Alice shivered, slapping her arms. “Well—we couldn’t move you and Cormac at the same time,” she explained gently. “He’s coming back. He’s right behind me. He wanted to—”
“What do you mean, coming back?”
To Kait’s great shock, Alice smiled down at her, her eyes glinting even in the looming darkness. “We got it in the water,” she said, almost gleefully. “There was ice, but it wasn’t thick. And he sank like a, well, like he had a bunch of rocks in there with him—that was a good idea, Kaity. And there’s a road. Right down by the water’s edge. Ben thinks it’ll take us to the main highway.” Alice’s mitten-clad hands grabbed hold of Kait’s own as though she would help her stand, but instead she simply held it tight, like she feared it would fly from her wrist. “You did it,” she said. Her eyes shone in the dark, pinpricks of light held captive in the middle of her round face. “You did it. We’re going home. It’s over.”
Then she did pull Kait to her feet, just in time for Ben to come crashing through the snowy underbrush. “You’re up,” he said when he caught sight of them standing together. He averted his gaze, his face flushed with cold. “We, ah. We were worried.”
“Thanks.” Kait looked from one face to the other, feeling her own face flush pink. Something had changed while she slept. She could feel it, loose and kicking in the air: Ben nudged a pile of snow with the toe of his boot and slapped his cheeks with leather-gloved hands, pointedly avoiding her gaze, while Alice shuffled her heels in the snow, looking embarrassed, caught-out.
Kait felt her heart sink. She knew this was no time to think such things, but her mind could not shake the feeling welling up within her. I think I might have been in love with you. What did this mean for them now? What would it mean after, when they were back in the world? Guilt like the cold weight of lead sank into her. Ben had known all along. He had seen more clearly than she had—and it had driven him to hatred before. But now there could be no pretending, no feigned ignorance. Now the same truth burned inside them all. Ben loved Alice, but could that love survive a confession like that? Did he want it to? Did she?
She studied Ben’s face, a dark profile against the backdrop of the forest. In spite of everything, she could not help feeling some measure of affection for this boy. It was no romantic feeling, or even the sisterly love she’d felt for Riley—no, it was almost… recognition. Perhaps even gratitude. But for what? She could not reason it out, and so her guilt continued to gnaw at her, to peck at her heart like a mob of crows with raw, bloody beaks. She wished she could go back. She wished they could just keep on hating each other, or at least return to the comfort of that old, sullen, silent distrust they had enjoyed so much.
Things would have been so much easier if Ben Alden had not become her friend.
“Did I miss anything else?” she asked, breaking the silence. “While I was…”
She gestured vaguely to the Kait-shaped snow angel on the ground and shrugged.
“Nothing,” Alice said. “Kaity, we were right there the whole time. We weren’t…”
“We weren’t going to let anything happen to you,” Ben finished for her.
Kait felt like crying again. Fatigue crushed inward like the weight of an ocean, and she felt what little energy she had regained slough off her like a heavy blanket sliding off her shoulders. This was backwards. It was wrong. She was supposed to protect them, not the other way ‘round. But now she wondered if she would even have the strength to lift the Model 94, much less fire it. She turned at the waist, looking for the glint of the gun’s barrel. There it was—leaning against a slender oak, just like Alice had said. She thought of Riley, wished she hadn’t. She tried to focus on the dull throb of pain in her right shoulder, but the sensation there had vanished. The arm seemed to belong to her again. It was the rest of her body that rebelled.
“Alice said you found a road,” she murmured. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw them both nod. “So let’s go, then, huh?” She could not raise her head to look them in their faces.
“Night’s comin’ on,” Alice remarked.
“It’s here already.” Kait flexed her hands inside her gloves and lifted the rifle to her shoulder. Even through the pads of the fabric, the metal and wood were deathly cold against her shaking fingers. Alice removed one mitten to flick on the flashlight of her smartphone; all around them the darkness seemed to leap as though to the rhythm of night music only it could hear, lurching in ever-tightening circles as the fragile beam of light swung in her grip. Human forms flashed against the trunks of trees—but it was only their own shadows, looming huge above them, projected nightmares loping and twisting against the wood.
But none of it matched the crawling, scraping dread that perched on the rungs of her ribcage like a stoop-shouldered carrion bird. She wanted to hope—oh, she wanted to dream of warmth, and a heavy locked door standing between her and her friends and all the horror and blood of the last twenty-four hours. But she could not shake off the terror of her dream. She could still hear his whisper in her crowded mind. It sounded like footsteps in the distance.
It sounded like the last grains of sand in the hourglass dropping into the bottom.
“Show me the road,” she said over the clamor of her jangling nerves. “Please.”
The snow was especially treacherous in the darkness. Now every crunch, every shuffle, every crack of a dry branch under their feet echoed in Kait’s ears like thunder. Alice held her light as steady as she could manage, but every time her foot slipped, the beam would swing around crazily, making the dark surge up around them like a cloud of bats. Kait’s eyes kept playing tricks on her: she saw shadow-people in the trees, phantom faces looming just beyond the fragile boundary of the flashlight’s beam. Once an owl shrieked, and she jammed the stock of the Model 94 into her shoulder so forcefully it left a bruise, her heartbeat exploding out of her sternum. She wished one of the others would speak—something to fill the air, to plug the gaps of quiet in between footsteps. But the snow seemed to have stolen her friend’s voices, and Kait herself couldn’t think of anything to say.
When they finally crashed through the tree-line and emerged under open sky, to Kait it felt like the first breath of fresh air after being trapped under a frozen pond. And sure enough, there was the lake, with the wooden pier projecting nearly thirty feet over the ice, its wooden slats covered in snow and slush. There was a break in the clouds now, and the moon poured through: under its frigid gaze, Kait could see footprints in the snow, two pairs of tracks leading all along the length of the pier, as well as the thick track-mark of something heavy being dragged up to its edge and pushed over. She could not see the hole in the ice that Cormac had plunged through, but an image sprang into her mind, of Alice and Ben hauling the bulky carpet to the edge and slipping it through, watching it vanish into liquid darkness under that same moon. She pictured the rug unraveling below the surface, the huge body wrapped up inside drifting slowly upright to stand in the mud under the ice as it closed over him, angling back as if to peer up into the night sky. She pictured Cormac’s raw head still wedged in its tree, pecked down to just the grinning skull now, staring at nothing forever, preserved by the cold.
They were standing in the road. Kait almost didn’t notice it at first, but there was a narrow paved path under their feet, covered up by snow and winding away from the water, just wide enough for two cars to drive side by side. The lake was at the bottom of the forest valley, and the road rose up into the hills on both sides of them, vanishing into the dark woods to the left and right. The snow was smooth here, and in the newly uncovered moonlight it glittered like flecks of broken glass.
“Well, this is it,” Ben announced, planting his feet with a dry crunch. “One of these has got to take us to the main road. I guess we just pick a direction and start walking? I mean, they both have to go somewhere, don’t they?”
But Kait wasn’t listening. She was staring up the leftward road, at the bend, where it disappeared from view beyond the wall of the trees. At first, e
ven in the moonlight, she could only guess at the geography—but soon, light began to blossom along the crest of the first hill. One beam of light split into two headlights, and then the quiet snarl of a big engine floated down the incline towards them, along with the crunch of broad tires on snow.
Kait held her breath—it seemed too good to be true. In that moment, her entire reality felt carved from paper-thin crystal, as though the slightest sound could shatter it. She didn’t dare blink, terrified that in that quick wipe of darkness the car would vanish or that she would wake again in that snowdrift, gripped by terror, Alice shaking her awake once more. But before her very eyes, a large yellow SUV lumbered over the hill, its headlights swinging up and over like long, outstretched arms. The vehicle had a roof rack strung with red, gold, and green bulb lights, and a drooping Rudolph nose made from red tinsel hung from the front grill.
“Oh, my God…” Alice seized hold of Kait’s elbow—the bad right arm, and it sent bolts of pain scurrying up past the shoulder. But Kait didn’t care: she grabbed Alice’s arm, and Ben’s, just to know they were there and seeing what she saw. She felt Ben stiffen at her touch, but when he spoke, his voice was jubilant.
“It can’t be…” he said. Then he raised his other hand over his head and waved frantically, jumping up and down a little in the snow. “Hey!” he bellowed. “Hey, over here!”
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Alice said, pressing her knuckles to her lips.
With a hushed roar of tires on loose powder, the SUV braked about fifty feet from the three of them, bathing them in the gaze of its headlights. The driver’s side window rolled down, and the dark shape of a man’s shaggy head emerged, along with a plume of cigarette smoke and a tinny fanfare of alt-rock garbage pouring from the car’s stereo system.
“Hey, now,” shouted out a chilly basso voice over the gurgle of the engine. “Hey, now, are you kids in trouble or something?”
They all looked at each other, momentarily voiceless—and then, as if some secret signal had passed between them, each of them burst out into high, hysterical laughter.
Kait couldn’t understand it—and yet, she couldn’t stop the ghastly noise that bubbled up her throat like an insuppressible belch. Perhaps it was the appearance of their ridiculous, washed-out faces in the glare of the headlights. Or perhaps there really was something funny about the whole scenario. Maybe this kind of merriment was the natural human response to nearly freezing to death in a snow-hushed forest a hundred miles from civilization. Kait would never know, and didn’t expect to learn. She doubled over, clutching her stomach, the barrel of the gun dragging a furrow in the snow at her feet. Each breath filed her lungs with thousands of tiny icy needles, but even this only made her laugh harder.
Trouble, she thought to herself as she held her aching midsection. Yeah, no. No trouble here. We’re fine, really. Nothing to see here. Go about your business.
“Hey—what’s so funny out there?” the man’s voice hollered. “Hey, now, if you’re not in trouble or nuthin’, how about getting out of the road, huh?”
“We’re sorry, sir!” Alice called out quickly, straightening and smoothing down her coat.
“We are in trouble,” Kait added, hoping her voice would carry enough for the man to hear. She wiped her eyes, a last giggle wriggling loose from her lips. “We’re stranded out here. We’re trying to get to the nearest town, but we got lost in the dark. If you could just give us a lift out to the gas station or something, we can call a taxi service from—”
“You all the group up at the Alden cabin?” the man cut her off.
Kait nodded, realizing too late he probably couldn’t tell she’d done it.
“The power got shut off,” Ben explained. “And then… Ah, well, my car wouldn’t start up, either. Kind of a bitch of a weekend, all told.”
“Lot of that going around,” the man replied evenly. “Sounds like you kids have had a time of it.” Then his head drooped, almost in resignation. “Well, come on then,” he said. “It’s not like I can very well leave you out here.”
“Oh, my God—thank you!” Alice’s voice was almost a shriek as she bounced up and down in the snow. Her mass of curls drifted up and down with the motion of her body, and in the intense glow of the headlights there almost seemed to be a halo, a ring of golden tinsel around the silhouette of her head. “Oh, my God… We did it. You did it.” She turned bright eyes to Kait—then, very suddenly, she leaned across the snow-covered road and pecked her gently on the cheek. Kait’s face was so numb she hardly felt the pressure of her lips, but it scrambled her insides all the same. She felt hot under the skin, then cold, then hot again, then both all at once.
“You got us through,” her friend was saying, suddenly bashful. She opened her mouth like she would say more, but instead she just turned on her heel and trotted off toward the SUV, still bouncing slightly with every step.
Kait didn’t need to look up to know Ben was staring at her.
But she made herself look anyway, her feelings still wrestling back and forth inside her chest. His face was a wash of smooth yellow, lit from beneath by the headlights. His glasses were a mask of white light, rendering his entire expression inscrutable. “I’m sorry,” she started to say. “I didn’t want—”
But Ben cut her off with an airy wave, forcing a brave smile onto his face. “She’s right, you know,” he intoned. “You got us through.”
Kait’s heart dropped into her stomach. His smile never wavered, but there was no mistaking the break in his voice. The sound of a heart coming unglued, piece by piece. What had she done? How had she allowed this to happen? She wanted to say something, to defend herself, to offer some assurance to this boy, but she did not trust her own voice. “We’ll talk about it later, when all this is over,” he told her, turning away. “All three of us together. We’ll work this out somehow. I owe you that much.”
“You don’t owe me anything,” she whispered. But when Ben didn’t respond, she could only nod and look away as well. “All right. Later, then.” Kait felt like something inside her had burst a seam. She forced her gaze back into the powerful blast of the SUV’s headlights, watching Alice’s broad back moving away into the light. She raised her eyes, peering through the dark windshield of the vehicle: the man had pulled his head back inside like a turtle, and the window was rolled up. He was only a blob of motionless shadow behind the glass now. And it could have been a trick of the moonlight, but Kait could swear she could make out a second body in the car, a slouched form next to him in the passenger’s seat.
Alice was only twenty-five feet from the car. Now she was twenty.
Then a pinprick of flame bloomed behind the glass. The jet of a cigarette lighter—and though the flame was tiny, it was just enough to illuminate a small sphere inside the cab of the SUV. Half the man’s bearded face sprang into view, smiling coolly, his lips wrapped around the tip of a cigarette, his eyes locked on Kait’s. And there was a second body in the car. All Kait could make out was a curtain of long blonde hair, almost covering a grin that mocked all human smiles—and the black oozing pool of an empty eye-socket.
“ALICE!”
The scream tore loose like a gasp, for that was all her aching lungs would allow. She coughed cold air, suddenly shaking all over. Her right arm tingled like it was crawling with hot embers. Alice did not hear her. She kept bouncing forward, almost to the SUV now. The flame from the cigarette lighter was gone: other than the bright needlepoint of the tip of the lit cigarette, the windshield was a mask of darkness. There was no time to think. There was no time at all.
She launched herself forward, the treads of her Converses struggling for purchase on the loose powder, the Model 94 swinging in her gloved fist. But it felt as though she was running through the thick amber of a dream. Her limbs crawled through the air, her muscles resisting every step, every movement, as she urged her exhausted body onward. She tried to call out again, not a word but a mere meaningless half-formed cry—and this time Alice di
d turn, slowly, as though she was spinning on a line of invisible thread. Kait saw her lips move through the haze of darkness, her face screwing up in confusion and concern, Always concerned, always worried about her, such a dear, dear, sweet, apple-cheeked Alice Gorchuck…
The driver gunned the motor. The SUV lurched forward at impossible speed.
Kait found her scream at last.
The front bumper was wide enough to crush them both, but the driver yanked the wheel, aiming for Alice alone. But the ice had other ideas. The tires shrieked against the loose snow, grinding all the way down to the cold pavement beneath, the headlights slashing across Kait’s body like a swipe from a long sword. The back wheels sent up a shower of powder that seemed to hang in the frigid air like a curtain, and in a sudden burst of speed, the entire SUV shot straight past Alice, only managing to hip-check her into the snow between the road and the trees, where she collapsed face-down with a soft cry, her limbs in a tangle. But now it was skidding sideways, an uncontrolled slide, gliding almost silently across the snow as it bore down on her. Kait could see the driver’s hairy face through the side window now, his features set in an expressionless mask, even as the meaty, white-knuckled hands battled the steering wheel.
Maybe she could have run, or tried to dive out of the vehicle’s path. Perhaps even an hour ago she could have managed it. But it wasn’t just her arm now. Her entire body felt it belonged to someone else, like she was watching another girl standing on some other snowy road, some other body being destroyed. Each muscle was locked in place as if by some hidden protocol of the flesh. She thought of a gun jamming. She thought of screws falling loose into a vast, alien mechanism. She thought of a hollow tree swaying, about to crash to the earth. She wondered, in that brief instant before impact, if Lutz was right about it all, if it would really hurt so much to die. If she would feel anything at all.
It was funny—she wasn’t even really scared anymore.
Then something heavy struck her from behind, tossing her out of the path of the SUV as though she weighed nothing at all. She landed on her hands and knees, the rifle spinning away across the frozen surface of the snow. The vehicle swung past her, skidding a half-donut on the snowy road. There was a dull thump, and the crunch of flesh. Ben did not even cry out—she heard something like a surprised sigh as the car struck him broadsides, carrying him away, out of sight. The SUV spun away almost gracefully, making no sound save for the almost-distant purr of its engine, gliding like a duck on a pond. Then it whirled into a tree, the metal of the back bumper buckling with the impact. A shower of loose snow plummeted down from the branches with a muffled thump. Then there was quiet.
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