28

“Over here!”

Ollie meets Sheridan at the mouth of a cave as the black of the night sky just begins to lift, turning the woods eerie and gray. She crouches in the dirt, Devin’s limp body draped in her arms. For a brief, numb moment, Ollie worries she’s already dead. Her limbs are covered in bruises and scrapes, her face swollen and red. Her fists are smudged with dirt and, under the dirt, burn marks. Her fingertips and knees are bloody from crawling. The mouth of the cave is dark behind her, a trail of disturbed soil the only sign of her escape. When they prod her, she doesn’t move. When they say her name, she’s silent.

“Is she…?” Ollie starts.

Then Devin sputters to life, sucking in a ragged breath. Ollie slumps over in relief and he can feel Sheridan do the same. Behind them, Aidan releases a relieved sigh, too. They may have lost Hannah, but the rest of them can still make it out of here. They don’t need to lose anyone else.

“It’s you, right?” Sheridan breathes.

“Yeah.” Devin groans. She tries to sit up, but winces in pain. Through gritted teeth, she says, “You were being so loud. I had to come tell you guys to shut up.”

It takes Ollie a moment to realize she’s telling a joke. Tenderly, he and Sheridan haul Devin to her feet. The trees shift overhead, the sound around them ebbing and swelling like Ollie’s ears are popping and unpopping. The mimics linger somewhere in the shadows near them. The trap might’ve stopped the ones back at camp, but Hannah was right. There are far more than they imagined, and now they’ve drawn their attention.

“I can get us to the water,” Sheridan rasps.

Ollie nods. Sheridan impressively takes on Devin’s full weight, releasing Ollie to help Aidan. In the dark, they move as a unit toward the water. Ollie listens for it, the slow-moving roar of a distant river, but with the sputtering quiet, it’s impossible to make out for sure. They don’t move quickly, but they move. Every few steps, Ollie sees another one. Sometimes they’re in the shape of his father. Sometimes they’re in the shape of his grandmother. He sees his friends from school, the coaches, his teachers. He hears voices that he knows and feels hands on his arms, but he keeps pushing until finally, they reach the water.

Ollie eases Aidan to the ground and collapses to the dirt. His head spins so badly he thinks he might be sick. He’s never had a concussion before, but this seems worse than that. There’s a slithering in the trees behind them, but in the dark, he can’t see what’s followed them.

Sheridan takes a step toward the water and stops, cupping a hand at her brow. “Oh my god,” she whispers.

“What?”

“Look.”

Ollie rolls over and looks across the river. Far in the distance, beyond the scraggly patches of trees and gold grass turned blue in the dying night, Ollie sees it. A row of lights glowing against the dark. The kind of lights you don’t see in the woods.

The building kind of lights.

“Is that…?” Ollie mumbles.

“There’s people.” Sheridan lowers Devin to the ground and starts digging through her backpack. She tosses a bundle of rope into the grass near Ollie. For the first time since they entered the woods, Sheridan is the most prepared of them all. She gestures to the water. “We have to get across. For help.”

“Sheridan…” Ollie croaks. “I don’t think I can pull us.”

Sheridan pauses. She looks down at Devin and, in a moment of surprising softness, touches her cheek.

In an instant, Ollie sees the difference in her. Not just the way she’s grown, but the way she’s come to life. She casts a quick glance back at the trees, then slips the rope around her waist without hesitation. Once she hands the next section of rope to Aidan, she takes Ollie’s shoulder. “The river’s not that wide here. It doesn’t look that fast, either. I’m gonna get across and we’ll do it just like we did last time. Pull each other across one by one.”

“Last time, Ollie almost drowned,” Aidan warns.

“Last time was different. Last time was my fault,” Sheridan says. “We don’t have a choice. Let me do this.”

Ollie doesn’t have it in him to fight anymore. He agrees to cross last, only because he’s marginally more sentient than Devin. The forest behind him spins, but he doesn’t focus on it. He watches Sheridan wade into the vein of glassy, starlit water, kicking until, shockingly, she washes up on the other side. The branches crackle behind him as he feeds Aidan into the river next. Aidan swims weakly, mostly pulled by Sheridan, and Ollie crouches at Devin’s side.

“Hang on a little longer,” he says. “Almost there.”

She nods. “Alright, team head injury. Next stop, Portland.”

Despite himself, Ollie laughs. His laughter echoes from the trees, and it takes Ollie too long to realize it’s the mimics laughing back at him. They mock him in his own voice, swarming like birds. He imagines the only thing keeping them from attacking is the faint hope they can still get a body.

Once Sheridan helps Aidan out of the water, Ollie eases Devin in. Once the water takes her, the quiet sets in. It doesn’t flicker anymore, doesn’t swing in and out. It’s a suffocating silence, pressed in so close Ollie can feel it like a blanket. It wasn’t smart to be on this shore alone.

Behind him, the whispers continue to hiss, growing closer in the grass. It isn’t until Sheridan tugs the rope, pulling him off balance, that he realizes he needs to keep moving. Behind him, there are dozens of them slinking from between the trees toward the water, all half wearing the faces of people he knows.

Ollie stumbles, tripping into the water.

And miraculously, he starts moving. He sees the other three in a pile at the opposite shore, all gripping the rope. The mimics crawl up to the water, the mass of them shifting into one grotesque cluster of almost-familiar faces, and Ollie is thankful the dark makes them difficult to see.

Finally, six hands meet his shoulders and pull him to the mud. The sky begins to glow blue with the coming morning. Across the water, the mimics watch them.

But they don’t cross.

“Ollie…” Sheridan breathes. “Can you stand?”

Ollie rolls onto his stomach and, pushing through the pain, manages to sit up. The cold air chaps his river-wet cheeks and pulls tears from his swollen eyes. He nods.

“Okay. You have to get to that building.”

“Alone?”

Sheridan sits with her legs splayed in front of her, drenched in mud. When she breathes, it’s a wheeze. “I can’t … I don’t think I can do it. Not trying to be a quitter.”

Even in the dark, Sheridan’s face is white as a sheet. Her hand is swollen so bad she can’t make a fist. Her eyelids droop and her breathing comes fast. Ollie remembers the river on the other side of this program, remembers Sheridan letting him go.

He reaches out and pulls her into a hug.

“I’ll be back,” he promises.

And then Ollie runs. The river water dries on his cheeks and the blisters on his feet split. The hunger tears through him, but he runs. The lights in the distance grow, expanding as he gets closer. He doesn’t stop running when the grass becomes short and brilliant green. He passes an outhouse and a shed, and then the lights in front of him become clearer. It’s a lodge of some kind, massive logs jutting from its sides.

The lights are on because there are people inside.

Ollie thinks he might pass out.

His feet meet pavement and he keeps running. He stumbles to the door of the lodge and tears it open before collapsing inside. A wave of heat from a roaring fireplace rolls over him. Ollie’s vision spins, but he thinks he sees a wine-colored carpet, a mounted animal head, an antlered chandelier overhead. He falls to his knees, gasping for breath.

When he looks up, a small crowd has formed. At least a dozen people, all flannel and hunting caps, eyes wide with fear. A family, maybe, though Ollie can barely make out their faces. The lights are too bright and he fights to keep his eyes open. He hears someone mumbling, Call the police.

“My friends…” he manages, grabbing the arm of the nearest stranger for balance. “We were in the woods. We need help.”