The Cabin at the End of the World(48)

Leonard says, “I know. We’re trying—”

“Try more! Try fucking harder! Threaten to hurt one of them, bust a knee, take off a finger, something. Not seriously hurt them, but enough to know this is serious!”

“Adriane!” Sabrina steps between her and Andrew and Eric.

Andrew’s sour and curdling stomach plummets through the floor, to the center of the shrinking earth, as his traitorous head fills with images of them cutting off Eric’s fingers or Wen’s, one by one. He looks at Wen and she remains huddled on the couch, half covered by a blanket. She has shut down. Perhaps she’s in shock.

“It’ll be the only way!” Adriane is full-throat yelling. “We have to get this shit done! They’ll just wait us out until all of us die if we don’t!”

Leonard strides forward, a rolling boulder filling a narrowing cave. “We can’t let you hurt them. You know we can’t. It’s not allowed.”

“Fuckin’ easy for you to say. You’re not next, are you? I don’t want my body stuffed under a blanket and stacked next to that piece of shit out there. I don’t want to die!”

Sabrina crouches and calmly says, “They’ll believe us. They will.”

“No, they don’t, and they won’t. Not ever.”

“Shh, they will. You’ll see. They will.”

Adriane’s words come in clipped bursts between hitching inhales. “The worst part is I knew I was dead as soon as I started seeing all this shit. I knew I was dead already.”

Adriane is still bent over and crying. Sabrina crouches and whispers and cajoles. Leonard checks his watch, and while he utters vague reassurances to them, he has the resigned, desperate, and committed look of a person who knows everything is going poorly and will continue to go poorly no matter what.

Adriane straightens up, pushes Sabrina and Leonard away, and wipes the tears off her cheeks violently. “Okay. I’m okay. I lost it, but I’m good.” She takes two steps toward Eric and Andrew. “Hey, so you know I’m dead meat—”

Leonard says, “Adriane, you can’t—”

She turns on Leonard and snarls at him. “Shut your fucking mouth. It’s my turn. It’s up to me and I’m going to do it my way. All right? Is that all right?” She doesn’t give Leonard or Sabrina a chance to respond. “So what’s it going to be? Another calamity like the earthquakes and tsunamis and hundreds, thousands more people dying, this time by plague. That’ll be fun, yeah? Plus the bonus of the unpleasant sight of little old me getting bashed like a pi?ata. Or will you stop it all from happening and sacrifice one of yourselves?” She pulls a white mesh mask out of a back pocket. It looks exactly like the one Redmond pulled over his own head. Unhinged and wild-eyed, she shakes and dangles the mask in front of Andrew and Eric. “Come on. What’s it going to be? You want me to put it on first?” She stuffs her right fist inside and holds it like a puppet that’s going to say something obnoxious, scandalous, something only a puppet would be allowed to say. “There you go. You pick. One of you sacrifices yourself or all kinds of other people die.” She makes crashing noises and pantomimes striking the mask-covered fist.

Andrew shakes his head and groans because he thinks he has waited too long to free his hands. So does he wait even longer? Wait them out like Adriane intimated? Are they really going to kill Adriane like they killed O’Bannon? Are they that committed to their obviously Revelations-inspired rituals? He still doesn’t know why they are killing themselves. And at some point they would have to stop killing each other and turn on Eric or Andrew or Wen, wouldn’t they?

Eric says, “Hold on! Wait, wait, wait!” He’s loud enough that Adriane slows her cricket’s bounce from her heels to her toes. She takes the mask off her hand and hides it behind her back, like no one was supposed to see it. He says, “Let’s just keep talking, okay? Adriane, tell us about the restaurants you worked at. I want to hear about them.”

Sabrina says, “Guys, this is it. You have to choose.”

“There’s time, there’s time. Come on, let’s talk a little while longer, okay?” Eric’s deep, smooth voice has the faintest waver. He is obviously stalling with how he’s trying to engage the others into talking about themselves and their old lives. They aren’t answering him and they close in toward one another, clustering like molecules.

Andrew imagines everyone in the cabin is visualizing the same blow-by-blow transgression of violence to come, an act of collective foretelling, or summoning. The room feels like it did in the moments before the others killed O’Bannon. Andrew experiences an animal foreboding and an instinctual compulsion to flee from the inevitability, as well as an unsettling, vertiginous itch to become a willing participant. If the others swing their weapons again, even if only against Adriane, he will raise his hands and fight.

Andrew says, “Wen, you should come be with one of us now, I think.” Wen is on the couch not looking at anyone or anything.

Leonard turns and says to her, “You can stay there, too. You can cover your eyes with your blanket. You’ll be okay.”

Andrew shouts, “Right, it’ll all be fine! After a little bludgeoning, maybe you’ll let her go outside and play with the grasshoppers.”

Adriane says, “Our last chance, fellas. What’ll it—”