Undone: The Complete Duology, page 32
She pulled a switchblade from her jacket. The blade gleamed in the weak winter sun.
“The town may want you alive, but I don’t. I’m going to carve out your heart and bring it to the Reverend,” she said without so much as a smile.
She was dead serious. This entire situation was rational to her, somehow.
With my hands on the ground behind me, I pushed down and slammed my sole into her knee with a crunch. She bit down on a yelp and tottered back and forth.
Then she swung her gaze back to me.
“Beth, wait!”
I jerked my head back to where Bobby peered from the cave. His face was red and purple, puffy and dehydrated at the same time. His bloodshot eyes darted between Bethany and me as he calculated the odds of the fight.
“Bethany, please, don’t,” he said.
Realization dawned on her face, then morphed to anger.
“I knew you did something!” She launched herself at me with the blade.
I rolled across the snow, out of the way. She stumbled into the remaining stack of logs. Bobby shot back in the cave as his barricade clattered apart.
Bethany spun on me as I staggered to my feet. With a screech, she raced at me again. I tried to catch her wrist to wrench the knife from her. Instead, the blade cut through my jacket sleeve and bit my arm. I ducked and skittered around her. She swung the blade again, delight in her eyes at scoring a strike.
Bobby struggled to stand, arms still bound behind him. He swayed before ducking out of the cavern. With each step, he grimaced as the snow buried his feet.
“Bethany! Wait!” He wobbled towards us, then collapsed on his knees. “Go get help! Bethany, please!”
Ignoring him, Bethany lunged at me again. I slid out of the way, using the frozen ground to my advantage. She swung around, thrusting the knife towards me. I darted back, barely missing a puncture wound in my stomach.
I took a few steps back. My heel caught on a rock just under the snow, and I slammed back to the ground.
Fighting in the snow sucked.
Bethany clomped towards me. “Just give it up, Gracie. You were always weaker than everyone else. Sheltered, catered to. What a shock it must have been to realize you weren’t so special after all.”
My soles slid on the snow as I tried to scoot out of her way.
“I just want out of this damn town,” I said through clenched teeth.
Not that it mattered. Bethany would never understand my plight.
“You will never leave.”
I launched off the ground and tackled her low, knocking her onto her back. We rolled back and forth on the snow as I grappled with her hand holding the knife. I needed to disarm her before she took out any eye—namely, mine.
I dug my fingers into her wrists, twisting to pry the weapon loose. She grit her teeth, then slacked her arm to pull away from me. Before I could stop her, she chucked the knife out of reach. It landed in the snow.
Bobby lifted his head to look at the knife several feet away from him. Then his head lolled forward again as if he had no energy to hold it up any longer.
I grabbed Bethany’s face, shoving down to hold her against the ground. She bucked underneath me and wedged her knee under my thigh.
“Just go, Bethany,” Bobby muttered. “Gracie is going to kill you too.”
He collapsed face first into the snow and didn’t move.
Bethany used her knee to flip me. My back slammed into the snow, knocking the wind out of me. She shoved off me using my stomach. I let out a low groan as I curled onto my side, pain racing up and down through my body. In my peripheral, Bethany stumbled a few steps then lugged up the rock that had tripped me earlier.
I forced myself onto my back, leveraging myself up on my elbows as she stormed towards me.
“You deserve everything we did to you,” she said, blood in the corner of her mouth. She hefted up the rock.
I put up my hand, trying to twist away, as she brought the rock down on my head. The world shifted then went black.
15
MAC
I braced myself against a log until the world stopped swaying. The pain in my ankle welled up in me, and I leaned forward and dry heaved. My throat ached with the strain. I finally collected myself, pushing down the agony, and crawled over the log in front of me.
Gracie’s footsteps formed a blurry trail in the snow. Since the storm had passed, her prints had not yet been covered. I hobbled after them as fast as my tender ankle would allow, careful not to put pressure on it. When I came down too hard, I stopped to heave before carrying on.
The surreal scene of Gracie swiping at me with the branch before stomping my ankle, knowingly and purposely, played back through my mind. How could she have done that to me?
Why had she? She had been a woman possessed, and yet I didn’t believe the church had gotten to her at long last.
Something else had happened. I needed to catch up with her, figure out what was going on. It would all make sense in the end.
I hoped. So many questions still remained unanswered.
Not only did I not understand why she had turned on me and then bolted like a wild stallion, but I hadn’t yet put together how the baby she’d lost factored into her quest for retribution against the town. I could understand the need for revenge, but what had set a fire under the town in the first place and forced them to cast out their golden child?
Gracie had once been so loved, and yet strings had attached that adoration to something far more sinister.
My head swam. I focused my attention on following her trail of kicked up snow through the trees. I didn’t dare to call for her. She hadn’t wanted me to come with her.
Scratching noises filled the distance. At first, I dismissed it as the wind, but the sound was far too repetitive and near the ground. I couldn’t identify any wildlife that would be making that sound. Not wolves, or deer, or chipmunks.
The sound grew louder. In Thorn Tree, nothing should go uninvestigated. God knew what was happening just out of sight.
I veered to the left to follow the noise, keeping an eye on Gracie’s path not to lose it. The scratching came from below a drop. I crouched behind a tree, breathing heavily against the pain in my ankle and now my opposite knee as it had taken the brunt of my weight over the last few hours. Carefully, I inched forward and peered over the edge.
The demon shadows gathered around, digging at the side of the rock wall. Their backs were to me, and I held my breath, afraid they might hear me. If I could still my heart, I would have.
I expected them to swing around to confront me. They either remained unaware of my presence, or they simply did not care. Their fixation on the cliff far exceeded any dog with a bone but wasn’t entirely unsimilar.
The rock wall rumbled. The pack huddled back and watched as a familiar orange line raced up the rock. The side of the mountain splintered, pulling apart to form the mouth of a dark tunnel. Warm air puffed out of the opening. Inside was darkness, but the tunnel appeared to go on forever.
One of the demons slipped inside, and the others filed after it, merging into the shadows and disappearing into the mountain.
I had no idea what I’d just witnessed, but I could guarantee nothing on this earth would convince me to traverse into the depths of that tunnel. The warm air had dissipated, but I couldn’t shake the strange feeling off my skin.
I turned back to the trail of Gracie’s footprints. They were muddled from her frantic run, but clear enough for me to continue to follow. The world around me was silent, and I couldn’t imagine where she had gone—or if she was safe. Any number of terrible things out in these woods could have gotten her, shadowy demons included, apparently.
Still, I resisted the urge to call to her. It was a strange sensation, the realization that for this moment, Gracie and I were not on the same side. We would be once she could explain what was happening, though.
I had to believe that. If I didn’t, everything that had transpired over the last few days would fall apart.
Up ahead, among the trees, a body lay face down in the snow. I leaned against a trunk to catch my breath then hurried towards the collapsed form. I couldn’t tell if it was still breathing, or who it was.
Please be Gracie. Please be okay.
Had the demons gotten her?
As I neared, my breath hitched. The body wasn’t Gracie, but I couldn’t identify them the way they laid with their face buried in the snow, their arms twisted behind their backs in a strange way.
Were they broken? Was the body dead?
I took another step, then the full scene came into my focus. Beyond the body gaped a small cave in the mountain. Around the entrance, logs were strewn in every direction. In the middle of the cave, a wooden chair sat, the legs frozen in an icy puddle.
Nothing made sense. Why a chair? Why this body?
I knelt next to the form and tentatively touched his frozen neck. I couldn’t make out a pulse, and his skin was far too cold and wet for me to determine anything for certain. I rested my palm on his back.
His rib cage moved up and down in slow shallow breaths.
Alive, but barely.
Grimacing against the pain in my body, I tucked my hands under his shoulder and hoisted him over.
All the air left my lungs.
Staring back up at me was my brother.
His face was pale and purple, with black puffy skin under his closed eyes. His blue lips were lined with traces of frozen blood.
“Robert?” I whispered.
What was he doing out here? How had he wound up here?
What was wrong with his arms?
The situation floated down into my brain like a paper seesawing on the breeze.
“Oh, crap.”
I rolled him onto his side to get a better look at his strangely moving arms. They were fastened with thick wet rope around his wrists that wound up his forearms. I lifted his sleeves, revealing raw skin that glimmered with ice crystals.
He wouldn’t last much longer in the snow. I eased him onto his back again and then hooked him under the armpits. Grunting, I pulled him a few inches. Normally, moving him wouldn’t have taken such effort, but I was barely standing upright on my own as it was.
I tried to determine where I was taking him. The frozen pond in the cave didn’t look promising, but snow covered everything outside the cavern. Pushing down the fiery pains shooting through my limbs, I dragged him to the side of the cavern and propped him in a sitting position against the rocks. His bare feet poked out from the snow, and I removed my jacket to bundle them with the hopes frostbite hadn’t yet set in.
Shivering against the cold encasing my arms and pressing against my shirt, I leaned down and patted his cheek.
“Robert? Wake up, man. Can you hear me?”
His eyes fluttered, and he groaned, rolling his head back and forth. A harsh cough escaped him. He drooped forward, and I caught him, easing him back against the rocks.
Finally, his eyes opened, but he stared at me vacantly.
I patted his cheek again, harder this time. “Stay awake, buddy. I can’t haul your ass out of here. I’m going to need your help with this.”
His vision cleared, and he focused on me. “Mac? You came… You came for me.”
“Of course I did. You’re my brother, asshat. Think I was gonna just leave you in this fucked up place? Not a chance.” I adjusted his shirt, and he winced. “You have to stay awake, though, alright?”
Robert nodded, albeit barely. “I just…I’m so…”
“I know,” I said. It didn’t really matter how that sentence ended. Nothing he felt right now had to be great. He was half frozen, and closer to dead than alive.
All that mattered was getting him out of here.
“Where are your shoes, bro? You can’t be out here trudging around like some barefooted hippy.”
I tried for a little levity, but he didn’t seem to possess enough energy to even attempt a smile.
“My arms,” he said, voice raspy. “Undo the ropes?”
Shit, how else was the guy expected to help with his escape?
“Lean forward,” I said, coming around to his side.
It seemed easier for him to slump forward than it was to stay upright. I crouched next to him, ankle throbbing—thanks, Gracie—and dug at the knot of ropes binding his arms behind his back. The ropes were wet and bulging, and I could barely get a hold on any of it.
This was going to take a minute.
I had to keep Robert awake though. His exhaustion wasn’t the kind that required sleep. He was on the brink of slipping away from me for good. I couldn’t let that happen. Not when we were this close to leaving this town.
I just needed to find Gracie. I’d located my brother. I had the map.
“Do you know that Dad hid something for you in the headmaster’s house?” I began as I struggled with the ropes.
“The map?” Robert didn’t sound surprised that I knew about the secret he shared with our father. “Yeah, he told me about it that one…”
“Thanksgiving,” I said. I’d already figured out that part. “Do you know how to read it?”
“The map?” Robert asked, dazed.
“Yes, Robert, the map. Do you know how to read the map? It doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.”
“I haven’t seen it,” he slurred, as if speaking clearly was beyond his abilities at that moment. “I don’t know what it looks like.”
That didn’t help me in the least.
“Dad didn’t give you a hint, a clue, not even a riddle?”
“Just read…Can’t you just read the…”
“There’s nothing to read,” I said.
My fingers slipped from the knot. I’d made no progress towards freeing him, even though my fingers burned with the effort.
I yanked off my gloves, my burned hand excruciating, and tried again to tug the knot apart.
“No street signs, no labels, not even a compass,” I added. “Just a bunch of squiggles and squares and shit.”
“The star.” He gasped as the skin under the ropes began to bleed from all my tugging and twisting. “Dad said to align the star.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I recalled a star on the map, but I couldn’t imagine how I was meant to align it with anything. “What is it? A treasure? The north star? I got nothing, Robert. I need something.”
“I don’t know.” He panted a few breaths. “I don’t know what it means. He just said to align the star.”
I swore under my breath.
“Can you…can you cut the rope?”
He sounded pained.
“I didn’t bring a knife,” I said softly. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get him out of this predicament. The ropes didn’t budge, not even a little. “Can you walk back to camp with me, and I can find something there?”
“I don’t…” He choked, and I stopped pulling on the ropes to give him space to recover. When he could breathe again, he said, “I can’t feel my arms. There’s a knife over there.”
He nodded out towards the snow.
I started to ask him what he meant, when a glint in the snow caught my eye.
I’ll be damned.
I jogged over towards where I had seen the reflection, careful not to lose the location in the vast white. My ankle throbbed and my arms burned with the cold.
An open switchblade lay on top of the snow, and I said a small prayer that the blade was clean. I wasn’t sure I could handle knowing it had recently been used on someone.
That, however, begged the question…
“Where the hell did the knife come from?” I asked as I returned to him. I somehow doubted he’d had one on him recently. He looked pretty beat up, like he’d been hanging out here in the cold for quite some time.
Now that he was conscious and alive, at least for the moment, new questions—and concerns—surfaced in my mind.
What was he doing out here? How long had he been here? Had the town told him about their intentions with him? Did they intend to come back soon to finish him off? Or were they just hiding him from me to keep me guessing?
What would happen to us when they realized I had helped him escape?
That last one, I could guess all on my own.
As soon as he was free, we needed to find where Gracie had gone and then get the fuck out of Dodge.
“That psycho chick,” Robert said, some life coming back to his voice as I crouched next to him.
I wiggled the blade under the ropes binding his arms.
“She was wrestling with Bethany,” he said, “but when Gracie—”
My head snapped up, my hand stilling. “Gracie? You’ve seen Gracie?”
With effort, Robert twisted his head to level his bloodshot gaze to me. He looked like an animated corpse under the splotchy skin.
“Who the fuck do you think tied me up here? That dumb bitch ambushed me as soon as I reached Thorn Tree.”
I stared at him, dumbfounded. The world around me swam.
Gracie? My Gracie?
That couldn’t be right.
She knew I was looking for my brother. She knew how important it was to me that I found him.
She knew.
She knew.
“You gonna cut the ropes or what?” Robert asked, with an edge. “I’m about to keel over here.”
He wheezed out a cough that sounded a bit like bronchitis.
I tried to shake off my stupor. This had to be a misunderstanding, though I couldn’t imagine how.
I also couldn’t imagine how Gracie had held my brother…hostage?
That wasn’t possible.
Was it possible?
My mind churned in faster circles.
“Mac!” Robert jostled his arms a little, then winced. “The ropes, yeah?”
“Right.” I went to cut the ropes, but my hand didn’t move.
Something was wrong.
I leaned to the side and took in my brother’s face.
This was Robert, wasn’t it? My brother. The man I had spent days searching for. The man whose disappearance had sent me to this terrible town in the first place.
He looked like my brother.
The world tipped and slid around me, like the ground had given way. I stared at a spot on the rocks near where Robert sat, trying to center myself back in reality.
