“WAIT UP!” JAYNE SHOUTED.
Cole hadn’t gone very far into the woods when the bouncing ball of flames approached from the distance. He was glad to see Jayne. Once again, he had planned poorly and hadn’t brought a flashlight, and the deeper into Blackwood Forest he went, the thicker the forest became overhead. No help from the heavens. Jayne, bounding down the trail with reckless abandon (and having no reason to bound down the trail any other way), caught up quickly. She took Cole’s hand without breaking stride and they continued towards the camp.
“Thanks, Jayney.” Now, Cole could see the entire forest, bright and clear as midday. Jayne was happy. With his affirmation, her flames grew brighter and bigger.
Cole wondered if somebody could ever make Jayne so sad that her flames would go out entirely. It was a quick thought, and a theory that he’d never wish to test. Her presence renewed his determination. If he succeeded, then she got to go to the Hunting Grounds. Looking at her and thinking of what she’d been through, but seeing a joy that couldn’t be extinguished, told Cole that it was exactly where she deserved to be.
“Where are we goin’, Coley? Are we goin’ on an adventure?” she asked.
She was swinging his arm back and forth, humming a song.
“Something like that. We’re going to a camp,” Cole said.
“Who woulda put a camp all the way out here?” Jayne scrunched up her face, deep in thought.
“That’s what we’re going to find out.”
Cole wasn’t sure where the camp was, exactly. Eva would’ve been helpful right about now. All he could do was find his way back to where he figured that he, Brady, and Eva had been running. Jayne’s presence made the task far easier. When he found that place, he’d just walk deeper into Blackwood Forest until he found the camp. Jayne liked the game, as she called it.
“It’s like hide-and-seek!”
“You’re right, Jayne, it’s just like that. Only in this game, the camp is hiding, not a person. We have to find it.”
“Well if it’s not even moving, that’ll be easy!”
“Yeah, you’d think.”
Jayne promised to keep a sharp eye out for the camp. From time to time, she let go of Cole’s hand. She would run up ahead, skip to either side, and light a bit more of the forest. During one of Jayne’s brief excursions, Cole—very proudly, it should be added—saw what he thought were broken branches on the ground and bent grass blades around that same area. Someone had walked right here. Maybe it had been him or one of his friends. Maybe it had been the killer.
“Not bad for a city boy.” Cole said this out loud, but he was really talking to an absent Eva. Granted, she might have found this path much sooner than he did, but he still found it. Maybe she would’ve been proud. That is, if she wasn’t wondering now whether or not he was the killer.
“Eat your heart out,” Cole whispered to himself.
“Gross!” Jayne ran over to where Cole was crouching.
“Huh?” Cole was looking along the ground, away from them, trying to make out which direction they should follow.
“Why would anybody want to eat hearts?!” Jayne stuck her tongue out like she’d eaten something disgusting.
“It’s a figure of speech, Jayney.”
Cole found the right direction, he thought, and together they followed the trail of bent grass, footprints, and broken twigs. The path was more obvious this time; it had been broken in by three or maybe four people. Before long, the clearing the camp was set up in was visible up ahead. They approached it slowly and quietly.
“Don’t be scared if we see somebody,” Cole whispered to Jayne the closer they got. “Or if I have to run.”
“I’m not scared,” Jayne said with her chin raised defiantly. “I’d protect you, you know.”
“I know that,” Cole said.
Nothing much changed since Cole had last seen the camp, only that the firepit was cold this time, which set him at ease. Nobody had been here recently. He poked around the firepit with a stick, but he only uncovered a few cans of food. The only thing left to inspect was the tent, which was still set up. With Jayne by him, he crawled inside. In the tent was the backpack he saw last time.
Jayne watched Cole go through the backpack like he was opening a Christmas present. Each time Cole pulled out an item she gasped or oohed or aahed, and said the exact same thing: “I love surprises!” He laid the contents on the ground as he went through them. He pulled out a first-aid kit (Jayne loved the assortment of stuff in the kit, from the antibiotic cream to the latex gloves); a few pairs of socks, expertly rolled; a survival knife which, Cole admitted to himself, looked pretty badass; and an MP3 player (he filtered through the music quickly, and thought, okay, this makes sense, when he saw an array of ‘80s rock music). Then he pulled out magazines of ammunition. That sealed it for him. Cole didn’t need the gun or a ballistics match. Terminology from crime shows, thank you very much. Of course, Wayne would need these things, but right now, that was neither here nor there.
This was the killer.
Cole was so excited at this revelation, so caught up in making plans on what to do next—namely, contact Wayne, at which point the whole ballistics thing would happen—that he almost missed the last item in the backpack. Stuffed in with the socks, the first aid kit, and everything else, was a file folder. Cole pulled it out of the backpack, and held it up to Jayne’s light.
“What is that?” Jayne asked.
“Probably nothing,” Cole said.
The unassuming brown folder was thickish, but not War & Peace thick. Cole opened it to a file on a classmate of his who’d died in the fire. Derek John Folster. His friends called him DJ. There was a picture of DJ beside information that included his age, height, weight, mother and father. Under his picture was a word in block letters: EXPERIMENTAL 715. Underneath the picture and the personal information was a biographical review of DJ’s family background, his reaction to some kind of drug testing, and then his date of death. Ten years ago tomorrow. UNSUCCESSFUL was stamped in big red letters over the bio.
“Awww, did DJ fail a test?” Jayne asked.
“I’m not sure,” Cole said.
He flipped to the next file, another classmate of his who died in the fire. Tasha Evans. The layout of the file was the same, only under Tasha’s name the block letters read: PLACEBO. Cole flipped through file after file, and each one revealed another dead classmate, and the words PLACEBO or EXPERIMENTAL followed by a three-digit number. Each file that read EXPERIMENTAL also had the big red letters: UNSUCCESSFUL. Jayne Flett was the last school fire victim. EXPERIMENTAL. UNSUCCESSFUL. Cole quickly tried to flip past it as soon as he saw Jayne’s picture.
“Hey, I saw that!” Jayne shouted.
“You don’t need to see it,” Cole said.
“No fair, Coley, come on,” Jayne said.
Cole turned back to Jayne’s file. She read with her index finger, moving it across each line like she’d been reading Braille until she’d ran it over the date of her death.
“I didn’t do good?” she asked when she was done.
“No, Jayney, you did good. You did just fine,” Cole said.
“What did I do wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Cole said. “This is just some, like, medical trial or something. I think they were trying to give kids a drug or something. Maybe they were trying to cure a disease, or a sickness, something like that.”
“What kind of disease?” she asked.
“Maybe we’ll find out.” There weren’t many files left. Cole turned to the next one. It was Ashley’s. EXPERIMENTAL. UNSUCCESSFUL. No date of death. Of course, he wasn’t in the school fire. But what was different about Ashley’s file was that his picture, Ashley at six years old, had a red X drawn crudely over it.
“This is so messed up, Jayney,” Cole whispered. He had another word for it, rather than “messed,” but he felt like even though Jayne was a ghost, she was still just a little girl.
The next file was Alex’s. Alex Captain. PLACEBO. Her picture also had a red X drawn over it. Cole ran his thumb across her picture. He remembered the time they’d spent together, just a day earlier.
“They both got shot,” Jayne said.
“I know,” Cole said. “Look at this.” There was a tab attached to the next file. It read: “The Reckoner.” Cole took a last look at Alex’s picture, and turned the page to find a file on himself. Cole Harper. There was a picture of him, too, from when he was eight. Under that picture read: EXPERIMENTAL 354. Paper-clipped to the file was a photograph of Cole leaving Kelvin High School, backpack over his shoulder, basketball under his arm.
“What the…”
“That’s you, Coley,” Jayne pointed out.
“Yeah, I know.”
The file had the same logistical information on Cole: his height (6′0″), weight (179 lbs), age (17), place of birth (Wounded Sky First Nation), current residence (Winnipeg), and so on. But his file also had a schedule. It listed Cole’s typical day, from start to finish. What he did, where he went. This was from Sunday to Saturday. From what Cole read, it was pretty accurate. “7:05 a.m. was breakfast. Bus came at 7:28 a.m. Route 19. Subject arrives at school at 7:58 a.m. Practices basketball from 8:00 a.m. until 8:45 a.m.”
There was a biography on Cole, too, starting right from his birth, but the bulk of it concentrated on his youth, when his father was alive. In particular, it mentioned his father’s work on a biological agent called God Flare (or Agent 33-29-8-45). He read through a lot of medical and scientific terminology that he could hardly understand, but saw that the symptoms listed for the biological agent matched what he’d seen in Chief Crate the night he came to Wounded Sky.
“I’m going to have to run this by Dr. Captain,” Cole said.
“It’s like another language,” Jayne said.
“It kind of is,” Cole said. “It’s like a language for doctors. But what if that’s what people have now, here?”
“Like when they’re coughing and stuff?” Jayne asked.
“Yeah,” Cole said.
“Like when you were trying to push Chief’s chest in?”
“Oh my god.”
Information on the accident that killed his father and his lab assistant had been redacted. That mystery would continue to live on. Cole, the child, came into the picture via speculation in the file that his father had attempted to run a different experiment on his son. They called it an “Unauthorized Parallel Design Trial.” Cole wasn’t sure what any of it meant, only that instead of a big red stamp on his file, there was a big green stamp that read: SUCCESSFUL.
“Holy shit,” Cole said.
“Coley, you said a bad word!” Jayne gasped.
“Sorry, Jayney.”
He read the part over again about the Parallel Design Trial. As he did, his mind wandered back to his father, the time they spent together. Breakfast.
“The vitamins,” Cole stated.
“I like those!” Jayne said. “One time, I ate too many of ‘em, and Dr. Captain had to pump my stomach. That’s what they called it, pumping my stomach.”
“Gross,” Cole said absently.
“Well, nobody was eating hearts!”
There was one file left. Cole pried himself away from his own file and turned to find a file for Eva Kirkness. PLACEBO. The only thing that was missing from Eva’s file, and Cole’s for that matter, was the red X that had been drawn over Ashley’s and Alex’s faces.
“Why do they each have an X over their pictures, and we don’t?” Cole thought out loud. “I don’t—”
“Because they’re dead and you guys aren’t,” Jayne said. The light that Jayne had been providing on the files went dim. He could hardly make out the words anymore, could hardly see Eva’s picture. Eva at seven. Eva, sitting on top of the blue mats. Eva, Waiting for Cole to come back.
“Jayne, you’re right,” Cole said.
“I don’t wanna win this game.” Jayne’s voice was shaking. A hot tear landed on Eva’s file, and a small puff of steam exploded from where it had landed.
“Somebody’s killing us off, one by one. Everybody in this file is…”
Pop!
Cole stood up and frantically looked around. He couldn’t hear anybody approaching. He could only tell about where the gunshot had come from.
“Eva,” he whispered to himself.
Every night, one of his friends had died. First Ashley, in the file. Then Alex, in the file. The last people alive were Eva and himself.
He crouched down in front of Jayne.
“Can you stay here?” Cole asked.
“But I wanna come with you, Coley! I said I’d protect you!”
“I know, but I need you to stay here and watch over this stuff.” Cole started to stuff it back into the backpack as neatly as he could with his hands shaking the way they were. “Can you do that?”
Jayne hesitated. She looked at him, she looked at the backpack, and she looked off into the woods, to wherever the shot had originated.
“Jayne!” Cole placed the backpack into the tent, just where he’d found it.
“Okay, I guess.” Jayne had her hands on her hips, pouting.
“This is an important job, Jayney. Tell me if anybody comes here, okay?”
She nodded.
Cole ran out of the camp and through the woods.
He had never run so fast. The trees were whizzing by him in a blur, like grass at the side of the highway. He couldn’t tell whether this was another ability or if it was just the adrenaline. The agility seemed to be something new. He managed to navigate over roots, branches, underbrush, rocks, and all with precision. Within minutes, he came to a stop in front of the body of a girl. She was face down, arms stretched-out in front of her. There was a wound in the back of her head. The hair around the wound was matted with blood that looked like tar in the dark. The ground beneath her, too, was thickened and black. It looked like her hair. It could’ve been her hair.
“No, please. Not her.” He kept praying as he approached her quietly. Begging for Choch to come back, give him another deal, and bring her back to life.
He approached as though Eva was only sleeping, and he was careful not to wake her. He placed his hands under her body and turned her over. He pictured her face, now, and the seven-year-old school picture that had been in her file.
“Oh no,” he whispered when he saw Maggie’s face. He felt relief and then guilt immediately after, that he was happy it wasn’t Eva, that he would’ve traded anybody for Eva.
Cole brushed some hair away from her face. His mind went into overdrive. Could this have been Tristan, getting revenge on her after their very public fight? He instantly banished the theory. Tristan was an asshole, but he wasn’t capable of doing something like this. Could she have done it herself? So upset about the break-up from her long-time boyfriend? No. You’d talked to her about this, Cole thought. She seemed to want the relationship over, and that’s what she got. It had to be the same killer. There weren’t two people going around shooting kids around Wounded Sky.
“But this doesn’t make sense,” Cole said, as though she could hear him. “You weren’t in the folder.”
He fished around the ground with his fingers. His fingertips connected with something hard and cool. He wrapped his hands around the handle of a pistol. Could she have? He looked at her wound more carefully. Oh, but if Jayne were here, he could’ve seen it so much more easily. Still, it didn’t take an abundance of light, or medical expertise, to tell that the wound was created at the back of the head, not the front.
“Who did this to you?” Cole asked, but the answer seemed painfully obvious. It was the third time he had failed. All he could do now was figure out why he, Ashley, Alex, and Eva were on the list, why he and Eva were still alive, and why Maggie had been killed when she wasn’t in the folder.
Cole looked for any evidence, something that might lead him to the killer, because the murderer certainly wasn’t at the camp. God, Cole thought, while I was rummaging through stuff in his backpack, he was here, killing Maggie. The thought gave him a chill.
He heard a sound behind him. Cole’s body tensed. His heart raced. No time for a pill. Surprisingly, he didn’t even think to take one. In fact, he was about to turn around and face the killer, rather than run. Before he could turn, though, he heard a familiar voice order, “Don’t move!”
“I didn’t do this, Mr. McCabe. I found Maggie like this, I swear.”
“And the gun?” Reynold asked.
Cole looked down at his hand where, yes, he was holding the gun. “Shit.” Was it not the number one thing you should not do at a crime scene—touch anything, especially the murder weapon? And not only had he picked up the gun, but he’d also turned over Maggie’s body, got down on his knees right beside her. He looked away from his hand to the rest of his body, and sure enough, her blood was everywhere, on his knees, his hands, his clothes. Had he not learned anything from Ashley’s murder scene?
“It was here on the ground,” Cole said of the gun, knowing that the explanation was never going to fly. “I picked it up, I…”
“Drop it!”
The gun fell to the ground and landed with a hollow thump.
“She was on her stomach when I found her. I turned her over to see who it was…” Cole stopped recounting his own stupidity. He realized how this all looked.
He heard Reynold’s footsteps come closer and then kick the gun further away.
“Put your hands behind your back,” Reynold ordered.
Reynold put cuffs around Cole’s wrists. Was this it, the end of his journey already, the path behind him lined with his own failings? What would that mean for the ones he’d saved ten years earlier? Eva. Brady. Would they now cease to exist? Would he? Or did that even matter? Would Eva be next, with Cole locked up, helpless to save her?
“I’m disappointed.” Cole heard Reynold take two steps back. “Here I was, defending you, in front of everyone. Now look at what you’ve done. Ashley, Alex, Maggie. How can I defend you now? Help me understand, Cole.”
“I didn’t do any of this. Think about it, Mr. McCabe. Where was the gun at Ashley’s trailer if I’d killed him? Mr. Kirkness was right there with me. What’s at Alex’s house that’s tied to me? Why would I leave there, but stay here with Maggie if I killed her?” Cole was scrambling, and he knew it, but Reynold had believed in Cole before, so why not now?
“I might have believed some of that, if you weren’t standing over Maggie’s body, blood all over your clothes, and a gun in your hand.”
Cole had nothing to say to that. He considered telling Reynold the truth, that he was at the camp and heard the gunshot, and came running. As quickly as he considered it, however, he decided against it. For the first time, and not only because Reynold had him at gunpoint, Cole could see why others were wary of him.
“Mr. McCabe, how’d you get here so fast?” Cole asked.
“Excuse me?” Reynold said.
“I was close when I heard the gunshot. Ran here faster than I’d ever run. But you got here almost as fast,” Cole said. “No offence, Mr. McCabe, but you don’t look that fast.”
“I was looking for kids out here, making sure they got home from the bonfire. It’s not safe, Cole. They could’ve run into you.”
“But everybody was leaving through Wounded Sky. Why would you be—”
In the middle of his sentence, Cole heard Reynold take two quick, heavy steps towards him, and then he felt something strike the back of his head. Wounded Sky’s dark night got a whole lot darker.