The Night Will Find Us

by Matthew Lyons

  He thought about telling Nate, even though he knew that he’d only make a joke out of it, or mock Parker about whatever part he found most ridiculous. That was just who he was; things could only be one way with him, a single objective reality that everyone else had to deal with. But what if objective reality had gotten all fucked up when none of them were looking? Wouldn’t Nate have to admit that things were no longer what he’d gone through life thinking they were? After all, wasn’t Nate the one who’d woken up dead today?

  They came to the edge of the town, stepping off the shore to circle around until they found a path that led to a tall, crumbling gateway with no gate attached. Parker stood there, looking up the main road at the collection of little homes and bigger outbuildings, trying to make them all fit in his mental version of the Barrens. He’d heard of homes being lost in the woods before, of course, but never whole towns. Not like this.

  “How is this even here?” he wondered aloud.

  Nate pursed his lips and whistled. “I’m starting to realize that lots of things can get lost in the woods. Towns, dads, lives. All sorts of shit.”

  Parker gave him the finger and walked into the town, keeping his head on a swivel, trying to see as much of the little collection of grayed, weathered houses and outbuildings as he possibly could. How long had they been abandoned out here? Two hundred years? More? It seemed to him like the town had been left to harden and petrify in the absence of the people who had built it. He couldn’t see any evidence of a fire or an explosion or anything else that would cause people to pick up and leave. They were just … gone.

  “Hello!” Parker called into the emptiness. “Hello? Is anybody there?”

  Only silence greeted him. He called out again, but there was nothing, no one, barely even an echo. The place was completely empty—not that he’d expected anything different of a town slowly being swallowed by the Pine Barrens.

  Where they weren’t haphazardly boarded over, doors and shutters hung open or had been ripped off their hinges entirely, roofs bowed and cracked with weather and age. There was even an old wooden wagon cart by the side of the main road collecting moss and rot, one wheel split apart, giving it a crooked, lopsided look. That effect wasn’t exclusive to the wagon, though; it stretched out across the whole town, much like a jumbled mouth of crooked, broken teeth, all gray and green with decay.

  Rotten teeth. Dead teeth.

  Park walked quietly along, the crunching of his feet atop the ashy dirt horribly loud in the silent little town. His eyes darted back and forth, looking for anything to identify it—a sign, something, anything—but there was nothing. It was just a nameless little town, lost in the middle of nowhere, like a dead body dumped in an unmarked grave. Even the air was sour out here, sick with stale moisture and the plant life that was overtaking the town, dragging it apart as it grew between the boards and through the foundations, taking the land back as its own.

  His dad had been through this place. He felt it all the way down to his bones. If Parker, clumsy and panicked and inexperienced and haunted as he was, had found it, then his dad had to have too. The old man had been camping for decades before Parker was even a glimmer in his eye.

  Parker choked back a fist of nerves and squared his shoulders, feigning a kind of courage he didn’t truly feel. He wasn’t scared, he wasn’t starving, he wasn’t exhausted—no. He wasn’t any of that at all.

  Dad had been here. He knew he had. Now all Parker had to do was find the next sign of him.

  The two boys—one dead, one alive—headed deeper into the nameless little town.

  Muttering to herself, Nicky gathered wood, breaking apart dry branches with her hands and heels while back by the tents, Josh cleared a space to build another fire. They didn’t speak, and Nicky’s insides silently pinballed back and forth between fury at everyone else and hating herself for being so stupid and broken that she poisoned every good thing in her life.

  Her mom’s voice echoed in her head again.

  I don’t know why you insist on dragging everything around you down, Nicoletta. Can’t you just let things be nice every once in a while?

  Her mom never understood Nicky’s mood swings—or at least never acted like she did—even though she had them, too, for as long as Nicky could remember. She should understand better than anyone that knowing about them wasn’t enough to stop them from happening.

  Another surge of tears welled up inside Nicky’s throat, and she had to twist her knuckles into her thighs to push them back down again. She wouldn’t let herself boil over. Not here. Not now. She and Josh didn’t need to talk, anyway. They could both just work in silence and try and ignore how ugly things could get when they weren’t looking. Nicky recognized this kind of mutual rage; it existed in a sort of low-level hum pretty much all the time at her house, constructed and maintained by both of her parents for decades now. And, hell, they’d made it work for them. Maybe this was just how adult relationships were.

  For her part, Chloe drifted in and out of consciousness, her lips parting to form half sentences—What did … ? Are we going … ? Is this the … ?—before she sank back into sleep. Nicky knelt by her side, checking her temperature, peeking at the wound in her belly under the improvised bandages, occasionally dribbling water between her lips from Josh’s Nalgene while stroking her hair softly and imploring her to drink up, please drink up.

  Nicky worked where she could see the both of them, never wandering farther than fifteen or twenty feet away, so if she raised her voice even a little, they—or at least Josh—would hear her and be able to help. Not that she needed help. She didn’t need anything. Not her boyfriend, not her friends, not even the pills that she’d left at home because they were going to be out here for only one night and it seemed stupid to bring them. Or because she didn’t want everybody to see her taking them, because then she’d have to explain them, tell them everything, and it would make all that ugly everything too real. Best thing to do now was try and keep herself distracted from the hot, oily blackness bubbling underneath her skin.

  God, but she wanted a cigarette. She’d left her menthols and her little yellow lighter back by the tents and sleeping bags, a small concession to Josh that she was sure he’d missed. He hated when she smoked, even though he never said anything about it. It was impossible to mistake, the way his nose wrinkled every time she lit up, the way he kept their kisses quick and dry after she’d had one. He wasn’t nearly as good at hiding things as he thought he was.

  If there was ever a time for a cigarette, this was it, but obviously that wasn’t happening. So she chewed on the inside of her lower lip until she tasted blood and she gathered firewood, bringing armfuls of dry branches over to Josh, who sat at the mouth of the cave, putting together a small circle of stones for a campfire.

  Josh stood up as she approached, rising quickly to walk off into the trees, his back turned toward her.

  “Where are you going?” Nicky’s voice shook when she asked. Another thing to hate herself for.

  “I have to pee.”

  He didn’t even look at her to say it. Like she didn’t matter to him at all. Being talked to like that made her want to cry, and it made her want to punch a hole through his face. Trying not to scream, she watched him walk into the forest, half-obscured by the trees, then turned her own back as she heard the faint zzzip of his fly.

  Nicky brushed her hands off and considered the bare tree by the mouth of the cave. It was so weird, all bone white and hard and dead like that. Inside her head, she called it a poison tree, good for absolutely nothing.

  Well. Maybe not nothing. It might make decent firewood, at least.

  Using her bare hands, Nicky took hold of one of the branches jutting off the central trunk, then pulled down. The branch broke away from the trunk cleanly, leaving behind a dry, crumbly dead spot where it had been attached. Under the bark, the wood was nearly black with rot, dead all the way through; she was sure it would burn. She held the branch up to consider it in the fading sunli
ght, comparing it to its bloody sister on the ground, the one that Adam had run Chloe through with. Brushing her hand off on the leg of her pants, she took hold of another branch and pulled. It peeled away from the tree as easily as the first. Nicky moved on to the next branch, plucking them off like the legs from a spider until the ground at her feet was stacked with dry, bony boughs.

  Behind her, someone coughed. Nicky spun in place—Chloe was awake.

  She sat up on the little bed they’d made for her out of their sleeping bags, one arm planted against the ground while she kept the other clamped tightly across her improvised bandage. Her skin was gray, and her hair looked stringy and lifeless … but her eyes were on fire, as bright as Nicky had ever seen them.

  “Hey.” Chloe’s voice was weak and scratchy, but there was a smile that pulled at the edges of her words, a smile that was more Chloe than not. Nicky dashed over to her friend, scattering the white branches with one foot, then pulled Chloe into a tight hug.

  “Careful,” Chloe gasped under Nicky’s arms. “Careful.”

  Nicky let go and leaned back. Behind her, she could hear the soft crunch of Josh’s feet in the soil and leaves, walking over to join them.

  “Sorry,” said Nicky. “I just … I didn’t expect to see you up and about so soon.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly up and about just yet.”

  “At this point I’ll settle for just up,” Nicky said. “With how badly you were hurt, we thought you’d be out for a lot longer than you were.”

  “Sorry to disappoint.”

  “No, Chloe, it’s not like that—”

  “Hey,” Josh said, standing above them with his arms crossed over his chest.

  “Hey yourself,” said Chloe. “Glad to see you guys are okay. How long was I out for?”

  Josh shrugged. “Few hours. Four, maybe? It’s hard to tell out here.”

  “Okay,” Chloe said, rubbing at her eyes. “But it’s still Saturday?”

  “Still Saturday,” Josh echoed.

  Nicky rested a hand on Chloe’s shoulder, gave it a gentle squeeze. “How are you feeling?”

  Chloe wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand.

  “Honestly, pretty bad. Better than before. But, yeah. Not exactly awesome.” She gestured to the bandages lashed to her wounded mid-section. “I assume this was you?”

  “Yeah,” Nicky said. “Both of us.”

  “Thank you,” Chloe told her.

  “Seriously though, you’re feeling all right? You were really out of it for a while,” Nicky said. “It looked like you were having some seriously messed-up dreams. I was worried.”

  Chloe blinked hard, over and over. “Yeah,” she replied. “Definitely some weird ones.”

  Nicky nodded to the backpack full of food beside them. “Are you hungry at all? Thirsty? We’ve been giving you water, but …”

  “No, not really.”

  Nicky nodded and watched as Chloe closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them again, they’d gone cold and weird, the same way Nicky had seen them get on school mornings before really big tests.

  “What happened to Adam?” Chloe asked.

  Nicky’s mood turned bitter. “What do you mean, what happened?”

  “You know, after … after he …”

  “Stabbed you?”

  Chloe pursed her chapped lips. “Yeah. That.”

  “Don’t know,” Josh said. “Think he ran off into the woods. He wasn’t doing too good, though.”

  “Good enough to run, apparently.”

  “I suppose,” Josh said.

  “So we agree we all saw it, right?” Chloe asked. “We saw Adam run.”

  “I didn’t see that,” Nicky said quickly.

  Josh’s face got dark. “Yeah, you did.”

  “I know what I did and didn’t see, Josh.”

  Josh narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure that you do, Nicky.”

  “I saw it,” Chloe said. “At first I thought it was a dream or something, but now …”

  “Except that doesn’t make any sense,” Nicky said. “How could a kid who got shot in the leg … ?”

  “Run off into the forest like that? I don’t know,” Chloe admitted. “But I’m starting to think we left sense behind back in Randolph. This place … I think it plays by its own rules.”

  Something inside Nicky bristled and recoiled at hearing her say it like that. “No, no, fuck that,” Nicky said. “Stop. It’s just a forest. That’s all it is. Don’t make it out to be more than that.”

  Chloe gave her a look, studying her face.

  Nicky wanted to glance away, break eye contact, stop her from doing that spooky-genius thing that always seemed to let her see the insides of people. It was something she’d been doing since they were all little kids.

  A second later, Chloe’s gaze softened, and she nodded, having come to some kind of decision. “Then how do you want to deal with this, Nicky?” she asked.

  Relief cascaded through Nicky’s body, like a cool blue wave crashing on the shore. “I think the plan needs to stay the same,” she said. “Same as before. We need to get out of here, especially now that you’re hurt. But we’ll have to stay here for the night. Give you a chance to rest up and heal a little so we can keep moving tomorrow.”

  Chloe’s face fell. “Yeah. Okay. That makes sense.”

  “Josh is going to build us a fire,” said Nicky. “We’ll try again tomorrow, find the car, go for help. We have food, and we have water. We’re going to be okay.”

  “As long as you’re sure,” coughed Chloe.

  “As sure as we’re gonna be,” Josh said, stepping back from the two girls. Using the broken white branches, he laid together a pyramid of wood in the center of the stone circle, stacking the smaller ones first, then the thicker ones around those until he ran out.

  Nicky and Chloe watched him work in silence, sitting back on the ground to wait. Nicky could feel Chloe trying to catch her eye, no doubt wanting to know what had happened between her and Josh in the time she’d been out, but what could Nicky even say about it? What would be the point? She just had to let things cool off for now. Things would be better by tomorrow.

  Together they watched as Josh sparked Nicky’s lighter to life and held the flame to the little thatch of matchstick twigs he’d arranged under the smallest white branches. The twigs caught fire almost immediately, crackling and popping and blackening with heat as the flames swelled up to lick and lash at the white branches. Any second now, they would catch, and the three of them would have a fire to keep them warm through the night.

  But the white branches didn’t catch, and after a few long seconds, the twigs sputtered and wisped out too.

  Josh tried again. With one hand, he held the lighter’s little orange tongue to another bundle of twigs, bigger than the first, and when it was good and going, he slid it under the woodpile and waited. And waited. And waited.

  The white branches wouldn’t burn.

  “You kidding me with this … ?”

  Josh plucked one of the white branches from the pile and then held the lighter to it, waving the little BIC back and forth, but the dry, ashy wood simply would not catch. It didn’t even brown under the heat of the flame. It was like trying to set fire to stone. Still, Josh tried again, and again, and again, his face knotting up with rage, his movements increasingly frantic until his temper boiled over and he jumped to his feet, kicking at the campfire, sending the branches flying apart in a lopsided spray.

  Nicky recoiled, as did Chloe beside her. “Jesus, Josh!” Nicky said.

  He spun around toward the two of them, his eyes wild and wide.

  “What?”

  His voice was calm, but there was a look in his gaze that Nicky didn’t trust. She’d never seen this side of him before. He wasn’t the type to get frustrated like this. She jabbed a finger toward the place where the campfire used to be.

  “What would you even do that for? How does that help?”

  “Whatever,” he grow
led, his voice full of poorly masked irritation. “There’s other branches, right? There’s a million other branches in this stupid fucking forest. I’ll just go and get some of those, because the ones you picked out clearly aren’t working.”

  Nicky had had enough of this shit. He could be a moody asshole all he wanted, but she didn’t have to sit here and take it. Without another word, Nicky stood and walked away, crossing her arms over her chest to hold herself close, hoping she could get far enough away before she started to cry.

  It’s just a forest. It’s just a forest.

  It’s just a forest.

  10

  The boy’s bones bowed and bent, then splintered and split inside his arms and his legs. They popped like bottles breaking underwater, the sharpness of the sound muffled by the red meat wrapped so tightly around them. His tongue, dry and cracked, swelled to fill his mouth as his eyes rolled into the back of his head, the purple veins sewn through the sclerae thick as butcher’s twine. The boy that used to be Adam screamed without sound and saw without sight as his body contorted into jagged shapes and terrible glyphs, dissecting itself in wave after wave of purest suffering. He lay where he’d fallen, in a patch of pine needles, a thin pink froth leaking from the corners of his drawn, bloodless lips. He clenched his teeth until they cracked and broke; he lashed and scraped at the dirt until his fingers were torn, bloody claws. His back arched and shattered into its thirty-three component parts, each knuckle of tender bone torn loose from the others, trailing shredded tails of nerves and blood vessels and all the stuff of life.

  He was dying. This was what dying felt like. Alone, the boy-thing started to weep. A great yawning fissure opened up inside him, cold and infinite, and he clutched at that emptiness, at that nothing, pleading for it to eat him all up and take his pain away. He would throw himself into the dark if it meant he didn’t have to feel this anymore.