Chapter 17
When Jake reached Highbanks it was dusk, and the first houses he passed were dark: rectangular windows limned with aluminum frames, the metal catching the glow of the rising moon, the panes black. To Jake, the village had a sense of being not only vacant but abandoned, and long-abandoned at that. The trail in the woods had petered out a mile back, fading as the light in the woods grew dim. He strode up to the first trailer house and pounded on the thin door.
In the silence that ensued he heard some faraway thudding, barely audible—felt it more than heard it. It was a sound he mistook for his own heart, and he was surprised to hear it beating so slowly. He pressed a thumb to his wrist and found the throb; his pulse was still hammering along, from the exertion of his final push to Highbanks and the knowledge that the end of the trail was very, very close. He cocked his head, the thudding finally making sense: they were drums, coming from the other side of town.
He stepped down from the porch. There were other houses in sight, two trailers on the left. Farther down, on the right side of the road, was a stick-built cabin, the typical A-frame construction used to ward off snow buildup on the roof. It looked even shabbier than the aging trailer houses. It had been his childhood home, before they had sold it and moved in with Coop.
He started trotting down the main road. It was just a dirt road mixed with some coarse gravel, but it felt like a superhighway after all his trudging through the underbrush. He reached the center of the village, stopping for a moment to rip one of the posters tacked to the side of the community center building free. The flyer was for the First Dance, Highbanks’ annual powwow, the time when all the parents from miles around brought their children in for their first taste of bear meat, their first hesitant steps in the packed earth around the central fire. It was tonight, Jake realized—the biggest festival of the year, the time to celebrate the end of the growing season, the beginning of the killing season.
And as it had since he had crossed the Braids, the question—the Question—returned. Not what to do when he found Darius. That was simple—he would finish the job he had started the night before. If he still could.
Because that was the Question—How can you kill what’s already dead?
He let the flyer drop from his hands, the sound of the drums now making perfect sense. He thought about Henry’s story about how the people had ended the plague of cannibalism and madness more than a century earlier, the story of how they had put the old monster to sleep. Now that monster was locked in Darius’s addled mind, his brain and body infested with the poisonous, half-dead presence trapped for decades in the soils beneath Resurrection Valley.
And now the great wanderer had found a medium. But it wasn’t a complete override of Darius, Jake realized. Whatever the underlying mechanism—the distillation of violent instincts in the promethium, hopping from an underground fungus to one person, then the next, or a possession from the old demon of the north woods—it did not discard what was there. It took what was bad and used it. Amplified it. Jake glanced around, looking for a car or an ATV he might commandeer, but all the rigs in Highbanks, large and small, would be parked at the dancing ground. The headlights would be turned on to keep the area well lit, to keep the toddlers from wandering off into the woods. Jake ran down the road, pausing when someone shuffled out from a building ahead of him.
“Hey!” he called out. “Hey!”
The person continued on, not even sparing him a backward glance. Jake ran forward, calling out as he went. Still the figure shuffled along, neck bent and shoulders bowed, wrapped in a long dark green cloak. Jake grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him around, an old man, his eyes widening in shock. There was an ancient, yellowed hearing aid in his ear. He looked to be full-blooded Cree and very old, his face filled with multiple and finely-formed lines, his eyes rheumy. He looked familiar but Jake couldn’t place him, a man who would have been advanced in years when Jake left here, decades ago.
“Have you seen Darius?” he asked, speaking very slowly.
The old man blinked twice. He tapped his ear and shook his head.
“The Okitchawa,” Jake said.
The old man’s befuddled expression cleared, and he grinned at Jake, revealing a mouth entirely devoid of teeth.
“Yes,” he said, in a croaking lisp, the Cree words coming back to Jake with a certain tickle in his cortex, the old rhythm of his first language. “The dance!”
“You saw Darius at the dance?”
The old man nodded. “Everyone. At the dance.”
Jake turned to go. The old man clawed at him, his fingernails scratching at Jake’s soiled shirt. “Everyone is there,” he said, his tone insistent. “Everything. Why I’m going. It’s been . . .” his eyes wandered off, searching the darkened woods for something, “a lifetime,” he said at last, his voice now shaking with terror, or perhaps elation. “Lifetimes since the old ways have held sway.”
“What?”
The old man’s mouth curled into his toothless grin again. “Go. They wait for you.” Jake turned and ran. The sound of the drums grew louder, the tempo faster. Jake could see flashes of fire through the trees now, the flames from the big fire almost reaching the tops of the balsam trees, thirty feet up.
He slowed as he reached the edge of the clearing and veered off into the woods, the silhouettes of dancing people flickering through the trees. The firelight bounced off of dozens of cars. The new fingernail moon had slipped behind some thin clouds, and the wind was picking up once again, sending the clouds racing across the moon’s crescent face. Jake could feel the faint heat from the fire even here. Closer to the fire the men and boys would be dressed in summer clothes, some in not much more than loincloths.
The beating of the drums was constant and the dancers moved as they always did, the adults nearest the fire, the children dancing in their shadows, even the two- and three-year-olds learning the rhythms of the dance. It had always amazed Jake and it still amazed him now—even caught deep in his dread, his mind working around the Question—to see how the toddlers could abandon their inherent clumsiness for brief moments, dancing in the twisting and flexing shadows of their fathers and uncles. On the outside were the old men, the elders, forming an outer ring. The First Dance for some, the last for others.
The wind picked up suddenly, and the flames blew sideways, causing the men on the downwind side to flare outward from the intense heat. Jake waited for the gust to blow itself out, but the wind continued to blow, quickly reaching a gale-force-level intensity, as though a low-pressure system had plopped down in the woods opposite him. The drum beats slowed, then stopped. The massive bonfire was nearly horizontal and people were scrambling out of its way, scooping up children and snatching blankets.
Jake stepped to the edge of the clearing. He was plainly visible, but nobody looked his way. They were all focused on the suddenly out-of-control fire, the intense heat. Already, the grass on the downwind side was scorched black. The flames roared with the wind, dancing and darting toward a cluster of people. One of the children screamed, and as though waiting for the cue, several others joined in, their high cries swept from their mouths by the ferocious wind. The fire roared, a captive beast almost out of its cage.
Then the wind stopped, and the flames that had sprawled out along the ground shrank back within the rock boundary of the fire ring. Some of the adults glanced at each other uneasily, several looking at Jake.
He paid them no attention. Darius and Rachel had appeared at the edge of the scorched grass on the far side of the fire, Darius’s hand clenched around Rachel’s upper arm. Behind them was another man, a strangely bloated man, half bent over, his face hidden from view.
Darius’s face was scratched and bruised, and his eyes seemed to be composed entirely of reflected firelight, as did Rachel’s. There was something on his face, a growth, spreading from his right cheek to cover part of his nose and the side of his mouth. Neither seemed to recognize Jake, wedged within the group of Highbanks villagers staring at them. The other man was bent over and clutching himself, as though suffering from intestinal distress.
“Darius?”
An old lady moved out from the edge of the crowd. She was wrapped in a coarse shawl emblazoned with bright orange and pink chevrons. Her long gray hair had been tied in a bun, but the wind had pulled most of it free, and it now formed a tangled snarl around her small head. She was no more than five feet tall and couldn’t have weighed more than ninety pounds, but people withdrew as she strode forward. Her face was pinched and lined, the eyes hooded. Elsie. She was the only person Jake recognized, outside of Darius and Rachel.
She stopped a dozen feet away from Darius and drew up to her full height. “Darius, what have you brought us?”
Darius opened his mouth as if to speak, but instead he pushed something out of his mouth with his tongue. It landed with a small splat at his feet, a green glob of sodden moss. Elsie recoiled, and then she caught herself and squared her shoulders.
“You let that girl go,” Elsie said. “She doesn’t need to be held onto.”
Darius grinned, and the spaces between his teeth were colored dark green. He shook Rachel slightly. “We ran,” he whispered, his voice lisping and guttural at the same time. “Ran faasst.”
Something rippled under the growth on his cheek, swelling and then subsiding. His hair was longer than it had been just the day before, Jake realized. More hair puffed out of his shirt, long tangled lengths that were matted with the same growth covering his face. His eyes were wild, dancing in the light of the fire.
Elsie took a step forward. “You did good, Darius. You found them. Now you . . . you rest.”
Darius cocked his head, then turned to the other man, the bloated man with his face smeared with dirt. At first Jake did not recognize him, and then he did, picking out his features. Warren Campbell crabbed his way into the firelight. His once neatly combed gray hair was filled with leaves and plastered with mud. His eyes darted from the group back to Darius, not in fear but with some strange combination of cunning and subservience. Behind them the pine boughs scratched against each other in the wind, which was increasing in intensity again.
“Eat,” Darius said, his voice phlegmy and rough. “Show them your hunger.”
Warren fell to the ground and began grubbing in the packed dirt, his fingers hooked into the earth. He started cramming soil and leaves into his mouth, making loud smacking noises. His teeth grinded away at the small stones in the soil, chewing up the pulpy leaves and sod.
Jake watched, horrified. He had thought that the infestation was limited to one person, one medium at a time. But Warren was affected, too, and the greed that he had possessed for the samples was running rampant. Now his desire to take from the earth was manifested in this primal urge to consume. Soon enough, Jake thought, he’ll eat so much dirt his belly will burst.
“I’m hungry, too,” Darius said. A little of the old mischievous gleam came into his eyes. “Not for dirt.”
“Darius,” Elsie said. “You and your friend got into something. Some bad plants, maybe. You . . . you need to get some rest, let your mind clear up.”
“He was lost,” Darius said, his voice a scratching whisper. “Forgot who he was. I—we . . . reminded him.”
“Who’s we, Darius?”
He grinned, a green smear of teeth. “You know, Elsie. You know.”
“What would you have us do?” Elsie asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
Darius took a step forward, dragging Rachel with him. She was pale, her face slack, and Jake still couldn’t tell if she was in shock or under the spell of the same affliction as the rest of them. Warren hopped after Darius, his mouth caked with dirt.
“Give us one,” Darius said, his voice barely audible above the crackling of the fire. His eyes roamed over the children, tucked behind the legs of their parents. “One to run and play with.”
“No,” Elsie said.
The purple bruise stood out in dark relief on Darius’s temple, the place where Jake had struck him the night before. Jake could even see the small hole in the hollow of his throat where he had pressed and twisted the splintered end of the shattered stick against his trachea. Jake should have finished it then and there instead of gloating, instead of savoring Darius’s terror.
“Just one,” Darius said. “And we will cast our eyes elsewhere.”
“No,” Elsie said. “Not that. Never that.”
You outran yourself, Jake thought, watching Darius. Whatever is driving you, it went faster and further than you realized. It’s already leapfrogged beyond all reason. Now you stand alone, and you demand choices that make sense only to you—or to whatever is wrapped inside your brain, whatever transferred from the ground to poor dying Henry, who was too weak to run, or didn’t want to. And then from Henry to you. Yes, you embraced it, and you ran with it, you certainly did. But you ran too fast, went too far.
“Just one,” Darius said. “One of your own accord. We need . . . we need something fresh.”
Several of the children had begun to cry. Elsie glanced behind her, then stepped forward, her voice firm. “Be gone,” she said. “Leave us.”
“We will come back,” Darius said, and again his face bulged and twisted under the growth. His jaw seemed to lengthen, to resemble a snout in the flickering light. “And when we do, it will be more than one that we take.”
“You’re not taking anyone,” Jake said. “Not one child.” He stepped forward. “Not Rachel.”
Darius’s hand moved to the back of Rachel’s neck. His lips parted, and a strange growling noise came from his throat, the cords of muscle in his neck twisting in the firelight. Jake was reminded of Greer, of his plea for help through his stiffening vocal cords. Was Darius really still in there, somewhere? It hardly seemed to matter.
Jake stepped forward, separating from the rest of the crowd and passing by Elsie. The heat was intense this close to the fire, and he could feel it baking into his bones, loosening his joints, the sweat pouring out of him and stinging his eyes. He stopped ten feet away from Darius. The wind was picking up again and it touched the sweat, made Jake hyperaware of the coolness on his hot skin. A few feet away Warren shuffled closer to the fire, then away, his bloated face smeared with dirt.
“Leave her.”
“You have not seen it,” Darius breathed. “Not yet. It is more than you would imagine. Greater and stronger and faster . . .” His eyes rolled back in his head, his green-stained teeth spreading open in a wolf’s smile.
“Rachel!” Jake called out.
Her head had been down. Now Darius tilted her head up and she looked at Jake with dulled and vacuous eyes. “She ran with us,” Darius said, “as did he.” Darius turned and regarded Warren, who was mumbling something fast and incomprehensible under his breath, his eyes alternating between the ground and the bluish core of the bonfire. “We had fun with him.”
“You’ve breathed in something, Darius,” Jake said. “It’s affecting your brain.”
Darius grinned. He had no weapon that Jake could see, but something about the way he held Rachel’s neck caused Jake to hold back.
Darius turned toward Jake. “Tell them,” he said. “Tell them what we found sleeping under the soil out there. It’s not a bad thing to have found.”
“Darius,” Jake said, “it’s time for you to go.”
“Yes,” Elsie said. “Go, but leave the girl.” She had reappeared out of the shadows, surrounded by several other women. To Jake’s surprise, he saw his mother was with them, older than he had imagined but still beautiful, her hair streaked with gray and the skin around her eyes crinkled into a fine bird’s nest of lines. Other women stepped forward, and the men followed, standing behind Elsie and Dawn Trueblood and the rest of the women. Someone had begun to murmur, a low singsong chant that several others picked up on.
“One,” Darius insisted.
“Leave us,” Elsie said, and to Jake it seemed as though she spoke not to Darius but to something behind his shoulder.
Darius stood looking at them. The wind was increasing steadily, ratcheting upward into gale force. Then he leaned forward and murmured something into Warren’s ear.
Warren shrieked, in horror or exultation it was impossible to tell, and flung himself forward. Jake sprang to the side, and Warren charged into the middle of the bonfire, stumbling over the tilted logs. Immediately, the smell of singed hair washed over them, and there was a series of small popping noises as his skin boiled and split. He exited the flames, arms outstretched and his clothes burning brightly, a plump scarecrow lit afire and come to life. He stumbled toward Jake, his shirt dripping off of him in burning ropes, his eyes filmed over from the incredible heat. His arms were spread wide as if in embrace, the dirt on his face cracking and peeling away to reveal bright pink skin.
There was a press of people at Jake’s back, with nowhere for him to turn. Warren’s milky eyes locked on Jake, his arms still spread wide, and he lurched forward again. Jake backpedaled, bumping into several people and almost tripping. He caught himself, casting his eyes around him, trying to avoid that burning visage steadily approaching. All around him people were fleeing, scooping up children and retreating from the madness of the scene. He was caught in the middle, Warren so close now Jake could feel the heat from his blazing clothes.
Ah hell, Jake thought. I was done running anyway.
He lowered his shoulder and tackled Warren at the waist, hearing the bigger man’s breath come out of him in a soft whoomf, the flames from his burning hair and clothes licking around Jake’s head and arms. He drove his legs forward, raising his body up as he went, Warren’s arms seeking purchase on his back. Warren’s feet lifted off the ground, and Jake surged forward with all his strength and then let go. Warren went flying backward into the fire, the flames closing over him. He landed flat on his back in between several logs, the flames white hot above the red embers. Warren managed a sitting position, his mouth open and working but there was no sound, just the roar of the flames and the stench of burning flesh. The rest of the huge logs, stacked up tipi style, collapsed over the top of him.
Someone was slapping at Jake. He whirled. Elsie and another woman were putting out the flames that had blossomed on his shirt.
“Mom?”
Dawn Trueblood used her thumb to squash out the last of the burning fabric on his collar. Her eyes were very wet. “Is it really you, Jakey?”
Jakey. He had not heard that in years and suddenly he was five years old again, with a bruised shin. He looked past the scattered bonfire, and in the flickering light caught a glimpse of Darius and Rachel, her upper arm held tight in his grasp, slipping into the shadows of the forest at the edge of the clearing. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “I need to go get Rachel.”
She held his chin in her hand, then nodded. “Go get her,” she said. “Then come back to me.”
* * *
He plunged into the woods, too dark now to see anything besides the outlines of trees, the amorphous shapes of the alder and mountain maple. He didn’t need his eyes, though; he could hear Darius ahead of him crashing through the brush. The sound was louder than the howling wind, louder than the sudden rumblings of dozens of cars starting in the clearing behind him. Their headlights came on almost in unison, sending flickering lights racing through the trees. The crashing stayed ahead of Jake and he ran after it, the headlight beams fracturing into slotted bars, the trees casting long shadows out in front of him.
He stopped at the edge of a small meadow. The slumped remains of an ancient shelter stood in the middle, surrounded by twisted trees. The clearing was no more than a quarter acre in size, the thick spruce and fir forest flanking it on all sides. The moon highlighted the edges of the tall grass and shrubs, not frost-burned yet but close, close. The smell of autumn hung thick in the air, mingled with the smoke of the bonfire.
Darius stood in the middle of the clearing, bathed in the meager light from the fingernail moon.
“Where is she?” Jake asked.
Darius looked down at the grass and prodded a lifeless form with his foot. “She ran too far.” Behind him, his shadow moved in the backdrop of forest, a giant that twisted and stretched among the trees. Darius’s hair had become disheveled in his flight through the woods, and its shadowy silhouette spread, shaggy and wild, across the canopy of the trees. It looked different from the fine hair Darius had had the day before. Now it was coarser, with lichens or something similar stuck in its lengths—or growing from it, just like the moldy patch growing across the skin of his face.
“I’m going to kill you,” Jake said. He withdrew the skinning knife from his pocket and clicked it open. “Whatever you are.”
There was subtle movement on the ground, and behind and above Darius the shadow nodded its giant, shaggy head.
“I am here.”
Jake circled to Darius’s right, his eyes darting down to Rachel’s slumped form, then back to Darius. He moved through the tall grass, the tiny heft of the skinning knife curving into the fold of his palm. Henry’s boots squelched water as he walked, and his breath came and went in steaming clouds, snatched away from his mouth by the wind. By comparison, Darius was quiet, still, waiting for Jake to close in. He seemed contemplative, perhaps even peaceful, as though Jake’s threat to kill him had placated, rather than alarmed, Darius.
That’s not Darius, he thought. Don’t be thinking that. It’s something more, something worse. The distillation of whatever was underground.
And again the Question raced through his mind: How can you kill what’s already dead?
In the grass at Darius’s feet, Rachel moaned. Jake lurched forward, the old battle haze returning, a red cloud building around the edges of his vision. It was the blinding, exhilarating sensation of letting go, all the pain, all of it, just sliding away, pushed to the back of his mind. He darted forward, cutting toward Darius’s uninjured arm, the little skinning knife held low and close to his hip. He would rip the blade upward, would gut Darius as he had gutted countless hares, as he had sliced open hundreds of muskrats. As Darius had gutted Henry.
You just kill it, he thought, and charged in.
He closed with the dark shape, and then he was inside the circle of Darius’s arms. The smell of decay and rottenness and plain old Cree, plain old sweaty human, Jake’s smell or Darius’s or both, was cloying in Jake’s nostrils. He could not get a good grip; Darius’s torso was twisting and bulging, growing outward and upward into something else, a slithering presence, incredibly strong. For all of that there did not seem to be much fight in him. One quick swipe would be all it took. You killed it by killing it, that was all. It was the only way to make the source of your pain go away, the only way to conquer it.
Jake brought the knife up, his teeth bared.
Not your path, Jake. Deserae’s voice again, no longer warm but stern. Not yours.
He paused, the point of the knife inches from Darius’s navel. A vision of Rachel came back to him now, wiping the blood and mud from her face at the bottom of the chasm after Jake had tackled her, the sky above them laced with writhing tendrils.
Come on, Jake. Let’s go up.
He paused. The knife dropped a fraction of an inch. What would happen once he gutted Darius, if he succeeded in killing him? The presence would still have to go somewhere, would still have to run with something. And Rachel was still alive. She might not go willingly, but she would go with it. She would run until she, like Henry, dropped. Or threw herself into some awful death, as Warren had in the bonfire.
“What?” Darius’s voice was not much more than a snarl. “What?”
“Take me,” Jake said. “I’ll run with you.”
The shape with which he had wrestled went very still. Something—the back of a hand, perhaps—slid across his face, pressing against his cheeks, dragging over his nose. He could feel the trail it left behind, cool and wet, clinging to his skin. Darius seemed to have grown very tall in front of him, his arms not so much fending off Jake and his little knife as embracing him, pulling the killing hand in close. Now his grip loosened, and Jake forced himself to look up into those eyes, the same haunting look in them that he’d seen in the alpha female wolf, the cunning and bloodlust and inherent wildness all mingled together. But these were mixed in Darius with madness, with a savage inhumanity that made it difficult for Jake to speak his next words.
“Let her . . . let her go,” he said. “Take me.”
Darius paused, uncertain. This was different, different from Henry, different even from the offering of a child.
It doesn’t think I mean it, Jake thought.
He took the knife and pressed it against his wrist, the sharp blade biting into the skin. He drew the knife across his wrist and then held the wrist up, the dark blood bubbling into his palm. The dark shape above him groaned, then leaned down. Something that felt like a muzzle snuffled wetly into his hand, inhaling the blood. Carefully, Jake transferred the knife to his mouth, biting down on the handle. He could taste his blood on the handle, bright and coppery. He drew his other wrist against the blade, pressing deeper, and blood shot from the newly cut wrist into the air, then subsided. There was little pain.
Jake let the knife slip from his teeth. A multi-ended tendril, shaped like a child’s hand but matted with coarse fur, pressed against the burbling blood. The pattering sound on the grasses below him slowed, then stopped. The great shaggy head bent forward, whining. Far above him the wind whined in response, echoing the long, greedy call.
“Leave her alone,” Jake said.
There was no answer. He drew back, pulling his wrists free. The Darius thing moaned, a low and piteous sound.
“Leave her alone,” he said again. “Her and the children.”
It moaned again, something that sounded like assent.
“Say it louder.”
It looked up at him. The creature was no longer Darius, if it ever had been. It was a conglomeration of what had been Darius and what had been in the ground. The way it looked at Jake was similar to the way the rotten-looking black tendril had regarded him back in the valley, like an old despot, one that lives through others and despises them for it. It opened its mouth, and a single, strangled word came out.
“Ye-es.”
Jake’s vision was closing in, his head growing faint as his wrists started to ache. He could feel the presence drawing on his blood, ingesting it, making it its own. Soon he would be drained completely dry, and this—whatever it was—would lope off into the woods, recharged and freed. Perhaps Jake would run alongside it, for a while. Either way it would fulfill its part of the bargain. It would leave Rachel alone, would leave the children of Highbanks alone. For Jake had given willingly, and something told him this thing valued that above all else, the surrendering of one’s self, the giving over of your will to its own, to be a slave to its desire.
The Darius creature wrapped its arm, its tentacle, around Jake’s back to pull him closer. His pulse was racing, the pain intensifying as the creature sucked more blood from his wrists.
I’m sorry, Deserae. I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m sorry, Mom.
He was starting to panic as his life drained away. He didn’t want to die, he never had. He just hadn’t wanted to live. Jake tried to keep still, even as his brain and body began to fight against the Darius thing, to struggle to regain what was his. He pushed at the coarse hair, and his fingers plunged into a damp, twisting mass under the hide. There was nothing there to push against. He tried pulling back, and the tentacle wrapped around his body tightened, drawing him in, in, in.
He forced himself to stop resisting. There would be no pulling away, and in that instant of understanding Jake realized he had been right when he decided it was time to stop running. He had been right earlier when, hemmed in by Warren, he had charged forward. No matter what his choice was, he had to go straight into it. No more backing away, not even in these last few minutes he had left.
Especially not in these last few minutes.
“You want it?” Jake asked. “Take it!”
From deep inside himself he let go of all the pain he had held tight through the years. First was the rootlessness, the sudden orphaning when he had lost his father to the aneurysm, then his mother to Coop. Next were the long years in the military, the nausea and guilt and elation of his first kill, then the slow grinding away, the long months spilling more blood, all the blood soaking into the flinty earth, sanding the edge off his youth, blunting what had been bright and hard and sharp, leaving him calloused, indifferent. There was the terrible last night with Deserae, the twisted, blood-splattered steel, the torn fabric spilling out of the passenger seat. Then room 217, the steady beeping, the eyes vacuous and gone, her mind gone, the rest of her still tethered to a world she could no longer meaningfully exist in. He let the hurt and pain and shame and regret all flow out, letting loose all the controls he had placed around it, mentally cutting away ropes and nets, letting it all go from him into this awful subterranean thing inhaling his essence. It would have all of it.
It whined. It moaned. The suction on his wrists lessened, became hesitant.
Take it, Jake thought. Take my pain. Let it grow inside you like a virus.
He had one more thing to give this creature. The chronic mental and emotional pains were not all he had carried. For years now he had harbored his own infestation: the insidious bacteria lodged deep in his joints. He concentrated on the aching that was still there, insulated by the sharper pains in his wrists and his feet. Feeling the pull of the creature connecting to it, deep into his lymph and marrow, the tick-borne malady that caused so much pain that it had driven hundreds, if not thousands, of afflicted people to kill themselves.
The creature gave a strangled cry and staggered backward. Jake regarded it on wobbling legs, his vision blurring. It had expanded, Darius’s compact frame spreading out and becoming wispy and tall, the hair long and thick, the moldy patches digesting and changing his face, until what remained had only the vaguest resemblance to a human being. The legs seemed impossibly long—the lower body of a great runner. Darius’s brown eyes now had a greenish tint, and of all his features, only the scar in his eyebrow remained, the patchwork of growth forming around the healed tissue.
But now that great, tall frame, which seemed as though it might continue to expand and expand until it filled the night sky, hunched over. It wrapped its arms around its stomach and bent at the knees, then contorted violently. It grabbed at a great knobby elbow, then its hairy shoulder, its teeth gnashing.
Jake could think of nothing to do with his wrists, so he pressed them together in a bloody smear, the sudden flare of pain making him focus. The creature was still twisting around and around, tearing at its own flesh, gibbering at the sky. Jake saw a thin line of reflected moonlight, the blade of his skinning knife. He needed to cut a tourniquet for his right wrist. The left was not cut nearly as deep, but he had found an artery on the right, and it was pumping out a steady stream of blood. He watched it, mesmerized, then leaned down to pick up the knife. He had already lost too much blood.
Lost lots of stuff, he thought. Never mind about that. The wrists, Jake.
He picked up the knife and it squirted from his blood-drenched hands. He scrambled after it, losing sight of the small knife and then finding it again in another spray of moonlight. It was almost impossible to grip, the pain and blood making the slender handle slip from his grasp time and time again. He felt something more than panic, something close to terror, run through him. It could not end like this, bleeding out while he chased his knife across the forest floor. A few yards away the creature gave a long and wavering cry, then fell to the ground, its great hairy feet thrashing in the tall grass.
Then Rachel stirred and sat up, blinking, just a few feet away. She looked from Jake to the struggling creature and then back to Jake. He held out his wrists, a mute gesture, more explanation than appeal. Blood splattered onto the tall grass, dark smears streaking down the yellow blades.
“Jake,” she said. “Your belt.”
He looked down stupidly. A second later she was there next to him, her fingers fumbling to unbuckle Henry’s simple leather belt. He held out his right hand and she cinched the belt tight around his arm, placing the end of the strap in his mouth while she unbuckled her own belt and placed it on his other arm. She took the loose end and wound it around his forearm, grunting as she pulled, then tucked the end under one of the loops. She peered at the wounds for a second, nodded to herself, then used his knife to cut several long strips from his shirt to use as bandages.
“It was in my head,” she said. “My body. I felt it, Jake. I tasted it.”
He murmured a reply and let his eyelids drop. She slapped him hard across the face and his eyes opened, her face coming back into focus. “No,” she said. “Stay with me, Jake. I can’t carry you out of here if you faint.”
There was a scuffling noise behind them. Slowly they turned to regard the creature, which had shrunk in on itself, the long legs and arms now contorted, bent at sharp angles. It was dragging itself along the ground, giving off a high, whining cry as it made for the far side of the clearing. It was mostly hidden in the tall grass, a dark shape scuttling back for the cover of the woods. Behind them, flashlights had slashed through the woods, men’s voices bouncing between the tree trunks.
“The knife,” he said. “I need to finish it.”
“I’ll do it.”
“No.” He held out his bandaged hand. Rachel ignored him and strode forward. She caught the creature at the edge of the woods, planting her boot in the middle of its knobby back. It seemed almost insubstantial, not much more than a great, fragile spider with several broken legs. It looked up at them, its green eyes full of pain and loathing, one of the tentacles waving weakly in the air. Rachel drew the knife back.
She can kill it, Jake realized. She can end it. It’s caught between forms, and the medicine I gave it was bitter. Bitter.
He strode forward and brought his bandaged forearm up, blocking the downward motion that Rachel meant for the back of the creature’s neck. She turned to him, ready to fight at first, and then perplexed when she saw his face and understood he wasn’t under its spell. He lowered his bandaged arm, the blood from his cut pattering slowly onto the grass. The creature was watching him, lips curled back to reveal its green-yellow teeth, fuzzy with mold. Rachel fell back a step, staring at the creature. She looked horrified, as though she had not yet seen what it was, had not truly understood what had been inside her until this very moment.
“Go, then,” Jake said. “You’ve taken it from me. Now run with it.”
It regarded him for a long moment, the hate and pain and anger in its expression mixing with something else. Not fear, not respect, but an acknowledgment, the barest tip of its misshapen head. One creature of the dark woods nodding to the other.
“Go.”
They watched as it dragged itself into the shadows of the trees, seeming to meld with the darkness. There were a dozen flashlight beams coming their way, the men in front already breaking into the clearing. Jake felt a surge of pride in the people of his hometown, people he barely knew, yet who were part of his family. They might not be coming for him, or not just for him, but they were coming. They were beating the darkness back into the night, bringing light with them. He tilted a little, suddenly dizzy again, and Rachel was there, under his shoulder, looking up at him with curiosity.
“Jake?”
He looked down. “I know.”
“It looked like you, Jake. For a second it looked like your face.”
“It’s okay.”
“Are you sure?”
He looked once more into the woods. His wrists were throbbing with a deep, biting pain. Every part of him seemed to hurt in some way and yet . . . and yet it felt different now. The sear of a clean cut. The knot of people had almost reached them, the flashlight beams dancing across the tall, blood-smeared grass.
“No,” he said. “But I have hope.” He looked up at the night sky, at the Little Dipper scooping away at the darkness. Rachel’s hand pressed against his lower back, supporting him. “I have hope.”