by Jen Blood
“You were gone. For a week, you’ve been gone. I thought Isaac got you like he got Allie.”
I shake my head. “You need to go.” I start to turn, but he grabs my arm. Turns me around. I spin and look at him. He looks like maybe he’s been crying. I try to remember what Daddy said. Will is the enemy. Allie’s okay, she’s waiting for me. And Will is the devil.
“Please leave me alone,” I whisper.
“I won’t let them hurt you again,” he says. He means it, too—I can see it in his eyes. “I’ll take you away from here. My Uncle Jed has a boat. We can get it. Before they hurt you again, before they make you forget, let me take you away.”
I stumbled on a tree root and righted myself just before I face planted on the trail. Let me take you away.
Einstein stopped when I did, and eyed me curiously. “Sorry, buddy. Come on. Let’s keep going.”
There were island deer out on the trail. Half a dozen of them stood with heads up and ears tipped forward, alert as Einstein and I came over the hill.
“Stay,” I said. Einstein didn’t move. Jamie and Bear were miracle workers.
The deer turned toward us. Stood for a moment, frozen in the moonlight, before they turned and bounded away. I remained where I was for a few seconds, listening to their hooves pound across frozen ground.
We resumed our trek.
My fingers ached with cold, and my toes and the tip of my nose had gone numb. We were on the last leg of the trail headed to the peak when I paused again. Einstein turned back. I heard rustling on the path behind us. Footsteps. Just a couple, before the sound stopped. Had it been an echo of my own feet, my own clumsy movements, or was someone following? My fingers curled around the pistol grip of the Ruger in my pocket.
“Hello?” I said, voice barely a whisper.
No response. Einstein looked at me again and whimpered. I reached down and scratched his ears, as much for my sake as his.
“We’re almost there. Then I promise, we’ll go home and get something warm and delicious. You game to go a little farther?”
The beautiful thing about dogs: they’re always game. We set back out, but this time I kept my hand on my pistol the entire time.
There was a ring around the moon that night—a sign of snow, my father used to say. The sky was a deep, dark blue. Trees, stripped naked for winter, provided a skeletal canopy overhead as I reached the peak…
And the Crack.
“You’re going to sit this one out, okay bud?” I said to Stein. He whined, then barked in protest when I tied him to a tree. I couldn’t run the risk of him either following me in and getting stuck, or—worse—falling off the cliff on the other side. “Sorry, buddy. I won’t be long.”
It was maybe eighteen inches wide at the opening of the Crack. It would get narrower as I got farther in, I knew. If we’d had trouble passing through this thing as kids, I couldn’t imagine how I would squeeze through now that I was working with a little T&A. Not a lot, mind you, but a little.
I took a breath. Straightened the headlamp.
Make it through the Crack…
“And you’ll live forever,” I finished. “Yeah. Thanks, guys. I’ve got it.”
I turned sideways and shimmied inside. The crevice stretched fifteen, maybe twenty feet up, and a good twenty yards ahead of me. There was no light visible on the other side or above. The thing had seemed endless when we were kids; it didn’t seem much less so now. When I disappeared, swallowed by the rock, Einstein barked after me.
“It’s okay,” I called back. “I’m good.”
I wasn’t really, though. My head was killing me—I imagined it splitting much the same way this rock had. I inched forward regardless.
“We keep our secrets here,” Will Colby said. “That way someone will know. Someday, they’ll find this. And they’ll know.”
“I’ll take you away from here, Erin. I’ll save you.”
“We keep our secrets here.”
Where?
Halfway through the Crack, it got so narrow I couldn’t breathe. The rock was ice cold against my body, granite digging into my breasts—which were definitely not helpful in this situation. I was still sideways. I inched my right foot forward, and paused.
Something wedged at the base of the Crack barred the way. It reached my hip, making it impossible to continue unless I climbed.
I shimmied up. Found a toehold. Braced myself with knees and hands. Behind me, Einstein started barking again—louder now. More serious. With deadly intent.
Shit.
My breath wouldn’t come.
I managed to get up high enough to get over the rock in my way. I could just barely see light up ahead, but it was distant. There was still a ways to go.
Where the hell were the secrets we’d kept here?
What did that even mean?
When I was past the rock in my way, it got narrow again. Einstein was still barking. The mechanics of breathing totally eluded me now. It was so cold that I’d lost all feeling in my toes. My hands. I stopped for a second. Bile climbed my throat.
And suddenly, like some unexpected, drenching rain, the memories came.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” Will says. “It’s just a little farther. You’re so little, it won’t be hard. Just follow me.”
“I’m not afraid,” I lie. We’re already in the rock. It’s light enough that I can see him, just a foot or so in front of me. He’s taller than me, skinny and brown-eyed and serious. The camera his uncle gave him—the one Isaac says he’s not supposed to have—is on a string around his neck.
“What are we doing?” Allie hisses. She’s behind me. “We’re supposed to be in bed.”
“It’s not even dark out,” I say back. “Only babies go to bed when it’s still light. You can go back if you want. I’m staying with Will.”
“How much further?” she asks.
“Not far,” Will says. “Hang on—this is the hard part. I’ll help you. Just wait a sec.”
I hold still. I can feel Allie crowding in behind me. Will stops walking ahead, and climbs up instead. He mashes his butt against one rock, his feet against the other, and pushes himself up. Uses his hands to pull himself. He goes up and up, the camera bouncing every time he shoves himself up another foot.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m showing you,” he says. “Just come. This is where we keep everything. Everything we don’t want them to know.”
“It’s wrong to keep secrets,” Allie says.
“So go,” I whisper to her. “If you’re so afraid, just go back to the house. I’ll come in a minute.”
“But Will—” she starts.
“We’ll be okay, Al,” I assure her. Will is waiting for me.
I wait till she goes before I start to climb.
Einstein stopped barking abruptly. His silence was more unnerving, by far. I angled my arm up and cast the flashlight beam around as best I could, trying to orient myself.
The light hit something solid about ten feet above me: another boulder like the one blocking my path below. This one, I remembered.
It was a couple of feet across, blocking the light in that one spot.
I approached it a little differently than Will had shown me that day—instead of using my ass, I straddled the Crack and pulled myself with my hands, holding steady and pushing myself up with my feet.
“That’s it,” Will says. “You’re almost there.”
My heart hammered loud enough to echo in the stillness. I was ten feet up, closing in on my destination. I climbed another five feet. The space was wider here, which meant I needed to work harder to span the distance between the two rock faces—one foot on either side as I scrabbled for a handhold, a toehold.
“How often do you come here?” I say.
“All the time. You can’t tell Isaac about it—this is where I keep everything. No matter what happens, my stuff will still be here after I’m gone. You make it through the Crack, and you live forever. Nobody erases this.”
/> “God makes sure we live forever,” I hear Allie say below us.
“What are you still doing here?” I say.
“I want to see it, too.”
Will looks at me. He rolls his eyes. I giggle. He points his camera at me. I stick out my tongue when he snaps the picture, and the flash blinds me. A second later, the picture comes out the front. He hands me the picture and the camera, and then he goes back down and helps Allie up. She’s slower than me, not as good a climber. Will doesn’t make fun of her, though. Dad doesn’t like me spending time with him, but I don’t understand why. He’s nicer than any other boy here.
She finally makes it. All three of us are far up, holding tight to the rock. Will’s camera is heavy, so I hand it back to him when he’s close enough. I hang on to the picture, though. Will is closest to the rock—the thing that he says will make us live forever. I can’t wait to see what he means.
He reaches inside the rock.
That’s when Isaac calls for us.
The memory was enough to rattle me a hell of a lot more than the situation I was in now. A headache roared in my ears, something living, breathing, burrowing into my skull.
I was close enough now to see what I’d been looking for. Einstein hadn’t made a sound in too long. I struggled to stay in the present, straining to hear the world around me. Were those footsteps above me, or some distant echo of the life I’d lived before?
“Allie!” Isaac says. “Will! Erin Solomon! Your family is looking for you!” He shouts it from somewhere in the forest, not far from us. My heart thumps in my chest. Allie gasps. Falls, a little way. Will grabs her arm.
“Stay quiet!” he whispers to us. “He won’t find us here.”
Isaac comes closer, though. He’s angry—I can hear it in his voice. Daddy says Isaac will never get angry with me the way he does everybody else, but I don’t know if that’s true right now.
We all stay there, holding tight to the rock. Allie starts to cry.
I rested my head back against the cool rock, and forced myself back to the present. That was over—the whole thing was behind me now.
But, finally, I knew what I was looking for. Remembered what my father had made me forget.
Fifteen feet up, wedged between two granite rock faces with a scant beam of moonlight shining down, I angled myself closer to my goal:
Another rock. It was wedged in tight, maybe two feet wide, forming a shelf suspended in mid-air. I remembered Will’s face. The triumph, before Isaac came.
This is where we keep our secrets.
I had no doubt that this was where I would find my answers.
I listened again. The footsteps weren’t a memory, I realized now—I heard them clearly on the rock above me. Light, but distinct. I wasn’t alone.
“Erin,” someone called from above me. A woman. I recognized the voice instantly. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Jenny—Cameron’s daughter. The one born and bred for psychopathy. The one who had just run down Diggs’ father and blown up a compound, with little regard for the lives inside. Memories faded; the here-and-now was suddenly just as terrifying.
“I think we’re on the same team now,” I said. “Trying to take J. down, I mean. So there’s really no reason to sneak around like this.” I was level with the rock now, just a few feet from open air above me. The light from my headlamp perfectly illuminated what I was looking at.
The rock was granite, but it wasn’t whole. There was a cavern inside—big enough for me to reach inside easily.
“Somehow I doubt that,” she said. “You’re still not willing to do what it takes.”
“You mean running down sick old men or blowing up little kids? Yeah, you’ve got me there. Is Einstein still out there?” I asked. The question made my heart hurt, just slightly.
“He’s right where you left him, gnawing on a ham bone. Don’t worry—I’ve spilled a lot of blood, but nothing with fur. He’s safe.”
That was a marginal relief—with the exception of the havoc a ham bone would wreak on my mutt’s digestive system. It was better than the alternative, though. I tried taking a breath. “Okay. Good. So…what is it you want, exactly? I’m assuming this isn’t a social call.”
“Definitely not.” I heard her shuffling around up there. When she spoke again, it sounded like she was practically on top of me. I looked up. She must have laid down on the rock, because her face was directly in the crack above me. She blinked in the glare of my headlamp.
“I’ve wanted to talk to you for a while, actually,” she said conversationally. She was armed—I could see a gun peering into the Crack at me alongside her beady brown eyes. “And then you came out here and I figured…there we go. Kill two birds with one stone. So to speak.”
I paused. My right leg was cramping. “I get that I’m the first bird. What’s the second one?”
“This place, of course. Or I assume it is—I wasn’t sure. I know they’re looking for something out here, but I really had no clue where to come.”
I could hear her breathing above me, just a few feet at this point—five, maybe six. I shifted enough to reach for the gun in my pocket.
“They?” I asked. My breath wouldn’t come anymore, body shaking with adrenaline and fear and the tension of hanging like Spiderman fifteen feet above the earth. Jenny didn’t answer. I eased my hand from my pocket, gun clenched in my frozen fingers. “Jenny? Who’s they? Why would anyone be searching here?”
She laughed, completely unexpectedly. “My father didn’t tell you, then?” she asked. “Hmm. I guess you guys aren’t as chummy as I thought. I figured after your old man offed himself in front of you, Dad would take you under his wing. He always did love a feisty damsel in distress. But he’s still keeping secrets, huh?”
“Why don’t you enlighten me, then? Are we talking about J? Lilah Waters? Is she the one who would be out here looking for…whatever it is they’re looking for?”
“Ehhhh,” Jenny said, making the sound of a game-show buzzer. “Sorry, wrong answer. Right team, wrong player. And it turns out this game isn’t as fun as I’d thought. So how about you haul whatever it is you were fetching out of there, and come on out?”
I maneuvered the gun toward the sky, and aimed it at the pale beam of light from Jenny’s flashlight. Before I could even adjust my grip, a shot rang out. In the enclosed space, the sound alone was almost enough to split my skull open. I dropped my gun. I could just barely hear Jenny talking to me, a voice on the far end of a wind tunnel. In the process of trying to recover my gun, my foot slipped on the rocks. I fell a few feet, scrambling to find another foothold.
It was a few minutes before I could hear anything again. Jenny was right where I’d left her, staring down at me with her gun trained on my falling form.
“Sorry,” she called to me, with no trace of remorse. “I’ll aim for something more valuable than your hearing next time, though. Get whatever’s in there, and bring it to me.”
“No. You want it so much, you can come get it.” She took aim again. My ears were still ringing. I definitely didn’t want to go through that again. “Wait, wait. Fine. Just a second.”
I shimmied back up and reached my hand in. A plastic container about the size of a shoebox was concealed inside the hollow. “You can’t tell anyone, Erin,” Will whispers. “But you bring your secrets to the Crack, and we’ll live forever.”
Why did J. care about the secrets of a kid dead twenty-five years, though? About a church led by a madman, him and his congregation long gone? I fumbled with the box for a few seconds, all too aware of the gun following my every move.
“I’ve got it,” I said. My voice shook. “What do you want me to do now?”
“Climb up,” she said. “Come to me.”
“What am I, a freaking mountain goat? I can’t climb that high.”
“’Can’t.’ That’s a terrible word. Come on, Erin. You’re built of stronger stuff than that, right? I saw you try to stuff your dad’s brains back in his head
when you were half-dead yourself in Mexico. Heard all about you in those woods in Black Falls. Show me what you’ve got.”
I shouldn’t let her get to me, I knew. I was cold and tired and cursing my own stupidity, and the thought of my father… I shook it off. Tried to control my own fury. Started climbing.
My wrist still wasn’t right after I’d broken it in Black Falls, even after more than a year and a handful of surgeries. It throbbed like a son of a bitch in the cold; just then, all I could feel was the ache. I clawed the rest of the way up, using my legs as much as possible. When my head cleared the top, Jenny was sitting up there waiting for me. She smiled brightly.
“See. I told you you’d make it.”
She set the gun down, reached for my hand, and pulled me up.
I didn’t even wait until I had my legs under me before I made my move. With my left hand still in her right, I summoned all the strength I had and swung the box I’d taken from the rock straight into her side. If nothing else, it caught her off balance enough to buy me some time. She went down—unfortunately, she still hadn’t let go of my hand, so I went down with her.
On the ground and half on top of Jenny, Einstein barking furiously below, I dropped the box and let fly with a flailing right hook that caught her in the side of the head. The rage in her eyes told me I’d done little more than piss her off—I needed to find some way to get the upper hand, and fast. My gun was at the bottom of the Crack; hers was just a few feet away. I did the math, and went for it.
Jenny grabbed me by the back of the coat as I made for the gun and pulled me backward with little effort. She flipped me over so I was on my back with the rough granite beneath me, and straddled me. She wasn’t a big woman, but she was definitely bigger than me. And stronger. And trained.
Poised above me, she got one good punch in, just about knocking my tooth out, before I bucked up and caught her enough to tag her again myself. I was about to make my comeback—possibly—when I heard the ratchet of a gun’s safety in the darkness.
“I don’t know whether to break this up or charge admission,” Monty said from the shadows.
“I’m not ready to date a UFC champion yet,” Diggs said. “Get off her, Jenny.”