alone in the woods for years and years, overrun by a menacing forest of gloom. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking of the old Eden, the one in the Bible. Eden was supposed to be this perfect place where nothing ever died and people were always happy. But the fort was like the anti-Eden, the place left over after the fall of mankind. The woods were still woods, but they were wild and tangled and dark. There were no perfect days here, no laughing people.

  I saw them all—the six—standing in front of the fort with worried looks on their faces. Even confident Kate Hollander was rattled.

  “This can’t be right,” she said, her voice floating through the clearing in crystal clear shards.

  “We could go back,” Ben said, which is when everyone seemed to notice all at once that I wasn’t there. Words pinged sharply against my ears, as if they were fired from the barrel of a pellet gun.

  Alex: Whoa. Spooky. What was his name again?

  Connor: Will! Hey, come out, man.

  Ben: Should we go back and look for him?

  Kate: I’m just saying, if they think we’re living in that thing for a week, they can forget it.

  Marisa: Seriously, Kate?

  Avery: (Sullen, voiceless).

  I glanced from side to side, taking in the whole of the clearing, sizing up my options. There was the fort, a rectangle slab of hard corners with one giant door at the front and barred windows along its sides. A hundred feet to the left sat a smaller building, squared off at its sides and just as ghoulishly unappealing as Fort Eden. From the map I knew this was the Bunker, whatever that meant. A huge, fallen tree lay against the Bunker where the trunk had snapped in two, the top half resting like a dead animal on the flat roof. The pinecones and needles of the tree were long since gone, replaced by a swarm of brown mushrooms and clumps of stringy green moss. On the other side of Fort Eden, a pathway lead into the woods, beyond which I knew there was a pond.

  Before the others could make up their minds about whether they should go looking for me or climb the front steps and knock on the door to a menacing concrete fort, a person came out of the sma
ller building. I saw her first, because I’d been looking at the Bunker already. She was old, dressed as a person of the woods: a dark flannel shirt, work pants, boots. The woman walked morosely down the cobblestone path, slow and steady.

  “Who feels like running?” asked Ben, too loudly, I thought. But then, he would be feeling the terror start to rise at the back of his throat. The deeper we’d gone on the path, the quieter he’d become. He was beginning to sense the presence of things he wanted no part of.

  At the midway point of her journey between the Bunker and Fort Eden, the woman stopped. She was standing directly across from where I hid in the underbrush and was smelling the air like a dog catching a scent. Her gaze settled in my direction, and I had an uneasy feeling in my bones.

  She sees me.

  Later I would conclude that it had been a trick of the light through the trees. But at the time, hidden as I was and frozen in place, I was convinced that she’d searched the whole of the forest and settled her cobalt eyes directly on my face. Whoever she was, she had a severe face, emotionless and cold. Her hair was short and nearly white, with small flecks of black around the crown of her head. She grew tired of staring off into the trees, and soon she was stomping up the concrete steps of the fort.

  She seemed to take almost no notice of the bewildered group of teenagers until she’d cleared the last stair and turned on them.

  “I’m Mrs. Goring, the cook,” she said sternly. Her voice was papery but strong. “Not your maid or your mother. Act like grown-ups and I won’t spit in your oatmeal.”