Cameron
Cam handled death poorly from the moment Grandma June died. Her overbearing mother made sure she would never forget how old she’d been.
Twelve-year-olds cry quietly. Twelve-year-oldsdon’t throw fits at funerals.
June Hayworth owned a dilapidated sheet metal barn and a big house on fifty-three acres in Raymond, California. She lived alone except for every birthday and holiday and family barbeque, when her three children, their spouses, and their children came over, leaving the foyer in a stinky disarray of tennis shoes and covering all kitchen surfaces with casseroles and wilted salads. Everything always had too much mayonnaise. Cam had spent a lot of time picking at the leftover food as a form of entertainment.
Out of the eight grandkids, Cam was the only girl. She was also the youngest, and had never been close with her brother, Coulter, who was five years older and five times stupider than she was, nor any of her other meathead cousins. They’d take off in a raucous pack at these gatherings, leaving an invisible cloud of fart smell in their wake.
They were never mean to Cam... not even Coulter. They were indifferent toward her, which was worse.
It didn’t take long for Grandma June to catch on when Cam was old enough to be miserable. After dinner, when the adults were drinking wine on the deck and the teenagers were playing football by the horse corral, June would whisk Cam away from the mayonnaise to help with chores. Not cleaning up dinner or sweeping up the dirt the boys tracked in—the other adults would take care of that. But real chores, collecting eggs and feeding the goats and hauling hay with the tractor. She taught Cam how to mend chicken wire fences and fill the horse troughs and clean a rifle. Out in the unkempt field behind the house, she showed Cam which wild weeds you could eat, and which ones would leave you swollen and itchy for weeks.
June did it all with a limp and a Camel cigarette hanging from her lips. She wore a silver revolver in a leather holster on her good hip—to scare the coyotes, she claimed, though Cam never saw her use it. Her jeans were dingy from the red clay, her skin leathered from the sun and the smokes. Her gray hair never left the braid that hung past her shoulders.
June was the only person who Cam loved unconditionally before she even understood what unconditional love meant. And then she was gone, just like that. Heart attack. It was her time to go. She’s in the arms of Jesus, now, her mother told her, which was a load of shit because they never went to church and neither did Grandma June. Jesus was an excuse her mother used to avoid explaining death to Cam, but it was too late. June was gone, and Cam was unprepared to deal with the grief on her own, something she never grew out of.
Cam stood on the porch in the mist, leaning against the cabin wall as she smoked one of the horrendously stale cigarettes from the cellar. A rifle rested on the cement in front of her.
Cam was beyond writing lists on walls or trying to figure out what the hell was happening. Even if they knew what was happening, would it matter? They would still need to escape this forest in the end.
They had only tried leaving once. Losing the path and her sense of time felt like a warning. The next attempt wouldn’t be so easy. Worse things could happen to her than whatever Isaac had endured. Death... death was always the worst thing.
And even worse than her death was the death of someone she loved.
In a flurry of hushed whispers over breakfast, Siena had relayed to Cam and Emmett the warning she’d received from Isaac. To Cam, it sounded like the fever dream of someone who’d taken way too many mushrooms. Something from the mythical place of the Briardark wanted to hurt Siena, and Isaac knew this for fuck knows what reason. He wouldn’t even tell them why Siena was the only target. And Cam would be quick to brush Isaac off if it weren’t for the morphing forest and Isaac’s age and Siena’s recorder and Avery’s bag magically appearing like a goddamn omen. But she couldn’t. The thought of Siena dying filled Cam with an incapacitating dread.
Cam caught a flicker of movement in the woods. She dropped her cigarette, smashed it with her boot, and slowly bent to pick up the rifle. She double-checked the chamber for ammo, and when she looked up, she caught the wavering again, like a lick of black flame.
Her chest tightened, every vein in her body constricting until blood thudded through her painfully. She spotted it once more, a finger of darkness beckoning her closer.
She could run in and tell the others. Stay on the porch until whatever was out there came to her.
She could meet it in the woods. Keep it away from the others.
The thought enticed her, hooking her by her navel and tugging her forward. She didn’t want to go, but she had to, didn’t she? She could almost hear it threatening the safety of those inside, holding them hostage until Cam was brave enough to meet it face-to-face. Whatever it was.
“Cam.”
Cam released a breath and turned around. Emmett hung out the door of the cabin. She flipped on the safety of the gun, not remembering when she took it off.
“I need your help.”
That’s rich, she wanted to say. Yesterday’s Cam would have said that.
“Doing what?” She scanned the forest for the black flicker, but it was gone.
“Siena wants to leave,” he told her, like it was the most absurd thing in the entire world.
No shit, yesterday’s Cam would have said. And you’re going to let her.
She lowered the barrel of the rifle and pushed past Emmett into the cabin. In the kitchen, Isaac used the help of the window’s reflection to cut his hair with medical scissors over the sink. He looked much better, his beard only an inch or so from his face. But without all the hair, Cam could see how old he truly was. She preferred the tangled mop instead.
Siena’s gear lay sprawled across the kitchen table as she repacked her bag.
“When are you leaving?” Cam asked.
Siena shot an irritated glare at Emmett. “The question is, when are we leaving? All of us. And I propose as soon as possible.”
“We can’t, Siena.” Emmett paced from window to window in the main room. Only the dense new forest greeted him back. “Whatever the hell this is, we can’t navigate it. It could be dangerous.”
“So you want to wait here until what?” Siena leaned against the counter and waved her hand. “It all just goes away? Until the phone magically works? Until someone back home realizes we’ve been gone longer than we should and sends in a team to get us? That’s weeks from now.”
“They won’t find you,” Isaac muttered.
Every muscle in Emmett’s body tensed, just like when Cam fought with him back at the tunnel tree.
“So you’re going to listen to this lunatic?” Emmett seethed. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m not talking about this with you anymore. Not when you’re angry.” Siena clipped her Nalgene to the outside of her pack and left the kitchen, hurrying down the hall. The lab door slammed shut.
“Fuck,” Emmett hissed. The map Isaac had unearthed loomed behind him in all its inky majesty. Not Deadswitch, but somewhere with similar topography. She thought of the map in Avery’s bag.
Emmett spun toward Cam. “You need to convince her.”
“Who said I agreed with you?”
Emmett threw his hands in the air. “Oh, I don’t know, Cam. I thought the fact you got lost the last time we tried leaving spoke for itself. Aren’t you search and rescue trained? Isn’t the first rule of Safety 101 to stay where you are?”
“I must have skipped the chapter on what to do if the mountain on which our designated shelter is constructed is overrun with masked killers and tunnels to corpse piles and tears in the fabric of space and time.”
Emmett pointed to the door. “Who says that shit isn’t out there? Who says it’s safe once we’re off the mountain? We found a dead woman on Wolf Ridge. That’s thirty miles from here!”
Cam gritted her teeth, acknowledging and hating his logic. They simultaneously turned toward Isaac, who shook out his hair in the center of the kitchen.
“You want my answer? You already know it, but you won’t listen,” Isaac said.
“How are you sure we’ll make it if we leave now?” Cam asked.
“You misunderstand.” Isaac gently set the scissors on the table.
“We misunderstand?” Emmett growled.
“I never said you’d make it. But what happens if you stay here is worse than anything you’d find out there.”
Cam tightened her grip on the rifle, imagining Emmett yanking it from her hands and shooting Isaac with it. “And you know how? Your crystal ball?”
To Cam’s surprise, Isaac smiled at her, extending his arms to either side. “Look at me. There’s a reason I’m old, and it isn’t because I drank from the wrong Holy Grail.”
Cam cracked a smirk. “If that’s true, I’m surprised you remember movies.”
“It was a couple of decades, not eternity.”
“Fair.” As much trepidation as she felt, Cam couldn’t be mad at Isaac. He’d clearly suffered more than any of them.
“No. No, no, no. No way.” Emmett waved his arms back and forth. “This isn’t up for debate.”
“And you aren’t God,” Cam said. “Look, I’ll talk with Siena, but I can’t promise I’ll sway her one way or the other.” She nodded toward Isaac. “Be easy on him. I mean it.”
Cam took the rifle with her to the lab, the tension behind her palpable. She forgot about it as soon as she saw Siena messing with the radio at the desk.
“Whiskey Six Lima Delta, does anyone copy? Over. Whiskey Six Lima Delta... we are a party of four in danger on Mount Agnes. In need of evacuation. Do you copy? Over.”
Cam propped the rifle against the wall. “Hey.”
Siena looked up at Cam, her shoulders wilting. “I don’t want to fight about this anymore.”
“Why the hell would you think I’m not on your side? I’ve stood my ground through all Emmett’s fits, Siena. This one isn’t different.” She ignored the sting in her chest. It wasn’t the time to feel betrayed.
“I... I know.” Siena rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry. It’s just Isaac—”
“Fuck what Isaac said. He’s obviously traumatized, and we can’t take his word as the end-all be-all. What do you think is best? Because I can tell you from my experience—not Isaac’s, not Emmett’s, mine—it’s a crapshoot. Unless Isaac quits being so damn enigmatic, we don’t know what we don’t know. But if you believe him, I’ll go with you.” She held her pinkie up. “I trust you. You should know that by now.”
Siena smiled, but before she could respond, static crackled through the radio speakers.
Beneath the noise, a song faintly played. Siena reeled back from the radio and held her hands in the air like she was in the middle of a stickup. “This is it! The station I found the other day.”
Cam knelt next to Siena at the desk. “Tune it, will you?”
“I’m gonna lose the transmission if I touch the dial. This is only the second time I’ve found it.”
“Just don’t fat-finger it. Here.” Cam reached out, carefully nudging the dial to one side. The static cleared to a melancholy pick of the guitar strings, and a feminine voice singing about rain and heartbreak.
No way. No way in hell.
“This isn’t the same song I—”
“I know it,” Cam interrupted.
Siena turned toward her. “You know the song?”
“The song. The singer.” Cam had watched countless online videos in the wake of Avery’s disappearance, and again after Without a Trace was published, trying to understand parts of Avery’s life Cam hadn’t known intimately. Trying to understand who she’d spent her time with. So many of those videos had been from Twitch streams of one of the disappeared, a desperate folk singer trying to make a name for herself—wild auburn hair, a cheap guitar, and playlists of sad, haunting lullabies.
First Naomi, and now...
“Janet,” Cam whispered.