When his hand made contact with the fabric of her shirt, the familiar weight of her thin shoulder, a great rush broke free from the core of him, a tidal wave of relief. Automatically, he pulled her into a great bear hug, enfolding her in his thick, long arms, squeezing her tight.
“Jesus, I’m so glad it’s really you,” he said, fighting back a sob. “I missed you, Chloe. I’m sorry, I’m so, so fucking sorry …”
When he let her go, Parker noticed her wincing, one hand pressed to a bloody spot on her shirt that he hadn’t noticed before.
“Shit. What happened?”
“Long story,” she said. “I’m fine, just … just leave it alone, okay? Back up.”
Parker quickly drew away from her, like he’d been burned. Or like he’d burned her.
“Where’s everyone else?”
Chloe’s expression darkened. “Nicky’s back at the camp,” she said.
“The camp … ?”
“Not that one,” she said shortly. “Somewhere else. It’s not far, straight back that way.” She gestured over her shoulder with the camp hammer. “We’ve been doing our best to keep moving. Trying to get out. It’s a lot harder than we thought it was going to be.”
This forest eats people.
“Million square acres,” Parker said, adjusting his glasses so she wouldn’t see the tears collecting in his eyes.
“So helpful,” Chloe said. Her tone jabbed at Parker like a dagger. “Really what I need right now, so thank you.”
“Chloe, I—”
“Don’t,” she snapped, her expression suddenly full of fire. “Whatever it is you’re about to say, just save it. Okay, Parker? I really don’t want to hear any more apologies right now, and especially not from you.”
Park swallowed against the lump in his throat.
“What about Josh?” He asked. “And … Adam?”
Chloe shook her head, looking away from him. “Josh is gone. Same with Adam, but that … that’s different.”
“Wait, what do you mean gone?”
She looked at him like he was stupid; instantly, he understood her meaning.
“Are you kidding?”
She shook her head.
“What the fuck happened?”
Chloe turned evasive. “Something got him.”
“Something … ?”
Her intense green eyes darted away from his. “Long story.” She made a show of shaking off whatever it was she was thinking. “What about you? What have you been doing since … yeah. Everything.”
“Camping. Looking for my dad.” Parker spoke deliberately, carefully, feeling his way around the words like his mouth was filled with razor blades.
“Jesus,” Chloe sighed. “Is that why you brought us all the way out here? All the blood and the awfulness, this whole nightmare—it was because you wanted to find him?”
Park couldn’t bring himself to say the words, so he just nodded, wincing away when she met his gaze.
“You should have told us,” she seethed. “You should have said something, anything. We would have understood. We’re your friends, you fucking asshole. You didn’t have to—”
“I know, I know—I’m sorry,” Park said, desperate to change the topic.
“Sorry. Doesn’t. Fix. Anything, Parker.”
“I know.”
“So stop saying it.”
“I know, I know … I just …” His voice was shaking something awful now. Parker puffed out his cheeks and blew air through pursed lips, blinking real fast to keep himself from crying. Not here, not now. “I’d take it back if I could.”
His cousin’s eyes were cold and furious.
“So would I.”
She turned away from him and hobbled a few steps back toward the little hillock, her shoulders rising and falling in a slow, metronomic wave.
“How’d you get all the way out here?” he asked, watching her go.
Chloe stopped, then glanced down and gave her branch-crutch a little shake. “Limped. Nicky wanted some space so she could bury him. Josh,” she clarified.
“Bury him? How … ?”
“Same as we did with Nate. Collected up some stones and cairned him down. Nicky wanted to do Josh alone, so I took a walk. Ended up out here, saw you talking to … yeah.”
Something like cold, shivery relief hummed inside of Parker, like crystal struck with the side of a fork.
“You saw him too?”
Chloe nodded. “Was it really him?”
Parker shook his head, clearing the noise away. “No,” he said, with grim finality. “It wasn’t.”
“Then what the fuck was it, because it sure looked—”
“I don’t know,” Park said, cutting across her sentence. “Something else. Something angry. Something from the forest.”
Chloe glared at him, and after another moment, nodded toward the broken-down old car. “So what’s in there?”
Parker felt another pointed sob knock at the pit of his throat, and he had to struggle to speak around it.
“Dead body.”
Chloe’s brow wrinkled. “Whose dead body?”
Parker watched her study his face. Watched her wonder whether he’d killed someone else out here. He hated that he’d given her a reason to consider that.
“Dad,” he said.
Her face contorted and fell, the rage there all but evaporated.
“Oh. Oh, Jesus. God, Parker, I am so, so sorry. How did … ?”
“I think he did it to himself,” Parker said. “Pretty sure, at least. He had marks on both of his …” He gestured to his wrists, unable to finish the sentence. “He’s been out here for a while.”
“Shit. What do you think … I mean, why was he all the way out here?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Parker admitted. “Maybe he was just looking for a quiet place to die. He definitely spent some time in that town—”
Chloe held a hand up, stopping him midsentence.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she said. “What town?”
14
Walking along the little corkscrew path, he told her all about what had happened to him since Friday, every crazy detail. The ghost, the burned-out house, the town, the church, the altar—he told her everything.
When he finished his side of the story, Chloe didn’t hesitate to catch him up on hers: Nicky’s rage after she’d overheard Chloe and Parker on the radios, finding Adam in the cave and how he’d gored her with the branch, the vision (or nightmare, or whatever) that had been waiting for her when she’d passed out, the flashes of twisted, alien consciousness while Nicky and Josh had patched her up. How Adam had come back to them, all twisted and broken, how he’d torn into Josh like a rabid wolf.
She even told him about what she’d seen this morning when her skin had touched Josh’s. Parker absorbed it all.
Eventually, the path led them to the town Parker had told her about: a hunched collection of homes and buildings backed up against a looming white church. She followed Parker along the footpath until they stood in the middle of the dusty main road, then he jerked his head toward the big church doors.
“I left my stuff in here.”
“And underneath the cellar, that’s where you found the altar, and the … ?” She nodded at the watch on his wrist.
“Yeah. We don’t have to go down there if you don’t want to.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t going to ask for a tour. Thanks, though.”
“Do you want to at least come inside?”
Chloe turned in place, scanning her eyes around the little town, letting her gaze wander down the main road, all the way out to the crystal-blue lake beyond the town’s edge and the wall of white trees that stood on its far shore. It looked like they went on forever over there. Like someone had come along and painted that one section of the Barrens bone white.
There was something about the idea of standing here alone that she didn’t like; it filled her with that same kind of prey-type vulnerability she’d felt when the ghost had looked at
her back by the car. It made her skin crawl—like she was sticking her arm into the jaws of some ravenous, slavering beast, hoping it wouldn’t bite down.
“Sure,” she said, trying to sound calmer than she felt. “Might as well.”
She followed him up the front steps, standing back while he placed both hands on the heavy double doors and pushed. They swung open with a groan, the rusted metal hinges grinding against themselves.
Inside the church, the light was already fading, what mottled old glass there was left in the windows blocking more sun than it let through. Over by the toppled lectern, Parker’s backpack lay on the floor in a jumble, next to a rectangular hatch cut into the floor. Parker knelt to lift his things back onto his shoulders, but all Chloe could look at was the impenetrable darkness beneath them, a perfect void ready to spread and cover the planet the second it broke free of its prison. She clenched her shoulders tightly together and felt the church go silent as she stared at that hole in the floor. The darkness, the silence—it was crushing, an impossible, hideous pressure that would drag you under if you dared dip even a single toe in.
How had Parker descended into a hellish darkness like that only to climb out again like it was nothing? How could anyone do that?
“Ready to go?”
Her cousin’s voice loosed Chloe from the cellar’s hypnotic pull, but it was what he held in his hand that gave her pause: long and spindly and black, with a silvery line of flint along the blade edge. Warmth rushed into her cheeks as her panic rose anew.
“Parker, where the hell did you get that?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t I tell you about this? I think it might have been my dad’s. Found it in a campfire—I think he tried to burn it or something. Here.”
He held the black hatchet out to her, but she didn’t take it. Memories that weren’t hers played across the back of her eyes—screaming children, a woman hiding in a hollow tree, a house engulfed by fire. Just looking at it set every nerve in her body alight with anxiety.
Chloe shuddered. “No,” she said. “No, I’d really rather not.”
“What? Why?”
“Because I’ve seen that thing before,” she said slowly. “Remember I told you about the reverend, the one who started the fires? In the nightmare?”
Parker nodded. “I remember.”
Chloe raised a finger toward the hatchet in his hand. “Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that that’s what he used to do it. There’s flint in the blade. You can see it there, if you hold it up to the light.”
Parker hefted the hatchet and considered the line of silver along the outermost edge. “But how would something like that even be possible?”
Chloe started to tally off her fingers: “The ghost. The dreams. Adam. Hell, even this town. How is any of this possible? Listen to what I’m telling you. Wherever that thing came from, it has some really seriously bad mojo attached to it.”
Park drew the hatchet back to press it against his chest, almost like he was protecting it. “You don’t know that for sure. I mean, come on, it’s just a hatchet, and it’s been helpful, having it. It’s seen me through a lot in the past couple days. I can’t just … get rid of it.”
“I know what I saw,” Chloe told him. “Whatever that thing is, wherever it came from, it’s not just a hatchet.”
“Are you positive?”
She didn’t even bother saying it again. She just met his eyes and nodded, slow and definite.
Parker dropped his arm, going quiet and letting the hatchet hang down by his side, his eyes dancing from the floor to Chloe to the hatchet and back again.
“I’m still going to keep it,” he said, with grim finality.
A surge of fury raced up Chloe’s spine at his stupidity, his stubbornness. She thought about barking at him, raging at him, but what good would any of that do?
“Fine,” she said with a sigh of resignation. “Just … please be careful with it, okay?”
“I will.”
“But like, really careful, Parker. Really careful.”
Parker made an annoyed sound in his throat. Without another word, he turned and walked away, beelining for the church doors. Chloe stood there for another moment, feeling herself drawn again toward the gaping darkness that boiled up from the floor. Setting her shoulders against its gravity, she kicked the hatch door shut with a BOOM and then turned and followed her cousin out into the wilderness once again.
The walk back to the camp wasn’t as arduous as the trek out here had been, or maybe it just didn’t feel like it. Maybe the weight that had lain on Chloe’s heart since she saw Parker standing out in front of that old car, arguing with a ghost, had finally started to slip away, bit by bit. The farther they walked together, the more things felt … well, normal, for lack of a better word. Like they were just them again, two against the world. For a little while, it didn’t matter that Chloe was limping because she’d been fucking stabbed or that Parker had shot their friend and stranded them all here. The gun and the black hatchet didn’t matter. The nightmares or the ghost. None of it. All the details just fell away, and it was like they were six again, going walking in the creek by their grandpa’s house—going adventuring, they’d called it. They’d stay out for hours, soaking their jeans and sneakers, digging in the dirt, hurling rock after rock into the water, trying to decipher what the graffiti left by the older kids on the cement pylons meant, both of them playing at their own imaginary versions of Indiana Jones.
Chloe hadn’t felt anything like this in years, and she was glad to have it returned to her, if only just for a little while. Back at the camp, she knew reality would be waiting for them there, with all of its stubborn, ugly horrors. But reality could wait. For now, for a little while at least, they could just walk together and be okay.
Guided by the orange afternoon light, the cousins followed the deep green gashes hacked into the trees to where a small campfire popped and crackled in a clearing. Nicky slumped beside it, her eyes a million miles away.
Chloe emerged from the trees first, and Nicky smiled with relief when she saw her. But when Parker trailed Chloe out of the woods, Nicky’s smile vanished, like a magic trick. She was on her feet in an instant, rushing over to the cousins in long, furious strides, her hands knotted into hard, bony fists.
“You motherfucker,” she seethed.
Behind her, Chloe heard her cousin come up short and say, “Nicky, wait—”
“You fucking asshole,” Nicky spat at him. “You total fucking cunt.” Chloe took a step forward, trying to put herself between the two of them, but on the crutch, she could only maneuver so much. The fact of the matter was that Nicky was still way more agile than Chloe had ever been, even at her healthiest. Now, hurt and riddled with infection, Nicky wove around her like she barely existed at all.
Leaning on her crutch, Chloe twisted around just in time to see Nicky lash an open hand across Parker’s face, the sharp impact of it cracking between the trees. Parker recoiled, his head snapping back on a hinge, but he didn’t try to stop her. Incensed, Nicky reared back and hit him again, harder than the first time. Chloe could already see a pair of glowing handprints rising on Parker’s cheek, one on top of the other. She hit him, and she hit him, and she hit him some more, each successive impact ringing out louder than the last.
“Fuck you, Parker,” she snarled. “Fuck you! They’re dead because of you! Because of you and your bullshit!”
“Nicky—” Parker began, but she slashed at him again, drilling another full-force blow across his chops. A bit of blood had started to collect at the corner of his lips, and he licked it away, his eyes big and sorrowful.
Chloe could see Nicky running out of steam. Carefully, she took her by the elbow and pulled her away, marveling internally at the tension in Nicky’s body; she was practically vibrating with rage. Holding her, Chloe watched as the hate tattooed into Nicky’s face mutated again, melting like candle wax into anguish and desperation. Unbidden, tears spilled from the bottoms of her eyes, le
aving shiny silver tracks down her freckled, sunburned cheeks.
“It’s his fault,” Nicky gasped into Chloe’s shoulder. “All of it. He should have died out there. He should have fucking died out there, Chloe.”
“I know it is,” Chloe said, her voice a tender hush. “I know. But we need to stick together if we’re going to get out of here. Right?”
Nicky sobbed and shuddered, but a second later, she nodded.
“I know,” she choked out.
“I’m sorry,” Chloe whispered to her. “I wish it didn’t have to—”
“I understand,” Nicky said, cutting her off. “But fuck. Fuck.”
Behind them, Parker cleared his throat. “Nicky …”
Suddenly, Nicky turned free of Chloe’s grasp again, thrashing like a fury, stabbing a long, sharp finger out at Parker, who just stood there and took it, like a cow on a factory belt.
“No, no, no, no,” she screeched in his face as she drummed him with tiny fists. “You! Don’t! This is your fucking fault, Parker! You did this to us! We wouldn’t have ever come out here if it wasn’t for you. We wouldn’t be stuck, Nate and Josh wouldn’t be dead, none of it!”
“I’m sorry,” Parker whispered. “Nicky, I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, you’re sorry?” she fumed. “He’s sorry. Chloe, did you hear that? Parker’s sorry. Except sorry doesn’t fix a goddamn thing, and it sure as hell doesn’t bring anyone back from the dead.”
For a second, she looked like she was going to hit him again. Chloe stepped forward to rest her free hand on her shoulder, as if that might calm Nicky somehow.
“You’re sorry,” Nicky spat. “Sure you are, you miserable piece of shit.”
Park’s expression fell, and he held his hands out to his sides, utterly defeated. “Nicky, I never meant for any of it to happen like this. You have to believe me. I didn’t mean for any of this—”
Underneath her hand, Chloe felt Nicky bristle in the half moment before she dashed forward, crashing into Parker and bunching both of her hands into the fabric of his shirt as she reared up to scream in his face.
The Night Will Find Us Page 19
