The Night Will Find Us

by Matthew Lyons

  “No, I’m supposed to be alive,” said Nate, jabbing a finger in Parker’s direction. “You’re the reason I’m not.” He held his hands out in a lazy Christ-pose. “Ta-da!”

  “So you’re what? A ghost now?” There was an embarrassing shake in Parker’s voice.

  Nate shrugged. “Man, hell if I know. Last thing I remember was telling you that you weren’t going to do it, and then … you did it.”

  Parker remembered things differently. His skin still stung from all the mean, ugly shit Nate had sprayed at him the day before. He could still feel where Nate had jammed a finger into his chest.

  “It didn’t hurt or anything, dying. In case you were wondering. It just felt like somebody’d poked me in the forehead, and then everything sort of got cold and blinked away, and then there was just nothing. Like, noth-ing. Like yanking the sheet clean off the bed, but instead of a mattress and box springs underneath, it was just … void. Empty black space where real life should have been.”

  “That sounds terrible.”

  “Yeah, it was pretty goddamn horrible, Parker. Then, like a second later, I opened my eyes, and I was in the woods again. And I gotta tell you, I have never been happier to be anywhere. Like, at least I was somewhere instead of nowhere. I fucking cried, no shit. I sat down and cried for like an hour, and when that wore off, I realized I could hear this … ringing in my ears. At first I thought it was nothing, just leftover noise from you blowing my brains out, but I figured out that wasn’t actually the case pretty quick. You know the sound I’m talking about, like one of those headaches you can kind of hear? Yeah, that. Fully drumming inside my brain too. Faint to begin with, but it got quieter or louder depending on which way I was walking. First I tried walking away from that shit, but the thing was, the headache got worse the farther away I got from the sound. So I figured, hell with it. I’m already dead, might as well try going the other way, see what happens, you know? Not like it was gonna kill me, right?

  “Anyway, I walked all afternoon and all night. Followed the sound through the trees until it was the only thing I could hear. Followed it all night. Then, the second I walked up and saw you sleeping, the noise just—” He snapped his fingers on both his hands. “Gone. Like it was never there at all. You gotta figure that means something, right?”

  “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  Nate rolled his eyes. “Fuck makes you think I know? I woke up like this. You’re the one who paid attention in school and shit. You learn anything there that could help us out here? This kind of shit usually means something, right?”

  “Everything means something, or nothing.”

  “Helpful, Parker.”

  “But now that I think of it,” Parker mused, “there is one thing that I learned. Might be helpful.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Ghosts aren’t real,” said Parker. “So you’re not fucking real.”

  Nate cracked a smile and prodded at his own body with sausage fingers. “I don’t know, I feel pretty real to me. Not exactly a hundred-percent solid”—he reached down and tried to pick up a rock from the ground, but his fingers passed right through it—”but, you know, I’m here. Real quick, though, you ever have a deer run through you? It’s real weird, I’ll tell you that much for free. I don’t think it was a lot of fun for the deer, either, honestly.”

  Nate took a step closer, and Parker took a step back, jabbing the head of the black hatchet out at the dead boy.

  “No, no, no, don’t, okay? Just don’t,” Parker said. “I’m having a bad dream, or a nervous breakdown, or I don’t know what, but there’s no way that you’re really Nate, incorporeal or not. You’re some broken part of my brain fucking with me for whatever reason. Nate’s dead. You’re. Not. Him.”

  “‘An undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato!’” Nate crowed, doing a little dance where he stood. “Now you say it. C’mon, Park. You know the next part—‘There’s more of gravy than of grave about you.’ Say it.”

  Parker didn’t say anything. Nate gave him the finger.

  “Fine. You make for a shitty Scrooge, anyway, and I’m not too hot on playing Marley, either.”

  Something inside Parker softened, then broke. “When did you read that?”

  “What?”

  “A Christmas Carol. When did you read it? You hate reading. You always said that it was gay, which doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t know you’d read any Dickens.”

  Nate gave him a sour smile. “I didn’t. I liked the version with the Muppets and the old English guy from those Batman movies when I was a kid, though. My dad always made us watch that one before we opened presents.” A shadow passed over his eyes. “But I guess that’s over and done with, huh?”

  Something cold and weird climbed up Parker’s back, from belt-line to shoulders, and stayed there, weighing him down.

  “You shouldn’t have made me do it,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper.

  “I didn’t make you do anything, Parker. You brought the gun, you stuck it in my face, and you pulled the trigger. Everything that happened is one-hundred-percent your fault. All because you couldn’t keep from losing your stupid temper. You don’t get to ignore the truth because it sucks.”

  That same old anger flared behind Parker’s ribs, bright blue and burning hot, but he didn’t scream at the ghost, he didn’t curse, he didn’t do anything. He just watched Nate for three long breaths, and then he knelt and collected his things, hefted his pack onto his shoulders, and walked away into the woods.

  Parker didn’t have any interest in putting up with Nate’s shit dead any more than he did when he was alive.

  He shoved through the trees at a death-march pace, using his long stride to put as much distance between him and the old campsite as he could, driving his boots into the earth like they were punishments from God, splitting the branches in his path with bone-breaking cracks. It felt good to break things, all of a sudden.

  Up ahead of him, Nate stepped out from between the trees, wagging a finger like a disappointed babysitter.

  “Oops. Sowwy. You can’t get rid of me that easily,” Nate said. “Not twice, friendo. This time, I’m sticking around. We’re going to be best buds.”

  Parker wove around him and kept walking, kicking sprays of pebbles and dirt from his path.

  “Seriously, man. I’m not going anywhere, so you might as well start getting used to it,” Nate called after him. After another second, Parker stopped in place and looked at him, his shoulders falling in a two-slope avalanche.

  “What do you even want from me?”

  Nate made a face like he’d tasted something disgusting. “From you? Nothing. Do you honestly think I want to be stuck with you for the rest of my afterlife, or whatever the hell we’re going to call this? Honestly, I’d rather cut my own tongue out with a pair of my mom’s sewing scissors than spend eternity with you. But I’ve got this, remember?” He tapped two fingers against his temple. “The farther I get from you, the more it feels like somebody’s pounding nails through my skull. So until we figure out how to unfuck this glitch, curse, whatever it is, I’m sticking next to your big ass like stink on shit.”

  Parker shook his head and sighed.

  “Fine. Whatever. I don’t care. Could you at least do it quietly?”

  Nate showed him that same sick grin he always made when he was being too clever by half. “That doesn’t sound like me to me.”

  Parker walked around him, studying the angle of the sun, trying to get his bearings. A moment later, Nate stepped out from behind another tree and fell into lockstep with him.

  “Stop doing that,” said Parker.

  “What?”

  “The teleporting thing. Stop it. If you have to be here with me, just be here with me. Stop messing with me and just be a decent person for once in your life.”

  “Says the murderer.”

  “Nate, please.”

  The ghost-kid threw his hands u
p. “Fine, Jesus. Have it your way. See if I care. You were never any fun anyway.”

  They came to a sunken clearing and wove around the bog-like wet patch in the middle that boiled with mosquitoes to crest the slope on the other side. Parker swept low branches and brush away with the hatchet, getting a better feel for it with each swing. The trees were thicker here, so far off the paths, much older and denser. He hacked through another dry tangle and caught Nate watching him with squinted, riverstone-black eyes.

  “What?” Parker asked.

  “You know, I didn’t see it yesterday, but I think I get it now,” said Nate. “Why you came out here.”

  Parker didn’t even turn his head to look. “Enlighten me then,” he said, still carving a path through the trees.

  “You came looking for him.”

  Parker stopped in place, just for a moment, feeling his guts spool out the front of him like a broken measuring tape, trying to keep his face from betraying him. Don’t say it. Please don’t say it. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Sure you do. You didn’t really want us to come out here and camp together, because who gives a shit about camping? No, you came out here to find your dad. Didn’t you?”

  The words hit Parker like a truck, and for the second time in two days, he wanted more than anything to shoot Nate in the face.

  Chloe heard the sound before she even opened her eyes: a coo and warble, followed by the airy, fluttering snap of wings. Slowly, she sat up and unzipped the flap of her tent, careful to make as little noise as possible, then peeked her head out to see.

  The blanket had blown off of Nate in the night and now hung awkwardly in the branches of a tree on the far side of the campsite. Something black and thick had settled over the top of his body, like a sort of horrible, writhing moss. It took her eyes a second to adjust to the light before she understood what she was seeing.

  Crows. Nate was covered in crows.

  Crouched in her tent, Chloe watched with mounting revulsion as the horde of birds clustered and shifted on top of her dead friend, flapping and lashing their dirty black wings at each other, jockeying for position as they stitched their sharp beaks into their cold perch. Chloe scrambled to her feet with a revolted wail. They were eating him.

  They tore at his body with short beaks like scissor blades, snipping at his bulk through the holes they’d torn in his clothes, coming away dipped in red and dangling bloody strips of his insides. Horrified, Chloe threw a rock at the churning black mass. It sailed in a high curve, flying wide and hitting the ground in the distance with a thud.

  “Go!” Chloe barked at the birds. “Get out of here! Get out of here!”

  She sent another stone flying at the murder of crows, harder this time. This one flew lower, bouncing off the ground to glance across Nate’s slack face, opening up a stripe of sour purple-red along his cheekbone. The gash didn’t bleed; it just hung there in his skin, like a punched-in smile. She heard the other tent unzipping, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nicky and Josh emerge, blankets and arms wrapped around each other.

  Nicky saw it first.

  “Chloe, what the hell is … Oh, god. Oh, Jesus.”

  She bent at the hip and retched onto the ground while Josh stared. Chloe didn’t wait. She’d had enough of this shit. She hefted one last rock and sent it flying true, landing dead center in the mass of birds, smashing one open against Nate’s body as the rest took flight in a frightened black wave that disappeared into the trees like smoke.

  Chloe toed the rock off of Nate’s chest and watched as it rolled down and away, coming to a rest by the dead campfire. On top of the body, the dead crow was half-flattened against Nate’s bulk, its skull split open and leaking, body bent and warped, broken wings glued with fresh blood to the corpse below it. Underneath the bird, Nate was a mess. His face and chest looked like someone had gone after them with a flathead screwdriver, pitting out little red divots of skin that didn’t bleed. Some of the birds had been at his eyes too; his lids hung in rags over hollow-looking sockets that wept a kind of clear jelly that Chloe didn’t want to look too closely at. His lips were torn to shreds, same with the outside edges of his nose. He didn’t even look like Nate anymore. Now he was just this big, bloody dead thing on display before them.

  “We can’t leave him like this,” Chloe said in a strangled voice. “We can’t.”

  Josh absently turned to look at the blanket still splayed in the branches. “I don’t think I can reach that without climbing.”

  “No, we need to bury him or something. We should do it together.”

  Nicky made a sick, sad sound in her throat and turned away from them.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t take this shit,” she said. “I won’t. Just, goddammit. God fucking dammit.”

  Nicky stepped back and then launched herself back into the tent. A second later, Chloe heard the muffled sound of her sobbing, a noise she’d already gotten too used to. Josh didn’t even seem to have noticed that Nicky was gone. His face had gone pale and queasy.

  “Alright, that means it’s you and me,” said Chloe. “Come on, help me drag him. Josh?”

  But he didn’t say anything, staring at the picked-apart mess that used to be their friend. Chloe leaned in to break his sight line, waving her hand at his face.

  “Hey. Hey, Josh. Right here.”

  A second later, his eyes cleared, and he saw her again. “Sorry, what?”

  “We have to cover him up, or they’ll come back. Let’s go.”

  He nodded to himself. “Right. Yeah. Okay.”

  They dragged Nate by his arms to just beyond the edges of the campsite, out where the trees got a little thicker, looking for a place where he’d fit, laid out like he was. The feel of his cold skin against hers was awful and unnerving; it made her want to scrub her palms until they bled. It wasn’t natural, dealing with the dead like this.

  When they found a spot that would work, they left him there and went rock hunting, gathering up as many as they could carry. After twenty or so minutes, they were pretty sure they had enough to do the job, so they began to cover him over. First they laid an outer ring, tracing Nate’s silhouette in stone, then piled whatever they could on top, building their friend a loose, formfitting coffin piece by piece.

  “This isn’t really how I thought I’d spend the first day of summer break,” Josh said, stacking stone after stone across the summit of Nate’s big belly. “Me neither.”

  “I’d at least thought I’d be a little hungover by now. Or a lot hungover.”

  “Same.”

  “I was looking forward to that hangover,” said Josh. “I was really going to earn that hangover. Nicky was too.”

  Chloe kept her head down and stacked stones. “I think we all were.”

  “She’s not as tough as you guys think she is, you know,” Josh said. “She likes to play the hard-ass, but she’s so not that. She’s sensitive. All that toughness—it’s just a front.”

  Faint annoyance crackled along Chloe’s neck hearing him say it, doubly so because he was right.

  “I know, Josh,” she said, biting back her irritation. “We’ve known her since elementary school.”

  “I’m not saying you haven’t. I’m just saying, I think I might see parts of her that you guys don’t.”

  “You’re saying you know her better than we do? Better than I do?”

  “No, no, that’s not it at all. I’m just saying that, you know, this is a screwed-up situation—”

  “For all of us.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a screwed-up situation for all of us, Josh. Not just you, and not just her. Everybody.”

  “Well, sure, I was just—”

  “I know what you were just,” Chloe said wearily. “But do me a favor and save it. We don’t need more shit to deal with right now.”

  Josh closed his mouth so quickly, Chloe heard his teeth click behind his lips. They went back to piling stones on top of Nate in silence.

/>   “I’m sorry,” Josh eventually said. “I wasn’t trying to be an asshole. I just … I worry about her, you know? I really like her a lot, Chloe. I love her. I want to make sure she’s going to be okay.”

  Chloe placed another rock, then another. “She likes you, too, man. She likes you a lot. And, honestly, if you can help her be less scared sometimes, then god bless.”

  Josh blushed, just the tiniest bit.

  “I know.”

  Chloe shot him a sideways glance. “But you gotta back off when it comes to telling people shit about their friends. You’ve been around for a few months now, and I like you and all, but that doesn’t mean you’ve got the right. This isn’t your place, and it’s not your circle. Maybe someday, but not now, and definitely not for a while. I’m glad you’re looking out for her, but right now is a profoundly shitty time to try and make people pick sides. We’re all on the same side, at least until we get out of the Barrens. Okay?”

  “Sure, yeah,” Josh said. “Of course.”

  “Good answer.”

  It didn’t take them long to finish building the cairn, and when it was done, the stones were piled half as high as Chloe stood. It would do for now; at least it would keep more crows from getting to Nate’s body. She wasn’t sure about anything bigger, but she didn’t know what else lived out here. Were there coyotes in the Pine Barrens? Wolves? Bears?

  When they got back to the campsite, Nicky was already dressed and sitting by the firepit, hanging her head between her knees. Chloe exchanged a look with Josh, who nodded over toward his shared tent.

  Go, Chloe mouthed to him. I’ve got this.

  Josh peeled off and went to the tent to change, while Chloe crossed the distance to Nicky and stood next to her, looking at the back of her head, gazing at the wildfire hair tumbling down around her shoulders.

  “Hey, Nicky.”

  “Hey yourself,” Nicky said, her voice flat and empty.

  “How are you doing? You okay?”