by Kieran Scott
Then it quickly laid itself out again and slithered off into the trees, moving much faster this time, like it was bent on escape. Once it was gone, Callie’s posture relaxed. She glanced over her shoulder toward the trail. Nothing was there.
Jeremy took a step forward. “Callie, are—”
“Are you okay?” Ted asked, turning toward her and gripping both her elbows.
Callie nodded. “Fine. I’m fine.”
“All right. Let’s give that thing a couple of minutes to put some distance between it and the path, and then we’ll keep moving.”
“Are there, um, a lot of those snakes … out here?” Callie asked.
“Not really.” Ted reached up to squeeze her shoulder. “Seeing one of them is rare, so now that we have, we probably won’t see another.” He dipped his head to look her reassuringly in the eye. “Okay?”
She nodded. “Okay.”
Ted let her go and blew out a sigh. “I think we’re clear. Let’s keep moving.”
Callie shivered, shaking off the last of her terror, and reached for Jeremy’s hand.
She caught air.
“Jeremy?”
When she turned to look at him, he was glowering at her, the same way he’d looked at Lissa when she’d teased him by the river yesterday. His chest heaved beneath his black Star Trek T-shirt.
“Jeremy, what—”
“Nothing,” he said, trudging ahead of her, his hands balled into fists. “You heard him. Let’s get moving.”
Callie was so stunned by his sudden change in demeanor, she couldn’t move. Tears stung her eyes and she gulped in the thick air.
When she finally turned to follow the group, they’d disappeared around a bend in the trail, and for half a second she experienced the mind-numbing terror of being completely alone. The trees around her were identical spindly sentries.
Move, she told herself. Move!
But, suddenly, she didn’t know which way to go. Left was right and right was left. Had her friends gone uphill or down? She wildly scanned the ground for footprints, but her gaze was so blurred she couldn’t make out a thing.
Move!
Callie heard a laugh—Lissa’s laugh—and took off running toward the sound. Her face was wet with sweat and tears, her backpack slamming painfully against her spine.
What if I don’t find them?
But then she came around the bend and nearly ran right into Lissa. Penelope, Ted, and Jeremy had walked ahead.
“You okay, Cal?” Lissa asked, looping her arm through Callie’s.
Callie could hardly hear past the pounding of her heart. She felt light-headed and sick, scared and desperate and pathetic.
“Fine,” she said, her voice cracking. “Totally fine.”
She just wished it were true.
The meek little twit seemed so innocent at first. So clueless. Not anymore. Maybe it was the fact that she was challenging herself, that she was “surviving,” that made her so brazen. What a joke. She had no clue what it really took to survive. The kind of sacrifices a person has to make. The kind of pain one has to endure. Honestly, watching her attempt to flirt made me sick to my stomach. I almost felt bad for her boyfriend. Or I would have. If he wasn’t such a gutless loser himself.
He simply stood there. Just stood there and watched it happen. Spineless.
He wasn’t a man. He was never going to be a man. So it was obvious: He’d have to be the first to go.
The sun was high in the sky and Callie knew lunchtime was fast approaching, but she had no clue what they were going to eat. She’d added her Snickers bar to the collection of food that Penelope now carried in her pack so that they could split it when the time came. But a dark, insidious part of her wished she’d kept the bar for herself. She imagined sneaking off into the woods to devour the whole thing. Her mouth watered at the very thought of it.
“You guys! Up here!” Lissa shouted.
Callie’s heart squeezed. What had they found now, a severed head or something? She looked over her shoulder at Jeremy, who had walked the last mile or so in silence behind her. He barely met her eye, then quickened his pace, skirting past her. Callie jogged to catch up.
What was the matter with him? She was the one who’d been wronged here.
The tree line abruptly stopped at a flat outcropping of rock that ended at a cliff—a sheer drop to nowhere. A huge hill rose up to the right, the slope covered with evergreens, and the blue sky above seemed endless. An enormous bird circled the yawning expanse.
“What kind of bird is that?” Callie asked, taken in by the majesty of it all.
“An eagle.” Ted slipped out of his backpack. “Searching for its prey,” he added in a menacing voice, then laughed.
Callie responded with a tight smile. Penelope walked up next to her and tugged her earbuds from her ears. They still hadn’t talked about yesterday’s revelation. Callie wasn’t sure how she would, or even if she should, broach it, now that Jeremy had sort of explained. But she also wondered why Penelope hadn’t said anything. Wasn’t it up to her to apologize for keeping Callie in the dark?
Maybe upstate New Yorkers had a whole different set of social and friendship rules than they had back in Chicago. But if this was how things were going to be in her new life, Callie didn’t think she could survive it.
“See that line of downed trees out there?” Ted said, pointing.
Everyone stepped closer to the edge of the cliff, and Callie’s head and heart swooped, temporarily switching places. She was looking straight down at the tops of towering trees. It was surreal to have this vantage point when those same trees would have dwarfed her had she been walking beneath them. The realization of this made her dizzy and she took a step back, forcing herself to look up and follow Ted’s sightline instead.
That was when she zeroed in on the destruction. Hundreds of trees had been felled and crushed, trunks and branches splintered and bleached white like gruesome, gnarled fingers clawing up through the earth. “That’s where your trail would have led you eventually.” He turned to grin at Lissa. “Aren’t you glad you bumped into me instead?”
Lissa held his gaze for a second, then blushed and looked at her toes. Blushed and looked at her toes. So now Lissa Barton was bashful? Callie felt as if she’d just stepped through some kind of wormhole into another dimension.
And what about Zach? Callie remembered the painful game of I Never, how she’d learned that Lissa had cheated on someone. Would she cheat on Zach with Ted?
Callie bit her lip. If Lissa had caved and let Zach come on this trip, this little flirtation would not be happening. In fact, if Zach had been allowed to come on this trip, they wouldn’t be in this situation at all. He’d hiked the trail they were supposed to be on. He would have known the second they made the wrong turn that had landed them here.
Out of nowhere, Callie felt an itch to dig out her journal and start a new story. One that involved a guy who looked a lot like Zach Carle leading a grinning bunch of hikers safely through the woods. No conflict, no love triangles, no snakes or spiders or creepy dolls. Just a happy nature story.
“So I guess that means you intend to lead us around it?” Lissa said finally, recovering herself.
“That is exactly what I intend to do.” Ted reached over, twirled Lissa’s ponytail once around his finger, and flipped it, letting it tumble back down her back.
Lissa smiled and tugged on her ponytail. Penelope took a quick swig from her water bottle and narrowed her eyes. Yeah. This was going to be fun.
“My cabin’s north of the slide, so we’ll be fine.” Ted crouched over his backpack and got busy pulling out tools. A box of matches, a compass, and a thermos.
“What’s all that for?” Lissa asked.
“You guys hungry?” Ted asked, standing up.
“Um, yeah,” Jeremy said, sounding annoyed that Ted even had to ask.
“Well, I’m gonna go get us some lunch.” Ted clapped Jeremy on the arm. “How about you see if you can get a fire st
arted, Little Man? That should be simple enough for you, right?”
He tossed Jeremy the matches, which hit his Star Trek T-shirt right in its USS Enterprise, then bounced off onto the ground. Ted scoffed, then took off into the trees at a jog, leaping over a fallen trunk. Lissa bent to retie her laces, picked up the matches, and chucked them at Jeremy. This time, he caught them.
“You guys want to gather some firewood?” he asked, his jaw tight.
“For what?” Penelope lifted her shoulders. “Do you think he has a cooler of burger meat hidden out there somewhere?”
“I don’t know, but the guy told me to make a fire, so I guess I’m making a fire.”
He trudged over to the tree line and gathered a few sticks in his arms. Callie followed to help, keeping her distance, since she was still getting a cold-shoulder vibe from Jeremy. As she crouched to grab a broken branch, she cast him a quick look, wishing he would look back at her and smile, but he didn’t. He just kept working, his jaw still clenched. Callie’s insides felt hollow. What was happening with the two of them?
Finally Callie heaved a sigh and went back to drop her twigs on the dirt. Jeremy did the same. Lissa and Penelope had set up a circle of rocks for them and Lissa quickly built an expert tepee out of the kindling, which lit up quite quickly. Jeremy sat back on his heels, avoiding eye contact with everyone.
“What do we do now?” Callie asked, eyeing Penelope’s backpack as if she could see the Snickers bar through the blue vinyl.
“Now, we eat!”
Ted appeared through an opening in the trees roughly ten feet from where he’d disappeared. He was holding two very large, very bloody, and very dead bunny rabbits.
“Oh my God,” Callie blurted, jumping to her feet and half hiding behind Lissa. She wanted to gag. “Where did you get those?”
Ted strolled over with his chest out, looking proud of himself. Three smeared lines of red ran down the side of his shirt, as if he’d swiped his bloody hand there. That explains the bloody marks on his shorts, Callie thought. I guess.
“Traps I set up earlier. Lunch is gonna be a feast today,” he crowed, tugging a small red tarp out of his backpack. He slapped the rabbits down on top of it and the bigger rabbit’s head lolled to the side. Callie turned and pressed her face into Lissa’s back. The top of her skull prickled and she wondered if she was going to faint.
“You’re really gonna eat that?” Jeremy asked, rising to stand next to Lissa and Callie. Penelope hovered off to one side, clutching her skinny elbows with her hands.
Ted reached into his bag and pulled out a large wood-handled knife. The blade glinted in the midafternoon sun, sharp and sure. The handle looked almost exactly like the one that had been sticking out of that tree trunk yesterday afternoon. Callie stopped breathing.
“What the what?” Jeremy gasped.
Callie’s vision clouded over with gray and black spots.
Dead kids. A boy covered in blood. The broken doll. That laugh in the woods.
Did they really know that laugh hadn’t come from Ted? He could have been faking sleep last night when Lissa checked on him.
“Why do you have that?” Lissa asked, pointing to the knife, a mix of intrigue and fear in her voice.
“Survival of the fittest, baby.” He flipped the knife over, catching it deftly by the handle, and smiled. “We don’t have enough food to feed the five of us over the next day, so we gotta supplement with what the woods provide.”
Callie pressed the heels of her hands into her temples. The Skinner. The Skinner. The Skinner.
“There’s no way I can eat fresh bunny,” Penelope said, her nose wrinkling.
Ted shrugged. “You gotta do what you gotta do.”
“Can’t argue with that,” Lissa put in, hovering off Ted’s left shoulder.
Callie stared at her friends. How could they just stand there and act like it was no big deal that a perfect stranger had just produced a deadly weapon as if from nowhere?
“Now she has got the right attitude,” Ted said, pointing at Lissa with the knife.
Then he turned and, with one swift downswing, chopped the head off the first bunny. Kling!
Callie’s stomach heaved and she tasted bile in the back of her throat. She turned around and shuffled toward the edge of the cliff, struggling to draw in breath. There was another loud kling as he beheaded the second rabbit. Callie braced her hands against her knees.
“Ew!” Jeremy groaned. “Ugh. That’s nasty.”
Callie hazarded a glance over her shoulder. Ted was crouched next to the carcasses, deftly skinning the first rabbit.
She slapped a hand over her mouth and turned away again.
The surviving boy. Half naked, dazed, caked in blood and mud. His friends skinned alive right in front of him. She could picture him so vividly, his hair matted, his eyes wild, his steps staggered.
Help, she heard him beg inside her mind. Somebody help me.
A hand came down on Callie’s shoulder and she screamed.
“God, chill!” Lissa gasped. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Don’t tell me you’re not thinking it,” Callie said through her teeth, keeping her back to Ted and his work.
“Thinking what?” Lissa asked, though it was clear by the glint in her eye that she knew.
“Ted is very good with the skinning!” Callie hissed.
Jeremy moseyed over to join them. “Hey, I admit I don’t like the guy, but he wasn’t even born yet when those murders happened, Callie,” he said in an uncharacteristically condescending tone. “There’s no way it could be him. Besides, people skin animals all the time. It’s kind of necessary if you’re going to eat them.”
Callie reluctantly turned to look back at the butchering station. Ted was working swiftly, nearly done with the second rabbit. He leaned past the carcasses, grabbed a couple of extra sticks from next to the fire pit, and started snapping off their excess branches. Penelope stood nearby the whole while, fiddling with her bracelets and watching intently. Maybe she was worried that she’d get stuck out here by herself one day and need to skin something. Meanwhile, Callie’s decision to never venture out of civilization again had just been solidified. There would be nothing but concrete, steel, and brick for her from here on out.
“Get a grip here, Cal,” Lissa said, crossing her arms over her chest. “He’s not a murderer. He just … knows what he’s doing out here.”
She said it with a hint of respect, even attraction. Callie looked Ted over, trying to see him and not the knife. Yes, he was good-looking in a rugged way. But he wasn’t really Lissa’s type. Or Penelope’s. Lissa had been with clean-cut, preppy Zach as long as Callie had known her. The only guy Callie knew Penelope had liked was standing next to Callie right now, and he was Ted’s polar opposite.
Ted skewered the raw rabbit leg with one of his cleaned branches and set the skewer up over the fire, balancing it against one of the rocks so that the flames licked hungrily at the flesh.
“Whatever. I don’t care who he is,” Callie said with a sniff. “There’s no way I’m eating that.”
They fell one by one. It was the scent of the roasting rabbit that did it. It smelled so much like chicken, it was unbelievable. Lissa was the first to give in. She asked for a leg, sat down with her ankles crossed, and started gnawing on the meat like she was hanging out at KFC. Callie even saw her lick her lips. Once Lissa started eating, Penelope wasn’t far behind.
“Oh my God, this is so good,” Pen said, popping a bit of flesh into her mouth. “You guys have to try it.”
Jeremy looked at Callie. His leg bounced beneath him. His eyes were desperate.
“Don’t,” she said even as her stomach caved in on itself.
“I have to.”
He turned away from her and walked over to the fire. Callie sat back on her hands near the edge of the woods. She pushed her legs out, knocked the toes of her boots together, pulled her legs back in again. She thought of the Snickers bar in Pen’s bag. Overhea
d, the circling eagle suddenly let out a cry and dove into the trees below. There was a loud rustle, another caw, then nothing.
Apparently the eagle had finally tracked down its lunch.
“You’d better get over here before I eat it all,” Lissa chided, sucking on her finger.
“Seriously, Callie. It’s really good,” Jeremy said.
“Thanks, Little Man,” Ted said with a self-satisfied smile.
“Don’t call me that,” Jeremy muttered in reply, which only made Ted’s smile widen.
The breeze shifted, making the fire dance and sending the scrumptious scent of the cooked meat directly toward Callie. Her stomach was basically devouring itself in its desperation. Finally, she shoved herself off the ground and walked over to drop down next to Lissa.
“Give me a piece,” she said reticently, holding out her hand. “A small piece.”
“Ha! Knew you’d come around.” Ted reached down and picked up a skewer. Callie couldn’t tell what part of the rabbit it was, and she was glad. What she could tell was that the meat had been cooked to a charred perfection. She held her breath, sent a silent apology to all bunnies everywhere, and took a bite.
Her mouth nearly exploded with happiness. The meat was tender and slightly salty and really did taste almost exactly like chicken. She chewed slowly, carefully, waiting for a wave of disgust to hit her, but it didn’t. She was eating. And it was good.
“Thanks for this, Ted,” Penelope said with a shy smile. “You’re officially my hero.”
Ted beamed. Lissa reached for a nearby twig and cracked it, tossing both halves in the fire moodily.
“Can you guys imagine what Zach would say if he saw us right now?” Penelope asked, glancing at Lissa.
“Who’s Zach?” Ted asked.
Lissa shot Penelope a warning look, but Penelope was reaching for her water bottle. “Lissa’s boyfriend.”
Callie bit her lip. Lissa was stone-faced.
“You have a boyfriend?” Ted asked, raising his eyebrows.
Lissa took a long gulp of water.