“So that’s why he went outside while you were searching the cabin for the gun? To shoot up?”
“Probably. I don’t like it when he does it around me, and he definitely didn’t want you guys to see.”
Galen being a heroin addict really did explain a lot of his behavior. His irritability in the afternoons at school, his breezy attitude the rest of the time, even his general bravado.
“Weren’t you worried about someone hiding out in the woods?” I said.
“He didn’t tell me he was doing it,” Mia said. “He just left. I really didn’t know he was gone.”
“You think the drugs could’ve made Galen do all those things?” Liam asked. “The things that have been happening to us all weekend?” This hadn’t occurred to me, but it made sense.
Mia shook her head. “No! I know you don’t believe me, but he managed it. He never got out of control. Ever.”
“He was out of control enough to leave the cabin alone in order to shoot up,” I pointed out.
“It’s not the same thing,” Mia said. “Yeah, he had a problem with drugs, but he took it out on himself, not other people. He liked you guys. He never would’ve done these things.” Mia looked at me. “You don’t believe me that he used, do you? Needles don’t leave tracks—that’s a big misconception. Not unless you shoot up in the same place over and over. But if you look close, you can see the marks on his arms. He did it in his armpits a lot too.” She nodded to the bedroom. “Go check. He kept his stash in a glasses case in the front of his coat.”
I remembered the lump I’d felt in Galen’s jacket, and the discoloration I’d seen under his arms when we’d gone skinny-dipping. And I remembered at the tattoo parlor, when those guys had chased us down that alley. That wasn’t about Galen sleeping with that guy’s girlfriend, it was about some drug deal gone bad.
Everything Mia said fit.
Even so, I said, “I don’t know what to believe. I know someone’s been jerking us around, and I know someone is now dead. Then you turn up with a weapon in your pocket that you didn’t tell us about, after pretending we were still helpless victims. And when another part of your story doesn’t make sense, you finally admit that your boyfriend is a drug addict.”
I was sixty percent sure Mia was going to explode in anger, but once again she didn’t. All she said was, “I didn’t do it. And Galen didn’t either.”
“But you can’t prove that,” I said.
“I didn’t know I had to.”
“I’m looking for an explanation,” Liam said. “That’s all.”
We all stood there, stock-still. Now the floor creaked under Mia’s feet, but she didn’t seem to have moved at all.
“I think we should leave,” I said at last.
“Leave?” Mia said. “Leave where?”
I was confused. Hadn’t Mia been the one who’d wanted to leave a few minutes before? I rubbed my face. My head was pounding, the headache worse than ever. I could feel both Mia and Liam staring at me.
“This cabin!” I said. “This whole place. We have a gun now. We have protection.” More specifically, I had the gun, and even if I had no idea how to use it, I wasn’t giving it up.
“And go where?” she said.
“The highway,” I said. “I don’t know. Anywhere but here. There’s something wrong with this place.”
“But it’s getting dark,” Mia said, “and the sheriff will be here soon. I thought we were waiting for the sheriff.”
“I don’t care!” I said. “I just need to get out of here!”
I turned for the door, eager to throw it open.
“Wait,” Mia said, stopping me. “I think I have one.”
“One what?” Liam asked.
“An explanation. When we were in Marot, when we went in that sporting goods store, we lost track of Galen. I think maybe he did go outside. To make a score.” As she talked, Mia crossed to the kitchen and poured herself a bowl of cereal with milk from the cooler.
“It was weird how fast he could always spot a dealer,” Mia went on. “It’s like they have some kind of secret code to identify each other. Maybe it was those guys leaning against those cars. I mean, Marot is poor. It’s desperate. It may not look like it, but it’s exactly the kind of place where a lot of drug deals happen. But maybe it somehow went bad. Maybe Galen gave them some bills wrapped around some newsprint or something. Heroin is expensive, and Galen doesn’t have a lot of money. Maybe the dealer was so angry that he and his friends followed us all the way up to this cabin. If they live around here, they’d probably know these woods better than anyone.”
Liam and I listened. Another drug deal gone bad? It actually made sense. We knew from first-hand experience that Galen did things that really pissed dealers off.
But if drug dealers were the ones harassing us, if they were the ones who’d killed Galen, that meant they were still out there in the woods. Maybe they’d leave now that Galen was dead, but maybe they wouldn’t. For all they knew, Galen was buying dope for the lot of us. And along with revenge, they probably also wanted their money.
“Then we’re safer in here,” I said. “Inside. We’d be crazy to try to walk for the road, especially in the dark.” I was contradicting what I’d said before, but Mia’s new theory changed everything.
“When did this stuff go stale?” Mia said, meaning the cereal. But she didn’t stop eating it.
“We can seal the windows,” Liam said. “Break off the doors to the kitchen cabinets and nail them over the windows.” He nodded to the items on the kitchen table. “We have a hammer and nails. It might not keep them out if they really want to get inside, but it’ll slow them down.” He nodded at me, at the gun in my hand. “And now we have a gun.”
I looked back at the front door. I knew I’d locked it, and it looked locked now, but I was tempted to check it to make sure. At least the dead bolt looked strong.
“We don’t have to hold out forever,” Mia said, gripping the bowl of cereal like it was a life preserver. “Just five or six hours.”
Five or six hours? Suddenly that seemed like an eternity.
I put the gun on the table for the time being.
The first thing to do was seal the windows, like Liam had said. There were only three windows in all, two in the main room and one in the bedroom. The hardest part was getting the doors off the kitchen cabinets. We didn’t have a screwdriver, so we had to tear them right off their hinges. The metal squealed like an animal dying. If there really was anyone outside watching us, they’d probably think we were in here torturing one another.
As we worked, my head throbbed. It wasn’t just all the crazy thinking I’d been doing, it was everything: the tension of the situation, the squealing metal, and the sour smell of Galen’s piss. Changing my shirt hadn’t been enough. The stuff must have dried on my skin, and now that I was perspiring, it was stronger than ever. But I couldn’t wash it off because there wasn’t any running water in the cabin.
We sealed the windows in the front room first. The cabinet doors didn’t cover the windows completely, but at least they’d stop anyone from trying to crawl inside. Then Liam and I headed into the bedroom while Mia stayed at the dinner table trying to figure out the mousetraps. If they worked okay, we could still set them around outside.
In the bedroom, I held the wood up to the window while Liam positioned the nail so he could start hammering.
Something clattered in the front room. Was it a mousetrap snapping, or something else?
Liam and I looked at each other.
“Mia?” I called.
Something scraped against the floor in the other room—a chair. Then it sounded like the chair fell over.
Mia gasped, almost like she was choking.
Liam and I ran to the doorway of the bedroom.
Mia had fallen to the floor by the dinner table. She was on her back, like a beetle that had been tipped over, her arms flailing, reaching for things she couldn’t touch.
She was convulsing, li
terally foaming at the mouth.
It took a second for all this to make sense. Had she been shot? But the windows were mostly covered, and we hadn’t heard any gunfire or breaking glass. Had someone come into the cabin and attacked her? My eyes found the dead bolt on the door, and it was still latched. Besides, except for Mia, the room was empty.
Liam and I ran to her side.
“Mia!” Liam said. “What’s wrong?”
She tried to speak, or maybe to scream, but nothing came out of her mouth, just a white foam that bubbled up like a science experiment gone wrong. Unlike with Galen’s dead body, this did look like it does in the movies. It was that weirdly perfect.
Did Mia have some disease I didn’t know about, epilepsy or something? But Liam looked as surprised as me. So was she faking it?
She wasn’t faking it. Her whole body began to twist. I’d never seen anyone move like that, flex and jerk into such weird positions, still on her back. Her eyes bulged, her face flushed impossibly red, and she gasped for air, desperate to breathe. She wasn’t even trying to scream now.
Whatever this was, she was in terrible pain.
Liam and I tried everything to help her, to save her. We thought she might be choking on something, so we tried the Heimlich maneuver, but she pushed us away—or maybe it was her flailing. Then, thinking she was having some kind of seizure, we tried to hold her down, but she kept pulling away from us, thrashing about.
Finally, after what seemed like an hour but may have only been ten minutes, she whimpered. In a way, that was the most disturbing thing so far, because somehow I knew she knew it was all over.
She went rigid one final time, as stiff as a cupboard door, then fell completely slack. I won’t say I could see the light leaving her eyes, because that also sounds too perfect, but that’s almost the way it looked.
I checked for a pulse, and there wasn’t one, like I knew there wouldn’t be.
Mia was dead, and Liam and I were alone. But time did not stop now, or even slow. It just ticked on, second by second, propelling us both forward into whatever the hell was going to happen next.
18
For a long time, Liam and I stared down at Mia’s lifeless body.
After Galen, I knew what a dead body looked like, how limp and lifeless it could be. That’s what Mia looked like now. But she hadn’t just fallen dead. Something had happened to her. Someone had done this. And whoever that someone was, they had to still be around.
But I had no idea what to do about any of this. It was like I was paralyzed.
Finally Liam said, “What the hell?”
That knocked me into motion. I stood up and walked to the door. Now I did check the lock, but everything was fine. The windows in the front room were still covered too.
So what had happened?
I looked down at Mia again, the pain and fear frozen on her face. But there were no answers there.
I noticed the spiderweb tattoo on her wrist, red and a little puffy, like it had become infected, or maybe it was only still healing. Not that it would ever heal now.
“Rob, what just happened?” Liam said louder. “How did she die?”
I looked around the room. Only now did I notice the box of rat poison on the table. I picked it up and read the back. The print was old and faded.
“Strychnine,” Liam said. He stood behind me reading the ingredients on the box.
“What—?”
“It’s a poison. A nasty one. I don’t think it’s used much anymore.”
“But how—?” Even as I said this, I knew the answer: Mia’s bowl of cereal. I turned to her dirty dish on the kitchen counter. Someone must have mixed the poison in with her cereal.
I looked inside the box of poison. There was still a little bit of rat poison left, dark and flaky, almost like wood shavings. I looked into the box of cornflakes, and even though I couldn’t make out the rat poison, I knew there was some in there too. With everything mixed together, Mia wouldn’t have seen it either. She’d said it had tasted stale.
I didn’t say any of this to Liam. He already knew.
“Whoever killed Galen killed Mia too,” I said. “They must have come into the cabin when we were over at the Brummits.”
“Unless . . .” Liam said thoughtfully.
I looked at him.
“Galen,” he said.
“What about him?”
“Maybe it was Galen who did this. Before he died. With everything going on, he had to know that Mia would have a bowl of cereal before too long. So he put the poison in her cereal.”
“But then why did Mia kill him?”
“Because she found out what he’d been doing. That he was the one who’d been harassing us all along. They fought, and she killed him, and then she lied to us about the whole thing.”
Somehow Liam had found a way to blame Galen after all. But if he was right, it meant we were safe, that anyone who might harass or kill us was already dead. That all we had to do was wait a few more hours for the sheriff to arrive.
But what if he’s not right? I thought. What if it was someone else who had done all these terrible things?
Liam and I kept staring at each other, not moving.
And then we did something I never in a million years thought I’d do in a situation like that.
We had sex.
First, Liam leaned over and kissed me.
I immediately kissed him back. I wasn’t surprised by what he had done, not at all. It was like I’d been expecting it.
It was a passionate kiss, daring and desperate. As we kissed, our fingers fumbled with each other’s buttons and zippers and elastic bands. Our hands roamed across each other’s bare skin, over muscles, into crevices, stroking and squeezing, cupping and probing.
Clothes disappeared as if by magic. They were suddenly all around us on the floor.
Then we were naked together on that floor. Fields of skin had appeared, hills and valleys to be explored with hands and tongues, even as we gasped and grunted and moaned. I followed trails of dark hair that led to forests of thatch. Things dripped, but not on me, not like in the rain forest. This time I tasted the moisture, Liam’s sweat and more. I took it inside my mouth, savored its flavor, let it become part of me.
I honestly can’t believe I’m telling you all this—I’m really embarrassed right now—but I think it’s important for you to know, to understand exactly how I felt.
I was closer to dying than I’d ever been in my entire life, and I was closer to actual death than I’d ever been and probably ever will be until the day I die myself: there was a dead body in the bedroom and another one not five feet from us. The mud I’d tracked in from the rain forest surrounded us like Satanic symbols painted on the floor.
But I’d never felt more alive. Galen’s and Mia’s bodies were dead and limp and sagging, but not Liam and me. Our bodies were firm and taut and throbbing. Everything that could be hard was hard, everything soft was tender and vulnerable. All the blood that flowed was warm and alive.
It was the hottest sex I’ve ever had in my life—hotter than my first time with Liam, hotter than that night up in the loft. It’ll probably be the hottest sex I ever will have, but it wasn’t necessarily because of anything we did.
It was why we were doing it, what it meant.
Mia and Galen were dead, but Liam and I weren’t. And through this complicated ritual called sex, this magic spell that we somehow instinctively knew the motions to, we could ward off death, keep it at bay, no matter how close by it might be. And the louder we grunted, the harder and deeper we thrust against each other, into each other, the farther we pushed the darkness away.
At least until we were done. We went on like that for at least half an hour, but eventually our bodies exploded in release. Our heartbeats slowed, and our bodies relaxed. We were still alive, the blood was still flowing, but everything was back like it was before.
When it came to death, all bets were off again.
I looked over at Liam, spe
nt and naked on the floor. No words were needed to say what I was feeling, how satisfied I was, how close I felt to him. We’d been so in sync before, often knowing what the other was thinking, but it hadn’t been like this. It had never occurred to me that human beings could even be this close. All that talk people do about sex and love, about people becoming one? Until now, I’d always thought it was just so many words, some kind of stupid metaphor. But it didn’t feel like a metaphor now. The sex had made us one, and even though the sex was over, it was like we were still one person, sharing all the very same thoughts and fears, with no distance or barriers between us. And I knew it was the danger we were in, all the things that had happened, that had made us this way. Did that make the whole experience worthwhile?
Not unless we survived, it didn’t.
From my spot on the floor, I could see up under the dinner table. There were spiderwebs there too, lots of them, thick and silvery. There were more webs under the chairs. I thought we’d gotten them all on Friday night, but we hadn’t, not even close.
Liam sat upright. “We should go.”
I sat upright too. “You want to leave the cabin?”
He nodded. “We’re not safe here. We never were. Even if Galen did poison the cereal for Mia, who’s to say that’s the only trap he left? Maybe there’s a bomb in the fireplace. Maybe he cut some beam and the whole roof’s about to collapse.”
“But—” I began.
“—we don’t know the roads?” he finished. “We can take our chances. Besides, we know the direction of the main highway. We can cut through the forest if we have to. It can’t be more than ten miles.”
“But what if—?”
“—there really is someone out there waiting for us? Well, if we stay here, they know exactly where we are. And besides—”
“—we still have the gun.”
I met him smile for smile.
Like I said, Liam and I were one.
• • •
The tin cans with the nails inside rattled quietly when we opened the door.
Night had fallen, and the moon, if there was one, was still hidden behind soggy clouds. But we didn’t dare dig for the flashlights in our backpacks for fear that we’d be obvious in the dark. We started for the road.