“You all right?” he asks.
“I won’t be for long apparently. And neither will you.”
Jude shakes his head. “I told you, I don’t think we’re hurt.”
“I know you’re not.” I point at my doll, ignoring the way my finger shakes. “Victim.” Then I point at the other three. “Killers. It’s pretty obvious.”
“But it’s not going to happen,” Lucas says.
“You’re damn right it’s not,” I say, walking closer to the sled. Mr. Walker’s head lolls to the left, and his mouth is slack. There are fresh stains on his T-shirt. I frown. “Why is he out again? He was coming to when we got here. When the speaker was playing. What happened?”
“I’m not sure,” Emily says. “He didn’t wake up when I screamed.”
“Oh, he did. Long enough to throw up again,” Jude says. “That’s about it.”
Emily nods. “Maybe he’s working it out of his system.”
“Well, he needs to work it out quicker,” I mutter.
I walk around him, assessing. Which is ridiculous because I don’t know anything medically helpful. But I know it’s time to wake him up. If Mr. Walker has been drugged to keep him out of the way, then we need to fix that. It’s time to change the game.
My muscles are sluggish and achy, and my stomach hurts, but I square my shoulders like I’m giving final instructions before opening night.
“I think we need to stop reacting,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
“We’re responding to everything this asshole does. We find water—we all talk about whether or not to drink it. We hear noise—we chase it.”
“We get food, and we all sit around wondering if we should eat it,” Lucas says, nodding at the cooler with a look of disgust.
I smile. “Exactly. We are feeding into this game like rats in a maze. We need to stop trying to solve his little riddles. We need to remember what he did to Ms. Brighton and Hayley and Madison. He’s going to do that to me. And he’s going to try to pin it on you somehow.”
We all go quiet at the mention of their names. It’s easier when we pretend to forget.
“So, what then?” Emily finally asks.
Jude and Lucas nod, and I straighten my back.
“We change the game,” I say. “Wreck his plan.”
“I’m in,” Jude says. “But how?”
“First, we wake up our teacher. He’s been asleep the whole time, and we haven’t. That’s not an accident. He knows more than us, right? He could get us out of here.”
“She’s right.” There’s an energy in Jude’s expression I’m not sure I’ve ever seen. “Asshole or not, he could get us out of here. He knows all this crap.”
“Yes,” I say. “The drugs have to wear off. We haven’t left him alone, so we know he hasn’t gotten any today. He’s come around a little, right?”
“Some,” Emily agrees. “Here and there.”
“So we keep trying to wake him up.”
Lucas nods. “OK, what else?”
“We eat. We’re all out of energy, and it’s slowing us down too much.”
Emily arches a brow. “How do we know it’s safe?”
“We don’t,” Jude says, arms crossing under his chest.
Lucas’s mouth twitches. “The blood around those dolls tells me it isn’t poison we need to be worried about.”
“But logically, it’s a risk, right?” Emily asks.
“Logic isn’t working out here,” I say. “Believe me, I prefer to have both a method and a plan, but I have to go with my gut here. I don’t think the food will hurt us.”
“You could just be hungry,” Jude says.
“I’m ravenous. But those foods are all my favorites,” I admit. “You could have packed that whole cooler at my house.”
“Since you’re the one who winds up dead, that isn’t comforting,” Jude says. “No offense.”
I wave it off. “It’s fine. It’s a valid point, but I think this is part of the plan. It’s my last meal or whatever or at least that’s his plan.”
“Whose plan?” Emily asks.
“Whoever wrote on us and made these creepy-ass dolls,” Lucas says. Then he bumps his chin at me, and I can see the smile in his eyes, hear the affection in his tone. “The same freak who thinks this walking pistol over here is a Darling.”
“That freak could kill us all instead,” Emily says.
Anger, white-hot and knife-sharp, runs along my skull. I scoop the dolls out and toss them, sending them scattering. “That freak isn’t counting on how hard we’re about to fight back.”
Chapter 17
The food doesn’t kill us, but Mr. Walker’s stench might. I don’t think there’s a bodily function he hasn’t experienced on our sled, and as bad as I feel for him, he smells vile enough to melt my skin right off my face. Emily’s the only one who can get within six feet, and every time she ventures into the hot zone, I wonder a little more about what things are like at her house.
Jude catches me watching and gives me a calculating look. What the hell gives with that? Two days ago, Jude and Emily were virtually strangers—and not overly friendly ones at that. Now they’re so buddy-buddy, he gives me the stink eye for looking at her wrong?
Then again, two days ago, I would have said I’d sooner grow a pair of wings than kiss Lucas. Again.
My lips tingle with the memory. I press them together hard and turn back to the task at hand. Mr. Walker is rousing. Finally. We’ve been chattering at him nonstop, and at first, we didn’t get much—just nonsense noises and head movements, a little kid rolling away from the light in the middle of the night. We all go still when it changes.
He groans out something closer to a word and lifts his head. Then he smacks his lips together, and my shoulders hunch. Is he going to throw up again? God, I hate watching people vomit. His shirt makes me queasy enough.
He jerks his head back a few times like he might, and then his eyes flutter and finally open. He looks at Emily, then Jude, then Lucas. Finally, he looks at me, and his lips stretch into a strained smile. Cue the rising music—we’ve got a live one.
“You all look pretty freaked out.” His laugh splinters like dead wood. “I don’t know what I got in to, but it messed me up plenty. Did we run into bad water?”
I tilt my head. “You could say that.”
“It’s all right,” he says. “I’m alive, so you can stop with the long faces.”
None of us can seem to manage a response to that. Because it’s clear he doesn’t remember the bits we’ve told him. He doesn’t know what’s happened to us.
Mr. Walker gives an awkward laugh, but I can’t force myself to smile back at him. No one says anything, and I have zero idea where to start, but we have to tell him. Because right now, he thinks the extent of our problem is a teacher with a nasty stomach bug.
My heart twists, imagining what he’s going to feel when we fill him in on Ms. Brighton.
“Well, don’t everyone talk at once. What time is it? How long was I out?” he asks, and then he looks around, forehead furrowing. “Wait, where are Ms. Brighton and Madison and Hayley? Are they still on the other side of the river?”
“What do you remember, Mr. Walker?” I ask.
I can tell his brain is prodding at his foggy memory, pushing for answers. His expression turns grave before he speaks again. “Where are the tents? Where are we right now?”
Emily tries to reply, but the words catch and snag on her tears.
I’m done crying for now, so I take the lead. “Things are bad. You’ve been asleep for a couple of days. Do you remember anything? Do you remember us moving you on the sled?”
His brow scrunches, creases forming so fast that I think of one of Mom’s scarves sliding off her dresser, folding over and over, an accordion of silk against the bedroom wa
ll.
“No,” he says. “What’s happened?”
“There is a murderer out here,” I say. It’s the first time I’ve said the word, and I have to fight off a shudder. “We think Ms. Brighton has been killed. We don’t know about Madison and Hayley, but we called for them. They didn’t answer. There were—” I think of the birds, the swarms of flies buzzing. “I don’t think they made it. We haven’t been hurt, but we were all drugged. You most of all. We think they used sleeping pills or some other sedatives. They put it in our water.”
He struggles like he wants to argue, but I hold up a hand and fill him in on the rest, bit by bit. The destroyed supplies, the words on our arms, the numbers we’ve found, building the sled, our plans to head north, and the noise that led us here. When I finish, Mr. Walker’s eyes search the area.
“Where exactly is here?” he asks. “Does anyone have a compass? Anything useful?”
“No on all counts,” Lucas says.
“How far are we from where we started? From where we left the girls?”
“Maybe three or four miles?” Lucas guesses. “I’ve been trying to cut north for the road.”
“You shouldn’t be too far off it. Maybe a day’s hike, six or seven miles? But we need to head back to the river first. That bridge is out, but there should be another a mile to the west. Or there will be places where the water may be low by now.”
We prickle so fast at the idea, it’s like we’re turning into cacti. Lucas picks up on it and leans forward.
“We’re not going back to the river. It was a hard hike, there were bears baited to our camp…and we think we’re being followed.”
Mr. Walker’s expression twitches. It’s like he’s holding himself in check. Forcing himself not to sigh or roll his eyes. I can see it written all over his face—he’s in denial.
He doesn’t believe us. He doesn’t believe us because he can’t handle this.
“I know it sounds crazy,” I say. “But someone is out here, and they aren’t hunting deer. They are hunting us.”
Mr. Walker shakes his head, making a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a groan and a complete dismissal. He does this in school sometimes when a kid makes a joke. He tries to play along, but then he’ll make a sound—just like this one. It’s his version of a fade-out. Yes, the joke was funny, so har-har-har, but could we all turn to page sixty-nine and get serious about these polynomials?
He makes the sound again, eyes going a little wide when no one laughs or opens a textbook. I feel so bad for him when I lift my arm to show him the word again. Lucas shuffles to my doll and holds it in the air with a tight smirk.
Mr. Walker’s eyes fix on that mess of twigs, and I see the realization sliding down over every feature. Just as fast, his guard slams back up. I can’t blame him. None of this is easy to swallow.
“Let’s try to stick with the facts here and save the boogeyman talks for later.” He licks his lips, obviously determined to hold on to his disbelief.
I get it. If I could cling to the world where camping trips mean mosquito bites and leaking tents and maybe a sprained ankle, I would.
Ms. Brighton would have been better at this. God knows she would have bastardized bits and pieces of half a dozen religions to explain it, but I’m pretty sure she could handle mystery words and voodoo dolls better than Mr. Walker.
Jude sighs. “It doesn’t matter if you believe us. We just need you to help us get out of here before our neighborhood psychopath figures out you’re awake and comes back for us.”
Mr. Walker holds up a hand that looks pale and shaky. “Something’s going on—that’s clear—but murder? We’re in the middle of nowhere. Now, you saw something. I believe that, but we can’t just—”
“I saw a body,” I say softly, interrupting him. “I think it was Ms. Brighton. It was—” I pull a breath that feels like spun glass, thinking of the dark, wet thing behind the bushes. “Someone cut off her finger, Mr. Walker. Hung it from a tree. There were flies. Vultures.”
“I saw it too,” Lucas says. “Looked like there might have been more than one body.”
“That’s just that damn rumor talking,” Mr. Walker says. “It’s messing with your heads.”
Lucas moves forward. “That stupid ghost story? That’s real?”
“It’s not a ghost story!” Mr. Walker seems incensed. “It’s a terrible tragedy. It took days to find that girl, and her family was grief stricken. No one should have ever started using her death as some sort of cheap fireside entertainment.”
Days to find that girl.
“What are you talking about?” Jude snaps. “You’re telling us the girl was real? The one who was eaten? I thought that was an urban myth.”
Mr. Walker turns away from him.
“I knew it was real but not like that,” Emily says. “And it happened here in these woods?”
“No, not right here,” Mr. Walker says, but I can see the way his eyes shift. He’s skirting the truth. “And it was nothing like Madison told it, Emily. It’s tragic, and she treated it like a joke.”
“She treated it like a ghost story,” Jude says. “And that’s what we all thought it was!”
Goose bumps bloom on the backs of my arms. “Why are we even out here if there was a murder?”
“It wasn’t a murder!” Mr. Walker goes pale. Or more pale. He’s already looking like death eating a saltine cracker, but I can tell something changes. He drops his voice to a soft mutter. “Look, when bad things happen, people talk. They want someone to blame.”
Emily stiffens. “My dad said no one really knows what happened to her.”
“Yeah, I remember hearing that too. Back when we all thought it was a ghost story.” Jude scowls at Mr. Walker. “Tell me, were our parents aware you planned to have us camping at an old crime scene?”
“I already told you it wasn’t a murder!” Mr. Walker looks at Jude like a glass of curdled milk. Maybe Jude was telling the truth about Mr. Walker avoiding his desk.
“There was a camping trip,” Mr. Walker continues. “Not organized like this. Just four kids who planned a party in the woods. They weren’t prepared, and one of them didn’t make it back. These things happen in the wilderness.”
“And then a bear eats your body,” Lucas says.
“It’s all about preparation.” Mr. Walker says. “Careless people die in the woods all the time.”
“Maybe,” Lucas admits. “But I’m pretty sure they don’t wake up with words on their arms and dollies dressed in their clothes. If you’re wrong and that girl was killed, her killer could still be out here!”
Mr. Walker’s face mottles, and I stiffen. He looks like he wants to hand out detentions. Or worse. Does he really think we’re pushing his authority here? Or that this is some senior live murder-mystery prank gone horribly wrong?
“If I find out this is all someone’s sick idea of a—” He stops abruptly, eyes lolling and breath gone raspy. Emily approaches with quiet detachment, and the rest of us wait. In a moment, he opens his eyes and struggles against the sled. His expression is still surly. “We’ll discuss this more as soon as you help me out of this.”
Lucas tilts his head, and something cold zips through me. He doesn’t untie him right away, and if Jude’s expression is any indicator, he’d just as soon leave him to rot in his own filth. Eventually, it’s Emily who unfastens the ropes.
My heart clenches when Mr. Walker stumbles awkwardly to his feet, but I don’t reach to help him. I stand there like a pillar of stone.
He disappears in a clump of trees and brush, and we can hear him groan. Fumble with his belt buckle. Before I can think too long about that or about what will inevitably follow, I move away, and the rest come with me.
We cluster together by a hemlock, heads bowed and fists clenched. Lucas budges in close to me and takes a slow breath.
“OK, am I the only one who’s suddenly thinking about the fact that it was Mr. Walker who gave us the drugged water first? It was in his pack.”
My stomach sloshes, a boat bumping over a rock at the bottom of a stream. “What are you saying? He’s our teacher.”
“I’m saying I don’t trust him,” Lucas whispers. “I mean, come on. He planned this trip intending to take us to the exact forest where a girl mysteriously died?”
“He was drugged,” I whisper.
“Drugging can be faked,” Lucas says. “He was asleep, not foaming at the mouth. He knows too much about that dead girl.”
Jude nods at him, a strange camaraderie in the look they exchange. His voice is also low when he responds. “I’m with Lucas. That makes two of us.”
“Three,” Emily says. Her eyes are dark smudges in the shadows.
In the distance, Mr. Walker gives a gurgling groan that wrings my insides out. I press my sweat-slick hands together, my pulse going thready. “So, what now? What do we do?”
Jude shuffles closer, whispering even lower. “We watch him like a hawk, and we watch out for each other.”
“But he’s going to try to take charge,” I say. “That’s what teachers do.”
“He’s too sick to take charge,” Emily says. “Whatever else is true, he’s not faking that. He has a fever.”
“Which means he can’t be a part of any of this,” I say, hating how desperate I sound to believe it. “Sick people can’t carry out crazy elaborate plans.”
“Maybe that’s why nothing’s happening right now,” Jude says.
“Maybe he’s not as sick as you think,” Lucas says. “He could be a good actor.”
Emily shakes her head. “No, he’s got a fever. You can’t fake that sort of thing.”
“Can’t fake what sort of thing?”
The hair on the back of my neck rises as I turn, but we all know who’s asking. It’s Mr. Walker. He’s standing maybe twenty feet away, and I have no idea how he finished up and got this close without us hearing him. But I know he must have been moving quietly.