“You are so full of shit,” she seethed. “You… You don’t know anything about me and Lutz. If you did, you’d have shut your fucking mouth when you had the chance, because now—”
“Holy hell, Kaitlyn…”
“Now I’m gonna make a project out of you.”
“Kaity…!”
“I’m gonna show you exactly what smooth sailing looks like.”
“Kaity, please—”
“Tell me we’re not gonna have any more problems, Ben Alden…”
“KAIT.”
“What?” Kait wailed, only it didn’t sound like a human word when it left her mouth, only an animal screech, something dying in the desert, screaming vengeance at the sun. Alice had come up behind her, putting a hand on her shoulder—but also taking a firm hold of the barrel of the hunting rifle. Both hands trembled, but when Kait turned away from Ben to face her, there was flint in the other girl’s eyes.
“Kaity… Kait,” she corrected. “I’m sorry, but you’ve got to put the gun away now…”
Alice, her flash of bravery seemingly spent, appeared to wobble on her feet for a second, pitching back and then forward like she would collapse into Kait, send them both crashing to the floor—but she did not relax her grip on the barrel of the Model 94. Her eyes were wide, her face pale and stretched; she was staring not at Kait but at some point beyond Kait’s head, out the window, perhaps, into the night sky behind the drawn shade. Then the big girl took a breath and held it, held it like she never wanted to let it go.
“I’m really sorry,” she repeated. “But you’ve got to put the gun down. Because I think I believe him…”
“Alice—”
“Because I think it’s happening to me too.”
Now it was Kait’s turn to wobble. The whole room seemed to expand and contract once, like a single beat of an enormous heart, and the faces surrounding her floated off their moorings; they shuffled around, swapping places with one another in dizzying, arrhythmic patterns.
“Alice…” she whispered. “Alice, no, Alice you can’t…”
But Alice only looked at her, almost pityingly, and when her mouth moved to reply, the swirl of the room swept her words away, drowned in a whirlpool of sensation and color. Kait felt curiously weightless, but the rifle was suddenly huge in her arms, the weight of a world pulling her to heel; it came loose, slipping through her fingers, sliding harmlessly to the floor, which seemed miles away and falling. And now there were arms beneath her, scrambling for purchase as she toppled back, as she felt herself drifting backwards into darkness, Oh, come on, Heart-Brecker—don’t be like that, and the last thing she heard, from a great distance away, was the sound of her very own voice crying out in stifled terror as they eased her gently to the ground.
Chapter 9
Touch
And now Riley was talking, very fast and very animated, but Alice only half-listened. She kept looking back at the bed where Kaity lay sprawled, her eyes three-quarters closed and rolled so far back in her head that only the white showed under her lashes, and she kept thinking to herself, If I fall apart now, they’ll never find all the pieces, over and over again until the words smeared together in her head like wet blobs of paint. Her rump was starting to ache from sitting, while Riley kept her feet, striding around the little bedroom and making big gestures in the air with her hands. The bed—and Alice’s outstretched legs—got in the way of her pacing, so she had to make horseshoes instead of full circuits, but it didn’t seem to slow her down much at all.
“So what are you saying?” she was asking. “How does it work—by touch?” Riley paused in her patrol, pressed palm to palm, showed Alice where they touched. “Bare skin to bare skin? That’s the only logical way I can figure…”
“You’ll have to ask Ben,” Alice replied in a low voice, half to herself.
Ben was gone, mercifully, off in the other bathroom—throwing up again, Alice guessed. She could almost hear the splash of it, even across the cabin, an undercurrent to Riley’s constant chatter. The thought of it turned her stomach. She felt like she ought to check up on him, but she still didn’t trust her legs to lift her—and she kept imagining the sight of the open toilet bowl, the water in the bottom standing filmy, maybe with a single spittly bubble floating on the surface. And besides that: She did not want to be in the same room as her boyfriend right that second. That wasn’t fair, she knew, but it was the truth—and Dr. Lehman had said that was important, hadn’t she? To acknowledge what you were feeling, and why you were feeling it? But she’d just told Ben she loved him not an hour ago. Why couldn’t she stand the sight of his face now?
The answer came without her bidding: Because my boyfriend tried to rape my best friend.
Because my boyfriend admitted he tried to rape my best friend.
Because my boyfriend got possessed by my best friend’s ex-boyfriend, and then tried to rape my best friend…
Alice let out a stifled wail, pressing the heels of her hands to her ears as though she could block the awful thoughts out. The room was suddenly too big and too loud. She tried to focus on her body, on physical sensation, but it was her body that was betraying her now: heart still pounding, stomach knotted, face caked with tears and sweat… She felt gross. Gross and ugly and totally exhausted from all that crying. Her face was sticky with grief.
If she could just talk to Kaity, she reasoned, if the two of them could squirrel away in some hidden place and put their heads together like they used to, Alice knew they could dream up a way out of this craziness. But now? Kaity’s eyes kept flashing across her mind, widening and going glassy just before she began to topple backward—the expression of anguish, of betrayal, of sheer brute-force horror making Alice quail as though she had been struck across the face. She stole a glance at her friend’s limp form, at the one pale hand that had flopped over the edge of the bed, then quickly looked away again.
She probably hates me now. The thought skittered through her head like a rat through a hole in a wall. And she’s right. I would probably hate me right now too.
She felt a shadow fall across her. Riley was standing over her, bowing forward at the waist with her fists planted on her hips. “You all right down there, girlfriend?” she was saying, pink around the cheeks and a little out of breath. “Come on, talk to me—I feel like I’m alone in the room over here.”
Alice flinched, screwing up her eyes; the light was right behind Riley’s head, and it was painful to look her in the face. “I don’t know,” she muttered at last, bring her knees up under her chin and wrapping her arms around them. “I’m fine, I guess. I can’t—I mean, I don’t know. I’m trying not to think about it.”
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Riley crouched, both knees popping, and she took hold of both Alice’s shoulders. She didn’t shake her, not exactly, but the force of her grip moved Alice just the same—or made it known she could be moved. “Alice, you’ve gotta stay with me, okay? We can’t go goofy on each other. Not now, not until we know for sure what’s going on here.”
“But I don’t know what’s going on,” Alice moaned. “It’s like Ben said. There’s parts of yesterday I don’t remember. That’s all. Maybe it’s nothing.”
Her gut squirmed, and she looked past Riley’s silhouette at the closed bedroom door, expecting Ben to walk through it. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said—”
“Bullshit, it’s nothing.” Something like anger flashed in Riley’s eyes—her grip on Alice’s shoulders flexed, and for a second, Alice thought she might actually slap her across the face. But instead Riley released her and gathered her hands in her lap. “If there’s time you can’t remember, that’s not nothing. That’s a serious problem.”
“We were drinking last night,” Alice reasoned, shrugging limply. “I… I must have blacked out. Things got crazy. That’s what it has to be. Because—”
Because, what? Because there’s no such things as monsters?
Or because monsters aren’t supposed to look like Lutz Visgara?
>
“Bull. Shit.” This time Riley did slap her, only it was more of a nudge, a tap on the shoulder to draw her notice. “Don’t talk like that,” she urged. “Don’t you ever talk like that. This wasn’t your fault. You know something’s wrong here, and so do I. Ever since we got out here, we’ve all been acting screwy. And you felt it, didn’t you? I can see it on your face—but I can’t put the words in your mouth, Alice. I need to hear you say it, do you understand that?” And when Alice tried to look away, she tapped her again, harder this time, on the cheek. “Look at me. Look at me. Do you believe Benjamin would do something like that?”
Alice’s gut squirmed again. “I don’t want to believe it.”
“Neither do I,” Riley replied. “But unless you can back up his story, we’ve got to go with what Kaitlyn’s telling us. She’s…” The other girl paused, glancing over Alice’s shoulder at the shape of Kait laid out on the bed. “She’s our friend,” she said at last. “We owe her that much. I don’t want to believe her creepo ex-boyfriend was wearing you around like a Buffalo Bill suit any more than you do—but what Ben said’s got me scared to death. I think there’s something seriously messed up happening here, but you’re the only one who can say for sure now.”
She squeezed Alice’s hands, and Alice was shocked to note the lines of moisture underneath both of Riley’s eyes. “Goddammit, I’m asking for your help, here. Don’t you get that? I’m asking for you to save me.”
“I wish…” Alice sniffed and wiped her nose. “I wish I’d never touched him…”
“Just talk,” Riley pleaded. “Don’t think about it, just talk. How did it feel?”
It felt so good.
Like a symphony—just like she’d imagined a hundred times. Even if it was over far too quickly—the sharp, hot spike of adrenaline, followed by the throbbing ache in her clenched fist as she stared at Lutz on the ground, nursing that bloodied nose. But that’s when everything had gone wrong, hadn’t it? She’d felt hot all over climbing back into the car, but as her pulse slowed, the uncanny heat remained. At first it was almost pleasant, like a kitten curling up in her lap, but then it sank deeper—she could still feel it in her gut, a phantom sensation, wet and warm.
Like fresh blood, she thought. Like I was bleeding inside.
“After the gas station,” she began at last in a faltering voice, “that’s when it started. When I started losing track of time. Like I zoned out in class, staring out a window—only I couldn’t come back, you know? No matter how hard I tried. And then suddenly, we were here, pulling up to the cabin. I’d lost five hours: I know, I counted… I thought I was getting sick, but then I started remembering things. Little things, right? Little bits of time—like a few words of a conversation, or the feeling of a seatbelt digging into my chest when Ben stomped the brakes. But it was all coming through fuzzy, like I’d dreamed it. Or like my body was remembering instead of my head. But…”
But I couldn’t have dreamed that voice, she wanted to say. Because if I had dreamed it, I would’ve woken up screaming.
Alice paused, hoping Riley would pick up where she’d dropped off, but the other girl knelt still as a stone idol, those wet tracks still glistening on her inscrutable face, until at last Alice knew she would have to speak again or the silence would crush her.
“It was him,” she murmured, the words sending tremors throughout her entire body. “It had to be him. I don’t know how—but when I punched him in the face, that’s how he got me. That’s how he got in my head.”
She looked from Riley’s face to the bedroom door, then back at Kaity, still unconscious on top of the rumpled sheets. “And do you know what the worst part of the whole thing is?” she whispered. “The worst thing is, I don’t even know if it’s over. I don’t even know if he’s gone, if he’s really done with me. What if he’s still here? What if… if he never lets me go?”
She fell silent, her arms limp at her sides. Riley cocked her head at an angle, and Alice could almost feel the pressure of her eyes running across her face. The quiet between them seemed to stretch thin like an elastic band, and it wasn’t until Alice could feel the band tremble, about to snap, that Riley spoke at last.
“Then we’ll force him to,” she said. And then, in barely a whisper:
“That’s what it felt like for me too.”
So the story came spilling out at last, and though most of what Riley said should have horrified her, to Alice it was like the liberation of a captured city during wartime. By the time the telling was over, both girls were shaking head to foot, and Alice felt so fiercely close to Riley that she could hardly contain it. They had never really been friends, she realized, not in the way she and Kaity had been friends—but now she felt prepared to kill and die for this girl, almost begging the world to give her the chance to prove it. Her pulse still roared in her head, but this peculiar kinship pulled up her cheeks, contorting her face in a confused and crazy grin.
“One of you must have tagged me,” Riley guessed, looking down at her hands with a shrug. “You, or Ben, or even Kaitlyn, I suppose. I never went anywhere near Lutz—the whole thing must be contagious, somehow. I thought it was the alcohol at first, but I couldn’t shake off that warm feeling in my belly, even when I went out in the cold for a smoke. What do you think he wanted with me?” She rubbed her chin with her knuckles thoughtfully. “I didn’t lose as much time as you—only a half hour or so. But I’m used to blacking out. I didn’t think anything of it until Ben started in with—”
“I don’t wanna think about it,” Alice cut in with a shiver. “You know, I always thought there was something scary about that guy, even before Kaity busted up with him. But I never figured… I mean, I never thought…”
“Stop that talk.” Riley smiled, though it seemed to take some effort. “You didn’t know. You couldn’t have. Let’s focus on what we do know, huh?” Alice nodded, and Riley straightened her shoulders, rising to her full kneeling height, about to deliver a lecture.
“Item one,” she said. “We know Lutz Visgara can take over people’s bodies. I don’t like to think about it either, but we’ve just got to accept it and move on for now. Item two: I think he or whoever he’s puppeting needs to physically touch you to get control. Meaning, he’s not a virus. He’s not in the air. This is good—that’s what’s going to protect us. As long as we stay away from each other, we’re safe from him. You with me so far?”
Alice withdrew her hands, scooting back a foot from where Riley knelt, and nodded once.
“Item three, then.” Riley heaved to her feet and began to pace once more. “I think he can only control one person at a time.”
Alice cocked her head. “How do you figure that?”
Riley grinned and tapped her forehead. “I know my own mind,” she said. “I’ve been drinking a lot longer than you have, I guarantee it. I know when I’m in the driver’s seat and when I’m not—and right now, I’ve got both hands on the wheel. If Lutz was able to control us all at the same time, why wouldn’t he? It’d make things a helluva lot easier on him, wouldn’t it?”
Now it was Alice’s turn to shrug. “I suppose that makes sense,” she replied. “As much sense as anything has tonight.” A thought struck her. “Item four,” she continued. “We know what Lutz is after.”
Both girls turned their heads, looked at Kaity, then turned back to face each other once more like a pair of pizza parlor animatronics.
“We need to get her out of here,” Alice said in a low voice. The tight panic in her chest, quelled before by Riley’s lively talk, began to quiver and bloom once more. “The sooner the better. We know what he’s here for. He’s already tried to…”
No. I won’t say that. Not in front of her. I won’t even think it.
“He tried to get at her once already” she managed to get out at last. “What’s going to stop him from trying again?”
“Nothing,” Kaity replied softly from the bed. “Nothing in the whole world.”
Alice leapt to her feet, s
tubbing her pinkie toe on the corner of the bed. Somewhere behind her, she heard Riley stumble backward, bashing an elbow or a knee against the back wall of the bedroom with a sharp cry of pain. Kaity was sitting up in bed, a tangle of sheets drawn up to her chin, with one pale leg swung over the bed’s edge as though she meant to stand. Her face was a blank, smooth shell—but Alice could see the gears and levers of panic working behind the mask. She knew, from a dozen Halloweens, that Kaity could scream and holler at a scary movie with the very best of them, but it was only when she went completely dead in the eyes like this that you knew she was good and truly rattled.
“You’re awake!” Alice cried out, feeling immediately ashamed and stupid for saying such an obvious thing. “How long were you—”
“Long enough,” Kaity said, her voice frosty. “Both of you, stay where you are.”
Alice froze in her tracks, her pulse up and racing. She hadn’t even realized she’d started forwards—but there she was, halfway across the distance to Kaity, her arms half-raised as if to embrace her. She dropped them to her sides guiltily, stealing a glance at Riley, who leaned against the wall by the door with her arms folded awkwardly across her stomach.
“Kaitlyn, you have to understand—” Riley began to say, but Kaity cut her off with a sharp look.
“Shut up a minute, will you?” she muttered, and rubbed her eyes sleepily. “I’ve been listening to you talk all night.”
Alice’s mouth clamped shut around a hundred hoarse pleas. Kaity didn’t speak, not immediately; instead she yawned, rolled her shoulders, and slid her other leg out from under the sheets and planted her feet flat on the wood floor. And as she rose from the bed, Alice thought she saw something change in her eyes—a certain hardness, like the dull glint of black iron. But her movements were slow, unsure, deliberate to the point of caution; to Alice, she looked like a much older woman, one who’d just struck some terrible bargain and was only now beginning to feel the weight of what she’d wagered away.
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