Wilder Girls(47)

   Get it together, I think. We’re here. There’s no going back.

“Come on,” I whisper to Reese. There’s a clump of pines back in the tree line that should keep us hidden.

We get there just in time. I crouch down, my muscles stiff and hurting. Lay the shotgun across my knees and peer between the tree trunks at the house laid out in front of us. The flashlight beam is getting stronger, catching some of the reeds, turning them translucent. I squint, my blind eye throbbing. I think I can make out the shape of a person, but whoever it is they’re bent over, moving slowly. Is that Welch?

“Lift your end higher” comes Welch’s voice. I jump. She sounds so close. But who is she talking to? Byatt?

It feels like forever, but finally Welch steps out from the last of the trees, into the moonlight. She’s hunched over something, and there’s someone else with her, their face in shadow until they straighten, and it’s Taylor. Taylor, who left Boat Shift, and I guess this is why.

And between them. Carried between them, a body bag.

I clap my hand over my mouth, muffle the whimper that slips out of me. No. No, no, no. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. We’re gonna make it, she said. She promised.

   Maybe it’s not her, I think wildly. Or maybe they knocked her out and she’s alive in there, waiting for me to save her. I can’t give up until I know.

“This would be easier with a third, you know,” Taylor says as they set the body bag down among the reeds. It’s not moving. Whoever’s inside isn’t moving, and I can’t let myself think about what that means.

“Oh?” says Welch. “And who are you going to ask? Carson’s a pain in the ass, and Hetty’s not an option.”

But before I have a chance to wonder what that means, Taylor says, “How’s she working out?”

I go rigid. This is it. If Welch knows I’m on to her, everything’s over. My life here, this new thing with Reese that I’m nervous to name.

Welch just shrugs. “Well enough,” she says, and I muffle a shaky sigh of relief. “But not well enough for this.”

“What about Julia, then?” Taylor says.

“I’d rather not.” For a moment Welch sounds as young as she is. “I don’t think she likes me very much.”

Taylor lets out a laugh. “If you don’t like Carson, Julia doesn’t like you.”

“I missed you out there,” Welch says. She turns off the flashlight, shoves it into her jacket pocket. I watch her pause to spit out a mouthful of what must be blood. “It’s not the same without you.”

“I can do more good this way,” Taylor says. I want to shake her for it. There’s nothing good about this. “After what happened to Mary…She deserved better, you know? They all do.”

   Mary, Taylor’s girlfriend, who went vicious and wild like the animals. Taylor was the one who had to kill her, and the rumor was it broke her. But now I know it didn’t. It just made her into something worse.

Welch steps back to the body bag, and for a second she stops there, hands on her hips, looking down at it. Moonlight skittering off the ocean, throwing her face into shadow, and I can’t make out her expression, but there’s a slump to her shoulders, almost like defeat.

“I really thought we’d got it right this time,” she says at last. “You know? She seemed like she was okay.”

“Well,” Taylor says, “evidently she wasn’t.”

I knew, of course I knew, the body bag motionless in the grass, but it’s something else hearing it out loud. The pines around me hemming in, closer and closer, and Taylor joking like it doesn’t matter, like she hasn’t just torn the whole world down. Reese pulls me against her chest, holds me tight. It’s the only thing keeping me together.

“All right,” Welch says. “Let’s finish up.”

They pick up the body and Reese grips my hand as we watch them carry it into the house. Pain shoots up the inside of my arm, a sparking and twitch, and I try to pull away until I realize it’s me, holding on to her so tightly her scaled fingers have cut deep into my skin.

“Come on,” Reese says, her voice cajoling in my ear. “She’s alive, right? She’s Byatt. She gets through everything.”

   I nod, but there’s somebody in that body bag, and I don’t know how much longer I can do this. How much longer I can keep hope burning in my heart.

I lose sight of Welch and Taylor as the house swallows them up, and then I catch a sliver of Welch’s face through the gaps in the walls, the beam of the flashlight bouncing off the white bark of the birch.

“Let’s put her down,” Welch says, “before my arm falls off.”

I bite my lip to keep myself from calling out. Her. This is real.

“Where are they?” says Taylor. She must mean whoever was on the other end of that walkie call.

“They’ll pick her up,” Welch says. “We can leave her here.”

“What about—”

There’s a fizzing sound, and then the house bursts with red. Through the holes torn in the wall I can see Welch holding a flare, the bloodlight harsh and sparkling. “This should keep the animals back,” she says. I shift to one side to get a good look as she wedges the flare into the branches of the birch.