by E. M. Fitch
“Thank you for coming, girls,” Lara’s mother said, hugging them both when they came into the room. Rebecca moved right to Lara’s bedside but Cassie hung back. The glass sliding doors behind her stayed open, keeping the rest of the ICU a soft murmur of background noise and beeping machines.
There was an IV hanging from Lara’s hand, the tip of it under her skin, secured there with clear tape that had been written on. From the doorway, it looked like scribbles, though Cassie knew from her mother that it was probably the initials of the nurse who set it, that and the date it was done. The tubing was attached to a bag of clear liquid, more stickers and scribbles hung from this. The air in the room felt sterile and smelled of plastic tubing, antiseptic cleaner, and the medicine dripping into the girl’s veins.
The Mitchell’s belongings were strewn across the room, jackets hung over the backs of chairs, a blanket from home was spread over Lara’s still legs. Empty coffee cups, a half-eaten sandwich covered in plastic wrap, and a dozen other cards lined the windowsill. There was an open magazine thrown on the bedside table, something mindless and full of gossip to keep Lara’s mom from going crazy as she watched her daughter struggle through a sleep from which she couldn’t wake.
“Any news?” Cassie heard Rebecca ask. Cassie herself felt paralyzed, stuck in place at the door, her eyes drawn to Lara’s sleeping form. Her face was a peaceful contradiction to how Lara normally looked, swearing and sweating and feisty.
As though from a great distance away, Cassie heard Mr. Mitchell answer. “No news,” he grunted quietly, adjusting his position on the stiff chair in which he sat. The vinyl creaked under his weight. Mrs. Mitchell, in what seemed like a practiced move, walked around her daughter’s bed, fussing and tugging at the blankets. Her husband sighed and leaned back in his chair again, his face turned toward the window.
“We don’t want to bother you,” Cassie murmured, her eyes locked on Lara’s face. It was bizarre to consider that the girl was sick, she looked so peaceful. Mrs. Mitchell assured the girls that they were not intruding, fluffing Lara’s pillow from behind her still head. She lovingly pushed her daughter’s hair from her face before finally looking back to the girls. Her eyes were glassy with the tears she was obviously struggling to keep at bay.
Rebecca walked up to the bedside and placed her hand gently over Lara’s, the hand not taped up with IV tubing. She spoke in a calm, soft voice, telling Lara about the game and apologized for losing. She told her the J.V. player they pulled up to play third base was terrible, a slight exaggeration, Cassie thought, but it made Mr. Mitchell smile. Rebecca promised in a whisper to kick the team into action for the next game, promising they’d win if only Lara would wake her ass the hell up.
Her parents didn’t even flinch as Rebecca cursed. Though, after living with Lara, Cassie supposed they would be used to it by now.
Rebecca said all the right things and in the perfect way. Mrs. Mitchell thanked her and pulled her in for a hug. Cassie was just grateful Rebecca had agreed to come along with her. She could not have done for the Mitchells what Rebecca just did.
“I’ll come again tomorrow,” Rebecca said, releasing Lara’s mom. The older woman nodded thankfully.
The ICU was a relatively peaceful circle of rooms all enclosed by glass sliding doors. Each room was visible from the nurses’ station in the center of the floor. It was a small hospital, only six private rooms encircled the unit. Just four of those rooms were currently in use and three of the patients were classmates.
Cassie saw Samantha’s parents across the hall, hovering protectively, just as the Mitchells were, over their own daughter. Rebecca stepped into the hallway beside her, looking from Cassie to Samantha’s room.
“I guess we—”
Cassie was cut short as an alarm went off in the room next to Samantha’s. Every nurse that had been at the desk leapt to their feet, charging one after another into the room. Behind a flurry of navy blue scrub tops, Cassie could see Mrs. DeRubertis, Mark’s mother, hysterically crying and clutching at a tangle of bed sheets wrapped around the still figure in the center of the hospital bed.
Mark’s bed fell back with a bang, the slight incline gone in a millisecond, his body flat. One nurse left the room and grabbed a large cart on wheels, rolling it toward the room.
“Code Blue. Code Blue on Level Four,” a pleasant mechanical voice called out over the loudspeaker.
The medical staff were a blur of hands, limbs, and spoken orders. Mrs. DeRubertis was moved to the corner, away from her son. Machines buzzed and dinged and within seconds, Mark could be seen through the glass doors, the sheets ripped off him, his torso bare, one of the nurses standing over him, her arms perpendicular to her patient’s chest.
“Oh, God,” Rebecca murmured, standing in frozen horror next to Cassie. She tore her eyes from the sight of Mark’s lifeless chest, the rhythmic pushing that was accentuated by the grunts of the nurse above him, and the counting.
“One, two, three, four—”
Rebecca’s mouth moved in what Cassie assumed were silent prayers. The door to her right banged open as a barrage of nurses and doctors and who knew what else came pouring through. They filed past Cassie and Rebecca to Mark’s room, pulling the curtain to his glass doors closed after they all charged past.
Two of the nurses came out of the room, the same who had first run to Mark’s bedside. They took a collective breath, eying each other before taking off in separate directions, checking in on the other rooms and drawing curtains to minimize the distraction.
Cassie didn’t think it mattered much. Everyone in that ICU knew what was happening in Mark DeRubertis’ room.
“Stop! No! Stop!”
Cassie jumped, almost screaming herself as the shrieking erupted behind her. The two nurses in blue ran toward them, shoved past Cassie, and rushed to Lara’s bedside. Cassie and Rebecca spun, not entering the room but staring through the glass as their friend writhed and screamed on her bed. Her sheets twisted in her fists, wrenched from her body, and exposed her thrashing limbs.
“I won’t! I’m not doing it!”
Lara’s IV was yanked out as she flailed, a slow trickle of dark, red blood leaking from the site, staining the sheets with maroon splotches. Blood landed in flecks all about the room, spattering like heavy raindrops without pattern. Her mother and father stood together on one side, holding an arm down. The nurses hovered. One tried to get a hold of Lara’s other arm, the other’s hands skimmed along her body.
Curses flew from Lara’s mouth, loud and strong before cutting off in a gurgling, piercing scream that seemed to never end.
“What’s happening?” her mother cried, looking toward the nurses. Her hair came undone, flying into her eyes just as her daughter’s was flying all over her pillow as she tossed and yelled.
“What are you girls doing here?” someone rasped in exasperation as they pushed past them. Cassie could barely feel it as she got bumped to the side. Behind them, Mark’s room was still a blur of bodies, visible only as outlines behind a drawn curtain. Before them, nurses tried in vain to calm the girl who was screaming so sharply Cassie’s own throat hurt in response. A woman rushed in with a syringe filled with a murky looking liquid. They turned Lara, her naked backside exposed to Cassie and Rebecca.
But Cassie’s eyes were drawn down, not to the site of the needle going into her friend’s skin, but to her calves and lower.
“I won’t,” Lara panted. “I won’t. I’m not doing it!”
Cassie’s eyes traced the outline of her feet, her swollen, grotesque feet. They were bruised, purple in places, the skin split.
Cassie’s face fell slack even as Lara lapsed into silence. As the machine that monitored her heartbeat slowed to a steady rhythm, her mother sobbed quietly in the corner, held by her father. But Lara was still, quiet, breathing.
“What was she … ”
“It’s probably nothing,” the nurse assured a hiccupping Mrs. Mitchell. “She doe
sn’t know what she’s saying just now. It’s okay. This was scary, but good, she—”
Cassie stopped listening. She turned from the room and raced to Samantha’s. Her parents startled as Cassie ripped the curtain open.
“Oh, Cassie, it’s—”
She didn’t give Mrs. Reynolds the opportunity to continue. She strode to her friend’s bed and ripped back the sheet, exposing her feet.
Her bandaged, swollen feet.
Cassie stumbled back, careening into the wall. The white board behind her fell and clattered to the linoleum floor. Mrs. Reynolds was talking to her, asking her what was wrong. She could barely process the words.
Mark’s room was still a mess of activity, Cassie could hear it through the wall. First the sound like meat getting punched, then a soft voice calling, “Clear.” A faint pulse followed by a long, uninterrupted beep.
Quietly, muffled by the wall and the glass doors that closed off each room, Cassie could hear Mrs. DeRubertis call out. “Please, don’t stop,” she cried.
Cassie felt abruptly sick.
“Cass?” Rebecca’s voice broke through the maelstrom of her thoughts. She looked up, horrified, clutching her tender stomach. “We should go.”
She blinked, then apologized through numb lips to Mrs. Reynolds. The older woman nodded, understanding lighting her expression. She cast worried eyes toward the empty nurses’ station and then toward the wall that separated her daughter’s room from Mark’s.
The long, continuous beep that came from his room shifted into short pings of noise. There was silence in the space between the heartbeats, and then the sounds of weeping. Part relieved, and part drained, the sounds of Mark’s mother sobbing leaked into the hall as the team of nurses and doctors trickled out.
Rebecca steered Cassie from the room and out of the ICU. As soon as the doors swung shut behind them, nausea seized Cassie’s gut. She ran to the nearest bathroom, getting to the toilet in time for her to retch. She felt her friend’s cool hands gather her hair from behind.
“He’s alive, Cass,” Rebecca murmured. “He’ll make it. I know he will.”
Cassie wasn’t so sure.
“You okay?” her friend asked after Cassie rinsed her mouth clean.
“No,” she said, her whole body shaking. “I am not.”
Anger rippled through Cassie with the affirmation that yes, it was them, the creatures of the forest that stalked, taunted, and abused. Because why else would Lara be screaming like that and why else would both girls have their feet torn up, as though they had been forced to dance until near death? Just as Jessica had been. This was no natural occurrence. This wasn’t a group of kids doing stupid things in the woods and landing themselves in the hospital. This was a horde of monsters, converging on them and stealing their senses, bleeding them near dry, and forcing them into stupors they may never wake from.
For what? For fun? Amusement? A sick and twisted form of entertainment?
Cassie could barely speak on the drive home. Rebecca didn’t seem to notice, both girls were still wrapped up in the horrors they had just witnessed. They drove in stoic silence, Rebecca contemplative, Cassie murderous.
She hated them, more than she could ever imagine possible. She didn’t just want them gone, she wanted them suffering.
Suffering in the way Mark’s parents were suffering, in the way the Blakes and the Evans had to suffer every single day. These vile creatures should have to pay. It wasn’t right that they should live, carefree and happy while the people they hurt hung in a fugue of misery and the possibility of near death.
People weren’t playthings. Those monsters needed to know this.
Rebecca dropped Cassie off with barely a word, waving as Cassie slammed the car door shut behind her. Her parents would be home soon, but they weren’t yet. That was good. Cassie didn’t want to see them like this, they wouldn’t understand the rage. A part of her feared they may actually talk her out of it, what she was planning to do. Cassie didn’t even want that to be a possibility.
She went into the house mostly for show, aware that Rebecca’s car hadn’t left her driveway yet. She spun on the spot in her living room, her eyes flying about the room.
It looked almost unfamiliar. She knew it wasn’t. The room hadn’t changed, she had. Some fundamental part of her snapped when she understood that the creatures of the forest had struck again, they were back to hurt more of the people Cassie cared about.
She wouldn’t stand for it.
Her eyes fell on the iron fire poker and she paused. It stood quite innocently propped up next to the other fireplace tools, the brush and the small, almost decorative, shovel that made up the set. She remembered the heft, the feel of it in her hand. She had a sudden flash of Aidan’s face as he eyed it. Trepidation.
She grabbed it and strode out through the kitchen to her back lawn.
She didn’t want to confront them in the cemetery, her backyard, or the local park. Those places were too public. These creatures may be the monsters of her nightmares, but they looked like regular people to everyone else. She did not want to be seen clubbing an old man with a fire poker.
She feared it would come to that though. She wasn’t sure if she could kill them, any of them. Not because she thought they didn’t deserve it, but because by their own account, they were immortal. At least, Aidan had certainly inferred that.
And yes, she could admit, deep inside, that maybe she wasn’t sure if she could kill anything at all. Even a murderous person like Jude, someone without any obvious care or concern for human beings. She tried to picture it in her rage-blackened mind and had trouble drawing up the scenario, the exact moment of impact between fire poker and skull. It was hard to imagine, painful even. Her anger flashed. She tamped the hesitation down, convinced herself that yes, she could do this.
Her sneakers hit the grass of her backyard and she ran. She burst past the tree line into the forest. She hadn’t run this route in ages. When she had ventured into the woods that surrounded her home in the past, it had typically been with Laney, sneaking toward the Gray Lady Cemetery. Cassie ran in the opposite direction.
Branches whipped at her face leaving stinging caresses in their wake. Her muscles stretched in a familiar burn and ache, loosening and coming alive. Cassie’s thoughts focused on her destination, and if she’d be allowed to run that far. She wasn’t sure when Aidan and the rest would stop her, she just knew they’d come.
Her fire poker knocked into the trunks as she ran past, nicking the bark and exposing the soft pulp of the tree underneath. The sweet smell of sap trickled into the air. Green gashes appeared at each thwack of the fire poker’s decorative iron tip. Nothing stirred but the ground beneath her shoes. The earth trembled with each footfall as she kicked up dead leaves and underbrush. She ran at a steady pace, a nymph who left freshly scarred trees in her wake.
Ahead, through a break in the trees, Cassie saw what she knew was the edge of the fairground parking lot. Distantly she heard the murmuring of people. She slowed her steps, coming to a halt beside a tiny grove of newly sprung pine trees. The tang of their resin hit the back of her throat as she drew deep, hurried breaths.
A few cars lingered in the large parking lot. She watched, almost as an afterthought, as men went in and out of booths, some carrying large boxes and one pitching hay into a nearby barn. The annual town fair was in two weeks. This event was larger than the traveling carnival that came yearly. There would be horse shows and ax throwing, log chopping competitions and dance contests. It was so bizarre, so ordinary, that it almost drew her out of the rage, softening the anger at the edge of her mind.
Then she realized that Samantha, Mark, and Lara would all be missing the fair this year. They were hooked to machines and alternating between raving out of their minds and looking asleep like some bizarre Disney princess waiting for a kiss from a Prince Charming that doesn’t exist. They wouldn’t be there for the fireworks that lit the night sky in colorful explosion
s. They wouldn’t win dingy stuffed animals in the prize booths, wouldn’t eat their weight in fried food, and laugh with their friends, and dance, and goof around, and buy useless junk. No, they wouldn’t be doing any of those things.
The anger returned, and her resolve steeled. There was no one else, no one saw them. No one knew.
Except Cassie.
She turned her back on the fairgrounds. Her shadow elongated in front of her, pointing the way through the forest. She drew a deep breath and resumed her run.
Cassie didn’t slow again until she had reached the hard-packed earth of the hiking trail. The area was empty. It was one of the first places Ryan had ever taken her to hike, the closest entrance to his beloved Appalachian Trail. It was located at the edge of town, and if she had driven, it would have been several miles. Straight through the woods, as the crow flies, it was closer. She knew because she had stumbled across it before, finding the trail by accident when she was a child.
Ryan and Cassie had used this location as a starting point once, and then never again. It was so close to home that they had hit every part of the trail in walking distance. To walk farther would require an overnight trip. That possibility was now so far removed from her future that the thought of it, even as enraged as she was, caused her pain.
She tightened her grip on her weapon, turning left down the trail. The slope of the Appalachian Trail wasn’t steep here, as it was in some sections. The trees were spacious and even, with wide paths between. The underbrush was light, the ground moist. In the summertime, the area was covered in ferns, fronds sprouting up everywhere in the marshy, fertile soil. Now, in the spring, it looked bare and open. Which was good. Cassie didn’t want the creatures to have any cover.
