“No, no, no!” Nicky cried. “Adam’s our friend! We need to do something!”
“Nicky, we are doing something,” Josh interjected, pulling his phone from his pocket and thumbing at the screen. “I’m calling the cops, okay? They’ll be here soon. An ambulance. Our parents. Anyone. Everyone. But until then, I think we just need to hold tight.”
“The hell with that, and with both of you,” Nicky dropped down to the dirt, stretching one long leg out in front of her.
Chloe stepped in close to her. “Nicky, please, don’t do this.”
But down in the ratty earth, Nicky was already retying her sneakers with a singular focus, all traces of the crying fit gone from her face, save for her puffy red eyes and the clean tear tracks cutting through the grime on her cheeks.
“I’m not going to wait around to get killed,” she said. “If you want to stay here and wait for him to come back, that’s on you, but I’m not going to hang around like a sitting duck. We’re witnesses. You know what happens to witnesses, right?”
She double-knotted her laces and punched the sides of her trainers with rigidly balled fists, apparently satisfied. Walking between the trees, Josh circled around and around, his cell phone held aloft, eyes squinting to focus on the screen.
“I can’t get a signal,” he said. “We should be able to get some kind of signal out here—we’re not that far out of service reach. A bar or two maybe. Especially for 911. They have contingencies built in for 911 calls. This doesn’t—”
“Cell service died back when we pulled off the highway,” Nicky snapped. “Remember in the car, Nate was …”
Chloe watched as the sentence died on her lips at the mention of their dead friend’s name. Nicky stood and looked at her boyfriend, then at Chloe, face set in a stony scowl.
“You guys coming?”
Chloe shook her head. “Nicky, don’t.”
The tall redhead’s eyes narrowed. “He needs my help. That was a gunshot, Chloe. You heard it as well as I did.”
Chloe held her hands out to Nicky in what she hoped was a placating gesture.
“That’s exactly the point. Even if he’s hurt, Adam’s smart, and he’s strong. He might still be okay. But Parker’s been going camping out here since he was a little kid. He knows what he’s doing in the woods.”
The words were out of her mouth before she even really knew what she’d said. Instantly, Nicky’s eyes flashed with fury.
“Are you kidding me right now?”
“Nicky, stop it,” snapped Chloe. “You know what I mean. What Parker did was fucked up and horrible, but you can’t deny he knows how to look after himself out here better than any of us do. The three of us need to stay together. We can’t just freak out and go running in some random direction. We don’t even know which way they went.”
“But what if he comes back for us?” Nicky’s voice was coiled like a spring, all of her nerves slashing through to the surface. Chloe couldn’t blame her; she felt like she was barely hanging on herself.
“Then we’ll deal with it,” Chloe told her. “Whatever happens, we’ll deal with it. Together. I promise.”
“And Adam?”
“Adam’ll find his way back,” Chloe said, sounding way more certain than she actually felt. “And if he doesn’t, or can’t, we’ll hike back to the van at sunset and drive until we get a signal and we’ll call the cops. We’ll call the FBI, the National Guard, whatever you want. The army or something. But right now, we have to wait. Just for a little while, and then we’ll go. I promise. But we have to give Adam a chance to find his way back to us first.”
She watched Nicky’s eyes twitch back and forth, from her to Josh and back again, then farther. Toward the clearing. Toward the tents, the firepit, and the body. A silence passed between the three of them. Nobody wanted to say the words again. Doing that, repeating those words, would make it completely real, and it couldn’t have been real—not really real. The truth was too big, too gruesome, too awful for any of them to look at head on. The truth would leave them all in shreds if they let it.
Finally, something in Nicky’s face softened, the tiniest bit of give.
“A couple of hours,” she said at last, her voice small and fragile. “Just until it starts getting dark.”
“A couple of hours, then we’ll go,” Chloe agreed.
Nicky swallowed. “Okay.”
She turned and stalked back to the clearing, Chloe and Josh trailing behind her. When they reached the campsite, Nicky went straight to the tent she shared with Josh, getting down on her hands and knees to climb in.
Josh gave Chloe a resigned look, then followed his girlfriend inside.
“Guys, can you not zip that thing up? If you don’t mind?” Chloe said. “I really don’t want to be alone right now.”
She counted eight whole breaths before Nicky answered.
“Fine.”
Back by the firepit, Chloe pulled a ratty old blanket out from the shambles of Nate’s tent and went to lay it over his body. He already looked so much worse than he had a little while ago. His face had gone loose and slack in death, hanging half off his head like a wet rag as the hole above his eyes seemed to grow and spread. Standing there looking at it made her stomach turn, so Chloe spread the blanket over the top of him and beat a quick retreat, sitting down on the farthest stump, and ran her fingers through her hair, pushing loose locks away from her face and tucking them behind her ears.
Eyes shut for a moment, she tried to do the breathing thing that the school counselor had taught her after Uncle Dave had gone missing—four in, six out; inhale the good, exhale the bad. Visualize it like white light and black smoke, cycling in and out of her lungs, purging all the stress and fear from her system, one breath at a time. She stood and crossed the clearing to the far side, to the tree that Parker had been examining when they first got here. There were carvings in the wood, six letters ringed with deep tally marks, counting the years.
DAC/PDC
Chloe understood at once. She knew those initials well.
Parker had led them to his and his dad’s old camping spot.
Some faraway part of her brain knew he’d told them that before, but for some reason it hadn’t really clicked into place until this moment. She didn’t want to worry about Parker, but she couldn’t help it. He was alone too—even if he did it to himself. He was still her cousin, after all. That cold thing she’d seen in his eyes when he pulled the trigger—that wasn’t really him, was it? She had to believe that it wasn’t all that was left of him. The Parker she knew better than maybe anybody in the world had to be in there somewhere. Parker was so much more than the bundle of fear and nerves and rage and hate and sorrow that lived inside him.
And now he was out there on his own. But then again, he’d been alone for a long time. Ever since his dad went MIA.
The details, such as they were, were few and far between. One day last October, for no reason at all, Chloe’s uncle Dave had told Parker and Aunt Lori that he was going camping so he could get some time alone. He hadn’t told them where he was going or when he’d be back; he’d just packed up some gear and left. At the time, it hadn’t seemed like a big deal. Dave went camping all the time, with and without his family. He was an outdoorsy guy. This was just what he did sometimes. So, thinking nothing of it, Parker and his mom had told him that they loved him and to be careful.
Then he never came home.
Chloe pulled her cell phone from her pocket and clicked the screen to life: 4:16 p.m. Up in the corner, the battery indicator read 40 percent, and beside that, just like Josh had said, zero bars.
That was okay. They could last. It wasn’t long until they would hike back to the van and get the hell out of here. Come nightfall, this whole place would be swarming with cops and state troopers. Their parents would come and get them. Everything was going to be okay. All they had to do was make it to the highway, and then it would be over.
And yet, Chloe couldn’t shake the feeling there wa
s something wrong with their plan. It was like a burr caught in her brain, biting deeper into her whenever she turned her attention toward it. She was forgetting something. What the hell was it?
Wait. Shit.
Oh, shit.
The realization hit her like a cartoon safe falling from the sky.
She’d given Adam the keys.
4
A dam crawled.
Despite the agony, despite the nausea, despite it all, he crawled. He had to get back to his friends, to the camp. It would be dark soon, and Adam had been camping in the woods before—he knew what it was like when it got dark in the forest. Night in the city, in the suburbs … it was nothing compared to how it was in the woods. The darkness out here was absolute, a living thing that flooded in around you to eat you alive.
Unless he was totally mistaken, he still had an hour or two until the sun dropped past the horizon. Plenty of time to crawl back. They could start a fire, wrap his leg, keep him warm while somebody went for help.
He was going to be okay.
He kept telling himself that as he dragged himself along the forest floor, digging his bare hands into the dirt and rocks, heading inch by bloody inch in the direction he thought he’d come from.
He was going to be okay.
Over and over, he told himself the lie, knowing it was a lie, but bereft of anything else to cling to. The truth was ugly, and it was brutal, and it only made things worse. Better to cling to the lie and press on for as long as he could. That’s what people did in these situations. They kept going, even when there was nothing left to keep going for.
Stopping to rest his head against a rock, Adam closed his eyes and drew a deep breath to scream out again.
“Chloe! Nicky! Anyone!”
He lay there and waited, hearing his own voice bounce off the distance in diminishing returns, then fade out entirely. Where the hell were they? How far had he followed Park off the trail? He counted to ten and then started to crawl again, grinding his teeth against the astonishing pain radiating out from his injured leg. Up until this point in his life, Adam hadn’t known that he could feel this much of anything. His whole world had been reduced to this hot, sick glow burning out from his ruined knee to fill his whole body, like firing a flare gun in the middle of a small, dark room.
Adam slowed and then stopped and rolled to sit up, leaning forward to get a better look at his bloody knee. He had to see. Holding his breath, he peeled back the torn denim, then immediately wished he hadn’t.
Underneath his shredded jeans, the skin hung off his leg in rags, blood pulsing steadily from its messy edges, staining the bottom of his pant leg dark and shiny. In the middle of the mess, Adam could see something cracked and white, like the shards of a broken plate sticking out of the pulpy meat, clustered around a little black hole in the middle that looked like it went on until forever.
Adam felt sick, staring at it like that, and another warm, slurry wave of nausea rolled up from his stomach to the back of his throat, impossible to swallow back. The wave turned into a flood, and a second later, he twisted to the side and puked, a cord of bile jetting from behind his lips, splashing across the leaves in a thin spray.
Hopelessness danced through his body again, stronger now than it had ever been. He wasn’t used to being empty. He didn’t know how to hurt and keep going, no matter how many times he told himself otherwise. Looking back, he could see an uneven trail of red in the dirt behind him, leading off into the distance, tracing his path all the way from where Parker had shot him.
Where was he, even? He thought he’d been heading back toward the camp, but now he wasn’t sure. None of this looked familiar. He should have paid more attention when he was trailing Park. He should have been on the ball. Now he was lost out here with a blown-apart knee, all because of Parker fucking Cunningham.
Adam closed his eyes and felt his whole future crumble, all the puzzle pieces blown off the board in a single, awful blast. His football scholarship was gone now, that much was obvious. Nobody was going to give a full ride to a running back who couldn’t run. And it wasn’t like he had the grades for an academic scholarship. He was fucked. Even if he got out of this forest alive, he was totally and utterly fucked.
In a single second, with a single bullet, Parker had destroyed Adam’s whole life. Parker had ruined everything.
Alone and bleeding in the woods, Adam pressed his face to the earth and started to cry, feeling the heaving gasps twist and bow his body. When they finally subsided, he took another deep, rib-cracking breath and howled out again,
“CHLOE! NICKY! ANYBODY! HELP!”
There was nothing but silence to greet his cries. Fine. That was fine. Adam didn’t need their help. He could do this on his own. He was strong, he was capable. He was Adam Jarvis, and Adam Jarvis could do anything he set his mind to, trashed leg or not.
Rising to crawl again, he pounded a fist against the ground, splitting his knuckles open on the rocks, summoning up all his rage to wash the fear and sorrow away. It was what they’d spent years drumming into him during practice: anger was useful. Anger could be harnessed.
After another second, he started crawling again. He was going to find them. He was going to be okay. He just had to get back before dark, and that was still a long way off.
But he was going to be okay.
* * *
Parker ran for as long as he could, feeling his lungs burning and his head starting to pound. He ran until Adam’s screams faded off into nothing, until the only thing he could hear was the thrush and hum of the woods behind his own wheezy breathing. Slowing to a lumbering trot, he slung his pack around one shoulder and opened it up, trading the still-warm pistol for the busted old canteen he’d taken from the kitchen at home. The water inside was already a little stale, but it tasted good.
Parker knew this place. He’d been out here plenty of times with his dad, fishing and hiking and starting campfires, grilling hot dogs on sticks and telling ghost stories. They’d come out here as far back as Parker could remember. His dad loved it out here, which made Parker love it too. There was something serene and perfect about a forest like this being square in the middle of New Jersey, like it had been dropped there, in between the highways and townships, right out of the clear blue sky.
There was another campsite up ahead. Parker pushed through the brush to have a closer look. This site was far older and smaller than the one he and his friends had stopped at, but the layout was similar: a rough clearing surrounded by trees, with a blackened firepit in the middle, filled with ashes.
Step by step, he paced around the outer edges of the clearing, taking it all in. It was peaceful here, like this. He couldn’t hear anything but the soft buzz of the woods, the blood thumping in his ears, the crunch of his boots on the soil. This could work, at least for the night. Everything else could wait until tomorrow. He’d left his tent back with his friends—could he even still call them his friends, after what he’d done?—so he’d have to make a shelter from whatever he could find. But that wasn’t a problem; he’d done it before. His dad had shown him how.
He’d need a fire, though.
Park knelt beside the firepit for a closer look: the stones had been burned as black as the thick mounds of ash inside. He’d have to clear it out before building a fresh fire. He jabbed at the dead cinders with a stick, then thrust his hand into the firepit and felt around. The ashes were warm. Someone had been here just a couple of hours ago. Inside his ribs, Parker’s heart jumped despite his common sense. It’s not him, he told himself. It’s not him, it wasn’t him.
But what if it was?
Parker dug through the pit, scooping out handfuls of ash until his fingers brushed against something smooth, solid, and cold. What the hell was that?
He gently closed his hand around the object and drew it from the ashes.
It was a hatchet, heavy and stained black as shadow. Parker shook the loose ash from its length and turned it over in his hands, inspecting it from ha
ndle to blade. It was old, ancient even. The blade was long and curved the wrong way at the top, the handle thin and almost delicate. It seemed like it would be fragile, but it wasn’t; the wood was worn smooth and stained pitch-black to match the head, but it felt sturdy. Parker had never seen a hatchet like this before.
At the base of the handle, someone had carved a cross like two nails stacked together.
Who had left this here? Who’d tried to burn it, and why hadn’t it taken?
Dropping his pack on the ground, Parker took the hatchet over to one of the trees at the edge of the clearing, set his feet, and sunk the blade into the wood with a satisfying thunk. Yanking it free, he did it again, and again, leaving thick gashes behind in the trunk. He didn’t know how old this thing was, but it was still strong, still sharp, and he was definitely going to need something like this out here. He’d left his knife and his camp hammer in the dirt at the main camp, and it wasn’t like he could go back and get them now.
With his thumb, Parker brushed the last few dovewings of ash from the head and went to work. The sun was going down fast. He had to make some shelter while he still had the light.
Chloe went through all of it again.
“Okay, we’ve got a box of cinnamon Pop-Tarts, a couple tins of Vienna sausages, six beef jerkys, some Mountain Dew, a handful of candy bars, the water, the beer, the Everclear, the hot dogs, and the granola bars. We’ve also got like two cans of SPAM, three of sardines, plus Adam’s precooked bacon and that oatmeal you brought, Nicky. Also I think there’s some gum and breath mints in there, but I’m not a hundred-percent sure on that. You guys sure you don’t have anything else to add to the food pile? Guys?”
Neither of them were listening. Josh was kneeling by the firepit, sweat pouring off his face as he tried to build them a campfire from a pile of dead branches baked dry by punishing New Jersey summers past. Meanwhile, Nicky was circling the tree line around the clearing again and again, her eyes increasingly frantic in the sharp glow of her cell phone light.
The Night Will Find Us Page 5