Ollie is the first to pass out, Sheridan losing consciousness only seconds later. Devin miraculously keeps hold of reality long enough to scoop up a fistful of dirt, searching for anything to prove that, seconds earlier, there were two creatures here.
In the minutes that follow, reality flakes away. Hannah helps Devin to her feet, dabbing at the blood in her eyes from her brand-new forehead gash. Ollie blearily wakes and Hannah moves to tend to him. Aidan elevates Sheridan’s head and checks her pulse, and Devin sits and stares into the fire, heart racing. It doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense.
What she saw was impossible. It looked like Liv, but it wasn’t her. When it grunted, there was something animal to it. When it pushed her to the ground, it was ten times stronger than Liv should’ve been. It was too quick to be human. It burned too fast to be human. Devin sits with her elbows on her knees, mouth pressed to her hands, and she tries to find a single rational explanation.
She comes up empty.
Sheridan sleeps for what feels like hours, though Devin’s sense of time is a little different tonight. Eventually, she blinks awake. There’s a bruise blossoming along her jaw. Her lip is split and crusted with blood. Aidan tells her she might have a concussion and she laughs. Devin watches her and remembers a brief, hazy moment where Sheridan jumped at Liv to save her. Sheridan meets her eye and says nothing.
Another item for the list of things that don’t make sense.
Eventually, night smears away and sunlight touches the east-facing trees. The fire putters until it’s out, tendrils of smoke thinning as the sun washes their camp with light. Devin’s stomach growls, but she doesn’t move.
Finally, Aidan breaks the silence.
“So…” he starts, voice hoarse. “Should we talk?”
Devin clears her throat, feeling the soreness from where Liv—or not-Liv—tried to choke her. She massages her neck before croaking, “Okay. What was that thing?”
“Liv?” Aidan asks. “Or the thing with her?”
Silently, all eyes slide to Ollie. His cheeks are hollow, the bags under his eyes dark. In the time they’ve been apart, the woods have changed Ollie. The softness in his cheeks, his eyes, his posture, is gone. He presses his knuckles together, but he says nothing.
“Both?” Devin offers. “I guess?”
“I don’t know what the thing with her was,” Ollie finally mutters. “But that was Liv. We were with her for days … there’s no way it wasn’t her.”
“We did feel like something was off with her,” Hannah cuts in. “She was acting weird from the minute she found us. I thought it was just her injuries, but the more she got better, the weirder she was acting. Right?”
She looks to Ollie and Aidan, waiting for them to back her up.
“Wait,” Devin says, pinching the bridge of her nose. “How did you guys even find her?”
“She found us,” Ollie says numbly. “A few days ago, she found our campsite and she was really injured. I should’ve … she got better so fast. I guess I thought it was weird, but—”
“—but how were we supposed to know she was a freaking monster?” Aidan finishes, voice wispy like he’s winded. “I mean, is that what she was?”
“If she wasn’t a monster, the thing with her was,” Hannah says. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Its head was…”
Ollie shifts. “It looked like my dad.”
The camp falls silent. Devin eyes Sheridan, but says nothing. She’s too quiet, slumped against a tree with her knees tucked to her chest, eyes idly fixed on her own knuckles. Aidan might be right about the concussion, but after ten days of exposure to Sheridan’s specific brand of quiet, Devin is sure something is wrong.
Aidan swallows. “I might’ve seen something like that before.”
Even Sheridan looks up from her daze at that. When Aidan speaks, there’s a quiver in his voice.
“The night we got lost,” Aidan says. “I left camp once you guys fell asleep and I swear I saw a … there was something behind a tree. Or, like, it was wrapped around the tree? Like its arms were snakes.”
“What the…” Hannah breathes.
“But it didn’t attack me,” Aidan clarifies quickly. “I ran away and I think I fell down a hill. I don’t remember. I hadn’t found the trail yet, but when I woke up, I was lying in the middle of it.”
“What?” Ollie says.
“Wait,” Devin finally cuts in, shaking her head. “You think this thing guided you back to the path?”
“You didn’t tell us,” Ollie says. “Why wouldn’t you—”
“I don’t know,” Aidan snaps, and Devin isn’t sure which statement he’s responding to. “I thought it was a dream or something. I didn’t know what happened, and I … I don’t know. I thought you guys would think I was seeing things.”
I thought it was a dream. Devin recalls the night they found the burnt cabin, the night she was sure she’d wandered into the trees and seen the long-legged creature that turned into Mr. Atwood. In her nightmare, she’d fallen to the ground and woke up in her sleeping bag. But that was different. She’d had a meltdown. She was feverish and tired and desperate and she saw something that wasn’t real. It was only a dream. She’s sure of it.
“How long ago was this?” Devin asks.
“Well, it was—” Aidan starts.
“Days,” Ollie says, jaw tight with frustration. “It’s been days.”
The entire campsite is silent, but Devin doesn’t miss the way Sheridan shifts. Her lips form a thin, tight line like she’s trying to keep herself from speaking. Briefly, she looks at Devin. “I saw something, too.”
Devin’s eyes narrow. “What? When?”
Immediately, the atmosphere is different. The open-minded awe the others lent to Aidan disappears. When the other three watch her, they look almost skeptical. They don’t trust Sheridan like they trust Aidan, and Devin can’t blame them. She isn’t sure she can fully say she trusts Sheridan, and they’ve been alone together for over a week.
“The night we were at the cabin. I just went to get some water and there was someone in the lake.” Sheridan shoots a look at Devin. “Before you ask why I didn’t tell you, I thought the same thing as the little guy.”
“Little guy…” Aidan mutters.
“I figured I was just seeing things.”
“What do you mean by ‘someone’?” Devin asks. “Did it look like a monster-thing?”
“Um…” Sheridan trails off. She looks hard into Devin’s eyes before she speaks, voice cautious like she’s afraid to give too much ground. “It looked like me?”
That stops Devin’s words in her throat. Because, if she’s reading Sheridan’s face right, the thing didn’t just look like her. She says it in vague terms, making it clear she doesn’t want the others to know about Theda. The distrust goes both ways.
“Okay,” Aidan says. “If she’s telling the truth, then there’s something going on out here. Something’s trying to … I’m sorry, I’m trying to figure out how to even…”
“… talk about them?” Hannah finishes.
Aidan nods. “So, I guess there’s a monster-thing that can look like other people. That just … exists.”
“Not just people,” Ollie adds. “It was my dad. It looked like him, it sounded like him, it dressed like him. How would it know how to do that?”
It looked like him, it sounded like him, it dressed like him. Devin was sure the creature pretending to be Ollie’s dad briefly took another shape. It’s like the sight of him is branded to the backs of her eyelids, the gauntness of his face, the timbre of his voice. Maybe this is just mass hysteria. Maybe they’re all losing their minds. She was promised that was a face she’d never have to see again and she’s seen it twice in these woods.
Sheridan raises her hand.
“Yes, Sheridan?” Aidan says.
“Why did you say, ‘if she’s telling the truth’?”
Aidan rolls his eyes. “That’s not what we’re talking about right now. We need to focus on the monster-things.”
“Can we stop calling them ‘monster-things’?” Devin asks. “I mean, maybe I’m the only one struggling to be okay with monsters existing?”
“What else are we supposed to call them?” Aidan asks, indignant. “If someone has the scientific name for shape-shifting, forest-dwelling, stretchy-faced creatures, we can use that. Until then, I think we’re stuck calling them monster-things.”
“What did Liv say to you?” Hannah asks, eyes trained on Ollie.
Ollie’s expression is difficult to read. He rubs his fist in the dirt. “It started as a normal conversation. She was just asking about my stuff with my dad, and then she started getting really … mean?”
“Mean?” Devin asks.
“Saying I would never amount to anything. And my dad deserves a better kid. And it would be better if I didn’t make it home so my dad could be happy.”
Devin’s eyes widen. “Jesus.”
“The thing is, I didn’t wanna listen,” Ollie says, a slight crack in his voice. “But I had to. Even if I thought really hard about waking you guys up or running away or even just standing up, I couldn’t. I was completely stuck. It was like I was…”
“… being hypnotized,” Hannah finishes.
“Yeah.” He nods. “Like that.”
“So, to recap,” Devin says, counting on her fingers. “These things can change shape and hypnotize us?”
“Plus, I don’t know what it did to Coach Liv,” Aidan says. “If it was her, she was possessed or something. If it wasn’t, it knew everything she knew. It knew where all the milestones were and it remembered everything we talked about before she disappeared. It could answer any question, even ones only the real Liv could answer.”
“If it wasn’t her, it was doing a damn good impression,” Ollie says.
“What do we do if there’s more of them?” Hannah asks.
The camp falls quiet again. Devin’s mind wanders back to the form the creature briefly took. Knowing it was fake doesn’t keep the electricity from her nerves or the nausea from her gut.
“What do we do now?” Aidan asks. “Do we stay here? Do we keep going?”
Ollie leans down, pressing his face into his hands. Muffled by his palms, he says, “Can we sit for a second? I think I need to, like … process.”
Devin takes stock of their tattered little group. Ollie isn’t the only one in shambles—Aidan is bruised, glasses cracked, blood crusted at his brow. Hannah’s usually neat hair is a mess, matted at the back of her head, purple bags heavy under her eyes. Sheridan’s head lolls back against a tree as she apparently fights sleep. Even if they need to keep moving, they can’t do it now. Ollie is right; they need a breather.
“Yeah,” Devin says. “Let’s rest. We’re gonna need it. I think it’ll be a long few weeks out of here.”
From across the camp, Sheridan snorts. When all eyes land on her, she shrugs, pulling her mess of hair over her shoulder. The sunlight is gold on her hollow cheeks. Her voice is painted with a laugh, but she isn’t smiling. Finally, she says, “If we make it out.”
And before Devin can consider her words, she frowns.
“Yeah,” she says. “If.”
After the group splits up for quiet reflection, Devin finds her way back to Ollie. He sits alone on a severed log, a long branch in his grip. One flick at a time, he whittles away the end of the branch with a hunting knife, sharpening it into a spear. A second spear, it seems, since another crudely sharpened stick leans against a nearby tree. He’s more haggard than he was the last time Devin saw him, the sandy curls at his neck matted and the bags under his eyes dark as bruises.
But when Devin settles on the log next to him, he smiles.
“So, you’re still alive,” Devin says.
“I’m more shocked that you’re alive,” Ollie says. “Or, I guess, that you’re both alive.”
Devin glances across the campsite at Sheridan. She sits with her back to the same tree as before, her hiker’s journal splayed across her knees. Devin scoffs. “You make it sound like you think there’s a chance she’d be the one coming back.”
“I don’t know.” Ollie chuckles, taking another swipe at his spear. “She seems kind of scrappy. I could see her waiting until you fell asleep and rolling you off a cliff.”
Devin shrugs, eyes still glued to Sheridan. “I don’t know. She’s okay. Evil, but … I kind of get her.”
“You do?”
Devin looks back to Ollie, and it takes more effort than it should. Watching Sheridan feels like waiting for a pot to boil. But she didn’t come here to talk about Sheridan. She motions to the spear. “What’s this about?”
“Well,” he says, and there’s a weight to his voice that makes Devin nervous. “At first, we decided we needed to start hunting because somehow a bunch of our food disappeared.”
Devin grimaces. “Ah. That.”
“You knew?”
“I mean, I didn’t know she took the food when she took it,” she says. “We got into it about that, though. She … it’s different now. I’m not promising she won’t do shit like that again, but I think she’d at least feel bad about it.”
“So, she didn’t feel bad about it then,” Ollie says. “Good to know.”
Devin nudges Ollie’s knee with her own. “I don’t wanna talk about her. I wanna talk about what’s going on with you. Are you okay?”
Ollie smiles. “I’m fine.”
Devin’s stomach sinks. She can’t look at Ollie without picturing that thing creeping up behind him. She wasn’t sure what to expect after finding the note at the campsite, but a lumbering, headless creature was certainly not on the list. And maybe they’ve made a general stab at understanding what they saw, but there’s a piece of her still stuck on their existence in the first place.
“You saved me,” Ollie says finally, softer. “I thought I was … I don’t know what I thought would happen. But I don’t think I’d be here without you.”
Devin laughs. “Listen, I want you to know that I had no idea these things existed. I was willing to kick the shit out of Liv just because you told me to. That’s called being a good friend.”
“It makes the world a little more terrifying, doesn’t it?” Ollie asks, scraping the end of his spear into a point. “Knowing stuff like this exists? I feel like my head is empty. I’m just…”
“… not able to get your brain around it?” Devin asks. “Yeah.”
“Do you wonder what they are?”
Devin looks up at the canopy and her stomach twists. The possibility that they’re surrounded is dizzying. She can’t even begin to think about what they are.
The log shifts. Aidan sits next to Devin, forcing her to scoot so close to Ollie their shoulders touch. He adjusts his glasses up the sweaty slope of his nose, expelling a familiar breath like they haven’t been apart for over a week.
“Welcome back,” Aidan says. “I didn’t even get to ask if you guys found anything good out there.”
“Oh yeah.” Ollie breathes. “I probably should’ve asked, too.”
“You’ve had stuff on your mind.” Devin laughs. “We all have. I wish we found more, but other than a lake and a burned-down cabin, we got nothing.”
“Sheridan was wrong about the cabin?” Aidan asks.
Devin shrugs. “Not wrong, I guess. She didn’t know it would be burned down. She got us back to you guys, though.”
Aidan thrums his fingers over his knees. “How did she get you guys back here?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean she couldn’t have known we were moving faster than we should’ve been.” Aidan shifts a little so he’s facing Sheridan. When he speaks again, it’s almost a whisper. “You don’t think it’s weird? There’s being good at maps, and then there’s finding us at a totally different campsite than where we were scheduled to be at the exact moment we were in danger.”
Devin narrows her eyes. The tone is different now. Ollie’s scraping at his spear has stopped. He sits entirely still, blade paused against the wood, eyes trained on his boots. Devin looks at him, looks at Aidan, and chances a glance at Sheridan.
“Are you trying to say something?” Devin asks, voice flat.
“I don’t know,” Aidan says. “I’m really confused.”
“I’m confused now, too,” Devin says. “Because it sounds like you’re implying Sheridan had something to do with this?”
“I’m not implying anything.”
Devin shakes her head. “She told me she spends a lot of time on Google Maps. I don’t know. We thought we’d get to the campsite before you, but when we got there, you’d already left. We probably would’ve stayed there for the night, but we saw the note.”
Aidan pauses. “Oh.”
“I don’t even like her,” Devin says, “but she pushed through a lot to get here in time to help. She jumped into that fight, too.”
“Yeah.” Aidan’s nose scrunches up. “I really thought she’d have a concussion. She seems fine, though. Kinda weird.”
Devin stands. Both Aidan and Ollie eye her, brows knit with concern. It’s like the forest is spinning. It was one thing to find out there are monsters, that they did something to Liv, that both Aidan and Sheridan have seen one in the wild. But the idea that someone in their group is working against them is too much to process. It’s a stupid suggestion, and Devin has half a mind to pretend Aidan never said it. It’s impossible, and it’s especially impossible that it would be Sheridan.
“Don’t freak out, okay?” Aidan says. “I’m just … I don’t know how, but Liv was helping that monster. She knew her way through the woods super well. Her injuries healed really fast. And why would Sheridan see one that looked like her? Why wouldn’t she tell you about it?”
“You didn’t tell Ollie and Hannah when you saw one,” Devin snaps.
“Why did it look like her, Devin?” Ollie asks.
Devin almost explains it. The dead sister, the withdrawals, all the cruel ingredients in the cocktail that make Sheridan the way she is. If they knew, she’s sure they would drop this. But there’s a heat at the side of Devin’s face. When she looks up, Sheridan is watching her, paused mid-page turn. Her brow arches in a question and guilt squeezes in Devin’s chest. As much as it would help, this truth isn’t Devin’s to share.
“I’m not gonna speak for her,” she says. “But I promise there’s … there’s stuff about her you guys don’t know.”
“That’s the problem,” Aidan says quietly. “There’s too much we don’t know. I just … think we need to be careful.”
Devin watches Sheridan a moment longer as thin sunlight just breaks the tree line, sliding like a mask over her eyes. She tries to understand their suspicion, but it’s out of the question. As infuriating and frustrating as Sheridan might be, she isn’t dangerous. Devin presses her forehead to her hand and sighs.
“I said don’t freak out,” Aidan says.
Devin turns her glare on him quick enough to make him flinch. “I’m not freaking out. Me and Sheridan saved you guys, so sorry if I’m a little frustrated.”
“You don’t have to be violent.”
“I’m not being violent,” Devin snaps. She motions to Ollie. “And I’m not the one making weapons and accusing friends of being monsters.”
“Devin—” Ollie starts.
“She’s not my friend,” Aidan says. “Or did you forget what she—”
“I’m done talking to both of you,” Devin says.
She turns, walking a few feet to the other side of camp where she can duck behind a particularly thick tree trunk. She crouches and she doesn’t look back at her supposed friends, ready to pull the group apart. She doesn’t look at Hannah, innocently sorting food. She doesn’t look at Sheridan, the source of all her frustrations since they entered this forest. Instead, she looks up at the trees, knees tucked to her chest, and she thinks of the one face she can’t get out of her head. In the quiet, the rustling leaves sound like silk curtains, like the tangling of blackberry bushes in the fields beyond a back porch. The wind sounds like a whisper in the middle of the night.
There were monsters following Devin before she ever got to these woods.
She doesn’t need conspiracy theories. She needs to get out of here.