Malorie(22)

The “sound meter” is a failed invention of Tom’s, an idea he had for verifying what moved in the woods around camp. He believes it could’ve worked with minor tweaks, but Malorie destroyed it before he could try.

“No talk like that now,” Malorie says, lowering the gloves at last. “Was the deer sane?”

She thinks of Victor the dog, chewing his own legs.

“Yes,” Olympia says.

Still, ten years deep, and no complete knowledge of which animals go mad, which don’t, and why.

Malorie wonders if there’s more information about this in the census pages she carries in her bag.

They reach the road a minute later, sooner than Malorie thought they would. The service station that houses Ron Handy is two miles to their left. But they need to go right. The many roads they will take are east of here.

Still, Malorie turns a blind eye Ron’s way. She imagines him in his own darkness there. Does he think of his sister just as she thinks of hers? Is he steeling himself for a run, south, of his own?

She wants so badly for this to be the case. But she knows it’s not.

“Good luck,” she says quietly, as if this is goodbye. Forever.

As she turns to face the road again, her shoulder strikes something.

She freezes.

Whatever it was, it’s taller than the teens. She swipes at her arm, as if able to remove the touch of a creature.

“Guys!” she says.

But Olympia is beside her, guiding her, suddenly, around a tree.

“We have to move slow,” Olympia says. “Really slow. Lots of trees this way. Remember?”

Yes. And perhaps Malorie needed the reminder.

“You don’t hear anything else?” she asks.

“No,” Tom says. But Olympia remains silent a beat. Is it the hesitation of a lie? Is Olympia only being careful?

“Nothing,” she finally says.

“Did you lose track of the one you heard outside the cabin?”

Hesitation again.

“No.”

“Where did it go?”

“To the lake,” Olympia says.

Despite not being able to hear the water from this distance, Malorie listens.

“Tom?” she asks. “Did you hear the same thing?”

“I lost track of it,” Tom says.

“You what? You can’t do that out here. You cannot lose track of anything out here. Do you understand?”

“Mom…”

“Tom. Do you understand or not?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“No yeah, no sure. This isn’t the time to daydream. I need you. Olympia needs you.”

“Okay. I’m sorry. Olympia said it’s in the lake. Then it’s in the lake.”

Malorie listens. She thinks she can hear the open road going in either direction.

“Fine,” she says. “Let’s go.”

She feels the road beneath her boots but she knows they won’t be on solid footing for long. The map in her bag includes paths through woods, over farmland, across rivers.

Sam and Mary Walsh.

It’s impossible not to imagine them on the couch in the home she grew up in. But now, rather than a view of the garden and the street, there are blankets over the windows.

And if they’re not at home, not in the only place Malorie can imagine them to be, what roads have they taken, and what did they hear along the way?

“Quiet,” Malorie says, though the teens aren’t talking. “Listen.”

And she thinks of the train. And she hopes the stop they just made, the few minutes they took to talk about the whereabouts of the creature, hasn’t made it so they miss it. Because if they do, if they miss the train by an hour, by a day…how can they be sure they’ll learn its schedule, if it has a schedule at all?

Malorie walks. She wants to move faster than they are, faster than they can. She wants to make up the time they just took to talk. She wants to make up the ten years they spent at Camp Yadin. And the six years before that. She wants to return to the moment when her parents stopped answering their phones, when she and Shannon shared a silent look in which both agreed Sam and Mary Walsh had died.

Malorie wants it all back. Now.

“Mom,” Olympia says. “Be careful.”

Her daughter’s hand comes to her wrist, guides her across a dip in the road.

“Thank you,” she says. She wants to believe in Fate, wants to believe there is a reason for everything. That they were supposed to leave now. That no time has been lost. That a bigger purpose will be revealed in the end.

But Malorie doesn’t think this way.

“Hey,” Tom says. “There’s something ahead in the road.”

Malorie opens her mouth to tell the teens to stop. But she doesn’t want to stop. And if the world is teeming with creatures now, and if they’re present with every step she takes toward her parents, then she’s going to have to live with walking among them.

She thinks of something else she read in the census papers. Something about a town called Indian River. And the woman who runs it.

Athena Hantz.

She simply cannot let Tom read about that place. The descriptions, the dangers, were enough to blanch Malorie white. But Athena Hantz’s philosophy is what sticks with Malorie now. The woman claimed to live freely among creatures. No different than she lived before their arrival. And the way the census man put it, his exact words, were chilling: Miss Hantz claims she has “wholly accepted the creatures.” She insists they no longer drive people mad and have no intention of doing so. She believes, fiercely, they have changed over time. Her words: “They don’t punish us anymore.”