Except it wasn’t just memories. Standing there, she could feel the grave at the bottom of the lake, the way the weird, poison light still shone in her, radiating out from those hideous, jaundiced eyes all the way down to her bones, as sure as she’d felt it shine in what was left of Mary Kane. Being this close to it made her spine curl. Instinctively, she took a step back, clasping a hand around Parker’s wrist.
“Okay, maybe this was a bad idea,” she said to him. “Parker, we shouldn’t have gone this way. There are other ways out of here. We just need to keep looking.”
“There’s no other way,” Parker told her, even though she could tell by his voice that he didn’t entirely believe that. “We have to get out of here. That hole in your side isn’t getting any better. How much longer do you think you can keep walking like that?”
She studied his face, wanting to tell him he was wrong, she felt fine, but that wasn’t the case, and both of them knew it.
“We have to do this, and that’s our path.” He pointed out across the lake, where the far shore was filled with giant white sentinel trees like dead, withered arms digging their way up through the soil. “You can do this, okay? You can do this.”
Unclasping her fingers from his wrist, she looked up at him. “Okay,” she said, swallowing against the stone in her throat.
“We’re just going to be extra careful, alright?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Sure.”
Wordlessly, careful to not touch the small, chopping waves, they started to circle around the lake, making for the creek on the far shore.
As they passed into the low shade of the sentinel trees, Parker felt it again, that same little itch that had come needling at the back of his neck ever since they’d returned to the abandoned town. Like they weren’t alone, being watched from nearby. It wasn’t the trees, either—this was something animal, something immediate. He hadn’t said anything to Chloe about it, because what good would that do? She couldn’t run, couldn’t fight, couldn’t do anything if things went sideways. They just had to keep on walking and wait it out. Something would happen or it wouldn’t, and either way, they’d deal with that when the time came. Not before.
“Uh, Parker?”
He looked back at his cousin. Her face had gone bone white. She was pointing at the trees out ahead of them. He looked, and for a minute, he didn’t understand what it was that he was seeing.
There was a body hanging from the trees.
She was mounted high in a cruel parody of the crucifixion, her arms strung out wide to either side, wrists spiked clean through with sharp, broken branches. Her clothes hung off her body in rags, revealing drying wounds and gashes; her arms and legs and midriff were exposed, scourged to bloody tatters. Her red hair spilled down around her head in limp, lifeless sheets. At some point, she’d lost a shoe.
Without saying a word, Chloe started forward, and Parker reached out to lay a hand on her shoulder, holding her back.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
She gave him a deadly serious look. “I have to see, Parker.”
“Wait, what!” A bright white shock coursed through Parker’s whole body. He knew what happened when Chloe touched things anymore. “No, Chloe. No, you don’t.”
“Yes,” she insisted. “I do.”
She shrugged his arm off of her and moved closer, the slow pick-thrush, pick-thrush of her uneven gait slashing loudly through the silence that had descended around them.
“Chloe, please don’t do this,” he called after her.
Standing there, underneath Nicky’s bloody, torn body, his cousin looked so small, but the look on her face was anything but fragile. She was determined. She’d already made her mind up about this, and Parker wasn’t going to be able to change it.
“It’s okay,” she said without looking back. “Really, I’ll be okay. Just stay here and keep watch, all right? Try and catch me if I fall.”
Face dark with worry, Park uncrossed his arms from over his chest and moved to stand behind her, but he didn’t say anything more. He tried to shut the thoughts of Mary Kane, of the sentinel trees, of the horrible thing at the bottom of the lake, clean out of his mind. Chloe knew what she was doing.
Standing there, he winced as she reached out to cup the pale, cold skin of their dead friend’s bare calf. Instantly, her shoulders knotted up tight as she braced herself against the mental surge that came boiling up out of the ether to drag her under.
She was ready for it this time. She told herself she was ready for it this time. But as her hand touched Nicky’s dead skin, she realized too late how wrong she was.
“I’m here!” they called out in tandem to the silhouette between the trees.
Slitting her eyes, Chloe felt Nicky spread her arms wide to embrace the shape in the distance, realizing too late that the bent, stretched thing scrambling madly toward them was not—had never been—Josh.
They screamed together, the sheer force of it straining their lungs. The sound was enormous, shattering the night around them, but it wasn’t enough to startle the creature from its purpose. With a wet snarl, the creature that used to be their friend fell on top of them, scrabbling and tearing at them like a rabid dog, ripping through their shirt like it was wet toilet paper. It was too late to fight back now. Everything had already gone so wrong.
The creature—handsome features still recognizable underneath the warped animal—leaned back and raised one of its red-streaked claws high, then hissed and buried it deep into their throat. Nicky/Chloe gurgled and thrashed as the Adam-thing curled that claw into a fist and hauled it back out again with a hard snap, like a rubber band breaking. Chloe expected it to hurt, but it didn’t. There was just a sickening cold that spread out from the place where their throat used to be. She could already feel Nicky slipping away, and quickly. Above them, the Adam-thing’s fist came away filled with a mess of torn red chunks; it brought it to its mouth and started eating noisily.
Chloe felt her back arch and leave the ground, then she was floating and falling, alone again in that infinite void, with nothing to do but close her eyes and wait for it to be over.
Nausea crashed through her as she came back, stumbling away from Nicky’s body and driving the walking stick deep into the soil, trying and failing to keep herself upright. She went sprawling to the ground, barking her ass on the hardpacked soil, the impact lighting the hole in her ribs up like a firework, flaring bright, brilliant red. She groaned and sucked air through clenched teeth and clapped a hand to her side, pressing down on the wound despite the bitter throb.
A second later, Parker squatted down over her, holding a hand out. She didn’t take it.
“You okay?” he asked.
She didn’t know how to answer that question. Every part of her hurt. The wound in her side throbbed in time with her pulse. Her limbs were shaky and numb with exhaustion, and a beacon of bright white pain had opened up behind her right eye, like someone was twisting a fork around in her brain, trying to spool it up like spaghetti. That was new.
“Yeah,” she said. “No. I don’t know. I guess. I told you to catch me.”
“Chloe …”
She waved him off, instead using the crutch to drag herself up off the ground. “I’ll be alright.”
“What did you see?”
Chloe turned her head and spat, then used the bottom of her shirt to wipe the remnants from her lips. She didn’t know what to tell him.
“Was it him? Was it Adam?”
She nodded. His eyes narrowed and went dark.
“Was it … bad?”
The images played across the backs of her eyes again, scarred permanently into her memory.
“Yeah,” she finally said. “It was bad.”
“Fuck. Did you see him … ?” He nodded to Nicky’s body, the way it had been hung.
“Shrike her to the tree? No.”
Parker’s shoulders fell. “Probably for the best.”
“Yeah,” she said, taking a deep breath, trying to
dispel a fresh surge of sickness at the back of her tongue. “Probably.”
She watched as Parker owled his head around at all the old sentinel trees that surrounded them. “You think he’s close?”
“Maybe,” said Chloe. “It’s possible he’s been following us since we passed through the town, maybe even before. Hard to tell.”
“What’s he waiting for?”
“I don’t know. Maybe for us to slow down, wear out. Easier to kill us if we’re both fucked up instead of just one of us.”
“Look,” he said. “Maybe it doesn’t have to go down like all that. Really. I guess I just wonder if we could try to talk to him—”
She didn’t mean to laugh, she really didn’t. It just happened, exploding out of her in a bitter, cruel rush. Even the sound of it seemed wrong, now; foreign, almost. Like laughter was an alien concept to this place.
“You want to try and talk to him. Really?”
“Yeah, Chloe. I do. I just think—”
She held up a hand, cutting him off. “No. Parker, listen. He’s not him anymore. I don’t think you understand how bad it really is.”
Parker shook his head. “There has to be some part of him that’s still him. No matter how bad it’s gotten. I mean, come on, it’s Adam.”
“Parker, I know you want to believe that that’s true, but you haven’t seen the things I have. You didn’t see what this place turned him into. That’s what it does. It happened with Mary Kane. It happened with Nate. It happened with Adam. Whatever you’re imagining, however bad you think it is, I promise you that it’s worse.”
Parker’s face flushed, and his eyes fell.
“Do you want to try and get her down?”
She sighed. “I wish I could tell you yes. But we’re burning daylight. I don’t think we can spare the time. Or the energy. We have to keep going.”
“Okay,” he said, then nodded toward where the creek weaved through a wide place between the trees. “Come on. I think that’s our way through.”
Chloe heard it first.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
The sound was faint and far off, so distant that she barely noticed it at first. Just another nothing-sound of the forest as they followed the water. But she’d long since learned not to trust the impulse to disregard or take anything for granted. That impulse had a body count now. So she listened, and the harder she did, the louder it got.
Crunch. Crunch.
Crash.
It was getting closer.
She reached out and slapped at her cousin’s shoulder, stopping him in place. “Parker?”
“What?”
“Did you hear that?”
Parker cocked his head to the sky, listening to the breezy roll of the forest. Chloe listened, too, straining her ears as the creek went silent and still and the wind died down, hoping she’d just imagined it, that there wasn’t any—
Crash. Crash. CRASH.
Parker’s back bolted up rail-straight and he dropped the packs, pivoting his head around like a panicked animal.
CRASH. CRASH.
The sound came again, and again, louder every time. Then, just as the sound seemed like it was going to come smashing down on their heads, everything went quiet. Ahead of them, just along the water, the underbrush parted, separating from itself to allow the vile thing to emerge from the shadows.
“Oh god,” Parker coughed. “Oh my fucking god.”
He was still painted with Nicky’s blood, long dried to sick, flaking rust. From where Chloe stood, she could make out crisscrossing highways of venous blue and arterial red throbbing steadily under spongy, spoiled-milk flesh. His clothes were in tatters around the grotesque shape of his body—torn and stretched and perverted into configurations unintended, as if he’d gotten trapped in a taffy puller, like the ones down the shore. His legs were bowed and banded, terminating in raw, bloody feet. His ropy arms hung down below his knees, nearly scraping the ground with hard, red claw-hands that looked like the flesh had been shaved from them, leaving only jagged bones behind. His face only barely read as human—his lips thin and fish-belly pale, drawn back nearly to his ears, exposing a gruesome, toothy smile; his nose a withered, crumpled remnant of its former self; his eyes stone black and set so far back in his skull that Chloe was surprised he could see anything at all. A few stray wisps of hair still clung desperately to his mottled scalp, sprouting out in stray clumps.
Neither of them moved. They barely even breathed. Chloe thought she’d already seen how bad Adam had gotten, but the thing that hunted them from the shadows was nothing compared to the grotesque horror that stood before them now, grazing its bloody fingers through the dirt. Beside her, Parker stepped forward and drew the black hatchet from his belt. With his free hand, he passed the gun over to her. She wondered what he expected her to do with it. She’d never shot a gun in her life.
“Just keep back, okay?” he instructed her quietly. “If this goes wrong, you shoot him until the gun clicks empty. Should be four shots left in there. Okay?”
“Uh, what are you going to do … ?”
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Adam move first, a smear against the white trees, and it was all she could do to shove herself out of the way as Parker howled and leaped forward to meet him.
They’d done this before.
The two boys crashed into each other with a hard smack that Parker felt all the way down into the marrow of his bones, the impact knocking him dizzy while the Adam-thing scrabbled at the dirt to stay upright, hissing and snapping its jaws. It kicked one bone-thin leg out at him, a cheap shot, but he was too far back for it to connect. A second later, it rushed him again, faster than before, but Parker was ready for it this time. Sidestepping the lunge, he ducked and drove one big fist into the spindly thing’s breadbasket with a hard, meaty thunk. The Adam-thing keened as it fell, and Parker backed up, keeping its attention on him and not Chloe, trading the black hatchet from hand to hand, keeping it out in front of him like a talisman or a ward.
“Please don’t do this,” he said. “Adam, please.”
A glimmer of recognition danced across the Adam-thing’s eyes, but then it was back on its feet again, sprinting forward, slashing its gnarled, bloody hands out in tight, knife-like swings. Taking another step back, Parker braced himself, tightening his stance to sidestep it again, but when he tried, the Adam-thing pivoted midstep, leaping to latch onto Parker’s bulk. With a satisfied snarl, it reared back and buried a claw into his midsection, shearing through the fabric of his shirt until it found purchase in the soft flesh of his belly, digging in with psychotic intensity.
The pain was immediate and immense, dwarfed only by the revulsion at having those hideous bone-fingers digging into the meat under his skin. Parker’s mind screamed at him—Getitoffgetitoffgeti-toffpleasefuckingjustgetitoff!—and through the hurt and the noise, he could feel hot rivers rolling down his stomach to pool in the waistband of his jeans. Somewhere far removed from himself, he felt the hatchet fall out of his hand, its usefulness lost in the frenzy, his brain defaulting instead to a primal, apelike urge to batter the thing off of him. Over and over he drilled his elbow down between the Adam-thing’s shoulder blades, hammering its spine as hard as he could until it shrieked and unlatched, dropping to the ground with a wail.
Parker didn’t waste a second. Throwing himself forward like a linebacker, he shoulder-speared the thing with the full weight of his body, lifting it off the ground, feeling it slash at his shoulders and back with its sharp fingers before they both crashed into the earth with a skull-juddering crunch. The two of them went rolling, swinging and swiping at one another with bloody hands.
When they broke apart again, Parker crawled quickly to where he’d dropped the hatchet, feeling some small measure of rationality return to him. He didn’t hear the Adam-thing race over to loom above him; he only realized what had happened when the thing jammed its claws square into his back, driving in so deep that he could feel the tips wriggling inside his body li
ke hungry worms. Parker screamed and tried to roll away, sweeping the hatchet off the ground with panic-numb fingers. He brought the blade end around in a wild twist and felt it clang off of something solid. There was a wet shriek, and a second later, the claws slid free from his flesh. Hatchet clutched tightly in his fist, Parker rose on rubbery legs. A few feet away, the Adam-thing was prodding at the deep red stripe that Parker had opened up in the flesh between its arm and shoulder. Dark purple blood pattered to the ground at Parker’s feet, falling freely from the blade.
Emboldened by the adrenaline dumping through his system, Parker advanced on the wounded creature that used to be his friend. The Adam-thing swiped at him, and Park ducked back, then dashed forward again, swinging the black hatchet over his head in a wide arc, screaming like a barbarian. He felt the wicked blade sink deep into something soft half a second later, but he couldn’t keep his balance. The two of them crashed into the icy creek. Cold water bit into Parker’s flesh like knives and held him down as he struggled to get back to his feet, the black hatchet still clutched in one fist, streaked from head to haft with thinning red.
The Adam-thing dropped down onto Parker’s chest with a vicious retching noise, pinning his bulk to the creek bed. With one claw it batted the hatchet from Parker’s numb fingers, and then it reared back the other to finish the kill.
Thunder boomed in the distance, and the Adam-thing’s body jerked to the side—once, twice, three times. Not willing to miss his shot, Parker gathered what strength he had left and punched the thing in the ribs, as hard as he could. His knuckles came away bloody.
Adam’s body shuddered and rolled off of Parker, crumbling to the bank of the creek in a twitching, fetal mess. Dragging himself away from the fallen thing, Parker saw Chloe standing over them, the gun smoking in her tiny fist.
The Night Will Find Us Page 24
