Famous last words, says Ethan.
And what about the dose of medication she missed?
Screw it. If it gets too hard, she can always just turn around, and she’ll take the damn pills when she gets back. She can’t afford to miss this chance. So she reaches into her backpack, pulls out a pair of lightweight, moisture-wicking pants, pulls them up under her muslin smock, then pulls the smock up and over her head, tosses it on the ground. Discovers she forgot the lightweight, moisture-wicking shirt, which leaves her with just her tank top, or the option of putting the smock on again.
Hell no.
But it might have some use. Julia gets the knife out of her backpack, picks up the smock, and roughly cuts off a strip of cloth from its hem. Wraps it around her mouth and nose, tying the ends in the back. Instant face mask. Then she stows what’s left of the smock, and the knife, in her backpack, zips it shut, and hefts it over her shoulder. Grabs the GPS phone, checks the compass for her direction, and then starts for the wall, and the jungle beyond.
In the jungle, the humidity seems to jump a few sweltering degrees, and she’s glad she’s wearing pants—the brush scratches at her legs. The boots, too, are useful in the soft earth, and with the help of a bamboo stick she found, she’s making pretty good time. She’s surrounded by plants she’s sure Irene would be able to name, categorize, in an instant, but Julia can only identify them with vague nouns and adjectives: tall thin trees with patches of that white mold, or lichen; whitish-gray moss that hangs from branches; knee-high plants with long leaves; thick roots pushing up through the layer of dead leaves and twigs; brown vines that curl around trunks; palms with bark that peels off like a coconut’s husk; rotting logs covered with a thin fuzz of green moss.
Julia hears life all around her, but doesn’t see anything except small gnats that buzz constantly around her head, and the occasional floating mosquito. Birds sing and chirp and cheep, something trills, something goes woot woot woot woot woot, and all the while the soft rush of wind blows through the leaves at the top of the canopy. It feels beautiful, peaceful in a way, but at the same time she gets the feeling that she’s being followed, or watched. Every time she turns around at the sound of a clink or a crack, nothing, and no one is there.
Isaac? Did he really leave her alone, or did he just settle into a distant spot to spy on her? Someone could have followed her out of the resort, to the village, and then into the jungle. Not inconceivable, given the competition.
What was it Irene said? Something about how every tree, every leaf, seemed to be watching. Whispering.
She pauses. No—nothing unnatural, or strange.
Don’t psych yourself out, Julia. Stay on track.
She pushes aside the dark, shiny leaves of a fern, digs her stick into the rise of a low hill, and starts to climb it. She should be close to Irene’s camp now, or what’s left of it. Julia’s improvised face mask is damp from her labored breaths, and her left hand is slightly reddened and itchy from something she must have touched or brushed against. She hears the soft buzz of insect wings, feels something land on her neck, which is followed by the quick pinprick of a bite—Julia slaps at it, sees something the size of a small cockroach haphazardly fly away. Wonderful. Her foot suddenly sinks into a patch of mud, and she reaches out for a tree branch to steady herself.
And she sees a pair of footprints. As in human footprints, barefoot, in fact, and small, child-size.
Snap.
Impossible. Her heart starts to pound—Evie?—but no, why would she even think that, Evie’s on the far side of the world. Maybe a child from the village whose curiosity got the best of them and they followed her into the jungle. They probably know every inch of it, the island is so small.
“Hello?” Julia says.
No answer. A pebble tumbles down from a rocky ledge a few yards to the left.
“You can come out. I won’t bite, I promise.”
Still no answer. But then they’ve probably been instructed not to talk to her. Told that Julia’s very presence is a danger. And she must look so very strange, in pants, with a mask covering her face. It’s a little unnerving for Julia too, but at least there’s a reasonable explanation for feeling like she’s being watched. And they can’t report her transgression without admitting their own, so she should be safe on that count.
“All right, I’ll just pretend I’m all alone. If you change your mind though, I have some M&M’s.”
That part is true—she’d squirreled some away in the false bottom of the suitcase. Quick energy for the trail. She lets her backpack slide off her shoulder, unzips it, locates the bag in one of the side pockets. She takes it out, rips it open, shakes a few of the round candies out into her hand. M&M’s were always serious currency with Evie.
It makes her feel better, not being totally alone, being in the presence of a child, even one that isn’t hers. A girl, most likely, at least if what the Reverend told her was true.
She eats a few M&M’s and drops the rest of the candy in the hollow of a nearby tree. She doesn’t think it will be there for long.
There’s not much of Irene’s camp left. If the GPS hadn’t started beeping, Julia would have probably trudged right by it. A pole covered in lichen leaning wearily against a tree, a rotting bamboo platform covered in dropped leaves—other plants sprouting up and through the poles—the remains of a frayed, mildewed rope dangling from a branch overhead.
Julia tests the platform with her weight, and thinks better of it. Instead she clears some of the debris, to see if there’s something salvageable. She imagines anything useful that wasn’t sent back to Aunt Liddy was scavenged by the villagers, like the people who went through her dead neighbor’s stuff in Los Angeles. Human beings are the same the world over.
Poking up out of the earth is the tarnished gilt handle of a teacup and another porcelain shard—she picks them up, turns them over, rejoins the pieces in her hand and recognizes the pattern with its pale roses. It’s the same china that Bailey served coffee in.
A soft click of a branch being broken a few yards away. Julia wouldn’t be surprised if the children didn’t play here, nothing like a good fort. She puts the broken teacup on the platform, reaches for the M&M’s, shakes a few more out, and places them into a small pile in the curve of the cup, then looks around for anything else. Under the platform, she finds a pair of rusted and bent silver eyeglasses, missing a lens, and a couple of tarnished copper pennies, 1931, 1928. There doesn’t seem to be much else.
Julia’s about to move on, see if she can hit one more waypoint, when her boot knocks against a hard lump in the dirt.
She crouches down and digs around in the earth with her hands, uncovering a rusted black metal box, the cover dented. Locked, of course. She shakes it. Light, and probably empty, but small enough to fit in her pack. She decides to take it with her.
Just as she slips it into her bag, there’s a booming clap of thunder, followed almost immediately by hard sheets of rain, a kind she’s never experienced before, so heavy the drops practically feel like hail. She frantically pulls out her rain poncho, but by time she yanks it over her head, she’s already soaked. At least it’s a warm rain.
The sensible thing would be to wait it out, find some cover somewhere, but then again, there’s no telling how long the storm will last. Wet is wet. She’s pretty sure the GPS is waterproof—it would have to be, right?—and she has, in the worst-case scenario, a backup print satellite map.
She reaches into her bag, pulls out the GPS, covering it as best she can with her free hand. It’s a three-mile hike through a ravine that cuts near the jagged peak of the extinct volcano, then half a mile to the beach with the corpse flowers. Forty percent power. Just about eleven o’clock in the morning; she should have at least eight hours of daylight.
Completely doable.
Right?
She can sense Ethan about to give a smart-ass answer, but she quickly finds an imaginary chair to prop under the imaginary doorknob of the imaginary closet s
he keeps him in.
CHAPTER 14
OF COURSE JULIA FORGOT ABOUT that other factor, terrain. She should have clicked over to the topographic map, because the three miles in the ravine are almost completely uphill, and the rain has turned the soft earth to muck. Every step is an effort—her boots sink deep into the mud, making them hard to pull out—her bamboo walking stick is rendered useless, so she has to reach out to the trees to keep herself steady. A couple of slips and falls have left caked mud all up and over her pants.
And, as Irene had noted long ago, the plants become stranger the farther she treks into the interior. Thick, squat trees with furry bark, primordial ferns sprouting just about everywhere, indigo mushrooms with caps almost a foot wide, a nearly bioluminescent fungus that looks like ocean coral embedded in dead trees, massive green leaves sprouting up out of the earth almost five feet tall, and she nearly steps into a cluster of red pitcher plants that look big enough to eat small animals.
Julia stops a moment, rests under a leaf big enough to use as an umbrella, just to take a break from the downpour. Pulls the hood of her poncho back, tries to tighten the knot of her face mask, but it slides off in the process. Goddammit. Not that it could have done any good—her skin must be crawling with all sorts of bacteria—but for a token gesture it did make her feel a bit easier.
She wonders if she still has a silent follower. Probably not—even a child would have enough sense to take shelter. Her calves ache; water has crept into her boots.
She shouldn’t have pushed it. Time to get back to the resort, take a shower, regroup. She pulls out the GPS, changes her waypoint to the resort. Damn, power has fallen to twenty percent. It must drain faster the lower it goes. She’s going to have to hustle to make it back before she loses her GPS. If it’s even possible.
Is it even possible?
She clicks over to the topographic map. Not good—looks like there are a series of steep hills between her and the resort from her present position, plus the snaking blue line of the stream. If her GPS loses power, if she got lost . . . how long before someone would even look for her? And no one, except for maybe her silent follower, knows where she is. Here in the depths of the jungle, she has no sense of direction, no way to see the ocean. She runs a wet hand through her hair.
“Shit!”
She kicks the stalk of the plant she’s standing under, puts her hand on her forehead. Calm down, Julia. If she just makes it to the stream, she can follow it downhill, then just pick up the trail to the resort. The stream’s only about . . . She checks the topographic map. Looks like a half mile. She should be able to make that on the power she has left if she picks up the pace, heads back now.
She notices a strong, acrid smell, like she just walked into a chemistry lab. She looks down and sees the stalk is broken where she kicked it, thick white sap oozing out.
She feels dizzy all of a sudden. The earth seems to tilt under her feet; black spots start at the corners of her eyes, and her stomach roils. She has to reach out for a nearby trunk to stay upright.
Then a rush of pure, unadulterated hate overcomes her—hate for Aunt Liddy for sending her here, hate for herself for agreeing, hate for Ethan for leaving her and putting her in this desperate situation in the first place. Hate for other things too, nonsensical things—bombs raining from the sky, and a cage, and a boat in a small harbor, and a syringe, and a scalpel covered in blood. A shivery darkness seems to creep out from her heart, down her extremities into her fingers and toes—black, consuming, cold, and deadly, but something ancient about it, too. A foreign sentience.
The next clap of thunder is deafening.
I spy with my little eye.
It’s a voice that’s inside and outside her, above and underneath. The air seems to compress in her lungs. Heavy as water. Thick as sin.
“I don’t . . .” Julia turns, trying to find . . . what? Her skin itches, her eyes itch, her blood itches. She yanks the poncho up and over her head, throws it on the ground. Rain hits her skin, which feels like it’s melting.
“I don’t . . .”
Something that begins with d.
Her tank top burns; she can practically feel her skin bubbling—there’s the stink of charred meat. She tries to pull her shirt off, but her fingers are swollen, shaking, and it’s hard, so very, very hard to keep her balance. The fumes. Something about the fumes. She takes a few halting steps away from the plant, nearly falls over, catches herself on a vine hanging from an overhead branch. Her left palm burns fiercely where her skin touches it. She lets go, pushes herself to take a few more steps, anything to get away from the smell that’s now searing her nasal cavities.
The ground beneath her gives way and she stumbles face-first into a pool of thick, algae-covered muck, gets a mouthful of it. It tastes metallic, like iron. She spits it out, tries to push herself up, but her palms just sink too, the mud making soft sucking noises.
A massive black centipede scuttles out from under a small fern—the thing is six inches long, maybe ten, with mean-looking pincers and the slightest dusting of white fuzz along its serpentine spine. It wisely skirts the muck, sensing exactly where the firm earth ends and the death trap begins.
“I spy with my little eye,” says Julia, her voice hoarse, although she doesn’t understand why she said anything at all. It was in her head and now it’s out of it, thoughts and words one thing.
The centipede pauses, turns its head toward her, raising its antennae. It lifts part of its body up in the air, smelling . . . something.
“I spy . . .” Her eyes so puffy she can scarcely see. She tries to get herself upright, her feet searching for something solid, but they find nothing, and the boots are so heavy, like concrete blocks. She’s sinking. She can feel herself sinking.
Another massive clap of thunder.
And then the centipede scurries toward her, right along the surface of the muck like a water strider. It clambers onto her shoulder—she can feel the burning, tickling sensation of hundreds of tiny feet on her bare skin. It curls around the back of her neck to her other shoulder, seems to start a trail down her spine but thinks better of it, and returns to her shoulder. Antennae tickle her ear.
Julia gags. This could very well be where she loses her mind.
And then there’s a rustling of brush in front of her, like a large animal is prowling—the white tiger—only no, it’s a girl that emerges and stands before her, pale skin, wet blond hair in clumps. A thin cotton dress that clings to her small body. She stares, preternaturally still.
Julia wants to speak but her tongue is too swollen, too thick.
The girl cocks her head, curious.
Julia coughs, the fumes now in her throat, which is starting to swell too. The centipede ticks up the side of her head; she can feel it running over her hair, until it pauses again.
The girl slowly walks forward, crouches at the edge of the muck. She reaches out a pale arm and the centipede jumps onto it.
I have truly lost my mind.
The centipede then runs up the girl’s arm, settling onto her shoulder like a trusted pet.
The black spots in Julia’s eyes grow larger. She reaches out for something, anything, to try to pull herself forward, but her arm is starting to go numb, and she misses, falling back in the muck again. She watches her poncho sink, the mud taking it. Damn thing was useless anyway.
It’s hard to keep her head up, and there must be a fire inside her lungs, because every breath is extraordinarily painful. A bad allergic reaction to something for sure. Done in by a leaf. Julia would laugh, only she can feel her heartbeat starting to slow. At least there’s a witness. Maybe they can ship her body with Irene’s, a twofer.
The only pang is Evie. How long before Ethan remarries, plugs in a substitute mother?
Not long.
The girl keeps watching her, examining her, saying nothing. Sheets of rain still fall in torrents, but the girl doesn’t seem to care.
Hard to breathe. Impossible to breathe. Death.
Death starts with d. Also deceive, and decay, and darkness.
Julia’s eyes close.
Then she feels small, fierce hands gripping her arms; she feels her body being pulled forward. Julia manages to open her eyes one last time. The centipede is gone, but the girl is there, really putting her back into it as she heaves hard, pulling Julia out to firmer ground, grunting with the effort.
Julia is able to push herself up, barely, and crawl a few feet farther before collapsing. Her breathing becomes shallow. At eye level to the ground, she sees leaves, and dirt, and a tiny brown frog that regards her with a serious frown. White fuzz dots its back. Everything around her is distant, surreal, like it’s someone else dying, like her body is just a cavern she’s temporarily inhabiting. She can already feel the current tugging her out to the deeper waters, the opaque, cold depths that even the hottest sun has never reached.
The girl’s muddy bare feet come into view, but Julia can’t move her head. Her vision starts to blur. The girl kneels—blurry knees poking out of a blurry dress. She feels the girl open her mouth, tastes the mud on her fingers. She can hear the girl chewing. Then her head is tilted back, her mouth is opened wider, and the girl spits something into it—a nasty taste, a thick sludge. She starts to gag, but the girl clamps her mouth shut, holds her there with a strength that seems impossible for someone so small.
Julia lets her eyes close, her lids so heavy, so heavy. She hears a bird chirp despite all the rain, its call getting response from another. Goodbye, birds.
Evie . . .
And then all goes dark.
#NDC DEV ORG HUB
15:04:52
what the fuck happened today?
The Nightmarchers Page 16