by Asher Ellis
“Looking for this?”
Eliza threw open the bathroom door and held the coveted bag of weed between two pinched fingers. Now that the jig was up, she finally let go of the torrent of laugher she’d been bottling up inside. Rob did not join in.
“You bitch,” he said, placing a hand on his chest. “You just gave me a heart attack. Very funny.”
Eliza chucked the weed at Rob’s head. His hand whipped up just in time to prevent it from smacking him in the face. “I thought so,” she sneered. “And don’t call me a bitch.”
Rob carefully opened the plastic bag. “Well, then, don’t play mean tricks on me for no reason.”
“No reason, huh?”
“What are you talking about?” Rob wasn’t even looking in Eliza’s direction, too preoccupied with removing a paper from the pack of Zig Zags and beginning construction on a perfectly rolled joint.
“Let’s just say I’ve learned to never leave you alone for a second with anything you could fuck. Including my friends.”
That comment brought Rob’s eyes away from his work, precious weed fluttering like snow to the floor. “Aw, shit!” He quickly placed the joint on the nightstand. “Now look what you made me do.”
“Oh I see.” Eliza turned away from him and crossed her arms. “Instead of apologizing, you’re just going to try and change the subject. Nice.”
She could tell the exaggeration in Rob’s sigh was intentional. He pushed up the brim of his trucker’s cap up so she could see his eyes. “Listen, babe, if this is about something I did on this trip, I don’t remember. Okay? It’s called blackout drunk. I know you’ve experienced it yourself. So can we just let it go?”
Eliza hesitated. Her anger still burned, but it was rapidly becoming apparent that further arguing wouldn’t do any good. Whether or not Rob was telling the truth, his excuse was infallible. And at least she had been witness to how much he drank, which was certainly enough to cause a considerable degree of memory loss. Still, he hadn’t apologized, nor promised it wouldn’t happen again. What if Eliza wasn’t around to catch him next time?
“Well, if you can’t handle your alcohol, then you should watch how much you drink.” A self-satisfied smirk planted itself on her face. She knew Rob would receive the comment as an insult, but due to his own excuse, he couldn’t argue. Instead, he could only look away and mutter, “Okay, mom.”
With a final lick of the rolling paper, Rob sealed the joint and stuck it between his lips as he patted his pockets in search of a lighter. In a flash, Eliza darted forward, plucked the joint from his mouth, and retreated.
“Hey!” Rob lashed out for the joint but missed. “Give me that!”
Eliza teasingly held out the joint in front of Rob’s face, but whenever he would grab for it, she’d jerk it away just in time. “I’m your mom, right?” she said, taking righteous pleasure in her taunt. “And what mom wants her son smoking drugs? We’re gonna flush this down the toilet, young man.” She made a move toward the bathroom door.
Rob’s eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t.”
“You don’t think so?”
“No way. You want it as much as I do.”
“True.” Eliza’s voice became abruptly solemn. “But not as much as I want an apology.”
The joint vanished from her fingers into her closed fist.
“Okay, okay!” Rob threw his hands up. “I’m sorry! I’ll control myself from now on, you have my word. Can I have the joint now, please?”
Eliza leered at her begging boyfriend. “I don’t know.” She drew closer, straddling his thigh. “Maybe your mom needs to give you a spanking first.”
“Hmm,” Rob said, bringing his face closer to hers. Still holding the joint, Eliza wrapped her arms around his neck and her lips closed on his. Her tongue darted into the warm cavern of his mouth, sending electrical shivers throughout her entire body. Charged by lust, she jammed their mouths together even harder while crawling on top of him. It didn’t take long for the deep kiss to harden the bulge in Rob’s pants and push a welcome pressure between her legs.
Eliza pulled back and inhaled deeply. A long string of saliva stretched its way between their parting lips.
“What about the others?” Rob whispered.
She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. I think they went for a walk.”
Rob smiled and lowered his head to nibble her long, slender neck. He stopped when he realized her flesh was entirely concealed in cloth.
“Baby,” Rob said, stepping back and putting a sudden stop on their steamy makeout session. Eliza’s eyes, which had been squeezed shut in ecstasy, popped open. Her boyfriend stared at her with an inquisitively raised brow. “What are you wearing?”
Distracted by her prank and the foreplay, Eliza had forgotten she’d changed into the plum-colored turtleneck that was many sizes too large for her.
“Oh yeah,” she said, touching her fingers to her neck. “I found this in one of the dressers. I thought it would feel nice to wear something dry for awhile.”
“I see,” Rob said with no enthusiasm behind his words. “But even if it feels nice, it looks pretty stupid on you.”
Her fist hit Rob’s shoulder before she even knew she was throwing the punch. “Fuck you!” Sometimes the insensitiveness of her boyfriend could be downright unbelievable. She folded her arms. “You’re the one who’s fucking stupid.”
“Damn, girl!” Rob said, hooking a finger from each hand into the belt loops of her pants and pulling her forward. “There’s no need for that kind of language.” His eyelids lowered in a sly expression. “All I’m saying is that maybe you should take it off.”
His tongue traced the outline of her upper lip. Eliza shivered, feeling herself become increasingly moist. She stared into his gorgeous brown eyes. “You think so?”
His hand squeezed the left cheek of her ass. “I do.”
Her palms went to his shoulders, pushing him back onto the bottom bunk. “And do you think we should get you out of your wet clothes, too?”
“Good idea.”
Eliza grabbed the bottom of Rob’s T-shirt, first ripping open his damp denim vest and then eagerly pulling it up over his head. Eliza took a moment to admire his sculpted pecs and abdomen.
He can be an asshole, sometimes. But damn. Damn. Damn! What a body.
Leaning over him as he lay on his back, she moaned as his hands kneaded her breasts through her shirt and bra. Eliza had always been secretly jealous of her sister’s larger cup size, but she still had something to flaunt up top. And even if Alex had been blessed with the 36Ds, it was Eliza who had gotten the supermodel legs. Compared to Alex’s stumps, Eliza had the stature of an Amazonian—a fact that hadn’t gone unnoticed by the guy writhing beneath her.
“Your turn, baby,” Rob whispered, gently tugging on the bottom of Eliza’s loose-fitting turtleneck.
Eliza reached down and grabbed a handful of the material. She drew the shirt upward, bending her spine to allow the garment enough room to come overhead. For a brief moment, she could see only purple darkness as the cloth pulled over her eyes, tiny crackles of static electricity snapping in her ears.
After a deliberately slow strip in the sexiest manner she could, Eliza pulled the turtleneck from her head and her boyfriend returned to her view.
But Rob didn’t look turned on the way she had expected he would at the sight of her firm, sexy body. He was staring at her, all right, but his jaw hung open in a frozen state of shock.
No, not shock.
Horror.
“What the fuck?” Rob screamed. He grabbed Eliza’s waist and flung her to the side. A heavy thump rocked Eliza’s vision as Rob scrambled out from underneath her, crawling away the moment his body hit the floor.
“Rob!” Eliza’s tear ducts were already at work. She held a shaking hand to her throbbing head, baffled by her boyfriend’s terrified reaction. “What the fuck are you doing?” she yelled.
Rob opened his mouth to answer, but instead putrid contents
from the depths of his stomach came sputtering forth. He pressed his fingers directly to his lips, trying in vain to dam the acidic liquid that was spraying onto the quilted rug under his feet. But the vomit was mostly beer, so it flowed like water between his teeth.
By the time Eliza realized Rob was fleeing from the bedroom, he was already at the door, slamming it behind him.
“Hey!” Eliza shouted, jumping to her feet and racing to the door. The knob wouldn’t turn an inch. “What the hell are you doing?” Her fists pounded on the door, shaking the wood in its frame, but Rob would not respond.
“Rob!” She was bawling now, a steady stream of tears rolling down her cheeks. “I’m scared. Please…open the door.”
There was still no answer.
Eliza was just about to punish the door with another barrage of fists when she glanced at the mirror above the bureau directly to her right.
At first, she refused to believe she was looking at her own reflection. But after a few seconds, she couldn’t deny the sickening reality any longer.
When she had last checked her injury in the bathroom, the scratch had merely been the slightest discolored puffy line marking her flesh. But now a thick blanket of green, fuzzy mold covered her entire throat and extended across to her left shoulder. Eliza watched the fungus sprouting from the gash on her neck, tendrils reaching out like ivy.
Eliza screamed, her fingernails clawing at her neck. Somewhere inside her head, a voice pleaded with herself to not tear out her own throat.
Chapter 13
An image of the cabin, with its covered porch and handcrafted rocking chairs, flickered across the inner projection screen of Jake’s mind. More than once had he pondered the origin of such random thoughts, memories that didn’t seem to be conjured by any sensual trigger. Sometimes it felt like the human mind was a broadcast tower picking up signals from far-off satellites that no one could see.
“Did you check on Red’s cabin last week like I asked you to?”
Jake asked the question while he drove and ate, far from the first time he’d had to multitask during his lunch. Doug sat next to him in the truck, also enjoying his midday meal.
Through a mouthful of turkey sandwich, Doug answered, “Yeah. The place looked fine. No signs of a break-in or any trespassing.”
Though this was the answer Jake was hoping to hear, for some reason he still couldn’t get the image of the abandoned cabin out of his head.
“Maybe we should swing by again.”
Doug rolled an empty plastic baggie into a ball and tossed it on the floor. “Why? I mean, I was just there. I’m telling ya, it was all good.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, his voice trailing off. He knew Doug was right. The Hogan cabin was quite a ways into the woods and going all the way up there would take up a considerable chunk of their time. It definitely wasn’t worth committing to such a cumbersome task just because of some weird feeling. “Forget I mentioned it.”
Doug nodded and reached for the volume knob to turn up the strains of a Crosby, Stills, and Nash tune over the patter of rainfall. Jake wanted to comment on Doug’s flawless memorization of the lyrics, but bit his tongue until the song came to a finish.
“Didn’t realize you were into the classics,” Jake said, reaching into the Coleman lunchbox between them. “It’s nice to see a young person showing some respect for the greats.”
He tossed a pack of peanut butter crackers at Doug, who caught them and said, “You talk like you’re in your fifties. You’re barely ten years older than me and it’s the only kind of music I can find on your iPod.”
Jake laughed through a mouthful of granola bar. “True, but I always think of myself as a rare breed. I’ve just come to expect all kids your age to listen to, I don’t know…Eminem or Green Day or what have you.”
“Nah, man,” Doug said. “Fuck that noise. Give me Neil Young, Van Morrison, or Cat Stevens any day over that shit.”
Jake smiled. “Good to know.”
Their bodies bounced in unison over a bump in the road, bringing a beat of silence that ended the conversation. Doug took the opportunity to change the subject.
“So,” he said, eyeing his partner, who was balancing the steering wheel with one knee while eating a spoonful of raspberry yogurt. “I gotta know, man. Did you ever have to take someone down? Phil made it sound like you did.”
Jake swallowed his mouthful and took a decisive glance at his younger colleague. It was not a story Jake enjoyed telling, but as he stared at Doug’s solemn expression, he knew it would be best to explain. It would only serve the rookie well if a similar situation were to ever arise.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s true. I had to shoot a man, once. Only time I’ve ever fired a weapon at another human being, but I had no choice.” He threw the spoon back into the box and closed the lid. “Still, I regret it. And I always will.”
He could feel Doug’s unwavering eyes staring at the side of his head. “So what happened?” the younger man asked.
Jake took a deep breath. “Believe it or not, it was during my first outing with Phil. We started out like any usual day—doing the rounds, shootin’ the shit. Pretty much like we are now. But then we parked for lunch.”
He paused to toss an old, brown-spotted banana peel out the window. It disappeared into a blur of passing ferns.
“So we’re sitting there enjoying our lunch—since Phil doesn’t like to eat and drive at the same time—when he gets out to take a leak. So he goes jogging out into the woods so we won’t have to smell it while we eat. And I’m sitting in the truck by myself, listening to some tunes—when my radio goes off.”
“Phil?” Doug didn’t miss a beat.
“Yeah. Walkie-talkie practically explodes with Phil’s voice telling me to grab the rifle and get out the fuck out there. So I spill half a Thermos of chicken noodle soup on myself, yank the rifle free, and start sprinting into the trees. I don’t get but fifty feet from the truck when I see it.”
“See what?”
Jake had to chuckle at Doug’s childlike attention. The rookie ranger was like a Cub Scout listening to a campfire ghost story. Jake did his best to turn the laugh into a dry-throated cough and continued.
“It was like I’d walked onto the set of a 1980s slasher movie. First thing I saw was a body slouched over a bloody tree stump—head split completely open. Then somewhere from my left I heard Phil screaming ‘Wait,’ over and over. So I run toward his voice and I’m yelling, ‘Phil! Answer me!’ and all that. Only took me a second and there he was, lying on his back. His left eye was completely swollen and bruised. But before I could ask him what the fuck happened, Phil starts pointing and yelling, ‘Behind you! Behind you!’ ”
Jake took a moment to loosen his death grip on the wheel. His fingers were beginning to fall asleep.
“I didn’t even think. I just pulled the trigger and watched a big, burly man drop the ax he had raised above his head. The guy took about three steps back, took a look at the hole in his chest, and fell to the ground. Dead.”
Doug released a lungful of air and shook his head. “Holy shit,” he whispered.
Jake nodded. “Holy shit is right. Guy was just about to put an ax in Phil’s head before I came along—just like he did with that poor son of a bitch on the tree stump. If I had hesitated for a second longer, both of us would’ve probably been found floating facedown in Emerald Lake.”
“So who was the guy?” Doug asked.
“A guy named Murray Dobson. He wasn’t from around here—just some drifter who turned out to have quite the police record. In fact, after the cops ran his name through the computer, it turned out he was currently wanted on suspicion of armed robbery and assault. And he’d been missing for some time. Everyone figured he must have been en route to Canada, walking through the woods so he wouldn’t be caught. The man with the split head was Seymour Cedar, a local lumberjack who worked at the sawmill for years before they shut down. The way the cops pieced it together, Dobson came upon Seymour
while he was out chopping some firewood. He got the jump on him, took his ax out, and that was that.”
Doug grimaced. “Poor son of a bitch.”
“You got that right.” Jake sighed. “He and his wife had just had their second child when he died. Everyone felt so bad for his widow that when she insisted she and her kids stay on the family land, no one had the nerve to persuade her otherwise. Never mind that she was now raising two children on her own, without any modern amenities. Besides, I don’t think she had anywhere else to go. But I’ll be damned if she didn’t prove everyone wrong when she somehow raised those two kids without any running water or electricity.”
“You mean they’re still there?” Doug sounded as incredulous. “Shit, how do you like that? No way I would’ve stayed out there after they closed the mill and shut down all the power in the area. No friggin’ way.”
An orange blur at the side of the road caught Jake’s eye as they rounded a turn. He turned to look out his window just in time to see a fox retreating into the trees. A baby woodchuck hung limp from its jaws, its small body still bleeding from fresh wounds. Another life claimed by the natural order of the forest.
“Well,” Jake said as the fox vanished in his side mirror, “that makes two of us.”
Chapter 14
For a moment, Leigh and Sam could only stare at each other. Sam finally broke their shared trance by quietly asking, “Was that…Eliza?”
Leigh ignored the question as she sprinted past Sam toward the front door of the cabin, the shrill scream still echoing in her ears. All concerns about Dale’s horrible condition instantly vanished, replaced by worry for her friend.
Practically ripping the front door off its hinges, Leigh burst through the threshold, frantically scanning the room for the other girl. Instead, she found Rob sitting on the floor, his back against a bedroom door. His face was bone white.
“Rob?” Leigh asked, bewildered. “What are you doing?”
Rob leaned against the door that shook behind him every time Eliza’s fist connected with it. “It’s Eliza,” he said, gasping. “She’s covered in something.”