“Chloe …” he gasped.
She raised the gun toward the crumpled Adam-thing and pulled the trigger one last time, blasting a messy red hole through its throat. The creature went still and stayed that way.
Chloe held the revolver out to Parker. “Are there any more bullets for this?”
Park shook his head in the negative, trying to catch his breath, in awe of the frost in her voice.
“Did you want to keep it?”
He thought about it for a second and then sighed, “No.”
“Fine by me,” she said and dropped it to the ground beside their friend with a dull thud. “Now, can we get the fuck out of here, please?”
Parker nodded and started to pick himself up off the ground again. “Yeah, of course. Sure.”
“Great,” she said. “Lead the way.”
18
They followed the creek east, or at least what Parker thought was east, tracking its path as it widened and grew through the white trees. They moved haltingly, constantly detouring around trees or over fallen logs, but nonetheless, Parker couldn’t help feeling like they were making progress. Walking a few steps ahead, he prodded at the wounds Adam had gouged in his back, then peeled back the wet rags of his shirt to examine the throbbing gashes sliced into his belly. An uneven red crosshatching decorated the soft, pale skin there. Not exactly shallow, either. There’d be some nasty scarring after they healed over. Tearing a length of fabric from his shirt, he blotted at the cuts, trying to stanch the bleeding.
“You okay?”
Parker wiped away a fresh rivulet of blood, leaving a thin red smear behind that spackled the hairs on his belly down to the skin. He thought it looked like maybe the bleeding was slowing a little.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll be fine. You?”
She laughed at that. “I mean, sure? I don’t know. I don’t think I’m going to fall over and die this second, so I guess I got that going for me.”
Eventually, the water led them to a little cliff, where the creek tumbled over the edge in a chuckling waterfall, spilling down nine or ten feet to a rocky patch below. At the bottom, the water pooled and widened and then rushed away along its track, the current stronger than it was above. In the distance, they could see where it started to grow into something more akin to a river. The white ghost trees branched off to follow the line of the cliff, heading deeper into the woods—heading, Parker had no doubt, toward her. They were a part of her, after all. As much as she was part of the forest and the thing that slept beneath it. The whole of the Pine Barrens was an ecosystem of fear and horror. But they were going to get out. A small amount of relief prickled his skin as he stood there. Surely they were close now. Closer than they’d been in days.
Chloe limped over to stand at the edge of the cliff while Parker turned his face skyward to gauge the angle of the sun, and the time they had left until night fell.
“Now what?” Chloe called out to him, raising her voice above the waterfall. “Do we go sideways, or down?”
“I mean, down seems right,” Parker said. “I’m thinking that if we can get down there, we can probably just follow the creek all the way through. Should lead us straight out, so long as it doesn’t turn around on itself and lead us deeper in.”
Next to the cliff, Chloe turned on her crutch to look at him. “Do creeks usually do that? Turn around on themselves?”
“I mean, not usually, but in this place?” He gave her a look.
“Yeah, no, I get you.”
“So, like I said, as long as the creek follows the sun, and we follow the creek, we’ll make it out, I think.”
“You’re sure about that?”
He shrugged.
“About as sure as I can be of anything in this—”
His hand suddenly seared with agony, throbbing like an overfilled water balloon, the skin swelling with pins and hot blood. Automatically, his fingers clamped shut around the handle of the hatchet, so tight that he could feel the grooves in the wood grain scarring into his palms. The pain was electric, coursing up his arm past his shoulder and into his neck, his jaw, his brain.
Kill the listener, Nate whispered, his voice quick and sharp like a scorpion sting, burying itself so deep into the meat of Parker’s brain that for a fleeting moment, Parker truly believed that the thought was his own. A knotted fist of nausea blew through Parker’s whole body, a hard twist of sickness that fired like a mortar shell on the Fourth of July, exploding in a green wave behind his eyes.
A groan slipped loose from his lips as the world went sideways. He could feel himself listing, his feet bicycling underneath to try and compensate for the sudden inversion of gravity.
Do it, Nate hissed. Do it, do it, put the blade in her head put the hatchet in her fucking head do it NOW DO IT NOW—
Parker felt like he was going to throw up. He thought he’d gotten rid of the ghost, whatever it was, banished it from his head. But of course he hadn’t. It was too stubborn and mean, too powerful to just give up like that. It’d keep its hooks in him for as long as it could. Even if they managed to get out of here, it would probably never really let him go. He’d be stuck hearing his voice—its voice—for the rest of his life.
It was so loud too. So impossible to ignore. Parker’s face pinched tightly into a knot as he took a measured step closer to his cousin at the edge of the cliff, then another. She was so small. It would be so easy. He could still hear his dead friend—not him, he reminded himself, not him, not him, not him—hissing in the back of his head. He wanted to fight against it, to deny the truth of the matter, but in that moment, he knew that he didn’t have any choice. He had to do it.
The boy-thing was lost deep inside itself, beating a panicked retreat from its own bloody wounds, all the damage that the two little crea tures had hammered into its broken, bent body. Deeper and deeper it ran into the dark, looking for a place to hide among the hard stone tunnels of itself, finding no comfort; the voice wouldn’t allow it that, no. The boy-thing didn’t want to return to itself, to the terrible world, with its pains and bloody horrors. It didn’t want to go back, but no matter how deep inside its horrible, distorted, wounded form it traveled, there wasn’t anywhere to hide from the light and die in peace. There was nowhere it could be alone, not anymore.
Nowhere to go but back.
Bleeding into the dirt, the boy-thing opened its eyes. It could already smell where they’d gone.
Parker closed the distance between the two of them and rested a hand on Chloe’s slender shoulder, giving it a squeeze he hoped was reassuring as he watched their shadows gliding across the ground: hers slight and painfully thin, propped up by her crutch; his broad and hulking, the hatchet clutched tightly at the end of one tree-trunk arm. Slowly, she turned around to look at him with a soft little smile, a look of actual hope that he hadn’t seen on her face in what felt like a very long time. She nodded down toward where the water collected itself after the fall, and the forest beyond, sunlight dancing through the trees and across the churning surface of the river. It was beautiful out there. Another one of the forest’s pretty lies.
“How far do you think we have left?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Few miles, maybe. Could be more. You know, give or take.”
She pricked an eyebrow up at him, that same bright, questioning look she’d been giving people ever since they were little kids.
“Hey, you okay?”
It ached his heart to hear her ask that, knowing what had to come next. But there wasn’t any way around it. Not that he could see. The hatchet was so heavy in his hand, the voice so loud in his head. He leaned in and gave his cousin a big, gentle bear hug, trying to show her all the love he had for her in a single, perfect gesture. He hoped it would be enough.
“What was that for?” Chloe asked, pulling away from him.
“I … I just …” he stuttered. “I’m so sorry about this.”
“What?”
Then he pushed her.
She fel
l.
Entirely unmoored from the constraints of gravity, Chloe went tumbling off the edge of the cliff, windmilling her arms as her feet left the ground, her stomach lodging itself in her throat. It had happened too quickly for her to understand what had transpired at first. One second they were standing side by side, and the next she was spinning over the edge. She didn’t even have the time to scream or shout before she was plummeting toward the ground.
But the falling was familiar. By now, falling was an old friend, that feeling of being suspended in midair, turning in languid circles before the inevitable impact. Hanging there like Wile E. Coyote, she thought to herself, Shit, this is probably going to hurt, huh?
And then it did. It hurt a fucking lot. Chloe slammed into the ground in a graceless heap, limbs splaying out in an awkward tangle. The wound in her side screamed against the impact, and the rest of her followed suit. It was like someone had set a bomb off inside her body, the detonation ripping through her at the speed of sound. Her eyes blurred with red and black, and for a moment, she thought she might pass out from the agony. When her vision cleared a moment later, she pawed at her tender midsection, the fresh charge of dark-brown blood pouring out of her impossible to ignore.
Crying out again and biting back a flood of tears, she struggled to roll over and look up at her cousin, who stood on the cliff’s edge with a sad, shameful look on his face. He’d pushed her. That was the only explanation.
“Parker, what the fuck?” She wept as she tried unsuccessfully to rise to her feet. The pain was like a boulder that had been laid across her, pressing her into the earth, keeping her immobilized. “What did you do that for?”
Above her, Parker worked his jaw open and shut, open and shut, like he was trying to think of the right thing to say.
“Sorry,” he said, after a second. “I … I had to.”
“You had to throw me off a cliff?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“What the fuck for?”
He made a tired face, the tiniest of smiles creeping into his round, dirty cheeks. “The ghosts … the thing under the lake … they’re still in my head. I can hear them now, too, talking to me. Whispering. They don’t like you. They wanted me to …”
He broke her gaze and twirled the hatchet around in his hand. It didn’t take her long to understand his meaning.
“So you pushed me down here instead?”
“ Are you …” he muttered. “Are you okay?”
She shook her head at him and forced herself to stand up, groaning as she did. It felt like she was going to rip her whole body clean in half.
“I have no idea. Probably not. I mean, goddammit already,” she said to him. Moving closer to the cliffside, she held her arms out. “Would you just get down here or help me back up? We’re don’t have time for this.”
He didn’t move.
“Parker, come on. Enough of this bullshit, let’s go. Stick to the plan, c’mon.”
He shook his head at her.
“Sorry, Chloe. I don’t think I can. They’re … they’re too loud. I wouldn’t be able to …”
A tiny fire of rage sparked inside her chest, fueled by the pain that had so completely gripped her body.
“Parker, come on. We have to go now.”
“I know.” He nodded off behind her, to the river that flowed away from the cliff and along the path of the sun. “You go that way, okay? Stick to the plan.”
He tossed one of the backpacks down the cliff to land at her feet, and then, after a long moment of deliberation, he tossed the black hatchet down after. It thumped against the dirt and stayed where it fell. Chloe gave him a confused look.
“What do you think you’re doing?”
“You need it more than me.”
Unbidden, her mind flashed to all the horrible things she’d seen done with that hatchet. All the ugly, evil shit she’d downloaded over the last few days.
“I don’t want it.”
“Neither do I. It’s yours now.”
“No, it’s not!” she insisted. “It’s not mine, and I’m not touching it, because everybody who does fucking dies.”
“I’m still here,” Park said, with a weird smile. “Come on, you don’t know what this place is going to throw at you between here and wherever it is we end up. You need something to protect yourself with.”
“What about you?”
He smiled at her and, with one big hand, produced the camp hammer she’d used to mark the trees from his backpack. She didn’t know when he’d lifted it from her, but it was a neat trick.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll catch up. I’ve just got something I need to take care of first. You just stick to the plan. I’ll see you at home, okay? Promise. I love you.”
She didn’t believe him at all, but she couldn’t get back up there to stop him, either. Her shoulders slumped, and wrapping her hand in the remnants of an old T-shirt, she limped over to pick up the hatchet. Maybe not touching it directly would dull some of the bad mojo radiating off of it. Even so, the second she curled her swaddled hand around that black haft, she felt it. Like whispers in the dark. Blood in the water. The T-shirt didn’t help much, but it was still better than mainlining any more of this place’s twisted magic. It would have to do. She’d had enough doors of perception kicked open without her permission already.
The hatchet was heavier than it looked, more like a cast iron pan than something lightweight and stainless steel you’d buy at the hardware store. It felt substantial in her hand, old and bitter. She gave it a few practice swings, testing out its balance. Wounded as she was, Chloe didn’t know if she could even defend herself at all, but she’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it.
“Fine,” she said at last, raising her head toward the rocky edge above her. “If it’ll make you happy, I suppose that I can make this w—… Parker?”
But the cliff was empty. He was already gone.
19
Step by hitching step, Chloe tracked the river downstream, walking along the soft earthen bank, following what she thought was the path of the sun. All around her, the forest seemed to breathe in and out, drawing in closer and then farther away as she passed through it. Her nerves had gotten worse since she and Parker had split up, drawing themselves tight like piano wire. Beside her, the water had begun to darken and pick up speed. But it wasn’t the river that was bothering her; it was that no matter how far she seemed to go, the forest was still riddled with sentinel trees. Every few feet, she’d spy another one, standing in her path or just peeking out from the distance. She’d thought that getting farther out would mean she’d be able to leave them behind. Guess not.
Up ahead of her, the river bent to one side and then straightened out. As Chloe pick-thrushed around its bank, she saw what the water was leading her toward. It was a row of white trees, clustered so tightly across the bank that it might as well have been a wall. Big enough that she couldn’t walk around it, tight enough that she didn’t dare go through them; she wasn’t going to risk accidentally jacking into the fear-Matrix again.
Walking up a little farther, she stood in front of the wall of trees and looked them up and down, the knots in the bark like dead, unblinking eyes. Somewhere along the line, she’d started thinking of the trees like individual nerve endings, all interconnected, forming a web throughout the whole of the Pine Barrens. The thing under the lake was stitched through all of it, Chloe understood that better than anybody.
The only way it lets us go is if we make it, she’d said, sitting on the log, staring out into the wilderness with Parker. And I think the only way we can do that is by giving it bigger problems than us.
Bigger problems like what? he’d asked.
She’d spat then, and hoped he couldn’t see the tears collecting at the corners of her eyes.
Like us burning this forest to the fucking ground.
It made sense on paper, but there was something else to it, something stubborn and cruel that she desp
erately hoped he wouldn’t notice. The Pine Barrens had bled her, violated her, turned her inside out. This forest and the awful, craven things that lived inside it had hurt her, and she wanted to hurt them back.
The plan wasn’t complicated, really: they’d follow the river as far as they could, and if (really when) things got dicey, they’d use the rest of Adam’s Everclear to start a fire the Barrens couldn’t ignore. The river would be their way out. They’d swim, if they had to. Even if they didn’t know where it led, anywhere was better than here.
Unslinging the backpack from her shoulder, Chloe used her crutch to steady herself while she knelt down to unzip the bag. She knew the white trees wouldn’t burn on their own; she’d seen as much when Josh had tried to light their branches for a campfire two days before. That was okay. She had all the propellant she needed right here. Drawing the bottle of clear liquor from the side of Adam’s pack, a Molotov cocktail waiting to happen, she uncapped it and brought it to her lips, taking a deep slug off the top. It tasted like a dozen different shitty, stupid nights, dragging napalm down her throat as she fired it back, resting in a ball in her belly. Ugh. She’d always hated this shit. Things always got too messy when they drank it. It was like jet fuel for bad decisions.
Unfortunately, bad decisions were all she had left at this point. In front of her, the sentinel trees swayed in a breeze she didn’t feel, back and forth, like they were waving to her. She upended the rest of the bottle onto them, shaking it until she’d dumped every last drop onto the trunks and ashy roots. Tossing the bottle into the river, she watched it float away, then fished Nicky’s little yellow lighter from her jeans pocket. Skritching it to life, she held the flickering little flame away from her face and touched it to the nearest trunk.
Nothing happened.
Goddammit, come on. The only thing more flammable than 190 proof liquor was like, pure gasoline. This should have worked. She waved the little flame back and forth across the booze-drenched bark, over and over, trying to force the issue, but the trees refused to take. It was like trying to set fire to stone; the Everclear didn’t catch, the bark didn’t blacken. She held the fire to the tree until the cheap little flint wheel grew hot and sizzled against her skin, forcing her to douse the flame.
The Night Will Find Us Page 25
