“Where are you?”
“Woods,” Parker said. “I’m not sure where, exactly. I found another place to camp, so … Are you guys still, you know, there?”
“Most of us, yeah.” The words came out of her mouth soaked in poison.
“Are you mad at me?”
The air caught in Chloe’s throat, coming out in an incredulous splutter. She didn’t even have to think about what she was going to say next. It was all just right there, waiting.
“Mad? Yeah, Parker, I’m pretty fucking mad. How could you even ask me that? Of course I’m mad. I’m mad, and I’m scared, and I’m so goddamn tired I could scream. And you know, there’s nothing that anyone can do about it, least of all you. I don’t have any idea what to do with all of this shit. I don’t know if I should hate you or if I should feel sorry for you, or both, or something else. What you did was so awful that I’m not actually sure how I should react. Honestly, I feel guilty even talking to you like this right now.”
The rage pulsed in electric arcs along her skin, up and down her arms, raising the tiny little hairs there to stand straight up. Saying it felt good, and saying it felt awful. The radio felt so small and flimsy in her hand then, like Chloe could crush it to powder if she just squeezed.
“You don’t have to talk to me if you don’t want to,” he said after another moment.
A fresh surge of white-hot anger tore through Chloe’s brain. “But I do, though. I do have to talk to you, because thanks to you, everything is now so profoundly fucked up that I think the only way we’re all getting out of this and going home is if we do it together.”
“I’m not going home, Chloe.”
“Of course you are.”
“No. I’m not.”
“Why?”
“It’s complicated.”
“So explain it,” she snapped. “If you’re worried about the cops, or your mom, or Nate’s parents—”
“It’s not that.”
“Then tell me what it is.”
The radio fell silent for a moment. “Did you find Adam?”
“No … wait, what do you mean find him? We heard another gunshot, but that was all. Is he dead too?” An image flashed across the surface of her brain of Parker and Adam standing across from each other between the trees, knee-deep in vines and brush—Parker with that gun held out in front of him, just like before, Adam with a jet of blood and brains streaming out the back of his head. She could almost hear the gunshot again, the horrible way it seemed to pinball off the trees and the sky and back again.
“I don’t think so,” Parker said.
His deep, calm voice brushed away the nightmare image. The relief that blossomed in Chloe’s gut at anything he had to say right now made her feel like such a traitor.
“But you did shoot him?”
Chloe heard him sigh. “Just in the leg. The knee. He was still alive last time I saw him. Probably still is.”
“How merciful of you,” she jeered.
“You don’t understand. He tried to rush me.”
“I don’t care! You don’t get to shoot people just because you’re carrying a fucking gun! That’s not how this works!”
“I didn’t want to.”
“That doesn’t mean shit,” Chloe said. “You still did it.”
Another long pause. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to go to the cops once we get out of here, Parker. You have to know that by now, right? As soon as we can call 911, we’re going to.”
“That’s a good idea. You should.”
There was no inflection in his voice; all the feeling had bled out, leaving him sounding flat and blank. She couldn’t tell if it was exhaustion or if he had finally just totally disconnected from reality. There was a hot surge in Chloe’s chest, like she was going to start crying again. She gulped it back and stood up from the log, pacing back and forth in the dark, quickstepping from one tree to another, hoping to distract her body from the sobs that were threatening her from her deepest core.
You don’t get to cry. Not now. Not in front of him. Not like this.
“You know you don’t get to walk away from this, Parker. You shot Nate dead, maybe Adam too. The police are going to find you, and they’re going to make you pay for it.”
“Yeah, probably. Eventually.”
“You know you deserve whatever it is they do to you for all of this.”
“I know.”
“Can I ask you something, honestly?” For a second, her voice shook, but it held steady.
There was a long pause on the line, an extended feedback hiss; then Parker said, “Sure.”
“Do you even feel bad for shooting him?”
“Which one are you talking about?”
Jesus. The sobs rose up in her one more time, and she had to take a few deep breaths before she was steady again.
“That’s not funny, Parker.”
“I’m not trying to be funny.”
“Then what are you doing?”
A silence settled across the radio, more complete than it had been before. Chloe punched the talk button again, even though she already knew what had happened.
“Parker? … Parker?”
Parker had turned off his radio. He was gone.
5
Nicky lay awake in her tent, listening to the woods and the night while Josh slept next to her, snoring softly. She couldn’t hear what Chloe was saying, but she knew that she was talking, and since she had never been the praying type, there was only one person she could be talking to right now. Nicky had seen the two of them pop open those radios, smiling in that secret way they didn’t think anyone else noticed. The two of them bulwarked together against the rising tide of reality, same as they’d been since elementary school. Like it was the world that was wrong for not running at their speed, rather than the opposite way around.
She thought for a second about going and having a smoke. She’d been half-heartedly trying to cut back, but whatever Chloe and Parker were talking about out there, it didn’t sound like it was going to be over anytime soon. She could get one or two in before Chloe came back, if she puffed fast.
She got as far as rolling over to reach across Josh for her pack and her lighter but at the last second decided against it. She didn’t want to be away from him, and she didn’t want to leave him alone. Asleep, he was already farther away from her than she would have liked. And the smokes would just keep her awake, anyway.
Screw it. She’d just lay here until her eyelids got too heavy to hold up.
Eventually, she heard Chloe’s voice strain and rise before settling back into a more restrained whisper, then silence, punctuated by a soft weeping that seemed to float along through the air like birdsong. It was a few minutes before Nicky heard Chloe’s footsteps getting louder as she returned to the camp. Nicky pulled Josh tight against her and closed her eyes, wishing she’d never agreed to go on this stupid trip.
Chloe tiptoed around the campfire and fed a couple of thicker branches to the flames to keep it going as long as she could. It would surely go cold by morning, but in the meantime, more warmth and light weren’t bad ideas. She watched the branches burn, the bark curling back and blackening in the flames while the heartwood took its time, swipes of dark brown trembling along their lengths before joining the fire proper.
She wanted to hate her cousin for everything that he’d done, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to it. She was furious and heartbroken, but she couldn’t crest that final hill that stood between rage and hate.
She really hoped Adam wasn’t dead. The next morning, after they found the path again, she’d take Nicky and Josh out and try to find him before anything got any worse. Parker said he’d only shot him in the leg, but saying you’d only shot someone was like saying you only committed a tiny bit of arson. Doing it at all was bad enough.
A chill wind snaked its way through the trees and across their campsite, making the fire pop and dance as Chloe’s clothes twisted and pulled against her thin
body. She waited for it to pass, then tossed another three branches on the flames. The fire contracted for a moment, then latched onto the new fuel and grew larger, the flames half as tall as Chloe. The heat felt good. Turned out, even in summer in New Jersey, the woods got cold at night, so she was thankful for the warmth.
She didn’t look at the trees. She didn’t look at the tents or the sky or the covered-over dead body only a few feet away from her. She kept her eyes on the campfire, fixated on the way it curled up and chewed on itself, perfectly content to burn. For a second, she wondered what it would feel like to throw herself on top of it, to just surrender and let the flames eat her up. Chloe wondered how long it would take her to die from something like that. Would her clothes and her skin melt together, or would they turn separately to ash? What would the embers do to her hair? How long would it take for her eyes to boil and burst into jelly?
Christ, but she needed sleep.
Banishing the fantasies of burning from her head, she went to her little tent and climbed in. Inside, she zipped up the flap behind her and lay down on her belly, burying her face in crossed arms. She was out almost immediately.
Adam came to drenched in sweat, curled up in an awkward ball against the far wall of the cave. The pain was still there, his knee was still a mess, and aches like broken bones still wracked the whole of his body, but his head had stopped feeling like it was going to burst like an infected zit. He was cold, though. Really cold. A chill, sharp and merciless, had sliced through the night air while he’d been out.
He pulled himself to a sitting position against the cave wall and tucked his hands into opposite armpits, trying to return some feeling into his numb digits. Hunger clawed at him, a panicked animal set loose to scrabble around in his belly. The fever had burned away his appetite, but it had come back twice as hard now, alive and awake and undeniable inside him. He wished he’d brought something along with him from the camp, but he hadn’t been thinking that far ahead. He’d just wanted to keep Parker from getting away, so he’d charged off after him like an asshole—and he’d paid the price for it.
Nobody likes a hero, Adam. His mom had told him that a million times, whenever he got too full of himself during football or baseball, or tried to get between his brother and his dad when they were having another knock-down-drag-out. It’s not like you see in comic books or movies. Whether they mean to or not, heroes have a way of complicating everything for everyone else.
Heroes only get people hurt.
Adam shucked off his overshirt and held it up against the guttering light from his phone to find the cleanest sections, then tore into it with his teeth, biting and gnawing at the tough fabric until he could rip the cloth away in thick, frayed stripes, one after another. When he had enough of them, Adam tied the biggest one into a knot and fit that between his teeth.
This was going to hurt.
He went to work, bandaging his destroyed knee up tight with the flannel strips. Touching the wound shot butcher knives into his brain, but he kept going, gnawing a scream into the knot. Each time he got one strip wrapped around, he tied it off, then moved on to the next one until he was out of strips. The makeshift bandage wasn’t hospital quality by any means, but it would do for now.
Adam spat the knot out into his hand and tossed it toward the mouth of the cave. That’s when he noticed it. The dead white tree had grown branches—branches heavy with fruit—while he was asleep.
It was one of those brief, nonsense thoughts, there and gone in a flash. It must have been that way all along. He’d just missed it when he first dragged himself in here. The fever had played hell across all his senses, and then it had knocked him out flat. But he was past all that now. He was on the mend, or at least stable for the time being. Seeing clearly for the first time in what must have been hours.
The lumpy fruit glistened in the dark, oddly shaped bulbs so red they were nearly purple, like a blister or a bruise. Dew had started to collect where they hung, rolling down to drip off and splash onto the cave floor. Looking at them, Adam’s stomach churned and gurgled. Jesus, he was hungry.
Peeling himself away from the damp rock wall, Adam slowly crept over and picked one of the misshapen fruits off the tree, holding it up to inspect in the scant moonlight. Up close, it was fist-sized, with a stem jutting out the top of it like an apple, with soft, supple skin. There were thin blue-black streaks running through it, too, branching off of each other to crisscross the whole thing in web-like veins.
The logical side of his brain was aware that eating this could be a really bad idea. For all he knew, it would be poisonous and kill him, or maybe just wreck his insides and leave him screaming in curled-up agony while he filled his pants with heaves of hot, bloody shit. He wasn’t stupid. But the animal in his belly slashed at him, immune to his logic. It wasn’t going to take no for an answer. He had to put something in his stomach, or his stomach was going to eat itself.
He looked around the cave for anything else to eat. Maybe moss, or some kind of plant—hell, he thought he remembered hearing that people could eat lichen in a pinch—but there was none of that in here. It was just the rocks, and the lumpy fruit, and him.
He brought it to his lips and breathed in its scent. There was a perfume to it, a sweetness that wasn’t quite cloying, a tartness that wasn’t quite rotten, with a tang of something simmering just underneath the surface. Iron? Copper? What fruit smelled like that? It wasn’t unappealing, more just that the fruit smelled exceptionally whole.
His stomach groaned, its protests growing louder. Looking at the fruit in his hand, Adam imagined how delicious it would taste, could almost hear it humming to him—Eat me, eat me, eat me all up—in some familiar tune that he couldn’t quite place. The growl in his guts turned into a snarl, and a second later, the snarl grew teeth and bit into him, deep. The pain was impossible to ignore.
Adam didn’t need another invitation. He didn’t even hesitate. He sunk his teeth into the meaty skin and chomped down. The fruit burst between his lips in a torrent of flavor that flooded his mouth, better than he’d ever imagined, like sweet steak. Adam chewed hastily, like a starving animal, before swallowing the mouthful in one throat-wrenching gulp. Juice spilled down his hands as he inhaled the fruit, making short work of it in four enormous bites, each a bit larger than the last. When he’d swallowed the last of it, stem, core, and all, he stopped for a moment and breathed, fully expecting it to hit like a brick in his belly.
Except he didn’t feel poisoned. In fact, he felt better already. His stomach shuddered with pleasure at the sensation, then growled for more.
Adam plucked another swollen, lumpy fruit off the tree and tore into it like a bone-thin street dog. He’d never tasted anything this good in his entire life. When he finished with his second, he reached up for a third, and a fourth. He’d eat every fruit on the tree if he could.
SATURDAY
6
Parker woke with the sunrise. It shot blades of yellow light through the trees, setting the forest aglow. Laying there, without his glasses on, he thought the blur made it look like the Barrens had caught fire while he was sleeping. He rolled over in his evergreen lean-to, then rose to a sitting position, arching his back until his spine popped like a string of Nate’s firecrackers. He’d slept well, a lot better than he’d expected, actually, especially after how things had gone with Chloe. He’d half thought he’d be up all night, but it had gone the other way; his eyes had fallen shut like a pair of portcullises as soon as his head hit the backpack again.
Parker pushed the wall of braided branches away, tipping the majority of his shelter over onto the ground, where it landed with a soft thrush. Fresh air rushed in around his body, prickling the spots of skin he’d left uncovered with a hard chill that had no doubt waited for him all night. He’d been smart enough to sleep in his clothes and his boots, but even so, the cold was enough to make his neck and cheeks and the backs of his hands tingle something stubborn.
The radio was still where he�
�d dropped it the night before, next to the black hatchet. Parker felt a pang of regret for ending the conversation the way he had, but he couldn’t keep talking to her like that. Of course he felt bad for what had happened. He didn’t want any of this, but he couldn’t take it back now. The best—shit, the only—thing any of them could do was keep moving forward. Looking back was only going to screw everything up worse.
He rubbed at gummy eyes with clumsy fingers and ran his hands through his short black hair before fitting his glasses over his face, shuttering the world into focus. That’s when he saw that he wasn’t alone.
A figure crouched in the middle of the campsite, its back to Parker, broad shoulders hunched up to bend its silhouette into a nearly perfect square. Park had to blink a few times before the shape lost its shimmering blurriness, its edges sharpening as the seconds crept on around them.
It was a guy, Parker could tell that much, and he—whoever he was—had knelt down next to the blackened firepit to poke at the ashes with one bare hand, humming tunelessly to himself. The man’s bulk was impressive, his broadness enough to rival Parker’s, but even squatting down, Parker could tell that the guy was clearly a lot shorter than him, maybe by a foot or more. Moving quietly, Parker reached over and lifted the black hatchet, getting a good grip around the black wood before rising to his feet.
“C-can I help you?”
Nate turned to regard Parker with a wide grin. “Hey, prick. You sleep okay?”
Parker didn’t even think—he just screamed and tried to put the hatchet through his dead friend’s face.
It didn’t work. The blade whizzed through Nate’s head like it wasn’t there at all. Set off balance, Parker stumbled back, while Nate only smiled wider. He ran a hand across the length of his face, as if checking for damage, then held it up for Parker to see.
“Yeah, nice try and everything, but I’m pretty sure shit doesn’t work like that anymore,” he said.
Parker looked at the hatchet in his hand, then back to the dead boy in front of him. This wasn’t possible. There was no way. Parker took a few more backward steps, slower this time, keeping the hatchet blade between them like a talisman. “You’re dead. You’re supposed to be dead.”
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