“See? I told you I’d help,” Nicky gasped. “You’re going to be okay now.”
Chloe tried to speak, but all that escaped her lips was a weak, crushed whine. Then her eyes fell shut again, and everything disintegrated into a great, merciful nothing.
8
Parker couldn’t say when it was exactly that he started to hear the waves, only that when he noticed them, it felt like they’d always been there, a soft, lapping undercurrent of sound that had joined the buzzing chorus of trees and wind and wildlife. He thought, just for a second, that maybe he’d walked all the way to the edge of the Barrens, where the trees hooked down and around to meet the ocean. But that was impossible.
Wasn’t it?
He looked back at Nate. “I don’t suppose you can like, ghost your way up above the trees to try and tell me where the hell I’m going, can you?”
Nate spat, but the loogie never hit the ground.
“Fuck are you talking about?”
“I mean, does that teleportation trick of yours work vertically? So maybe we can get a better sense of where we’re going?”
“It’s not a trick, man. That was me just trying to stick close to you, and to tell you the truth, I don’t know how it works beyond that. I focused on keeping up, so I kept up. And, as far as like, ghost flight goes? Trust me, that was the first thing I tried. Nothing doing. Turns out being dead is just as bullshit as being alive.”
“How lucky for us,” said Parker.
“Hey, I don’t make the rules. I just live by them. Or, you know, whatever.” Nate turned in a circle to look around. “Why are you asking, anyway?”
Park pulled up short and looked at him. “Well, look, I have a general idea of where we’re heading, right? The campsite was here”— he drew a line in midair with his index finger, punctuating each end with a sharp jab into the empty space with his fingernail—”and the burned house was here.”
“All right,” Nate said. “But so what?”
“I think we need to find the water.”
“What water?”
“Can’t you hear that?”
“Not really …”
“Just listen for a second. Okay?”
“Fine.” Nate cocked his head and narrowed his eyes. “Yeah, okay, I hear it now. It’s far away, but so what?”
“So I’m thinking maybe we find it and follow it. If my dad heard it, too, he would have done the same.”
“Sounds like a lot of guessing to me.”
“Trust me, I know what I’m talking about. He’s my dad.”
“Was your dad,” Nate corrected.
“Please, please stop it with that. Please.”
Parker took a long look at their surroundings. The trees around them were massive old things, monsters in their own rights that had been here for centuries before this moment and would likely be here for centuries after they’d all gone. Looking at them like that, an idea sparked in Parker’s head, and he dropped his pack to the ground, then the pistol, and the hatchet beside them.
“Do me a favor and stay here,” he said.
“What? Why?”
Parker waved a hand in his direction. “Just wait for me, all right? I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going?”
Parker pointed. “Up.”
“Up? What does up mean? Parker?”
Parker didn’t answer him. He was too busy launching himself up the side of the biggest, oldest tree he could find, climbing the branches like a ladder, lifting himself off the ground rung by rung. Twenty-five feet up, thirty, forty, fifty—the tree bore his great bulk all the way without complaint. Even near the top of the ancient pine, the branches were at least as thick as one of his arms. The tree would hold; Park knew it would. It had lasted this long, weathered innumerable storms and winters. It could carry one climber safely for a few minutes, no matter how small or big they were.
He didn’t stop climbing until he could see across all the surrounding treetops. The forest seemed to go on forever. It was a rolling ocean of uneven, paintbrush green that stretched out to the horizon in every direction. The sight of it took his breath away. He knew, on paper at least, how big the Pine Barrens were, but seeing it on a map was nothing compared to standing in the middle of it. Some part of him had honestly thought he’d be able to see a highway or the ocean from here, but there was nothing but trees in every direction, and in the near distance, through a small break in the forest, he could see …
Holy shit. Holy shit.
“Are you seeing this?” he called down excitedly.
“Obviously I am not,” Nate shouted back, annoyed.
Whatever. Park would show him soon enough. He couldn’t wait. They were so close too.
Oh my god. This was amazing.
* * *
It took a full quarter of the Everclear as disinfectant and nearly everything Josh had in his first aid kit, but eventually they managed to get Chloe’s bleeding to stop. Nicky was impressed; Josh had handled himself well. His time in the Boy Scouts wasn’t all for nothing. Sweat still poured off her boyfriend’s face in waves, and he wiped at it with the bottom of his own shirt, leaving dark hooks of perspiration in the fabric.
“Let’s just hope he didn’t puncture anything major,” Josh panted, slumping back on the damp grass.
Nicky sat down beside him and pitched both hands onto the ground behind her, leaning back on tired, noodly arms to study Chloe. She looked so small and broken like this. So fragile. As if a strong wind might blow her apart like a pile of leaves.
“How likely do you think that is?” Nicky asked.
“I don’t know,” Josh admitted. He spoke like his mouth had gone numb, slow and careful. “Not great, probably, and even if we got lucky … she bled a lot. And I know I was a Scout for only three years and I should probably shut up about my stupid doctor dad already, but as I understand it, losing a lot of blood’s not like, a good thing, generally speaking. If we can get her on her feet by tomorrow, maybe she’ll be able to walk out of here. I really don’t know.”
Nicky let his shitty little swipes pass. Starting a fight with him right now wasn’t going to do either of them any good, no matter how angry she was—at Josh, at Adam, at Chloe, Parker, Nate, herself, everyone and everything. The fury churned like a ball of liquid fire inside her heart, rolling and burbling, desperate for release.
That familiar rage, trying to come out in unproductive ways again.
Her therapist had told her that anger was healthy but rage wasn’t, and if she insisted on hanging onto the rage like she often did, she needed to learn ways to funnel it into something constructive. Track had been good for that. When she was running, all of her burned because she didn’t have any other choice. When she wasn’t, sooner or later those fires started to catch inside of her anyway. They always started out so small, too, sparked by a million tiny offenses that built into catastrophic blazes she carried around until she didn’t have a choice but to turn them on someone. When she pointed them at herself, it looked like depression, fear, despair. When she pointed them at someone else, the school counselor usually had to call her parents with more bad news.
It was funny—up until the very moment Adam had stabbed Chloe, Nicky had done her best to pretend that Josh was somehow immune to her fury. It had been a silly, stupid little fiction, but it had been hers, secret and true since the first time she kissed him. Pretending that maybe there really was someone she wouldn’t get so pissed off at for just being a person, with all the flaws and weaknesses that entailed. That maybe, somehow, he was the one human being out of seven billion who was special.
It sounded so stupid, thinking about it like that now.
And what about Adam? That thing she’d dragged out of the cave had been him, but at the same time, it hadn’t. Adam would never have hurt Chloe. Not if he was thinking straight, not if he was himself. The warped boy she’d pulled into the light … he was sick, feverish. Warped and scared and delusional. He’d been terrified, or fur
ious, so he’d lashed out.
And then he was gone.
She’d told Chloe not to touch him. She’d practically begged her. And look what had happened.
Thinking about it too much set that fireball alight again, so she turned her attention away from it and scooted a little closer to Josh, trying to smile a little bit for his sake.
“What time is it?”
Checking his watch, Josh sighed through his nose and hung his head, defeated. “I don’t know. Apparently this thing stopped running at some point.”
“What do you mean, stopped running?”
He unstrapped the old Timex from his wrist and held it up, giving it a shake. “I mean it stopped running, Nicky. As of … three fifty-three this morning. It’s dead. I didn’t even notice. Shit.”
“Doesn’t it have a battery or something?”
“Of course it does.”
“How old was it?”
Josh rubbed at his eyes. “Brand new. I had it changed last week because I knew we were coming out here. Just junk now.” He tossed the watch away into the underbrush.
A nervous unraveling popped loose in Nicky’s stomach, and she had to cross her arms over her midsection to keep from laughing or screaming or both. She hated this. She hated everything that was happening so goddamn much.
“So what do we do now?” she asked.
“Check your phone or something. I don’t know.”
“I mean about this. About her.”
Josh pulled his hands away from his face.
“Well, it’s afternoon already,” he said slowly. “I don’t think she’s in any shape to go anywhere. Maybe we just stay here for now. Set up the tents and wait for her to wake up.”
Nicky was incredulous. “That’s your grand plan? Sit here in the middle of nowhere and wait and see?”
Josh flopped over on his back, wiping his brow dry again.
“Unless you have a better one, yeah. I don’t see any hotels around, but you’re welcome to go looking if you want.”
A long, uneasy silence passed between them. Nicky watched Josh rub the bare spot on his wrist, couldn’t help but notice the way that he avoided looking at her.
“You don’t have to be such an asshole,” Nicky said after another moment.
“I wasn’t.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Chloe could have died, Nicky. She still might. And if that happens, I’m sorry, but it’s on you.”
“It is not my fault—”
“Except it is,” Josh cut across her. “It will be. I told you not to pull the branch out of her, and you did it anyway. You didn’t even listen to me, you just … did it, without a thought as to what could happen,” he ranted. “You didn’t think about it at all. You never just stop and think.”
His words slashed at her heart. Briefly, she thought about turning the blaze on him full force, letting him see how it really felt to burn. But she bit it back, and when she spoke again, her voice came out small and shabby.
“We had to do something, Josh. We had to try something.”
“You should have tried anything other than that.”
Nicky watched him for a few more minutes, waiting to see if he had any other mean shit to throw at her, but he seemed to be done, at least for the time being. Dusting her hands off on the knees of her pants, Nicky rolled to her feet and unbuckled her tent from her pack, rolling it out on the smoothest patch of ground she could find.
“What are you doing?” Josh asked.
“Setting up the tents,” she said, as neutrally as she could. “If we’re camping here for the night, we’re going to need shelter, aren’t we?”
Josh didn’t say anything after that. For a few minutes, Nicky worked in silence, feeling his eyes on her back as she went about assembling the tent. When he eventually got off his ass and started to help, she paid him no mind. She didn’t have anything else she wanted to say to him.
9
Parker hit the ground running, grabbing his things without a word to Nate and taking off into the trees.
Nate would catch up. He was a ghost. He could do whatever he wanted—except, apparently, fly. Whatever.
Parker followed the mental line he’d drawn out from the foot of the great oak, ducking and weaving through the lesser trees until he came to a shallow creek. He followed it downstream until the forest broke apart, giving way to the kind of open space Parker hadn’t seen since they’d pulled off the highway the day before. It was easy to forget how much forest there actually was in here, especially down among the trees. It was dense, practically claustrophobic, so intimate that it threatened to crush you at every step. It overwhelmed to the point that it was easier to just not think of how big the Pine Barrens really were. But sometimes—sometimes—the trees would give way, and you’d be reminded, its vastness impossible to ignore.
The open space before him was absolutely massive—roughly the size of a warehouse, but round and beautiful, like an oversized crop circle stamped in the trees. In the center of it all stood a crystal-blue lake.
The lake wasn’t huge, but what struck him about it was how perfectly circular it seemed, like an impact crater that had been filled in with water. The creek he’d followed fed into one end, and on the far shore, Parker could see the lake draining off into a wide river that disappeared into the trees on a downslope, far past where he could see. But despite the water actively flowing in and out, the surface was completely still, a single pane of blue glass from shore to shore. It reflected the late afternoon sky above like a mirror, absolute and unbroken. Not a single wave disturbed it, not a fish bobbing for food nor bird swooping down to slash at the surface for its lunch. The very idea of disturbing it seemed to Parker like some kind of minor sin, a heresy, an affront against God. Not that he believed in God anymore. Even when things were good, the only gods that his family seemed to hold dear were the New York Jets. After his dad went missing, his mom had added gin to the list, and more and more, it seemed like that was taking over the top spot in her book.
Whatever. It was just a lake. It was just water. God, or whatever, could deal.
Parker walked down the rocky shore to where the water met the silt and picked up a flat stone, dancing it in the palm of his big hand. It would do just fine. Curling his index finger around its edge, Park swept his arm out in a tight hook and sent the stone sailing across the surface of the water. He could nearly hear it whistling through the air as it flew, spinning like a Frisbee, tracing its arc with squinted eyes. He’d get at least four skips out of this one, he was sure of it. The rock dipped closer and closer to the lake’s surface …
And sank.
Park didn’t understand what he’d just witnessed. It was like the lake had opened some secret mouth and gobbled up the stone whole. No ripples radiated out from where it had dropped, there was no plunk as it struck the surface. It just … disappeared into the water. For a moment, Parker even wondered whether he’d imagined throwing it—until he looked down at his empty hand and saw that it was streaked with mud.
What in the hell had just happened?
Standing there, watching the glass lake, Parker felt his head swell and start to swim. His vision blurred and tilted, skewing to one side in a smudgy tunnel while his body swayed the other way to try and normalize. Looking at the lake like this, he felt an enormous isolation creeping up around him, as if he were the very last human left alive on the planet. The forest went quiet, drawing in close to hold its breath, waiting for the right moment to—
“The hell are you doing?”
Parker bit back a scream, his heart hammering inside his ribs, then looked over at Nate, whose smug grin was glued from jowl to heavy jowl. The vertigo instantly dispelled, and Parker felt himself wilt under Nate’s eyes, trying to breathe away the spike of nerves that had jolted into his heart.
“Nothing. Skipping stones, I guess.”
“And that’s what you dragged me down here to do? To show me how good you can throw rocks, or whatever? Because, l
ike, big whoop. I can throw rocks too, man. Or at least I could. Before.”
“No,” said Parker, blushing. “Nothing like that. It was just—”
He looked from Nate to the still lake and back again, feeling incredibly stupid. This was stupid. He was being stupid.
Get it together, Parker.
“Nothing. Forget it.” He straightened his shoulders and broke Nate’s empty gaze, pointing down the shoreline with a single finger. “Look. There. That’s what I saw.”
“Holy shit,” Nate coughed. “Dude, holy shit.”
On the far edge of the lake and maybe a quarter of a mile down, there was a little town. It was gray and stooped and weathered all to hell, the buildings hunched closely together, like they needed the warmth. From the top of the oak, he’d seen that, going farther back, the houses all clustered to surround a sagging, weathered old church. It was obscured by the trees at the moment, but Parker knew it was there.
Perched at the top of the tree, he’d half expected the town to turn out to be a collection of torched-out skeletons, like the one they’d found buried in the forest this morning. But standing here on the lakeshore, he could see that it was so much more than that.
Parker glanced over at Nate with an excited look in his eyes. “Do you want to go check it out?”
Nate didn’t look back, just nodded, keeping his eyes on the little gray town.
“Absolutely.”
They walked down the shore in silence, watching the town loom larger with every step, becoming more real somehow as the little details emerged from the blur: a crooked door here, a collapsed roof there, walls overgrown with lichen and hanging moss, the way the road was scattered with more dead white trees. It was like watching a dream emerge into the real world, something that couldn’t possibly exist but somehow did, right in front of you.
As they drew closer, Parker kept his stride a tiny bit crooked, his body turned just a little bit sideways, one eye still trained on the lake. Something about it unnerved him. It stuck in his head like a hook, like that feeling you got when you knew you were being watched but couldn’t say from where, or by whom. He couldn’t put a name to it, but there was something wrong with that lake, and with every step farther from the water’s edge, he felt himself unclench more and more.
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