by Logan Keys
Her voice is husky, and she stops walking.
Joe glances between her and myself, then stops the dog.
Cara shakes her head, then tries again. “How could you?” she says, emotions taking over her small body as she shakes with anger. “You know! You’re the only one at Ironwood who knows the truth, who knows what Dallas and I went through out here. And you still take a chance we could be thrown out? Are you stupid, or are you a selfish prick?”
“Cara,” I begin, just as Joe says, “I never meant—”
“Well, which is it?” Cara demands.
Joe’s face flushes red, and I try to get between them. “Cara, this isn’t all on Joe. I have a part in it, too.”
“Yeah.” She nods, then sniffs and looks away, lip quivering. “Yeah.”
Joe and I exchange looks. I’m torn in two.
Cara stalks off past the dog. Joe lets him off leash, and we try to keep up.
None of us speak until we come to the ridge.
“Smell that?” Joe says.
“Yup.”
Water. A stream’s up ahead.
We hike our way down the side, while Cara stays atop the ridge, watching us with a stubborn jut to her chin. It’s unspoken—she can maintain the high ground, shout if she sees anything.
With such blood loss, deer get thirsty. If they live long enough, that is.
Joe and I work in a steep zigzag downward.
Then he speaks so softly, I can barely hear the words. Down here, noise carries, and he doesn’t want Cara to hear, but he said: “I meant it.”
Before, when he said he loved me, he meant it. I swallow hard, like I’m the deer bleeding out and in search of water.
At the hill, we silently separate, taking different paths down at a fork to cover more ground.
When I get to the bottom, the soft sand gives beneath my boots.
Douglas runs and splashes along the edge of the river, and I suspect Joe’s over there.
Above, a sharp whistle makes me look up, shading my eyes, to where Cara motions in the direction I was headed.
About twenty more paces along the shore, another whistle pricks my ears—Joe, calling the dog back, away from something.
I lift my rifle and, after checking it’s loaded, head over that way.
Around the last bend, the deer’s carcass becomes visible. It’d made it to the stream, but then died soon after. When its body jerks, I raise my rifle, confused.
From behind where the carcass lies in heavy shadows peeks out a head—a girl’s head—and I gasp when I see her. She’s a teen, at most, and when she leans out again, I notice her mouth’s caked with blood. Eyes of the blackest night glare at me.
She returns to her meal, savagely devouring the deer’s insides.
Not totally strange these days. Out here, people starve, and if they’re starving, they eat uncooked stuff all the time.
Joe stalks quietly behind her, around her flank, and I give him a very slight shake of my head. She’s not a zombie, I want to say, but I’m afraid to startle her.
Joe keeps advancing, but she somehow hears him.
No one hears Joe; he’s as silent as a panther. But this girl turns around with a growl—a terrifying, guttural noise.
Joe freezes, just as surprised as I am.
When she moves out into the light, the girl hisses and backs away.
Joe pulls his knife and goes forward.
“No!” I call out.
Something’s off about her; she’s not normal.
At that moment, Douglas rushes through the brush, straight for the girl, and when he latches onto her tiny arm, she roars to life, lifting the big bloodhound like a piece of paper and tossing him at least ten feet.
The dog thuds near the stream and doesn’t move.
Could this be Cutter’s killer?
Joseph lunges at her in anger, no doubt thinking the same thing, and at first I can’t see anything but him falling backwards.
She’s on him so fast, I have no time to react.
I raise my gun, but the two wrestle so close together, I might hit Joe.
I stumble forward, when something wet hits my face, and the whole thing plays out like a nightmare as another spray of blood comes. But the girl is gone. Only Joseph sits, holding his throat, gurgling my name.
“Dallas,” he says, hoarse. “Dallas, are you there?” Like he can’t see.
Blood pumps hot and bright through his fingers.
“I’m here, Joe. I’m here.”
I press on his throat, but in a few more seconds, his eyes turn distant, like he’s hunting long-range prey.
And then … he’s gone.
I scream his name, until I lose my voice.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Tommy
We’re almost out of Arizona when we see fires in the distance. Somewhere out there in the desert are people.
“Stop,” Liza says.
I do, and for a moment, we both watch the smoke billow into the air.
I press down on the gas pedal of the Jeep we’d found not long after leaving the house. “I don’t know what type of people they are,” I say, “and I’d rather get to LA.”
“But—”
“Just drop it, will you?”
Sometimes my mouth has a mind of its own.
Liza leaves the subject with what seems to be immense regret, and we drive on.
Soon, out of necessity, we stop again, but the Colorado River is a sight for sore eyes. Rapids engorged, it flows triple its original size.
“The bridge is out.”
“We’ll have to ditch the jeep.”
We both eye the raging water until Liza points south. “Could it be narrower down that way?”
I nod. “Let’s follow it.”
We hike for two miles before we find a set of rocks that looks traversable—if we jump from one to the next, we might make it.
“Be careful,” I say as Liza hikes her pack high onto her back and moves out onto the first rock.
Now that we’re right on top of it, the water rushes by so swiftly, it makes my heart beat faster.
I fight against the sensation of my transition to focus on us getting across.
The sun begins to descend when we’re only halfway across. To have worked even this far it’s taken at least an hour or more, and I suspect night will be fully here before we’ve reached the opposite bank.
The river seems at least a mile wide, and that might be accurate.
We have to rest, having jumped, and leapt, and scrambled from rock to rock. We pull out our flashlights.
“We should have waited for morning,” she says.
“Yes. But we can’t sleep here and risk slipping off.”
So we continue across the fathomless water, listening to the rushing current and various logs crashing farther down the rapids.
As my anxiety grows, I begin to feel the monster’s pull at my consciousness.
“Hurry!” I shout up to Liza, who’s working across from me.
“What, why?”
“Just go!”
The transition almost happens while I’m leaping from rock to rock ahead of her, so fast I’m nearly slipping. “Go go go!” I call back, urging us to safety before I’m no longer myself.
Liza shadows my movements, feet sliding and splashing into the water, but she manages to keep up.
In the distance is the shore, and I quicken my pace, my flashlight illuminating the next spot. We spring and land, hands gripping the rock; light trained on the next spot, leap and grip.
Over and over.
Liza grunts from the strain.
Then she yells, and I spin around, light bouncing off the black water just in time to catch it onto her pack as it flows downriver.
“My pack!” she yells.
“It’s gone! Come on!”
We move again, and this time, since she’s lighter, she soon overtakes me.
When we land on the same rock together, both of us panting, frantic,
exhausted, we hold on to one another.
“You go first,” I say above the noise.
“Okay.”
She’s also dropped her flashlight, so I use mine to show her where to move to next.
Liza’s only two leaps away from shore.
I light up the last rock for her to land on, then I jump behind, and when I do, a scream like none other cuts through the air. I land short and hit the water instead.
Immediately, I plunge beneath the icy flow, into a deep pool amid the rocks. Fresh from the Colorado Mountains and unhindered by dams, the river had traveled hundreds of miles at a speed of little resistance, and the chill of it is such a shock—too cold to even feel cold; burning, filling my lungs and my eyes.
My flashlight sinks to the bottom and my pack drags me down, so I shrug out of it to swim to the surface.
Miraculously, I climb back onto my rock.
The dark shoreline’s empty.
“Liza!” I yell.
My transition leaps out from my panic, and my body starts to swell, but I fight it back, gritting my teeth. “Liza!”
Nothing.
I vault over to the last rock, then onto the shore.
“Liza!’
But she’s gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Tommy
In the time it took to decide if I should search the woods or the river for Liza, a thousand lifetimes went by. Steps in one direction would count as double on the way back, and since drowning was far worse than being lost in the woods, I decide the river it is. And the fastest way down it is being swept along.
I dive back into the black, turbid, frigid water. Hopefully I’ll end up wherever she did.
Trying to swim is too difficult. The best and least abusive way to go downriver is to simply back float and protect my head. With the blinking stars as my focal point, I let the river carry me (mostly sloshing over me, half-drowning me) without my being in control or knowing how far toward or away from Liza I was headed.
The beast, too—he’s fighting like hell to get out. He wants his freedom, making my being in the water and banging into every rock and every log, and crashing down some of the natural falls, even more torturous.
By some strange luck, or design from above, I’m tugged close to the bank, where I find a scrap of Liza’s white shirt, caught and torn. I lift it, then grip the side of tree roots against the current.
“Liza!” I scream hoarsely.
A small, still voice answers in the distance.
Try as I might, I still can’t swim, so I push off some rocks like a torpedo with a terrible guidance system toward where I thought I heard the voice.
A blonde head bobs seemingly miles away, still trying to yell for me before it disappears into the water. Using the force of the current, I rush headlong into her, grabbing Liza with one arm, while my other hand latches onto the side.
Liza’s shaking, clinging to my back, and it never occurs to me in all of my time in the water that we’re freezing to death.
After some nudging, she clambers over me and up the roots to the sheer side of the bank. With my palm pressed to her hind end, I push her as high as I can. She latches on like a kitten, claws deep in the dirt and bare feet scrambling up, making the last part on her own.
Then she turns, shivering, blue, half-naked, and reaches out for me. But I’m tens of feet away, and none of the roots could bear my weight.
“Ho … ho … old on!”
She disappears, and I wait for her to return, thinking we won’t survive anyway, even if we do get up onto the side; surely, the hypothermia will do us both in.
Liza returns with nothing, her expression frantic, so I call up to her, “I’m going to try to float downriver and see if there’s a better way!”
She shakes her head, but I let go, and watch wide, horrified eyes follow me into the blackness.
Not too much farther down, I realize there’s no other way up. The more I get pushed along, the more the current picks up. Cliffs grow on either side.
Letting go of myself, I give the monster what he wants, and after banging into a rock hard enough for flashes of light to prick my vision, I let the transition begin.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Liza
Walking along the ridge does me no good; I can’t see anything but water down there, and the cliffs are so high, there’s no way he’d gotten out. Tommy’s gone—either drowned, or who knows how many miles away.
I’m frozen solid, barely able to move, besides my shivering. I need to get warm, or I’ll lie down by this river and not get back up.
When I’d leapt for the embankment from the last rock, I’d almost made it to the edge before a face had appeared—a white face with glowing red eyes—and just as soon as it’d come, it was gone. By then, I’d already miss-stepped and had fallen in.
Seemed like hours before my head popped back up so I could take my next breath. Under the water, a strange sense of peace had engulfed me, with the cold finally not so stinging, and I felt the embrace of something else. I heard music, an orchestra, and I saw people dressed in fine clothes dancing all around. Someone just beyond my perception stood waiting; someone who maybe loved me.
And it went on like this—the music, and my trying to see this mysterious, hidden person—until Tommy saved me, again.
Now, I begin to walk through the woods, listlessly, careless of my footing, shirtless and tripping over every divot and bramble. Each tree looks the same; I could be going in a circle, for all I know. I’m soaked, and the air crystallizes out of my mouth in foggy puffs.
Time passes by immeasurably; it could be minutes or hours.
When I find the cabin, it’s so late into the night, I almost miss the shrub-hidden structure, tired and crooked, just like me.
The door’s open, so I wait to make sure nothing moves around inside, but besides a few squirrels that thud my heart against the wall of my chest, it’s empty. No white face greets me. I close the door behind, locking the latch. Someone’s recently used this place; a box of matches sits near a fireplace full of wood.
I hope whoever left them stays away. At least for the night.
After lighting the driest pieces of wood, I shiver on the hearth, hugging myself, rocking back and forth as the fire grows.
When I’m finally warm enough to move around, I unearth a moth-eaten canvas jacket in the closet, zip it up over myself, then take off my pants to dry, hanging them near the heat. Then I pace while I wait.
Something shiny above the fireplace catches my eye: a sword, mounted on the wall. My knife was lost in the river, but whoever’s face I’d seen, if it’d been real, could still be out there. Weapons are good, and Tommy would approve.
With my sharp loot in hand and my dry pants back on, I douse the fire. But before I get to the door, I hear a slow, sluggish knock.
I freeze, breath held, and it happens again, though with more purpose. This knocking has a rhythm, and it keeps on.
“Tommy?” I ask, creeping forward, sword in hand.
No reply.
I move near the window to peek through the curtains.
On the dark porch stands a hunched figure in profile. Tommy. But then … why did he not answer?
I press my ear to the wood, and try again. “Tommy?”
Silence.
Maybe he’s hurt. Or maybe he’s been bitten.
I pull the door open.
Tommy stands, unmoving, in the same position, face turned into the shadows.
“Tommy?”
This time, he snaps out of it and brushes past me. With the firelight gone, I can barely see the strangeness of his features. There’s something different.
Is it merely a play of the shadows, or is he … bigger?
Even his walk has changed.
“Tommy, answer me.”
He stops at the fireplace with his back to me. When he finally turns, his state is too obvious to ignore. He’s not Tommy at all; he’s something else entirely.
&nbs
p; I chance a step closer, while dark eyes, far darker than before, watch me with a feral gleam.
“What happened?” I ask.
The thing that was Tommy thaws visibly, snapping to with a swiftness that gives me no chance to react.
Enormous hands wrap around my shoulders, and I choke back a yell, my struggle against him as effective as a flyswatter on a mountain lion. But he lets me go, only to seemingly grow, spreading out like he’s filling with air.
I stumble away, tripping over my own feet, sword clattering to the floor, while Tommy stalks forward, backing me against the stone chimney.
This is what had been his secret: Tommy’s a monster!
I squat to dodge his swipe for my head, and snatch up the sword. The monster snags my hair and, lifting me up, grabs hold of my neck. It’s going to pull me apart, limb by limb.
“Stop it!” My throat feels as if a car tire is parked on it. “Tommy! Stop, please!”
During his next stage of growth, I start to black out from the lack of oxygen.
So I do the only thing I can.
I stab Thomas Hatter straight through the side.
Chapter Thirty
Dallas
“You’ll want to sleep in the woods?”
Cara knows me; she’s in my blood, almost. She can’t hunt worth a damn, but she’s tough. When she started chewing tobacco, it was weird. But so is Cara. Smoking makes it hard to run, she says, and out here we run a lot.
And she’s fast. Long legs, like her mother, she claims. They both ran from trouble, a lot. But we don’t talk about it, not since our time in captivity together when we both learned, firsthand, what brutal youths had in mind for the new world.
We never so much as mention that chapter of our lives, other than what she’d brought up today. To do so would open a door to Hell itself.
In fact, we stay away from all sensitive topics … but one.
We lay out our things, then sit down. She doesn’t ask me what killed Joseph, nor how much it hurt to bury the man I’d loved since I’ve loved anyone.