Nicky twisted around and fixed Chloe with red, dark eyes. “No, I’m not. Are you?”
Chloe shook her head.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Great. Glad we got that cleared up.” Nicky pushed her hair back and gestured to the place the body had lain. “What did you do with the … with him?”
“We took him out into the trees and buried him.”
“You don’t have a shovel,” said Nicky.
“We piled rocks over him,” Chloe said. “Started with an outer ring and moved inward. It’s called a cairn. Learned about it in Euro History last year. I think it’ll keep things from getting at him, and that way the cops won’t have any problems finding him when they come.”
“They won’t,” Nicky said with a sneer.
“Won’t what?” Chloe asked, startled.
“The cops aren’t coming, Chloe. Nobody’s coming. Our phones aren’t working. It’s just us now, and we’re all going to die out here. I know it, and you know it too.”
Chloe sat down next to her. “I don’t know that, because it’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. We’re not getting out of here, because the forest doesn’t want us to leave.”
“Come on, that’s crazy.”
Nicky’s eyes flashed with anger.
“I looked for the path again,” she said. “While you guys were out burying him. It’s not there. It’s just gone. Like the forest just ate it all up.”
A cold thread of trepidation crept up Chloe’s spine. “It has to be there.”
“It isn’t.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Apparently it is.”
Frustration roiled in Chloe’s belly. “Look, you’re just not looking for it right, okay? It’s there. I know it’s there,” she insisted.
Nicky’s eyes filled up with fresh tears, and she turned away from Chloe, back to the dead campfire. “Why don’t you look for yourself then, if you’re so sure. See what you find.”
“Fine.” Chloe stood and went to the nearest edge of the campsite and started to walk a careful circuit around its perimeter. She knew she was going to stumble on it after a minute. She had to. Nicky was just upset. She wasn’t thinking straight.
Chloe took small steps, tracing the entire outside edge of the campsite, waiting for the dirt path to open up before her … but it didn’t. After a minute, she’d walked a full circle to stand right back where she’d started.
Nicky was right. The path was gone.
Chloe clenched her guts against the horrible vertigo drop that opened up inside her, clinging to rationality like a life preserver. This was not the time to be freaking out. She couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t.
Solutions. They needed solutions right now, not more panic.
“Nicky, I promise you, there is a way out of here,” Chloe told her. “We just have to find it. If it’s not the path we came in on, then there’ll be another, or we pick a direction and just start walking until we hit asphalt. This is New Jersey—there are highways everywhere.”
Nicky got really quiet for a second. “I heard you talking to him.”
Chloe’s stomach dropped. She’d overheard. Of course she’d overheard. The Barrens got so quiet at night it was probably impossible for her to not. But Chloe was pretty sure that she could still defuse this.
“Sorry, what?”
“Last night. On your radio, when you said you had to pee. You were out there talking to Parker. I heard you.” Chloe’s face flushed. “Nicky, I—”
“Don’t lie to me, okay? Just do me the courtesy of not standing there and lying to my face. I know what I heard, so don’t try and tell me I didn’t.”
Chloe lowered herself to the ground next to Nicky, but it felt more like a collapse than anything—like the little bit of strength left in her body had just rushed out of her, leaving her to fall like a dropped puppet.
“I had to see if he was okay, Nicky,” she said quietly. “He’s my cousin. I love him.”
“You should have told me you were doing it, instead of sneaking around. You always tell me everything. You always have.”
“I know I should have told you. I know. I’m sorry. I just … I know how pissed you are at him,” said Chloe. “I’m pissed too.”
“But you still talked to him.”
Chloe sighed. “Because he’s still my family. The fact that he did what he did doesn’t change that.”
Nicky’s face was a bitter tangle. “What did he have to say for himself?”
“Not much. You know him. He wasn’t doing okay—”
“Oh, yeah, poor him.”
Chloe ignored her. “But he didn’t sound like he was hurt or anything. I asked him about Adam.”
“And?”
Chloe hesitated for a moment, unsure if she should tell Nicky the truth. “It’s probably a good idea for us to go and try to find him while we still can.”
“Why? So you and my boyfriend can drag him into the woods and bury him under a pile of rocks too?” She was playing hard-ass again, armor all the way up to mask her real feelings. Chloe couldn’t really blame her. Vulnerability had never really been Nicky’s strong suit.
“That shot we heard yesterday … that was Parker putting one in Adam’s leg. He might not be dead, but he’s definitely hurt.”
“Oh my god,” Nicky groaned.
“He was alive when Parker left him, Nicky. People don’t die from being shot in the knee, at least not right away. I think that if we can find Adam—soon—maybe we can help.”
“What about Parker?”
“Parker’s a nonissue.”
Nicky gave her a hard look from under a furrowed brow.
“I meant what I said last night, Nicky. I don’t think we have to worry about him right now. Whatever he’s doing out there, it doesn’t have anything to do with us. If he wants to be alone, we’ll leave him alone. We’ve got other problems to deal with right now.”
Nicky craned her neck to look up past the trees, toward the bright blue sky that seemed so much farther away this morning than it had the day before.
“Okay. Fine,” Nicky said. “We’ll go find Adam. All of us. Together.”
“That sounds good to me.”
“Maybe we can help him. I hope we can, at least.”
Chloe rose to her feet. “Great. I’ll let Josh know, and we can start packing up camp.”
“Sure. But, Chloe?”
“What?”
Nicky fixed her with a cold, empty glare. “If I see Parker out there, I’m going to kill him. Family or not, I swear to god I’ll do it, and if you try and get in my way, I’ll kill you too. Got it?”
Chloe nodded, swallowing the jagged lump of fear in her throat.
“Got it.”
“So were you ever going to tell any of us what you were really doing out here? Or was it supposed to be a surprise?”
Parker kept moving, drawing his pack higher on his shoulders, evening the distribution of its weight across his back. They’d been going for an hour or more, tromping through the trees, following the path of the sun. Parker watched the woods around them, keeping his eyes narrowed for movement, for something out of the ordinary, for anything. He didn’t know exactly what he was looking for out here, only that he’d know it when he saw it.
“You weren’t supposed to notice I was gone until it was too late for any of you to catch up.”
“Wait, seriously?”
Parker nodded. “That was the plan, yeah.”
“So what, you were going to get us all partied out and then disappear into the woods in the middle of the night?”
“Basically, yes,” said Parker.
“That’s cold, man. Really cold.”
“I didn’t say that I was going to feel good about it. But it was easier than explaining. I don’t know. I figured you’d all go home without me. I was going to leave a note.”
“Wow, a note? How goddamned magnanimous of you. You do understand how screwed up doing that
would have been, right?”
“More or less screwed up than killing someone you’ve been friends with since middle school?”
Nate bugged his eyes out at that. “Oh-ho! Was that a joke? Did the great and serious Parker Cunningham just crack a joke? That might be a first, folks. I’d say it’s too soon, but it’s not like we can uncrack the eggs or unmake the omelet now. Might as well have breakfast. Speaking of, are you hungry? Because I am starving.”
“Can you even eat?”
“No idea. Probably not. But I know what I feel.”
“I guess what I’m asking is, how do you even know you’re really hungry? Could be like, phantom hunger, or something.”
Nate’s lips pulled back in a smile Parker didn’t like and he let out a wet, joyless chuckle that sounded like something being drowned.
“Was that another joke, Parker? Phantom hunger? You’re on a roll this morning, bud.”
Parker pulled his glasses off his face and buffed them on the bottom of his T-shirt, clearing the grime and steam from the lenses. Beside him, Nate held a hand up to shade his eyes from the sun as he surveyed their surroundings.
“Do you even know where we’re going?”
“I have a general idea,” said Parker.
“Which means no.”
“Please shut up.”
The two of them came to a break in the trees and found themselves standing at the edge of a small field, grown over with vines and clover and scattered with bare white trees like dead aspens. Did aspen trees grow out here in the Barrens? Parker figured they must, since they were here. But still—there was something about them that he didn’t like the look of. He scanned their surroundings while Nate extended a finger toward the farthest edge of the field.
“What the fuck is that?”
Parker saw what he was talking about. The structure rose out of the ground like a rotten tooth from green-and-brown gums, half-buried in the dirt and scorched to charcoal. Looking at it from here, Parker could tell that it had been a house at some point in the past, but now it was just a charred ghost of itself, a dark ruin being lazily devoured by the earth. He’d heard of old houses that had been lost in the Pine Barrens, the homesteads of old Puritans who had wanted to commune with their Lord in the cathedral of nature, but he’d never heard of anything like this. This wasn’t decay, or the ravages of time; no, someone had set this house to burn.
Nate’s eyes sparkled. “You want to go check it out?”
“I guess, sure.”
“Awesome.”
“You’re weirdly excited about this.”
Nate gave him a look. “Why aren’t you? I mean, you’re the one who wanted us to come out here, man. Don’t get pissy now because I happen to be enjoying myself, especially given the circumstances.” He made a pistol with his fingers and mimed shooting Parker in the face. “Pew.”
Parker bit back everything he really wanted to say to the dead boy.
“Fine,” he said. “Come on.”
Up close, the house was way more of a disaster than it had looked from a distance. Its walls had fallen, its blackened floor long battered to splinters, its roof collapsed entirely or turned to ash and blown away after the fires had gone out. It would provide no shelter if a storm rolled in, so Parker considered the idea that it didn’t even count as a house anymore. It was a thing, an assemblage of scorched, cracked bones planted in the dirt and nailed haphazardly together.
There was another one of those white trees growing near the center of what Parker thought must have been the living room or the kitchen way back when—not quite a sapling anymore, but not totally mature yet, either. Across from him, near the other side of the ruin, he watched Nate lean in to inspect the burns and the breaks, his beady little rat eyes still glimmering.
“What do you think happened here?”
Parker ran a hand along one of the broken struts. His palm came away black with soot. He held it up and pointed it toward Nate.
“It got burned.”
Nate’s face curled into a sneer. “Yeah, no shit. I mean, how? Like, do you think this was a forest fire or something?”
“I don’t think so,” said Park. “Look at the trees around here. See how they’re all old? They don’t have a mark on them. It wasn’t the forest that burned, just the house. I think somebody set this place on fire.”
“Like on purpose?”
Parker knelt to lift a fallen pallet of boards. The soil underneath was as black as the house’s jagged remains.
“Maybe. Maybe not. Could have been an accident in the kitchen or something. But I suppose it’s possible.”
“Jesus,” Nate said. “How long do you think this place has been out here?”
“Hard to tell. Maybe a long, long time, especially if there wasn’t anybody out here to mess with it.”
Dropping the boards back down to the ground, Parker stood and dusted his hands off, then he went to the nearest wall to look out at the forest beyond the overgrown clearing. Coming out here as a kid, the endlessness of the Barrens was amazing to him, a wonder to behold. Like it had been plucked whole-cloth out of some storybook. But standing here now, that endlessness filled him with cold dread, laid like a stack of bricks on his chest. He could barely breathe, when he stopped to think about it for too long.
“Dude, are you seeing this?”
He turned to look at Nate. The other boy’s eyes were cast down at where one of the skeletal walls met the soil.
“What is it?” Parker asked.
“Just come here for a second. Check this out.”
Parker wove through the old wreckage to look where Nate was looking. On one of the remaining walls, there was a row of long, deep gashes, like claw marks hacked into the grain, and a big, dark stain that stood out against the dusty blackness of the wood.
“Does that look like blood to you?” Nate asked.
Parker felt a nervous chill ladder up the back of his neck.
“What the hell could do something like that?”
“My dad always told me there were bobcats out here,” Parker said. “Bears too. Might’ve been one of them.”
“Oh, good.”
“What are you so worried about?” Parker asked, trying to shake off the nerves. “You’re incorporeal.”
Nate gave him the finger. “Just because I’m not going to get chewed up by some big angry whatever-the-hell doesn’t mean I want to stand here and watch it happen to you.”
“Aw. That was almost sweet, Nate.”
“Great. Can we go now? Place is starting to give me the weirds.”
Parker looked around the burned-out old house one more time. They weren’t going to find anything in here. It was just a torched-out mess.
“Fine. Sure.”
Parker turned to follow Nate out of the wreckage, touching his hand to the pale tree as he passed it by.
Wait.
He stopped and turned on his heel to go back and look.
It couldn’t be.
There was something carved in the wood.
Past the edges of the burned house, Nate stopped and turned back to glare at him. “Yo, Parker, what the hell? Are we going or
not?”
“Just … give me a minute,” Parker called back.
“Whatever.” Nate razzed his tongue at him, but Parker hardly noticed. He stepped in close to the tree and used one hand to brush some of the ashy pollen from the bare, bone-white trunk.
There were lines scarred deep in the wood, cut by a steady, sure hand. They bled hardened sap, red amber collecting at their jagged corners in a dried-out crust. He couldn’t stop himself from touching them, running the pads of his fingers along their deep, deliberate edges, carefully probing at them as if they were razor blades that might butterfly his fingertips wide open if he touched them wrong. Like history could reach out and kill you, if it wanted to badly enough.
DAC.
David Allan Cunningham.
His dad had been here.
7
They packed up as much of the camp as they could carry and headed into the trees, following the same direction they thought they’d seen Parker and Adam go the afternoon before. Josh took the lead, with Nicky close behind him. Chloe trailed the two of them by a car’s length, marking their path by chopping a deep, ragged gash in every third tree with the prying side of Parker’s camp hammer. Nicky hadn’t said anything to her after she’d threatened her cousin’s life back at the camp; she’d just silently stood up and gone to pack up all her things. She didn’t even speak to Josh while she worked. In fact, for the first time since February, Nicky didn’t seem to notice his presence at all.
Breaking down the tent piece by piece, Josh had shot Chloe a furtive look.
What the hell? he mouthed to her.
Chloe shook her head. No clue.
Except that was a lie, wasn’t it? Another one to add to the list. She didn’t doubt that Nicky was mad enough to try and kill Parker if she ever saw him—only her ability to do so. Chloe was starting to understand that maybe she didn’t know her cousin half as well as she’d thought she did. He’d already shot two of their friends; no telling what someone could do after they did something like that.
But Nicky hadn’t ever been great at listening to reason when she wanted to be right, doubly so when she already knew she was wrong. Hurting Parker wasn’t going to do any good, but she was going to try anyway, if she got the chance. She’d probably do it just to prove a point.
Parker had broken something fundamental in all of them the first time he pulled that trigger.
WHACK. Chloe cleaved another scar into another tree, squinting her eyes against the morning sun as she brought the hammer down in a sharp, controlled rhythm. The first few times she’d swung the thing, the impact had rung up into her shoulder, the pain an electric charge arcing through her bones. After that, she’d started figuring out how to ensure maximum impact and coverage without lighting her arm up like that.
WHACK.
The claw tore away another thick stripe of bark and wood, leaving an ugly backslash a foot long in its wake. She was getting better at this. Up ahead of her, Nicky cupped her hands around her mouth to shout again.
“Adam? ADAM!”
She’d been shouting herself hoarse ever since they’d left the campsite. Chloe had told her that odds were the gunshot was farther off than they’d thought, but Nicky wasn’t hearing it.
The Night Will Find Us Page 9
