The Wicked We Have Done (12 page)

“Shut up,” I snap.

I follow Valerie’s gaze to a baby doll, soft body and porcelain limbs, head chipped and scraped white. Glass pieces scatter the ground.

“Not funny,” Valerie murmurs, and the sky falls dark until there’s nothing left but a gray ghost of light. Mist curls upward, and my attention shifts to the three bodies that weren’t there before—three bodies hanging from nooses, their feet swaying back and forth.

The tree creaks with their weight.

A strangled whimper escapes Jace’s throat.

“Now you scream,” Stella says.

“No.” Valerie’s response is immediate. “I’m guilty as sin. My jury knew it. I know it. I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I’m going to survive this place.” She stands. “You hear me?”

She speaks to the Compass Room gods like Casey did, convinced someone is listening. Is it hope that molds her desire to contact them, or surrender?

“Stop,” Jace pleads, but Valerie doesn’t. She glares at the three swinging bodies, mismatched shirts and gray flesh. Purple lips. Bulging eye sockets. How will this end? Will they reanimate and drop to the ground, throwing their nooses one by one around Valerie’s neck to strangle her? Will they beat her like Casey’s father did to him?

Will they infect her? Will she explode?

No one says anything. Valerie is stone, challenging them, and then, when unoccupied minutes pass, she says, “I have to pee.”

And then she leaves.

The tree holding the bodies groans. Stella shrieks.

“No!” she wails, marching toward the center of the clearing. “Come back, you stupid bitch!”

I jump up, my fingers clamping around her stick-thin wrist. She yanks away from me. “They don’t end like this! She isn’t supposed to walk away!”

Something inside me snaps. I take her arms and shake her. “Why?
Why are you so screwed up?
”

She melts, collapsing to the ground and sobbing shamelessly, snot and tears dripping from her chin. “Am I . . . Am I the only one . . . touched? Again and again he comes. . . . H-he can touch me. H-he can make me hurt, and it’s NOT FAIR THAT I’M THE ONLY ONE WHEN I’M NOT EVEN GUILTY. IT’S NOT FAIR THAT SHE CAN WALK AWAY.”

Stella chokes, and wretches, and squirms on the ground. She won’t get up. Not even when we leave to head back to camp, away from the bodies that dangle below the sunless sky. I hold Jace’s hand as we follow Casey, wondering what happened to Valerie.

But she’s fine. She sits and rubs her neck right in the middle of our desecrated camp. Our food has been stolen.

Our tent, our blankets, our bags—shredded.

May 21, Last Year

School

We didn’t realize the brilliant concept we stumbled upon, Meghan and I.

She took the blog to her favorite professor, a man who had an eye for ingenuity. He loved the concept so much—the idea of transforming a beautiful photograph into an art form that both reflected the original work and created a new piece—that he wanted to create an entire gallery based on the concept.

“Next semester we will have the exhibit,” he promised in a meeting with Meghan and me. “The two of you will lead a team through the summer to start setting up partners and getting these projects rolling.”

We held hands the entire time under the table. This project was supposed to be satiating our interests, but it was more than that. It was something academic, something beautiful. A way we could leave a mark on our college. Artists didn’t have a lot to strive for, only the hope that we wouldn’t starve to death and someone would appreciate us.

“Are you up for it?” her professor asked. “I want to make sure you two are dedicated before I start sending e-mails and directing funds to next year’s opening gallery.”

“Yes!” Meghan squealed before I even opened my mouth. “Yes! Of course. We’ll start scheduling meetings as soon as possible, won’t we, Ev?”

“I . . . uhh . . . yeah, of course.” Of course we would. What kind of question was that?

***

That evening, we had a celebratory dinner with Nick and Liam at a nice New American place. The boys hardly knew each other, which was insane. Technically this dinner was something we should have done a couple months ago, when Meghan and Nick started dating.

The way he was so comfortable necking her at the table made it seem like we did this sort of thing every weekend.

“Nick,” Meghan said with an exasperated sigh when our food came. She acted relaxed the rest of the time we were eating, but when I got up to use the restroom, I saw his hand on the uppermost part of her thigh, beneath the material of her dress.

Maybe, if I liked him more, this kind of thing would have seemed like a sexual quirk he or both of them had—a way to get a rush. But I didn’t like him, which was why I did my best to shoot him glares for the rest of dinner. He wasn’t paying me the slightest bit of attention, though. Instead, he was talking politics with Liam, a conversation I had absolutely no desire to get into. Not to mention, the topic—war—had been beaten to death centuries ago.

“People need the pain of war in order to function.” Nick twirled the pasta on his fork. “Without something so chaotic, we wouldn’t feel emotion at all.”

Liam stiffened. He was a total pacifist at heart, and I knew there was no way he would let Nick’s proposal of chaos slide. I kicked him so he’d drop it.

He didn’t. “Of course there would be emotion. There would just be less grief.”

Meghan released a tiny gasp, and I wondered what Nick was doing to her under the table.

“There’d be no way to understand happiness or safety in a peaceful world,” said Nick.

I knew that statement was ludicrous. Just because a world had no war didn’t mean that bad or sad things wouldn’t happen. There would still be accidents. People would still die of illness. There would be room for peace with plenty of things left to mourn.

But I didn’t argue, because arguing philosophy with someone who obviously knew what they believed in was completely pointless. “Drop it,” I murmured to Liam.

A waitress walked alongside the table carrying a tray full of martinis.

Nick continued. “People have been trying to understand the purpose of chaos forever. Not just violence, but everything—mathematics, physics, climate change, the neurons in the brain, divine fucking intervention.”

Meghan squirmed in her seat and glanced toward the restrooms.

“I know what chaos theory is,” Liam said.

“Then you’ll agree with the logic that it existing within almost everything proves that it’s necessary.”

The waitress tripped near Nick, martinis sliding off the tray and hitting the stone floor with a horrible crash.

Meghan stood and tugged down her skirt.

“Holy shit!” cried Liam, and bounced out of his chair to help the waitress. Several others were getting up from their tables as well.

But Nick wasn’t. He remained in his seat, his attention trained on me.

I knew he’d tripped her. Liam said nothing about it on the car ride home, and since he would have been the one to see it happen, I didn’t bring it up.

On my phone, I searched Nick. I’d done this before, when Meghan first started dating him (that’s what friends do), and this search pulled the same results. Nothing. No news reports, no online profiles, no blogs—at least, not relating to the Nick Malloy I knew. I’d hoped that I missed an article that graphically described his arrest for some insane crime so I could show it to Meghan, but there wasn’t. He had zero online presence. I didn’t even know that was possible.

Liam decided to stay at his place that night, so when the boys dropped the both of us off and we were home, I had to ask, “How’s the sex with him?”

Immediately, she put up her shield. Her back straightened, and she plastered on that sly smile, the one she used when she wanted to blow something off. “Why are you asking?”

I wanted to say,
Because he had his hand up your skirt all of dinner
, but I refrained. “Because he’s sticking around and it’s my job to pester you about sex.”

We sat across from each other on the patio. She reached for the pipe on the corner table and started to dig in her purse. I had hit a nerve—I don’t know how, but that smirk and her sudden needing to smoke a bowl within a span of twenty seconds was a sure sign.

“What’s up, Meghan?”

She exhaled in relief when she found her baggie. Opening it and packing her pipe, she said, “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, don’t you even think about screwing with me.”

“He’s kinky, you know? Not like quirky kinky. But like the real deal.” She lit up, and I waited for her to exhale. “The first time, he tied me up.”

“He
what
? Okay . . . okay. But he asked first, right? It was consensual?”

“He didn’t
ask
. But, I mean, you gotta try everything once, right?” She lit up again.

“Was it
consensual
?”

“God, Ev. He didn’t rape me, if that’s what you’re asking. What’s your deal, anyway?”

“What do you mean, what is my deal? He was possessive of you tonight and I’m making sure you’re okay with it.”

“You think I wouldn’t know if I felt okay with it or not? I’m fine. I don’t sit here and ask you if yours and Liam’s sex is consensual.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“You’re supposed to trust me, Ev. Trust that I make the right decisions for myself. Jesus.”

This wasn’t going how I had planned. “I’m sorry, Meghan. He’s new and I’m only skeptical because I love you so much. You know that.”

“Yeah.” She set her pipe down and stood. “I’m tired. I’m going to head to bed.” She paused when she was halfway inside. “By the way, tell Liam to try and avoid conversations with Nick that have the slightest chance of leading to chaos theory. He’s obsessed with it. And it’s annoying.”

***

I should have grown a clue then. I should have realized that gut feeling doesn’t screw around when dealing with someone you care so much about.

But at the time, I was hoping she was right. I was hoping to God she was right. But she wasn’t, because Nick knew the truth.

The world
is
saturated in chaos.

8

At first, it’s hard to distinguish if this is an act of another inmate or of the Compass Room itself, until I remember that the only other person out there is Gordon. While he’s insane, he’s small—certainly incapable of doing this in the span of time that we were gone.

No, this had to be a mechanical decision the Compass Room made. Stella was right—we’d been pretending to be safe and sound with our provisions. It kept the fact that we were stranded within the wilderness at bay. I sift through shreds of tent fabric, of blankets and spare T-shirts.

Valerie kicks an empty can into the stream and curses.

“We were expecting this to happen sooner or later—run out of food,” Casey plops down on a stump and massages his temples. “We’re fine. We just have to think this through.”

“Welcome back to the land of the living, Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky,” Valerie snaps.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Like I didn’t notice that for more than a day you’ve been moping around. Now suddenly you fake optimism because
all
of us are miserable.”

Casey jumps to his feet. “You want to know why I was so miserable? I can tell you right now that your little
illusion
was nothing compared to the bullshit I had to go through yesterday.”

Valerie’s voice rises. “Oh yeah? Well, I’m glad your pain makes you feel so entitled.”

“Stop yelling, please,” Jace asks, inappropriately polite. Surprisingly, it gets both Casey and Valerie to shut up, but not before Valerie groans and rubs at the bruises on her neck.

This place isn’t afraid to beat us up a little, that’s for sure. I guess the same kind of threat exists in the prisons, but that’s because of other volatile inmates. This time, it’s the actual place we’re trapped that’s causing injury.

We don’t deserve any less.

Most of the world would think we deserve to die long and painful deaths. Casey’s and Jace’s bruises, Stella’s escalating insanity—maybe this is only the beginning.

Stella.

“Where’s Stella?” I ask.

Even Tanner, who’s kept his distance from the rest of the party, scouting out the edges of camp to see if there’s anything useful left in the remains, shrugs. “I don’t think she ever made it. Last place I saw her was in the woods before we walked back.”

“Good riddance,” Valerie says. “Bitch was nothing more than a headache.”

I have to agree with her, especially after all of the crazy speak about how Valerie shouldn’t have been able to walk away from her test. Something is wrong with Stella, and I don’t think any of us have the ability to help her.

Suddenly Tanner asks, “What did you say before, Casey?”

“When?” Casey responds.

“You called the tests something. You called them illusions. What made you say that? They aren’t phantoms. If it weren’t for the fact that we know your father is dead, you would think that he was alive. Tangible.”

Casey flushes.

“What do you mean? What about his father?” Jace asks.

Casey tells them everything. Not spitefully, but almost like he’s using it as a peace offering. All cards on the table so we can figure this shit out together.

“He wasn’t real. Logically we know this,” Tanner says, sitting near the fire pit.

“Unless the government reanimated him for the sake of torturing Casey,” Valerie suggests.

Casey ponders this for a moment. “I’m not above considering zombies.”

Tanner rolls his eyes. “But for purpose of realistic circumstances, I think Casey’s term is the closest to what these things truly are. Illusions.”

“Well, virtual simulations were never out of the question,” I say.

“But how they become tangible, how they feel real . . .” Casey says.

Tanner scratches his head. “Technology. Has to be.”

But how is that technology even possible? I felt Meghan in my arms. She was there, dying. Casey’s
illusion
, so Tanner says, could pick up a shovel and leave real—very real—bruises on Casey.

“My uneducated guess is that these illusions are supposed to put us under enough stress to the point where our thoughts and actions become volatile and exposed,” Tanner says. “That’s when we die.”

I think of Stella. Her state of mind is that of someone who’s been tortured over and over. Maybe the Compass Room can’t get an accurate reading of her moral arrow. Maybe they must drive her insane in order to make her crack, to see the evil within her.

“What now?” Jace asks.

***

We enjoy a bonfire of the desecration of camp. Everything goes in the pit. The shreds of fabric, the last of the wood from the shed. The five of us huddle next to each other and watch it burn.

In the early afternoon, when our camp is nothing more than a pile of ash, we leave with the clothes on our back.

Valerie is amazing at imagining the geography of the area. In her mind she can picture exactly how far away the lake is, as well as the burned-up lodge in the other direction. We don’t want to go back to either of those places because we know what’s there. If we’re lucky, we might be able to find another pocket of supplies.

Or we might run into another test.

But it doesn’t really matter, because wherever we are, we aren’t going to be safe.

So we head west.

Our path slopes downward into a shallow valley. At the top, I make out a black line cutting through the trees, curving around and back to the lake.

“The boundary,” Tanner huffs. “Should we go back?”

Valerie’s too curious. “If we follow the boundary for a little while and figure out the angle it’s curving at, we can tell how big this place is.”

“Geometry was never my strong suit,” Tanner says. “Now, calculus . . . Ask me to graph something and I got it covered.”

Valerie slaps his shoulder. “Don’t worry, kid. I got your back.”

We follow an eager Valerie down into the valley, to a black wall. The material is metallic—titanium-like—it would be impossible to climb over. Pines nestle against it as if they always have, as if the wall has been here forever. The sun streaks through the branches in tiny fingers of light, not enough for me to feel safe.

We walk and walk until I can’t peel my tongue away from the roof of my mouth. Nothing changes other than the inclining ground as we follow the wall toward the direction of the lake. We must be trudging along for an hour before we come across a small outlet. All of us crouch together and gulp down as much water as we can.

In the middle of splashing my face, Jace releases a strangled cry. She coughs. I wipe my cheeks as Valerie says, “Oh God. Oh God, that’s—that’s fucked up.”

Both of the girls have a hand covering their mouths, Valerie’s arm flung around Jace’s shoulder, like she’s protecting her. Their attention is veered toward the bank to the left of us.

I stand, walking to the grassy patch they’re fixated on. Right as Casey says, “Evalyn, don’t,” my eyes fall upon the mutilation.

Bile rises in my throat. I cover my nose but the stench has already filled me. I dry heave once. The next time my stomach gives in, I spit a mouthful of yellow acid on the grass.

A hand rests on my shoulder. “You all right?” Casey asks. When I don’t respond, he says, “Here, let’s get you away from that thing.”

That thing
. I can get as far away from it as possible in this damn place, but the image will still be burned into my brain. What was it—a raccoon? I couldn’t even tell the species of the creature with the way its brains were ripped through its mouth, eyes dangling from its sockets, intestines tied around the carcass like a fucking Christmas present. A chain wraps around its neck, like it was restrained for the mutilation.

I gag, and Casey guides me downstream. The others follow. As I plop down in the grass, Tanner says in a small voice, “That’s the only animal we’ve seen so far.”

He’s right. There aren’t even birds here. No skittish deer or the chattering of tree rodents. This is the first. A dead, tortured raccoon.

Tortured.

Tanner and I seem to come to the realization simultaneously.

“You think it’s him?” I say.

“Who else would it be?” he responds.

“Who?” Casey asks, understanding a moment later. “Gordon.”

“How the
hell
is he still alive?” Valerie begins to pace.

Jace’s attention refuses to leave the raccoon’s grave—she’s entranced, wringing her hands in front of her.

“We don’t know that he is,” Tanner says. “Especially if he really
did
dismember that animal.”

“What do you mean,
if he really did
?” Valerie snaps. “Of course he did. I don’t care what kind of crime any of you committed. Not one of you is a sick enough son of a bitch to do something like
that
.”

“There’s Stella,” says Jace.

Valerie halts, deep in thought.

“No,” I say. “Something happened to Stella that screwed her up in the head, but—” I think of the raccoon and lose my train of thought.

“She’s not capable of that. Evalyn’s right,” Tanner finishes.

Arms crossed, Casey says, “We need to get out of here. I have a bad feeling about screwing around in a place where
something
—no matter what it was—did that to that animal.”

None of us disagree.

We get up and continue on the same path we were on before the diversion. My legs threaten to give out on me any moment, and it takes every bit of concentration I have to keep moving, using the wall for balance when I have to.

No one speaks for a long, hard while, until Valerie says, “At the speed the wall curves, if the prison is somewhat circular, I’d guess a diameter of eight miles.”

“But you can’t be sure,” I say.

“Not without a map. But even if I’m wrong, it’s obvious this place is damn big. Which means a lot of undiscovered territory for our little party right here.”

Which means a lot of secrets that could either help us or hurt us.

“I say we walk straight across, see if we actually do have an eight-mile diameter,” I suggest.

Everyone else groans. “I’m all for discovery,” Valerie says. “But I wouldn’t go that far. I’m wiped. And starved. And grossed out.”

Grossed out
doesn’t even begin to cover how I feel.
Violated
is more of the correct term, and there’s no way in hell I’m sticking around this part of the Compass Room for longer than I have to. “You see any food around here? There isn’t, unless you include that torn-up raccoon.”

“She’s right,” Casey says.

“Of course I’m right.”

We fill up on water at an outlet. I drink from the stream until another drop would make me sick. When we set out, we stray from the border perpendicularly. Valerie says that we’ll cut right between our camp and the burned down lodge and travel east—the place where Stella came from, but we’ve never been.

I lead the pack, determined to keep moving solely because of the fevered chill aching in my spine. Everyone’s quiet.

Even though we hike uphill, back out of the valley, the sky remains an underwater blue. The sun hasn’t fully shown today. Tension rests beneath my neck and no matter how I stretch my back, it refuses to disappear. Growth is so thick that I have to kick through the brush as it claws at my pants and boots.

Valerie huffs behind me. “Slow down, Ev. I’m not made for this shit.”

“I don’t . . . want to be caught . . . with nothing . . . in the dark,” I wheeze, smacking brush away. “Gordon might be dead but—but we don’t know for sure. He might be close.”

“A five-minute break . . . won’t kill us. . . . You know what, fuck you. I’m stopping.”

Valerie sinks to her knees and rubs her blotched neck. Jace takes the opportunity to stop too. Tanner’s so far behind, he’s like a figurine trekking over the trail we made.

“Fuck
me
? You’re the one who wanted to walk all of the way down to the wall. If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t have to hike back out of the valley.”

“I thought everyone wanted to know how big this place was. Wasn’t that the whole point?”

“I don’t know what else to do, Valerie. You want to be stuck here in the middle of the night without protection?”

“You don’t know that we’ll find anything. You don’t know that our demise won’t be starving to death. Maybe that’s why they destroyed our camp. Because we’re all guilty.”

“So you’re going to
give up
?” I glance at Casey, but he’s as indifferent as Jace. Have they all given up?

Valerie answers my silent question. “This morning, a noose crawled its way into camp and dragged me through the forest. And then the Compass Room took everything I worked to find. You think that we have any sort of say in what this place gives us? If it wants us to starve, we’ll starve. End of story.”

Dammit, she’s so right that I hate her for it. And no one’s arguing, no one, because everyone is thinking the exact same thing she is.

Tanner reaches us and plops down near Jace, falling forward on his stomach. His back rises and falls.

I can’t stop the swell of disappointment in me, the bubbles of resentment toward all of them. I’m tired. I’m hungry. And the last thing I want to do is really admit that she’s right.

“Fine. You can stay right here and freeze tonight.”

“And you’ll do what, cut through that?” She nods ahead, where the ground levels. I nearly fall over when I see what she’s referring to.

Vines have threaded into a rounded wall, filtered light casting dark shapes onto the grass. Tall trees bend toward us like a cresting wave. A pathetic whimper escapes my lips.

“It. Doesn’t. Want. Us. To. Move. Forward,” she spits.

She’s wrong. It wants us to move forward, but in a very specific direction. At the corner of the wall is a hole—a tunnel, more like—at its mouth a pale pink mailbox with five curly address numbers and a gardenia painted across the aluminum.

The stump on which it sits is charred, but the box is so friendly, so unbelonging, that on instinct I wonder if I’ve stumbled into a Lewis Carroll novel.

An object in the middle of this forest prison. This isn’t a random placement. This is someone’s test.

I turn back to my party, to check if anyone sees what I do. “What’s that?” Jace asks, and as if on cue, they all turn. There is no recognition from anyone, because the object isn’t from one of their pasts.