Beach Read(76)

This was the most at peace I’d felt in two days, if not all year. Whatever weirdness was between Gus and me was placed on hold as we wandered through the silent temple of the woods. Sweat built up around my armpits, along my hairline, and through my underwear, until I stopped and took the jacket off. Without a word, Gus stopped and peeled his off too. I watched an olive sliver of his flat stomach appear as his shirt caught around his shoulders. I looked away as he pulled it back down.

We picked our backpacks up and kept walking. My thighs began to burn, and the gathering sweat and rain plastered my tank top and my jeans to my skin. At one point, the rain picked up again, and we ducked into a shallow pseudocave for a few minutes until the showers let up. The gray sky made it hard to tell how much time had passed, but we must have spent at least a couple of hours marching through the woods until the trees finally thinned and the charred skeleton of New Eden came into sight ahead.

“Holy shit,” I whispered, stopping beside Gus. He nodded. “Have you seen it before?”

“Only in pictures,” he said, and started toward the nearest smoke-blackened trailer. The second fire, unlike the one from the lightning strike, hadn’t been an accident. The police investigation had found that every building had been doused in gasoline. The Prophet, a man who called himself Father Abe, had died outside the last building to catch flames, leading authorities to speculate that he’d been the one to light the place up.

Gus swallowed. His voice came out hoarse as he pointed toward a trailer on the right. “That was the nursery. They went first.”

Went, I thought.

Burned, I thought. I turned to hide that I was gagging.

“People are awful,” Gus said behind me.

I swallowed my stomach bile. My eyes stung. The back of my nose burned. Gus glanced over his shoulder at me, and his gaze softened. “Want to set up the tent?”

He must’ve seen the face I made, because he added quickly, “So we can use our computers.” He nodded toward the darkly churning sky as he slid his backpack off. “Don’t think this is going to let up any time soon.”

“Not here though,” I said. “It feels wrong to put a tent in all this.”

He nodded agreement and we kept moving, hiked off until the site was no longer visible. Until I could almost pretend we were in a different forest, far away from what had happened at New Eden. As Gus pulled tent poles from the bag, I came forward to help. My hands were shaking, from both the cold and the unease of being here, and I poured all of my focus into piecing the tent together, blocking out the memory of the burned remnants of the cult.

The distraction only lasted a few minutes, and then the tent was finished, all our stuff tucked safely inside, except the little notepad and pencil Gus pulled from his pocket as we made our way back to the site.

He shot me a tentative look I couldn’t interpret, then started toward one of the trailers, or rather three that had been cobbled together with plywood-and-tarp hallways. I swallowed a knot and followed, but after a few steps, he stopped and turned back to me. “You can go back to the tent,” he said gruffly. “You don’t need to see this.”

A knot rose in my throat. Obviously I didn’t want to see this. But it bothered me that he’d say I didn’t need to while still planning to explore it himself. I could tell he hated being here too. And yet here he was, facing it.

That was how it always was. He never looked away from any of it. Maybe he thought someone had to bear witness to the dark, or maybe he hoped that if he stared into the pitch-black long enough, his eyes would adjust and he’d see answers hiding in it.

This is why bad things happen, the dark would say. This is how it all makes sense.

I couldn’t go hide from this. I couldn’t leave Gus here alone. If he was descending into the darkness, I was going to tie a rope between our waists and go down with him.

I shook my head and went to stand behind him, his dark eyes dipping to study me, his rain-speckled lashes curved low and dark and heavy against his olive cheeks.

There was so much I wanted to say, but all I could get out was, “I’m here.”

And when I said it, his brow furrowed and his jaw tensed, and he peered at me in that particular Gus way that made the knot in my throat inch higher.

He nodded and turned back to the trailer, tipping his chin toward it. “Father Abe’s place. Apparently he’d seek counsel from a group of angels, so he needed the room.”

I tore my gaze from Gus to the sooty trailer. It instantly made me feel woozy and unmoored, like the air here was still overloaded with carbon dioxide and ash.

Why do bad things happen? I thought. How will it all make sense? But no great truth appeared to me. There was no good reason this horrible thing had happened, and no reason Gus’s life had been what it was either. Dammit, R.E.M. was right: Every single person on the planet had to take turns hurting. Sometimes all you could do was hold on to each other tight until the dark spat you back out.

Gus blinked clear of his solemn haze and crouched, balancing his notepad on his knee and scribbling notes, and I stood beside him, legs wobbling but eyes open. I’m here, I thought at him. I’m here and I see it too.

We moved around the site like that, silent as ghosts, Gus guarding his notes from the rain as it soaked through our clothes and skin right down to the bone.

When we’d circled the whole plot of land once, he headed back toward Father Abe’s Frankensteined trailer, glancing at me for the first time in the last two hours. “It’s freezing,” he said. “You should go back to the tent.”