Hours later, when she opened her eyes again, the first thing Chloe saw was Nicky, still streaked with rusty red, sitting cross-legged on the ground, cradling Josh’s torn, crumpled body in both arms. Memories from last night slithered into place inside Chloe’s head, fitting together in an ugly patchwork.
The dreams.
The fire.
The blood.
Adam.
Lying there in the dead of night, in the aftermath, Chloe hadn’t meant to sleep, but she couldn’t stay awake, no matter how much adrenaline her body dumped into her system. The wound in her side, the fever and the exhaustion had all jammed their bony fingers deep into her flesh and dragged her down into a deep, dreamless sleep that had proven impossible to fight off. One second, she was lying there in the glow of the campfire while Nicky wept and screamed herself raw, and then … well, then someone had clicked off the lights inside her head, and she was gone.
She was almost embarrassed by the relief she felt. She couldn’t have kept staring up at the empty sky like that and stayed sane, running through things again and again and again, trying to see a way through that would have kept Josh from dying so horribly at the hands of the thing that used to be their friend. Sleep was a mercy. Sleep was an escape hatch. No matter how strong you were supposed to be, sometimes it was just nice to not exist for a little while.
Sitting up slowly, Chloe pulled the sleeping bag off her legs and hazarded a few small movements, testing her new limits, stretching her arms out in opposite directions until the hole in her ribs screamed for her to stop. Rolling her shirt up, she peeled the bandage back to take a look at the bloody mess that lay underneath; it was a neat wound, about the size of a half-dollar, the edges already starting to clot over with a dark, crusty scab. She ran her fingertips across the places it had dried, feeling the smooth, bumpy ridges and the thin, flaky parts where it met her undamaged skin. For a second, she had the wild, childlike impulse to dig a fingernail underneath and tear it clean off, just to see how bad it would bleed.
Across the dead firepit, Nicky snuffled and wheezed, and Chloe glanced over at her. She looked as bad as Chloe had ever seen: her eyes big and dark and ringed with bruise-like shadows, her skin filthy and mottled, her shirt in red tatters where Adam had raked her. Those deep, parallel wounds she bore on her shoulder had crusted over in the night, the iron-red lines stark against her ghost-pale skin. Chloe wondered how badly they hurt, or if she’d even noticed that they were there. The hole Adam had punched through her own ribs still throbbed and ached like a motherfucker, even just leaning here like this.
“Nicky,” she said quietly, not wanting to startle her friend.
Nicky looked back at Chloe, her eyes crater-wide, but she didn’t say anything. She just sat there, curled around her dead boyfriend, totally silent, waiting. In that moment, everything that Chloe thought she had to say to her seemed so stupid, so completely irrelevant. What could she say that would mean anything? All they had was each other now. No Josh, no Adam, no Parker, no Nate. They were all they had left to try and get out of these woods, and Chloe truly didn’t know if it would be enough.
“Nicky, listen …”
Looking at her friend like that, Chloe wished she didn’t have to say it. But she said it anyway.
“Babe, I think we have to bury him.”
All the vulnerability drained out of Nicky’s face in an instant, leaving a hard, sharp thing behind. She didn’t look hurt like Chloe had expected; she looked mad, like Chloe had hauled off and slapped her.
“Why?” The word knifed out of Nicky’s mouth in an icy slide. “You saw what the birds did to Nate yesterday morning. You saw that.”
The reality of what she was saying hit her a moment too late. Had that been only yesterday? Only twenty-four hours away from the horror of piling rocks on top of their friend’s body, and they were already doing it again? This was so fucked. This was so completely unfair.
“You know we have to,” Chloe said, trying to keep her voice from shaking. “To protect him until someone can come and get him. His mom and his dad deserve to be able to bury him right.”
Nicky made a low moan in the place where her throat and her chest met.
“What are we even going to tell them, though?”
Chloe didn’t even have to think about it. “The truth. We’ll tell them the truth. All of it.”
“They won’t believe us.”
“They will, Nicky. But we have to be honest about all of it. Parker, Nate, Adam, Josh. We’ll tell everyone exactly what happened in here. They’ll believe us if we tell them the truth. I promise you they will.”
“But what if they don’t?”
“Then that’s on them,” said Chloe. “Right now, all we can do is stick together and do our best to stay safe and get out. Fuck Parker, and fuck Adam. They both might as well be dead too, as far as I’m concerned.”
“Don’t say that,” Nicky snarled, her voice quavering on the edge of tears.
“It’s the truth. Right here, right now, all I care about is you, and me, and doing the best we can. Right now, I think that means keeping Josh safe, just like we did with Nate, and after that, it means being smart and getting out of here together.”
Nicky flinched, casting her eyes down toward the ground.
“This is the only way we can help him now. We can still be good to him, but we have to do it together.”
“I really loved him, Chloe.”
Chloe’s heart winced, hearing her say that. She liked Josh, but she didn’t love Josh. She could only imagine what Nicky was going through. Thinking about it too much made her want to cry.
“I know you did, Nicky. I know. Keeping him safe is the best way to show him that.”
The redheaded girl rubbed furiously at her eyes. “Can’t you just … ?”
Chloe sighed and gestured to the lake of blood that had wicked through her entire shirt.
“I wish I could, I really do. But it has to be both of us,” Chloe said.
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
Nicky’s eyes filled with tears and spilled over, slashing her dirty cheeks with wet, clean lines that rolled down to her jawline.
“No,” she moaned. “I don’t.”
“Please,” Chloe begged. “I need your help. I wish I could do it alone, Nicky, I really do, but I can’t. I need you with me on this. Please.”
“Okay,” Nicky whispered, almost too quiet to be heard. Chloe wasn’t even sure if she’d actually spoken, or if Nicky had just moved her lips and let Chloe fill the rest in. Either way.
“Thank you,” Chloe said, holding a hand out in Nicky’s direction. “Can you help me up? I don’t think I can …”
Nicky nodded and delicately laid Josh’s body down on the cold ground, unfolding herself from underneath his dead, bloody weight, then crossed to hold her filthy hands out to Chloe.
Taking them and squeezing them tight, she met Nicky’s harrowed gaze, pretending not to see the way her eyes kept flicking over toward Josh’s crumpled, mangled form.
“Is this going to hurt?” Nicky asked her.
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “Probably a lot. Still, can’t lay around all day, right?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, on three, I’m going to pull, you do the same. Alright?”
Nicky nodded.
“Okay. One. Two—”
“Wait.”
Chloe looked at her. “What?”
“Are we going on three, or is it one-two-three, then pull?”
Chloe thought about it. “Pull on three.”
“Okay.”
“Ready?”
“No.”
“Yeah, me neither. Okay. One. Two. Three—!”
Chloe pulled, and felt Nicky do the same. There was a cold, bladed tearing that dragged through the middle of her as they both yanked Chloe up to her feet; she clenched her teeth against it, trying to not scream. Something went pop in her wound, and she felt a warm, wet trickle running
down her belly to seep into the waistband of her jeans, but still she pulled, feeling her arms catch fire and her shoulders start to burn through with acid. Lurching to her feet, she held on to Nicky for dear life, gasping for air, feeling the pain recede by degrees. Her legs were rubbery and unsure, but they didn’t buckle, and that was as much of a victory as she could hope for right now.
Pressing her hand to the wound in her ribs to try and stanch the bleeding, she scanned the area around them, spotting what she was looking for after only a moment.
“Here, grab that.” Chloe pointed to a big, wrist-thick branch that had fallen among the nearby trees. Nicky quickstepped over to scoop it up, passing it to Chloe.
Experimentally, Chloe planted the end of the stick in the ground like a flag or a pick, then, white-knuckled, transferred some of her weight over to it. She felt the wood bow and bend beneath her, but it didn’t break. Okay. This would do for now. She nodded at Nicky, who let her go and stood with her arms crossed over her chest.
“Thank you,” Chloe panted.
Nicky didn’t say anything in response. She just nodded, her eyes a million miles away.
“We should get him into the sleeping bag, Nick. Just to be safe. Okay? That way he’ll be protected. Can you help me with that?”
Nicky nodded.
Chloe hobbled over to the place where Josh lay, his skin pale and gray and slack, waxy eyes still hanging open, the shock of his own death frozen there. She watched Nicky gather up his sleeping bag and carry it over, spreading it out across the bare ground, unzipping it all the way.
“I think we can roll him onto it and then zip it up around him,” said Nicky.
Chloe watched Nicky’s eyes, the way she disappeared down that well of darkness deep inside of her. She’d always wondered what it was that Nicky hid down in that hole, though it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t anything good.
“I think you’re right,” Chloe said, choking back a fresh rush of pain. “Yeah. Let’s do this.”
Leaning down to take Josh by the sleeve, Chloe braced herself against her new crutch and dug her feet into the soil, while beside her, Nicky bunched one hand in Josh’s shirt and the other in one of the pockets of his jeans.
“Same as before, okay? Pull together on three.”
“Okay,” Chloe said.
“One … Two … Three!”
The two girls heaved at the same time. For a moment, it seemed like Josh wasn’t going to move at all, but then he lurched to one side, rolling toward the spread-out bag. Chloe could already feel the fabric of his shirt starting to slip free of her fist.
“Keep pulling,” Chloe groaned through her teeth, doubling her grip to try and keep hold. “Almost got him, almost there …”
The sleeve snapped out of her fingers, and she threw a hand out to try and grab back on. But instead of his shirtsleeve, her hand closed around the soft, cold skin of Josh’s wrist.
The vision hit her like a flash bomb.
She recognized the scene—she’d seen it before. Hell, she’d lived it before, but not like this. Not through Josh’s eyes.
The daylight fell away in sheets, giving way to the dark of night as the trees and the forest and the sky above held steady. The campfire, cold and dead only a moment before, rasped to life as the darkness rushed in all around her, the dancing flames painting red-orange afterimages on her eyes. Across the fire, Chloe could see herself, a short, slight little thing sprawled on the ground like a broken doll, her face wide with confusion and shock. Nicky was there, too, hunched shoulders drawn cable-tight as she regarded the creature that stood on the edge of the flickering light—the thin, pale thing that used to be Adam.
Standing there, she felt her arms and legs move, animating on their own, taking a few short, cautious steps in the Adam-thing’s direction, stretching one mole-dotted hand out while Nicky and Chloe watched on, barely breathing.
Step. Step. Step.
Her legs moved autonomously, experimentally, carrying her closer to the Adam-thing. In her peripheral vision, she saw Nicky’s jaw work and bob like she was saying something, but she couldn’t hear what; the words came out muddied and muffled, like they were being filtered through cotton batting. There was a pressure building in the pit of her throat, a strange sensation that she initially didn’t recognize as the precursor to speech. Locked inside a body that wasn’t hers, she heard herself speak with a voice that wasn’t her own.
“Hey, man, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay, Adam, I promise, we’re gonna get you help—”
In the next instant, there was a flash of motion, too fast for her to process. Then something struck the side of her head, and she was falling, chased down by a shrieking, spindly mess of teeth and claws. Chloe tried to scream, tried to thrash away, knowing what was coming next, but she never hit the ground. She just kept falling and falling, past where the forest floor should have been, past the point that she understood it at all. She tumbled through some horrible forever, locked in a body that wasn’t hers, wishing she could yell or cry or even breathe on her own. The seconds unraveled into minutes, then hours into years. She never stopped trying to scream her way out.
Then it was gone. Day again. Her own body again.
Chloe unclasped her hand from Josh’s wrist, then fell back and sucked in air, on the verge of tears at her ability to move and breathe and blink on her own once more. At her feet, Josh was slumped over onto the fabric of the sleeping bag, while Nicky watched her, pupils dialed to pinpricks.
“Are you okay?”
Chloe forced herself to slow her breathing. Get it under control, get it together. She darted her eyes away toward the blur of the forest. “Yeah,” she lied. “Fine. I’m fine. Sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Nicky told her, in the kind of deliberate way that said it really wasn’t.
Silently, they bundled and zipped Josh the rest of the way up in his sleeping bag and dragged him into the place where the forest grew thickest. Hobbling on her makeshift crutch, Chloe started to venture into the trees around them.
“I’m going to go look for rocks,” she called back over her shoulder. “We’ll pile them over the top of him so he’ll be safe. I can find them, but I’m going to need your help carrying them when I do, okay?”
Nicky nodded, her eyes glued to the wet, messy sleeping bag at their feet.
“Can you stay here with him until I get back?” Chloe asked. “I don’t think it’ll take too long.”
“I’ll be here.”
Figuring that was as good as she was going to get from Nicky, Chloe limped off into the forest, her gait uneven and slow, buoyed up by the branch clutched in her fist. Somewhere in the distance, she thought she could hear water.
Once she was far enough away from Nicky, Chloe leaned against one of the great, old trees that surrounded her and tried—and failed—to keep herself from crying again.
When she closed her eyes, she could still feel herself falling.
Parker and Nate followed the main street of the little town, scanning the nameplates on the front of each little house: CANTON, LITTLE, GROSS, EADWARDS. Hung outside the biggest house was a nameplate that read LEEDS. It must have been an impressive place in its time, just down the street from the church, surrounded by those bare, bone-white trees that stabbed up from underneath the ground. The doors were boarded up, the windows shuttered and nailed tight, the roof and walls crumbling just like the rest of the town. But there was a kind of majesty to it, a faded glory that hung around the house like an aura. There was just something about a house as large and austere as this in a town buried in the Barrens. The Leeds family, whoever they were, had faded into the past, but their house still stood in their wake like a tombstone.
Swallowing his curiosity, Parker followed Nate up the road to where the dirt path curled around and held his breath as the church gradually revealed itself to them. Tall and faded, its white boards had long since curled and gone gray from time and weather, but the simple cross atop its single tower stood
firm, nearly black against the drab sky. If the Leeds house was big, the church was massive, to the point where it wouldn’t have seemed out of place in Newark, or maybe even one of the smaller neighborhoods across the river in the city proper. Like the rest of the abandoned town, the church was mostly boarded over. But as they approached, Parker could see that a few of the planks blocking off the front doors had been pried away, the ghostly outlines of them still visible in the weather-stained wood.
Someone had been here.
Parker double-timed it up the path, heart throbbing in his throat. His footsteps thundered on the church’s front steps, the wood creaking and groaning underneath his bulk. Off to the side lay the discarded bracing boards, pried from the doorframe and tossed away like trash. Nate nodded at them.
“When do you figure that happened?”
“Not sure,” Parker said. “But it can’t have been that long ago. Look.”
He nodded toward the outline the boards had left, their shape weathered into the wood, the grain underneath fresher somehow. Nate looked back at Parker. “Shit. You think this is him?” Yes, Parker’s mind rasped. “I don’t know.” It has to be. “Maybe, I guess.”
“Well, let’s not just stand out here playing with our dicks. D’you want to go in or not?”
Park nodded, a little too quickly. “Sure.”
He considered the small space left open by the pried-free boards. In the back of his mind, he thought, Could Dad have actually fit through there? He honestly wasn’t sure, but there was no way in hell Parker was getting through that, even down on his hands and knees.
Fuck it. He had a better way through.
Twirling the hatchet in his hand, Parker brought the blade down hard on the lowest of the old boards, cleaving it in two with a crack like a gunshot. Bracing his shoulders, he swung the hatchet again, and again, and again, making short work of the other boards blocking the doors, prying them back from the frame with his free hand and tossing them aside. When they’d all been hacked away, Parker stood back and delivered a sharp kick where the doors met, sending them flying open, revealing little but shadows beyond.
The Night Will Find Us Page 15
