Wilder Girls(15)

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   I don’t think I ever realized how much sound we make at the house, but I figure it out after a few minutes on the road. It’s so quiet that you can hear the woods; you can hear them growing and moving and you can hear the things growing and moving inside them. Deer, small before the Tox and so big now they could feed us for weeks, if their meat weren’t rotten and dying. Coyotes, and I’ve heard wolves, though I’ve never seen one. Other things, too, that never show themselves. The Tox didn’t just happen to us. It happened to everything.

Moss layering thick carpets across the ground, vines spiraling high. Here and there, patches of flowers growing strong, even in the cold. They’re irises, vivid indigo petals coated with frost, a cluster in the middle gathered close with a skirt of petals draping down. They grow all over the island, all year round, and we used to have a vase of them in practically every room of the house. Raxter Irises, special for the way their petals darken once they’re picked. Like Raxter Blues. And now like us.

Before the quarantine it wasn’t like this. The animals felt practically tame, even if we did get lectures about storing food properly to keep it from them, and the woods felt different, felt like they were ours. Pines, growing in ranks, but the soil so thin and their trunks like needles so that if you stood in the right place, you could pretty much see from one end of the island to the other. You never forgot the ocean because the air was always tangy with salt. Here in the thickness, you only get a spark of it now and then.

   The way it happened is that the woods got it first. That’s what I think, anyway. Even before the wilderness reached inside us, it was seeping into the earth. The trees were growing taller, new saplings springing up faster than they had any right to. And it was fine; it was nothing worth noticing, until I looked out the window and couldn’t see the Raxter I knew anymore. That morning two girls tore each other’s hair out over breakfast with an animal viciousness, and by afternoon the Tox had hit us.

This part of the road runs arrow-straight, footprints dotted across it from a year and a half of Boat Shift girls making the trip. On either side there’s nothing. Nothing left of the small paths that used to scurry off into the trees. No sign of anybody else. All I can find are long, raw stripes ripped in the tree trunks. Claws, maybe, or teeth.

I expected it to be different. I watch the trees attack the fence, the dark between them thick and reaching. I know what the Tox does. But I thought something of my old life would still be here. I thought something of us would have survived.

“Come on,” Welch says, and I realize I’ve slowed down, the others a few yards ahead. “We have to keep moving.”

I wonder what’s left of Reese’s house. It would be off to the right somewhere, tucked in among the reeds. I never learned the way myself, always let Reese lead. It took her a long time to invite us over, and even once she had, it never quite felt like we were supposed to be there. Reese and her dad, laughing and talking as Byatt picked at her food, and I didn’t know what to do so I smiled the whole time.

   Somewhere behind us there’s a crash and then a kind of bleating, high and quick, and I can’t help the curse that drops from my mouth. Welch throws herself against the nearest tree, dragging me with her to lie flat between the roots. Across the road, Carson and Julia press into a hollow in the thicket, crouch low, heads bent together.

“What—”

“Shhh,” Welch whispers. “Don’t move.”

On the roof it was different, just branches and the sight of my rifle. But I can feel the shake in the earth. Heavy, churning steps. My mouth goes dry, fear shivering through my body, and I bite my lip to keep quiet.

Pressed to the ground next to Welch, the pine tree’s sprawling roots twisting around us, I catch a glimpse. First a hulking mass of shadow, and then as it prowls into view, I see it. Fur rippling like long grass. Too big for a coyote, too dark for a bobcat. A black bear.

I know what I’m supposed to do if it sees us. Grizzlies are different, but with a black bear, you make noise, stare it down. Don’t run. Fight back. That’s the lecture we got after Mr. Harker saw one digging through his trash. They’re faster than they look, he said, and they can spot a flash of color in the brush.

I snatch off my red hat and smother it under my coat, sweat freezing on my scalp. Count the beats of my racing heart, try not to breathe too loud.

   Next to me Welch smiles, just a smudge of one, like she can’t help it. We stay there for I don’t know how long. Wait until the footsteps have passed, the trees stilled, the noise faded, and then she stands up, pulls me with her.

“It’s gone,” she says. “You can put your hat on again.”

She calls out to Carson and Julia. They come jogging through the branches looking like they didn’t just have the life scared out of them, like they see this kind of thing all the time.

“Having fun?” Julia asks. I think she might be serious.



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Raxter is only about five miles long, give or take, shaped like a bullet with the tip pointing west, but we’re moving slow so it takes us a while to get to the other end. You can tell as we start getting close; all the trees rear back from the shore like they’re afraid of it. Up ahead somewhere, hidden from view by the last of the woods, is the visitors’ center. It was built even before the school, used to be the headquarters for some local fishing company until the lobsters disappeared and it got converted. Before the Tox it was always empty and closed up except during summers, and even then it was just Mr. Harker, sitting behind the counter and listening to a Sox game while tourists passed by on ferries, headed to other towns, other islands.