The Night Will Find Us

by Matthew Lyons

  Adam.

  From its crouched position, the twisted thing watched him approach with glassy, inhuman eyes, wide and unblinking. Parker wanted to say something to his former friend, anything, but the words wouldn’t come. He wasn’t sure if there was any Adam left inside the broken shell that would hear a word he said, anyway.

  The Adam-thing waggled its pale tongue between broken little razor teeth as it rose up to its full height and began advancing on him. Parker briefly wished he’d hung on to the black hatchet. Rolling his shoulders until the top part of his spine crackled, Parker braced himself. He could still feel every cut and bruise from the last time they’d done this.

  The Adam-thing leaped at him, claws out, and Parker lunged forward to catch it in midair, hammering its ribs with tight, heavy fists as fast as he could piston them. It slashed at his shoulders, opening fresh, deep cuts around the straps of the backpack, but Parker tried to ignore the pain, locking his hands on the creature’s midsection to throw it away from him with a mighty heave. The warped thing bounced off a cluster of trees with a bone-crunching thunk but was back on its feet as soon as it hit the ground.

  This time, it was Parker’s turn to rush in. He barreled toward the creature, but the Adam-thing quickstepped forward and struck Parker in the shoulder with one sharp claw, opening up long red streaks through his flesh. Parker cried out and winced back, then riposted, slamming one safe-sized fist into the side of the creature’s head. Shrugging off the blow, the creature clacked its teeth at him and swung again, then Parker did the same, backing up the hill as he swung, desperate to keep the higher ground.

  Punch, swipe, punch, swipe. They traded shots as they climbed the hill together, and when they reached the crest, the Adam-thing ducked down and dodged around his side to strike low. But Parker was ready, firing an uppercut home into the soft meat of its distended neck, the ragged wound blown into the flesh when Chloe pulled the trigger the last time. The creature trilled and recoiled, and Parker tackled it as hard as he could, sending both of them careening over the hill and down the other side.

  Rolling in a knotted clump, they fell, bouncing off trunks and over fallen logs, exchanging wild body blows until they crashed past the trees into a wide-open clearing covered in black soil and dry branches. In the center grew a massive, warped old tree, burned black as oil and cut all over with coarse crosses.

  It towered above him; it towered above everything, really. Two hundred and fifty feet tall if it was a foot, it stood ancient and heavy with bent, knobbled branches that sprouted like disfigured arms from its blackened, horrible trunk. From where he’d fallen, he could see the hollow hacked roughly into the side of the tree—an upright doublewide coffin.

  Flattened on the ground, Parker lay in awe of the tree. He’d never seen anything like it in his life. He’d never even dreamed of something like it. It looked like it had been ripped from another time, some brutal, prehistoric era, and then abandoned here to take root and spread. He could perfectly imagine this great, malignant thing growing and hammering its way out of the earth, cruel and hard, out of time and space. Another horror that had sprouted here and never stopped—a dead thing still growing, fueled by the curse that had been poisoning this forest since time immemorial.

  A growl came from beside him. He tried to roll away, but he was too late. Pain erupted across the side of his head. The right side of his vision went red and then black immediately after, and stayed that way. Parker screamed and recoiled, scrabbling his feet in the dirt, fingertips searching his bloody face until they sunk into a hot, wet split in the flesh that lit up with panicked, desperate agony as he touched it. Every instinct in his body told him not to touch it, just put pressure on it, stop the bleeding, but he kept his hand where it was, exploring. He had to know.

  The gash ran from the backside of his skull all the way to the bridge of his nose, bisecting his eye, slashing the skin deep and bloody. He could feel that his ear had been mangled, sheared in half as the Adam-thing had raked his skull. The lower half hung loosely by a few strings of skin and sinew, useless. He blinked, or at least tried to—he could only see out of one of his eyes, now. Pain, still far off but razor sharp, radiated across half his head, and when he tried to breathe, his lips sputtered against each other, warm and wet. The taste of copper filled his mouth, and he spat as his other hand went pawing for the glasses that had been stripped off his face when the creature had struck him. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew that the Adam-thing had slashed out his eye, but it hardly seemed to matter now. It was just an eye, just an ear. He had spares.

  When his fingers alighted on the molded plastic of his specs, Parker fit them over his face once more, shuttering his surroundings into what little focus he could lay claim to. He wasn’t dead yet. He could still do this.

  Out of his left eye, Parker saw the Adam-thing rise and start to advance, stalking toward him with a rictus grin pulled across its mottled, papery skull. Parker scrambled back, spiking his arms and legs beneath his massive frame to try and get purchase, catch his balance, something, anything. Then the bleeding, snarling, claws-and-teeth thing that used to be his friend was on top of him once again, digging at him with those horrible, ragged barebone hands, opening up fresh rivers of blood in his chest, shoulders, forearms. Biting back a howl of rage and pain, Parker clamped one hand around the creature’s throat, gagging inwardly at the soft, gelatinous feel of its skin, and pounded at its skull with a fist knotted tight as steel cable. After a few brutal punches, he felt the Adam-thing’s grip loosen, and Parker kicked him off, sending him flopping to the ground in a graceless heap.

  They were both slow to get back to their feet, but when they did, Parker was just a little faster on the draw. Rearing back as he rose, he threw his full weight into the swing.

  The Adam-thing never saw it coming.

  Parker hit him like a car crash. He felt bones breaking under the crush of his knuckles; heard the sick splitting sound the second his fist made contact with the creature’s skull; saw the way his warped, bleeding friend dropped to the ground like a cut-string marionette. Except that wasn’t enough. It was never going to be enough. He was going to get up again, and again, and again. How many times had he come back already? How much more damage could he be allowed to cause?

  No, this was Parker’s chance. He could stop it for good, right here, right now. Fear and panic, paranoia and rage boiled in his head like a writhing fist of black tentacles. Before he knew that he was really doing it, he’d fallen on top of Adam’s crumpled, grotesque form and started hammering him with both fists, drumming his head with a monstrous fury that seemed to grow with each successive blow.

  He hit him until his hands, numb from the beating, came away soaked in red, like he’d dipped them in a bucket of blood. Underneath him, the Adam-thing lay deathly still, head caved in like a rotten jack-o’-lantern, the uneven flicker of his lungs filling and purging the only sign that he—it—was still alive.

  Just one more, a voice that wasn’t his own whispered to him. That’s all it’ll take to spill that head of his all over the forest floor. One good hit. Better make it count.

  He almost did it, too. Parker reared up like a blood-crazed bear, lacing his cracked, split fists together and raising them high to swing like a sledgehammer before the fire that had caught inside his head and his heart sputtered, then went out and stayed out.

  “Do it.”

  Park turned his head to look for the source of that new voice, with all its cold cruelty. From around the great tree emerged a girl, not much older than he was, with dark hair and big, expressive eyes. She was tall—not as tall as Parker, but not far off, either. Her skin was pale, but not clammy or dead. It made him think of marble, like she had spent her entire life hiding from the sun. She wore a plain white dress, the fabric soft and thin, so thin that he could nearly see through to what hid underneath. He blushed when he realized he was staring.

  The girl took a few steps closer to him and held her hands out.
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br />   “He’s going to come back,” she said. “You know he is.”

  Parker’s arms fell to his sides and hung there, useless—dead things that had been nailed to his shoulders. He couldn’t hit Adam again even if he wanted to.

  “Because you keep bringing him back,” he snarled.

  Inside his chest, Parker’s heart knocked and hammered against his ribs at a madman pace that didn’t seem to be slowing. Forcing himself to draw steady, even breaths, he let his head hang down until his chin settled on his collarbone.

  He didn’t hear her move. Same as always. She didn’t make any noise, but then suddenly, she was right beside him, kneeling down, watching him watch Adam, all of reality drawn into a perfect little bubble that held the three of them together. A quiet, awful little universe all their own.

  “Not this time,” the ghost said. “Not anymore. I’m done dragging him along. If he gets up again—when he gets up again—that’s all him.”

  “But he’s not him,” Parker said. “Just like you’re not you. You never were.”

  “Of course I’m me,” the ghost said. “I’ve been me this whole time. I don’t know what your cousin told you, but she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Now finish it.

  Parker’s shoulders fell.

  Underneath him, Adam’s breathing had quickened, but it was shallow. He’d seen breathing like this before, back when he was a kid and his dog Baxter had gotten bit by a snake. Bax had lain in the garage breathing exactly this same way for hours before he finally died. Nothing to do now but wait, his dad had told him, tears in his eyes. Be with him. Remind him that he’s not alone. Nothing in this world should have to die alone, Parker.

  “He’s already gone,” he said. “And I’m not gonna be your new monster.”

  The giant boy rolled off his fallen, dying friend and rose, his movements achingly slow. Parker turned away from the ghostly girl’s cold, dead gaze, turning in a slow rotation to take in the whole of the clearing. Smoke was rising up beyond the trees on the other side of the hill. They didn’t have much longer. He glanced over his shoulder to catch another glimpse of the pale ghost that had stood beside him just moments before. Of course she was gone.

  With one hand, he wiped a fresh curtain of blood from his jaw and smeared it on his T-shirt, leaving a messy red handprint on the torn fabric. He could hear it now—the roar and crackle of the flames as they grew and devoured in the distance. Except the fire wasn’t so distant anymore. He could already feel the heat spreading through the air like a terrible fever. Limping, he stepped away from the body on the stick-strewn ground, moving toward the great black tree.

  “Parker …”

  For a moment, Parker imagined he could actually feel her fingers grazing his bare skin. Her touch was cool and delicate, but firm. More parlor tricks. More bullshit.

  “What do you think you’re doing here? You gonna try and break the curse, set her free? Is that it? One last good deed before the curtain falls?” the ghost’s disembodied voice called to him. “That’s not how it works. You can’t help her, and you can’t stop me. Hell, it’s too late for you to get away now too. Most you can hope for now is a quick death. After that … poof. Dust. Barely a memory.”

  “Better dust than an eternity here. And whatever you are, you’ll die, too, someday. Don’t think that you won’t. Everything dies. Everything.”

  The ghost scoffed. “You can’t kill something like me, Parker. You can’t stop the eternal.”

  “But we hurt you,” Parker said. “We made you feel it. Didn’t we?”

  Pulling Nate’s pack up onto his shoulders one last time, Parker closed the distance between himself and the tree. He felt like he was dragging himself through a swamp, his legs wobbling and threatening to give out at any moment. His body was worn and exhausted, beaten bloody and drained of energy. He was done. He had to be done now. Even though the branch-carpeted ground was dry and firm, he felt himself sinking down to the knees, forcing him to pull his legs from sucking mud with every step.

  With one foot braced against the roots of the great black tree, Parker curled both hands around the rough edge of the old hollow and pulled. He didn’t even have to put any muscle into it—with a soft crunch, the wood and bark came away from the trunk, crumbling in his hands and between his oversized fingers like dry clay. He pulled it off in dusty fistfuls until the hole was wide enough that he could see inside.

  The bones in the tree were a blackened wreck, scorched and caked with filth and age, yet still they hung together in a nearly complete skeleton. Its arms were folded over its gritty, cracked rib cage like a stubby pair of frontal wings, the spine bent and crimped like a broken Slinky. The skull was a ruined, crater-marked planet that leered out at him with a drawn, joyless smile. Looking into its grime-packed eyes filled Parker with a curious, vertiginous sensation. Like he was staring into the past and the future simultaneously, the directions of time laid over one another in a double image.

  “This won’t redeem you. You’ve gone too far, done too much. It’s not going to go the way you think,” the ghost said from behind him. “You small things have no idea of the kind of suffering that waits for you at the end of this dream you call life. When you see it, you’ll beg me to keep you here. Just like they did.”

  Parker didn’t turn to look. He curled his hands into the brittle wood and pulled again, stripping away a dry slab as big as a side of beef, tearing the hole wide enough that he could step through. Tossing the plank aside, Parker shucked the duffel off his broad shoulders and unzipped the top, spreading it wide. Inside, it was the same as it had been when Chloe had passed it over to him this morning, the same as it had been when Nate had first shown it off on Friday afternoon: packed full of fireworks and firecrackers, Black Cats, bundles of sparklers and Roman candles, and—because Nate had been a psycho long before Parker had shot him—ziplock bags bulging with black powder, filched from his dad’s gun safe. There was enough in here to level an entire apartment building.

  Or one giant old tree.

  A shuddering, cracking noise split the stillness of the great clearing from far behind him. He turned to look and, with his one good eye, saw that above the forest, gray-black smoke was already rising from the wild flames that were consuming everything nearby, cutting off all routes out. The blaze was everywhere now. From where he stood, Park could see columns of black and red and orange and yellow thrashing in between the trees on the hill, growing brighter and brighter.

  Chloe’s fire was finally breaking through.

  Carefully, he fixed Nate’s bag in between the skeleton’s folded arms, tucking it tight so she could hold it for both of them. Then he stepped inside the tree with her, burrowing down to sit against the dry, crumbling bark.

  Across the clearing, the fire spilled through the trees in a burning tidal bore, dripping flame that splashed to the earth and spread, catching the tinder-scattered ground alight within seconds. Parker crossed his arms over his chest and looked up at the skeleton long-grown into the wood, and the duffel cradled tightly in her arms. He wondered who she’d really been, all those centuries ago. He wondered if she’d been a happy person, before the Barrens had gotten its hooks into her, before everything had gone wrong. It felt like it had been years since he’d been happy.

  He missed his friends. He missed his dad. He missed his mom. He hoped that whatever happened after this, she’d be okay. Maybe more than anything else, he hoped Chloe got out of the woods all right. There was so much he wished he could change. There were so many things he’d done that he would give anything to undo. But it was too late. Nothing to do now but wait.

  He breathed deep, letting the smoke work its magic, summoning up little flashbulb pops of light in front of his eye and a numb, drowsy feeling in his head. Like he could just sit here and go to sleep and everything would be just fine. He blinked, and when he looked again, the fire had gotten so much closer—when did that happen? Another blink, and the flames were nearly on top of him, so thick and bright
that he couldn’t see beyond the edges of the tree anymore. The fire had swallowed it—them—up whole, thrashing at the space inside.

  From his pants pocket, Parker drew a battered silver Zippo, the letters DAC engraved on the side. He popped the lid open and struck it to life, the flickering little light almost laughably small in the face of the blaze that surrounded him. With one shaking hand, Park held the little flame out to one of the fuses sticking out of the duffel. It caught quickly, the spark curling around closer and closer to the bag. Parker snapped the lighter shut again and clutched it tight in his hands and started to cry.

  Broken, half-blind, and self-entombed inside the tree, Parker didn’t feel when it happened, and yet, he felt so much more than that. For a single, impossibly small moment in between the waiting and the nothing, he felt everything—the whole of the forest around him, alive with fire, twisted and ancient. He could feel it all, writhing in pain and rage, dragging him bodily into itself. He could feel the wind grazing across the dirt, he could feel the flames chewing into tree after tree, the creeks and rivers rushing across his body like beads of sweat racing down his back. For a single, perfect moment, he was finally connected to everything, and it felt—

  Boom.

  APRIL

  The smell. That was what hit her first. Not the humidity or the gray sunlight drifting through the low cloud cover. It was the smell. Dry and rich and earthy and sweet like pipe tobacco, rising up from the earth alongside the freeway. It was just like she remembered, waking up nearly dead—riddled with infection, one leg broken and her head split half open—on a silty riverbank underneath a smoke-clotted sky early on a Tuesday morning last May. She’d dragged herself along in that smell for an hour or more until she found a stretch of blacktop and a friendly stranger in a pickup truck willing to take her to the closest hospital. She’d breathed in that smell in great lungfuls, not committing it to memory so much as tattooing it deep into her soul.