The Unwelcome

by Jacob Steven Mohr

  “Then what’s our move?” Ben asked. To his left, Alice sniffed and nodded.

  Kait’s mouth flattened in a grim line. “We draw him out,” she intoned. “We finish this. Hike for the main road—it’s not far, but we need to make it out of these woods by nightfall. I don’t like our odds against him in the dark. If we act like we’re trying to make it back to civilization, he’ll come for us. Then we’ll take him.”

  Kait ran her fingers through her dark hair, shivering slightly as a blast of cold wind came rushing through the broken-in door. “Pack your things,” she said. “Whatever you can carry comfortably—but don’t leave each other alone, not even for a second. Go room to room together. You have to remember one thing: Riley died to give us this chance, but unless we all live through this, her sacrifice doesn’t mean a damn thing. You’ve got to survive. You’ve got to stay free. For Riley. Do you understand that?”

  She headed across the room once more, stretching her hands out to them, palms up.

  “I understand,” Alice replied. “For Riley.” She took the hand closest to her and turned her eyes to Ben.

  Ben gulped and nodded. “For Riley.” He took the other hand, so cold in his own, and so much smaller. But the strength of her grip was almost superhuman as she gave each of their hands a last squeeze, then released them.

  “For Riley,” Kait said, like sealing a letter with wax.

  Her lips twitched again, and for a brief instant Ben though he saw the beginnings of a shy smile grace her pale features, though it was gone as quickly as it had come. With slow, careful movements, Kait stooped to lift the hunting rifle—but before she could touch it, Alice’s mouth fell open in soundless horror. From the other side of the room, there came the sound of rapid movements: a cracking, shuffling sound, the noise of flesh scraping across a wooden surface. Then a terrific crash, and the tinkling of falling glass.

  Kait whipped around, raising the rifle to her shoulder faster than human thought. But Ben knew she was too late. The sliding back door of the cabin had shattered, and the glass lay gleaming in the snow on the back porch. He could see bare footprints, stained scarlet, bounding off into the wilderness, losing themselves in the swirling white vortex. And in the space where Riley’s body had fallen, there was only a dim outline in dry, faded blood.

  Riley was gone.

  Chapter 18

  Truth

  “This can’t change anything.”

  Mere moments had passed, but to Kait the frigid seconds—each tick of the clock, each beat of her thundering heart—seemed to stretch and pull like pink taffy. Alice and Ben stood on the rug in front of the dying fire, careful to avoid the crust of Ben’s drying vomit. Kait paced at the back of the cabin, winding a pensive path from one corner of the room to the other, the rifle perched on her shoulder like a tin soldier and broken glass crunching occasionally beneath the heels of her Converse sneakers.

  “I mean—it shouldn’t change anything,” she insisted. “We stick to the plan. Get out of the woods by dark. Find Lutz. Kill Lutz. Everybody goes home.”

  “But she must have been alive,” Alice wailed for perhaps the tenth time, her head in her hands. “She must have survived it… the bullet… somehow. It doesn’t make any sense any other way. He can’t… Lutz can’t drive a, a…”

  “Please don’t say it,” Kait murmured, but Alice fumbled on unheeding.

  “…a corpse. Can he?” She turned spotlight eyes to Kait. “Can he do that? I mean, has he ever done it before?”

  “Of course he’s never done this before,” Kait hissed. “Don’t you think I would have mentioned that? Now would both of you shut up and let me think.”

  Her friends’ mouths both snapped closed, and Kait resumed her pacing, her one free hand pressed to her cheek, her mind whirling with terrible possibilities. She hadn’t known—had she? How could she have predicted such a thing? The image kept flickering against the blank wall of her mind: Riley’s ragdoll body rising from the floor, bones clicking into joint, the head snapping back into place like a bobblehead doll on its spring, the eyes rolling forward inside wide bloody sockets. She pictured the body sweeping forward, almost weightless, drifting across the floor, breaking through the glass door as if it were craft paper. She imagined the feeling of wearing the corpse—the sensation of that dead skin and muscle hanging from her frame like a sleeping bag, heavy and sagging and soft.

  “That boy Riley knew…” she began at last.

  “Cormac?”

  Kait nodded. “Is he still in front of the cabin?”

  Alice paled and scurried to the transom window. “He’s still there,” she breathed at last. “I can see… Oh, God, I can see his feet under the car.”

  “All right.” Kait took a deep breath, squeezing the stock of the rifle to her chest. “We have to destroy the body.”

  Ben turned the color of beached seaweed. From the front of the cabin, she heard Alice’s gasp of horror. “What… What do you mean, destroy?”

  “I hit Riley through the eye,” Kait said. “I saw the hole the bullet came out, on the other side. The shot scrambled her brains.” She paused, letting the weight of her words click into groove. “Alice, I’m sorry. But that thing out there, that’s not Riley anymore. I… I killed her. I’ve got to live with that somehow. But pretending it didn’t happen isn’t going to bring her back.”

  A terrible shiver wracked her body, like the feeling of cold lips brushing her ear.

  “So we’ve got to face facts,” she continued. “Lutz can use dead things.” A hollow tree, an empty corpse. “I don’t know how he does it, but how doesn’t matter. I’m not going to let him do it again.” They don’t feel a thing, Heart-Brecker. “We have to destroy the other body: hack it up with the saw, or…”

  “No!” Alice shrieked through laced hands. “We can’t. Not with…”

  Her voice trailed off, but the unspoken words were clear as snowfall: Not with the saw he killed himself with.

  Kait scowled, dropping her shoulders. “Fine. Burn it, then. Or…”

  Her gaze fell on the braided rug in front of the fireplace.

  “How far away from here did you say the lake was?”

  “Not far,” Ben replied slowly. “Half a mile, maybe three-quarters. Riley and I… We didn’t make much progress there.”

  Kait scrubbed her tired eyes with the heel of her hand. “Do you think we could carry him there?” she asked. “Wrap him in the carpet, weighed down with rocks. Throw him off the pier so the water’s deep enough. It’ll take us out of our way, but…”

  “I think we could do it,” Alice put in hesitantly. “As long as we don’t have to… I mean, if you think we really need to.”

  Kait nodded. “I’m sorry. But it’s the only way to be sure.” The only way I can protect you. She adjusted the rifle on her shoulder, which had begun to ache, a dull pulse of pain just beneath the skin. “Go on and pack,” she said. “But pack light. Anything you can fit in a backpack. We won’t be coming back here again.”

  Her friends shared a glance, then nodded in almost-unison, retreating to their bedroom—Kait thought she saw Alice cast a nervous look over her shoulder, but she couldn’t be certain. She hardly trusted her own eyes now.

  She returned to her own little room and closed the door behind her with a low moan. Her earlier surge of adrenaline was cold in her blood. Now pain like hot blunt needles dove into her right arm, into the shoulder she’d bruised against the cabin door. No, not bruised—this was something else. She had been able to conceal it from the others, but every so often, her right hand would twitch on the stock of the rifle. A finger would move out of synch, or her grip would tighten without her meaning it. Like the whole arm was rebelling. Like it had a mind of its own.

  Like she had let something inside.

  She lay the rifle lengthwise on the bed and clutched at her shoulder with the other hand, peering around the room. There wasn’t much to pack: her big over-the-ear headphones lay on her bare pillow, and her backpack
slouched on its side in one corner, still zipped closed. She bent at the waist to lift it—there beneath it hid four brownish circular stains sunk into the floorboards. Off-brown, she thought to herself, feeling faintly ridiculous. If white could be off-white, then a brown could be “off” as well. And that’s what this was. Off-brown. The color of day-old blood.

  Christ—it had only been a day.

  Kait shook herself, reaching for the headphones, dragging the pillow towards her so she could reach. How many places were there like this inside the cabin? Or outside, on the grounds? Little signs, fading reminders of the nightmare. The flecks of blood here, the vomit on the rug, the broken glass on the back porch, the broken door near the front. The decapitated body out on the gravel. The silhouette of Riley’s corpse on the floorboards, like a chalk outline. Even that had already begun to fade, but the mark would last a while longer, she guessed. Maybe it would last forever, preserved by the cold. Like a gravestone. Like a sigil of a violent death.

  She shook herself once more, reemerging from the bedroom to find Alice and Ben waiting for her, looking at her expectantly. Kait gave them a nod and hoisted her backpack, propping the barrel of the Model 94 on her shoulder. She grit her teeth as red sparks of pain sizzled in her shoulder joint, struggling not to let the discomfort show on her face.

  Don’t you dare, she thought grimly. Don’t you fucking dare. Not now. Not when we’re so close. Not when they’ve finally decided to trust me…

  Trust you, cooed the whispering voice of Jill Cicero. You know better than that, Heart-Brecker. They chose the devil they know. But I bet you it could have gone either way.

  Kait ignored this. She led the others outside, Ben dragging the rolled-up rug from in front of the now-cold fireplace, and instructed him on how to lay it out beside Cormac, and where to position the stones so they wouldn’t fall out in the water. Nobody questioned her, questioned how she knew the things she told them, all in a voice as level and cold as sheet ice. But she caught them stealing glances at each other—but whether it was confusion or pity or plain old fear flashing in their eyes made no difference to her.

  Then she rolled the corpse onto the rug. She did this alone, insisted on it, even though her shoulder flanged with agony and her skin crawled to touch his stiff, cold flesh. Though it wasn’t as stiff as she’d first imagined—Riley’s hands had felt like living hands, only cold to the touch, but Cormac’s skin felt artificial, somehow, like a rubber glove filled with water. He was laid out with his legs straight and his arms at his sides, which made him easy to roll, but he was still awkward and stiff and monstrously heavy, and it took her almost thirty seconds to muscle him onto the carpet. Then the others helped roll him up inside, one on one side of her and one on the other. Kait thought she saw Ben trying to catch her eye, but whenever she looked up, his gaze was always elsewhere—out in the trees, or across the snowy lot. She wondered, briefly, what he could be looking for. But the answer wasn’t far behind.

  Eyes among the trees, she thought.

  One staring and glassy, the other a wet crimson hole.

  It took the three of them a few tries to hoist Cormac’s rug-wrapped body onto their shoulders. Once they dropped him, only a foot or so, when Alice’s grip failed, but the second time he fell from Ben’s shoulders, the head-end of the carpet sliding to the snowy gravel almost silently. The rug came unwrapped, and the oozing, empty neck sprang into view, tearing a shriek from Alice’s lips. Even Kait felt a frustrated cry bubbling up in her throat. She turned her eyes skyward: the snow had stopped, but the clouds overhead were still very thick, and the temperature was dropping by the second. It was not so late in the day, but the dark would fall quickly on this kind of winter evening, especially out among the trees.

  She tried not to imagine the woods at night. The white-gray of tree bark going ochre, then lead-colored, then black altogether, the beams of flashlights flickering among the looming trunks, the Model 94 useless in her numb hands. She tried not to imagine the sound of her friends breathing in the darkness, quickening with panic as fear crept in and the blood began to roar in their ears, loud but not loud enough to drown out the sound of stealthy footsteps somewhere in the snow—shambling, sliding footfalls, the gait of a corpse.

  Or perhaps they would not hear Riley coming at all. Perhaps there would be no sound, only the faint glisten of one bloody eye-socket in the dying light of a flashlight or a cell phone screen—glistening like dew in a spider’s web. Or perhaps she would turn around and one of her friends would be gone. Alice vanished, or Ben, without so much as a cry. Perhaps she would suddenly find herself alone, and then, only a few yards away, she would hear the hissing, ripping sound of a hacksaw working rhythmically against human flesh.

  Her hand struck out, latching onto Alice’s shoulder almost without her willing it. Her friend yelped and stiffened, nearly dropping her end of the rug a third time. “Kaity, what’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Did you see something?” Ben asked from behind the carpet.

  “No, I…” For a moment, she couldn’t speak, her breath like a lead weight in her chest. “We should tie this closed,” she said at last. “We’re… We’re runnin’ out of time.”

  * * *

  Ben and Alice carried the body. They carried it like lumberjacks with a fallen timber, in a row with one on the right and one on the left, threading down through the trees. Kait led them down, the rifle cradled in her arms, occasionally steadying herself in the snow against one tree trunk or another and watching her breath fog the air ahead of her. The snow was not deep here, but the ground beneath was loose and muddy—twice her sneakers caught a slippery patch, and it was only by throwing her shoulder against a leaning pine and digging her toes into the dirt that she managed to keep from toppling over.

  The atmosphere was nothing if not grim. The snow, which had reflected the sunlight in glittering waves in the early afternoon, had now begun to suck the color out of the air like a sponge. The world was a wash of gray and dull brown and dingy white, utterly silent save for their crunching footsteps and labored breathing, and the occasional low howl of the wind in the trees. Kait wished somebody would speak, but there was nothing to say. She could feel the strain in the air, held tight like piano wire between two outstretched fists. She was afraid to turn around, to see her friend’s faces twisted by fear—or transformed altogether.

  And she was losing grip, Kait realized. And it wasn’t just the crawling dread or the pain in her right arm—she was slowing down. Maybe it was the cold, or lack of sleep, or adrenaline fatigue, but she was definitely coming unglued somewhere. Now every movement, every foot planted in the snow took precise effort. Her arms and legs felt full of cold slurry. She slowed her stride, hearing the others skid to a halt to accommodate her. Let them wait—just for a moment. Just long enough to recoup a little horsepower, to stir some warmth back into her hands and face.

  If I fall again, she thought grimly,

  I won’t be able to catch myself. I won’t even have the strength to pick myself up out of the snow.

  “We can stop for a minute,” Alice called out hesitantly behind her.

  “I’m fine,” Kait said—or tried to say. The word came out in an empty breath.

  “Lake’s not much farther,” Ben added. “Just past that bit of old fence there.”

  “I said, I’m fine.” Kait’s head swam. Something wasn’t right. There—a flash of black against the low white sky. Too small to be a person, but too big to be—

  Shrunch.

  The sound of crushed snow. And it was close.

  Kait held up a trembling hand, her heart like a lump of ice behind her ribs. The others stopped without a word: slowly, she raised the rifle to her shoulder, the pain forgotten. There were soft movements in the snow just beyond the curve of a titanic redwood trunk—quiet, furtive sounds, almost stealthy. She sucked a breath through her teeth and held it, peering down the sight on the gun. Skirting sideways around the tree, careful not to cross one foot over the other. O
ne, two, three steps. Her hand went to the lever action, the other resting with one finger just beside the trigger guard…

  “Raawk,” said a strange, low-to-the-ground voice.

  Kait felt her skin jump across her bones. It was a crow. A fat black crow, hopping comically around in the snow with its chest feathers all ruffed out and its beady eyes glinting in the late afternoon sun. “Jesus,” she breathed, her hand pressed to her breast. “Jee-zus…” Behind her, she could hear her friends’ breath whoosh out, their feet shuffling noisily in the crunchy snow. The crow cocked its head one way, then the other, twisting its beak sideways to look up at Kait, completely fearless.

  “Raawk,” it intoned in that peculiar, half-human voice. “Buhrawk.”

  “Scared the shit out of me,” Alice hissed. She had one hand off the carpet on her shoulder, pressed to her heart in a mirror imitation of Kait. “Go on, shoo! Get!” She kicked at the crow, waving the toe of her boot in its direction.

  “Hold on,” Ben said. “Don’t… There’s something on its beak…”

  But Kait wasn’t looking at the crow. She took another step to the side, the rifle still leveled by her ear. There was more movement behind the tree. A flutter of another pair of wings, and another and another. Fluttering, and a strange repeated wet sound, and the sudden tickle of rot in her stinging nostrils…

  “Don’t look.” Kait twisted her head away, shutting her eyes against horror. “Don’t… It’s… No further…”

  “What is that,” Ben said. “Christ—is that… is that…”

  Blood. On the beaks, on the claws of perhaps a half-dozen flapping, hopping crows. They were circled around a tree with a low fork in its trunk, fluttering up to the fork and back again, tearing at something lodged in the split in the wood and squabbling among themselves as they floundered in a snow drift. There was more blood in the snow, so pale it was almost pink and sunk into dozens of tiny three-toed footprints. One of them was nibbling at a scrap of dark flesh; two more were having a tug-of-war with the front half of a pale, slippery human eye.