The Creeping (37 page)

“Shit, he has mush for brains.” Daniel takes a few steps away and jabs his finger at Caleb, who's standing with his hunched back to the trees. “I couldn't believe my luck when this idiot rolled into town. Fucking coward was pissing his pants when I told him what I did to my mom to keep
us
out of jail.” Daniel advances on Caleb. “What'd you tell me about Jane Doe?” he taunts. “It was the monster that did it to her?”

Daniel looks over his shoulder at me, smothering a contemptuous laugh. “He actually thinks that creature tucked a finger bone into the little redhead's hand.” His grin widens, and he winks just as
he did the afternoon at the cove—as if we're sharing a joke. He faces Caleb again. “You think it sliced the girl's scalp off, took a bite, and put the rest of it back? Your monster's got self-control, does it?” He spits a fat wad on the ground. Caleb stares at his shoes even as Daniel closes in on him. “Hey, look at me. Shit,” he snarls, sending a spray of saliva at Caleb. “You're a fucking idiot. You wanna know what goes bump in the night?” A pause. “I do. I'm the monster.”

I have trouble looking away from Caleb. He looks too much like his sister.
Zoey.
My legs twitch with a shot of adrenaline. They're twitching to run, to escape, to survive. I whirl around to face the lake, pressing my palms hard against the thudding in my chest, a wild hummingbird heartbeat near exploding. I order my feet to move for a minute before they get the signal. When they finally do, I stagger forward, stumbling, splashing up to my ankles.

I could make a run for it. I'm injured, though, and I'm not sure how fast I'd be. My gaze flicks back to Daniel and Caleb. Daniel shoves his fists into Caleb's chest. Caleb pushes back. They're distracted. With a head start I could hide in the woods. I could swim out a few yards and tread water, or float if I'm too weak, at least until Sam and the cops get here. Really, there are a dozen ways I could try to stay alive. But with every passing minute of Zoey knocked out on that bit of an island, it's more likely she'll drown. Even if I reach her, I won't be able to do more than keep her on that dock. Even in better conditions—sun shining, tepid water, and my shoulder not bleeding and split open—I'm not strong enough to tow her limp body to the opposite shore. Daniel and Caleb bet their whole plan on my love for
Zoey. On my willingness to die in order to save her. And I'm helpless but to play right into their hands.

My shoulder spasms as I throw my hoodie over my head; its angry buzz threatens to pull me deep into a soupy haze. I kick my tennis shoes from my feet and peel off my socks. I finally step deeper into the lake. The water's so cold it burns. It won't be swimmable until July. Great. I'll add hypothermia to the list of things that might kill me tonight. The dark water laps at my knees, my thighs, my waist. I shove off, closing my eyes and baring my teeth, reaching forward in a breaststroke.

I dunk my face, trying to bear the pain and cold all at once. I surface, mouth gaping open, a silent scream rising from my frozen lungs. The chill tears at my skin, hammers into my spine, drills into my head. I dunk back under and reach forward to propel myself again. I do it ten more times and the numbness begins setting in. The less sensation in my arms, the more I can move my injured shoulder. I pick up the pace, aware that I don't have long, aware that death is chasing me.

Ten more strokes and no matter how I gulp air, I can't catch my breath. My legs kick slowly, suddenly too heavy to move through the water. I get stuck under, unable to lift my head above the surface, like Jeanie really is weighing me down. No, Jeanie is dead. Daniel and Caleb killed her.
Like they're killing Zoey.

A little surge of panic electrifies my limbs, and I hit the surface. But I don't stop. I never stop. Not until my outstretched fingers jam into the dock. I grip its edge and scream, “I made it!”

There are muffled voices from far off, but they're dwarfed by the thrumming in my head. I feel blindly on the dock above me; my icicle hand jabs at empty space. I kick to move around the dock's perimeter, dragging myself to its other side. As I round the corner, Zoey's tiny silhouette slides into the water. I dive forward to catch her before she descends too deep to be found. The water is thicker now, harder to cut through with a kick, as if it's freezing to a solid. Or maybe I am?

Pins and needles attack my wide-open eyes as I catch her; her skin scalds mine.
She still has blood flowing through her veins.
I fight to bring our heads out of the water. Hers hangs to the side at an awful angle; her lips are parted, with buckets of water spewing out. I hook my bad arm under hers and reach with the other to grip the dock. It's smooth. No handles. No seams. My nails claw at the planks. A few nails splinter, but I don't feel them ripping away from the skin like I should.

“Help,” I cry, spitting up water and bile with the words.

A curtain of clouds drifts over the moon. There are only flickers of its light on the tips of waves that keep getting higher. A voice shouts above the buzz in my head and the lapping water. It's a ghost's wail, carried to me on the current of the wind. “Hooooold ooooon!”

The words float out in front of me, and I see them bright violet against the darkness that surrounds me. They shimmer and dip into the water, sinking down, like Zoey's body wants to. I try to keep my hold on the dock, but my fingers slip.

Rather than Jeanie weighing me down, Zoey is. I hold her tighter, even if she's an anchor who's drowning us both. This is my Zoey: savage,
hot-tempered, and loyal. I won't let her go. My legs are dead as we slip under the surface. I can't keep us afloat, so I just keep us together.

Bubbles escape my nose. We sink deeper into the inky depths. Burning-hot fingers wrap around my neck. Nails dig into my skin, and I open my mouth to scream but gulp water instead. It's the Creeping come to finish me off before a peaceful death can find me. It tightens its grip. I gag. A backdrop of hellish red is all there is.

I close my eyes just before I break the surface, too tired to see what sort of monster has me now.
No, no monsters.
Monsters don't exist. Bad people do, so they don't have to.

The hard lip of a boat scapes down my back as I'm hauled over it. I feel Sam's warm lips pressed to mine.
I'd know them anywhere
. He's breathing air into me. Water runs from the corners of my mouth, and I cough until the pith of my lungs feels shredded and dry. Sam is staring at me as my eyelids flicker open. The relief does something beautiful to his face. He goes from gaunt and pale to strong and determined with the oars of the boat in his hands. My tongue is numb as I try to hack the words out. Sam is here. Daniel and Caleb are here. Sam is in danger because of me.

“Daniel killed Jeanie,” I gargle through fat, clumsy lips. Sam's smile corkscrews, and I know he heard me. The words make me dizzy. My head clunks against the bottom of the wooden boat. Zoey's slumped against me, the flurry of her heart rapid and light. Her head rocks with the boat's rising and falling, knocking against my temple, hammering an SOS into my skull.

At times I know what's happening, other times I don't. Shane is
here. He came to Cole's. Sam found him, and they ran through the woods searching for me. In the same woods as the Creeping because of
me
. In the same woods as Daniel and Caleb. Monsters everywhere and nowhere.

Shane stands grimly on the shore, fists propped on his hips, bracing himself against the wind. I'm aware of my mouth moving, vomiting a jumble of warnings, accusations, pleas, and nonsense sounds. He should have known it was Daniel. He should have kept me safe. He should never have given me Jeanie's case file. He sent an innocent man to jail. I try to clamp my lips shut as I cry something about the Creeping.

Sam with his hands in my hair, stroking it, husky voice cooing in my ear. I'm rocking, ranting, raving as Caleb was in this very spot only minutes ago. Caleb left blood on the rocks; I'll leave behind everything that kept me immune from what happened to Jeanie. Shadowy faces of men with twisted appetites who snatched her from the woods. Vaguely imagined monsters who stalked her from tunnels in the understory. They shielded me from a truth I couldn't handle. As I twist my hands in Sam's shirt, as the shrieking propellers of a helicopter descend on us, I come unhinged. Finally, here it is, the wound that Jeanie left ripping me open.

I kick and spit when I'm loaded on the chopper without Sam. I howl to him that I'm sorry. That he has to forgive me because I need him more than he needs me. The giant bird goes airborne. The only reason I stop rioting is that Zoey is beside me. Sleeping peacefully. Sleeping beauty. She doesn't need to be awake for this.

Dad's waiting when we get to the hospital, pacing in striped pajama bottoms and a sweatshirt. He forgot his glasses, and he's blinking into the fluorescent lights. His eyes water when he sees me; I look bad even in his bleary-eyed state. I must appear haunted, the fury drained out of me, a ghost betrayed by someone she loved. I don't say anything about what happened, and he doesn't ask before I'm rushed to intensive care.

Zoey has her stomach pumped to get the booze up. I guess it was suspecting that Caleb was hiding something that caused her to drink enough to pass out; she couldn't stand reality and so she tried for alcohol-induced nothingness. The entire time the doctors work over me, musing at my tissue's rapid recovery from exposure to detrimental temperatures—their mumbo jumbo, not mine—I consider asking them to slice me open. Crack my rib cage. Take a peek at my heart. Fillet my scalp. Drill a hole in my skull. Look at my brain. I want them to diagnose the fatal flaw in me. The thing, however buried in my flesh, that made me blind to the monsters around me. I want them to remove it as they would a tumor.

Once the doctors have left, I stare hypnotized at the fifteen black stitches sewn in my skin. They remind me of the bramble growing through the strawberry vines. They're meant to piece me back together. Fat chance. I'm the relic of a child who saw brother kill sister. Child kill child. No wonder I didn't remember.

A nurse bustles around me, tucking me into a hospital gurney. She lets me borrow a compact mirror. I run my fingers over the skin of my bloodless lips.

“The stiches look worse than they are,” the nurse clucks, attempting a reassuring smile.

She's wrong. Everything is much,
much
worse than it looks. But why bother telling her? She wouldn't understand. She didn't half drown saving her best friend from said best friend's brother. She wasn't attacked by a man who killed his sister and his mother.

Eventually, the doctors decide that I'm stable enough for visitors. Dad, Sam, and Shane are ushered into the hospital room. Dad hugs me until he catches me grimacing from the twinge in my shoulder. I take shallow breaths and promise him it doesn't hurt badly. It does, but not so much as the razor-sharp puzzle in the soft gray matter of my brain. Monster. No monster. Daniel and Caleb. The Creeping. Jeanie's killer. Jane Doe's killer. Betty Balco's killer. It's so many shapes, it's shapeless.

“Looks like you put that through a meat grinder,” Shane says, pointing to my right hand and torn-off fingernails. Two cigarettes are tucked behind his ear, and his whole face is carved up with worry lines. His big oven-mitt palm pats me on the head. “I'm glad you're okay, kid. You told me enough of what happened for now. We'll talk about everything once you're up to it.”

Shane turns and heads for the door, broad shoulders collapsed forward.

“Shane,” I call. “Did you find Daniel and Caleb?”

He turns partially around, half his face shadowed. “No, but there were traces of blood. Signs of a fight. We were able to re-create what happened. Caleb and Daniel chased Zoey out onto the water. They
held you against your will. They confessed to killing Jeanie and Bev Talcott. Caleb and Daniel fought. There are signs of an escalating struggle. We're not sure if they fled into the woods when they heard our sirens or before. The boys will turn up,” Shane assures my dad.

Dad nods, satisfied at the promise of justice. After Shane leaves, Dad claps Sam on the back and kisses my forehead. “I think I'll go see if we can find you a decent cup of coffee and a muffin in this place.” He kisses my cheek. “That will fix you right up, Pumpkin.” He pads out of the room, relieved to find some way he can help.

Sam leans over the hospital gurney, his round eyes dilating as he studies the bruises on my neck. I have the imprint of his hand from him fishing me out of the lake. “I'm sorry I did that to you,” he whispers, skimming the injured skin with his fingertip. “If—if something had happened to you . . .”

I duck my head and kiss the top of his hand. “I'm so sorry for what I said this morning. You got hurt, and I was scared that something worse could happen to you. And then you were asleep and I was confused and suspicious. But Sam, you saved me.” He probably thinks I mean by rescuing me from drowning. I mean more than that. I lace my fingers in his. Blisters forming on his palms from rowing across the lake catch on my palms.

He inches farther onto the bed. “The day Jeanie died, my dad had too many beers on his lunch break and dropped a piece of canning equipment. He broke his leg in two places, and my mom and I were in the emergency room with him.”

I hide my face in the crook of my elbow. “I shouldn't have asked. I shouldn't
have needed you to tell me,” I say, my voice muffled by my skin. Sam pulls my arm down and kisses my cheek. I blink, surprised. “You forgive me?”

His eyes crinkle at their corners, and he laughs softly. “What do you think?”

I appraise him, trying to understand what I see. I am the lucky one. I have Sam
and
Zoey. They're both alive. “Daniel and Caleb killed Jeanie,” I whisper, closing my eyes. Caleb's face flashes across the inside of my eyelids; I see him every time it's dark. Caleb on his knees, bloodied knuckles dragged across his mouth, rocking and ranting. Caleb wailing that it was the monster setting them up. That it was the appetite that haunts Savage, crawling out of the darkness to enact its revenge because Caleb and Daniel had taken something that it craved—Jeanie—that reopened the case. How could I have been so wrong about them?
I trusted them.
I loved Caleb.