Chapter 21
Stella
The following days blurred together in a haze of fatigue and quiet misery. Dougal’s bathroom breaks hadn’t slowed, and while Ryder had recovered from that already, he still seemed off. His usual silence felt sharpened into something brittle.
At least the weather had been pleasant with warm sunny days and cool dry nights. The wildlife had been giving us a wide berth, too, which was mostly positive because we didn’t need to quarrel with anything dangerous. But it also meant that there wasn’t much hunting.
That wasn’t so bad for our group, especially Dougal and Ryder who had soured on fresh meat for a while. But I was craving it something fierce, and I was hardly sleeping because I was afraid of what I might accidentally summon.
So even with all our silver linings, it was hard to stay upbeat with the dark cloud hanging over me.
For Fae’s sake, and for my own, I kept my mind busy by pointing out anything interesting we saw.
Mostly that ended up being birds, bugs, and flowers, but it was important for Fae to know the world around us.
When a bird flew overhead, Fae happily babbled, and I started to reply with, “That’s right, Fae, it’s – ”
“I swear to God, if you say ‘barn swallow, Hirundo rustica’” – Ryder used air quotes, his voice going high-pitched to mock mine as he said the name – “one more time, I am going to lose my goddamn mind.”
He was trailing a few steps behind me and Edie in the middle, with Boden and Alphie leading the way through a wide trail winding through the forest in the foothills of the mountains. Dougal and Fergus were bringing up the rear behind Leandro and Ryder.
My cheeks burned with shame, and I suddenly felt like crying, but I managed to blink it back.
“Hey!” Boden shouted back over his shoulder.
“Oh, come on,” Ryder insisted, sounding annoyed. “Like you all weren’t thinking it.”
“She’s only teaching her daughter stuff,” Leandro said. “It’s nothing to be all bothered about.”
“I wouldn’t be if she didn’t say the same thing ten thousand times!” Ryder shouted in exasperation. “Is the barn swallow the only bird in this whole damn forest?”
“Ah, now, that’s not quite true,” Fergus corrected him. “There were two robins and a waxbird only fifteen minutes back.”
“A cedar waxwing,” I amended quietly. Then I cleared my throat and more loudly said, “It’s fine. If it’s annoying, I’ll just stop.”
“Everyone is tired, and probably hungry,” Edie said, playing mediator. “Why don’t we stop and have a break?”
“There’s an old campground not far ahead,” Alphie said. “It’d be a better place to have a rest.”
There were murmurs of agreement, so we went onward, but no one really said anything. Even Fae fell silent, as if she sensed the tension.
Eventually, the trees thinned a bit, and I spotted a faded lodge sign partially swallowed by moss. The first word was a little hard to read through the vegetation, but the big letters for Cedar Hollow Campground had been carved deep into the wood.
Over the top of the word Hollow, a unique design had been spray painted on it. Fairly recently too, if the vibrancy of the bright green was any indication. It was something like a lopsided maple leaf with a crooked smile in the center.
More ominously, below that, someone had scratched a warning into the wood with jagged letters: Beware of the Revvers’ punishments.
“Does that grinning leaf mean anything?” Boden asked Alphie. “Is it a mark for the Revvers?”
Alphie shook her head, glancing at the sign with visible distaste. “No, that has nothing to do with them. It’s something that stupid people do to let other stupid people know they’re around.”
“What about the punishment warning?” Ryder asked. “Is it something we should be worried about?”
“Not as long as we stay away from the Revvers, and that’s our plan.” She kept walking ahead, effectively shutting down the conversation.
The campground itself was mostly overgrown and worn down by the elements, but there were picnic tables under an old pavilion, and even a couple semi-functional outhouses.
We made our way to one of the sturdier tables. The mood was subdued, everyone picking quietly at their lunches of dried meats and stale biscuits. The weariness of the journey was settling into our bones, and despite the break, an unspoken anxiety hovered over us.
After we finished, we packed up our things, and we started out again. Alphie led us onward, taking a narrow trail of trampled earth. The nearby woods seemed to press in tighter, their shadows growing longer as the afternoon waned.
Conversation was sparse, with only Fae babbling occasionally, or Dougal asking to slow down. The silence finally broke late in the day when Alphie suddenly swore loudly.
“What’s wrong?” Ryder asked from behind me.
We were walking in a single line, with Alphie in the lead, and from where I stood three people back, I couldn’t see much of anything through the trees.
“We can’t get through,” Alphie replied.
“What do you mean we can’t get through?” Ryder asked, and he pushed past Edie, me, and Boden until he could see for himself. “Oh shit. There was a landslide or something.”
Carefully, since I had Fae on my back, I climbed up onto a fallen log at the edge of the trail.
From that vantage point, I could see the churned earth spilled across the trail, the tangled mess of branches and uprooted trees blocking any passage forward.
There was no way around it that I could see.
The hillside was simply too steep and unstable, the mud still damp and slick.
“They must’ve been having a lot more rain in the mountains then we’ve been getting this summer,” Edie mused.
“So what does this mean for us?” Boden asked Alphie.
“We will double back to the campground, and tomorrow we’ll have to cross the river and enter the Revvers territory,” Alphie explained. “I was hoping to skirt around it, but there isn’t any other option.”
At least the walk back to Cedar Hollow somehow felt quicker than it had been getting out to the mudslide. We ate quietly and slept under the pavilion, with me spending the dark hours as alert as I could be.
Morning brought a cold mist that clung to the ground, making the world seem even more isolated than before.
Ryder woke up last, even accounting for my brief nap after dawn.
He also managed to wake up in an even worse mood than he had the day before, and I was finding him less and less attractive by the minute.
Once everyone was ready, Alphie led us down another path, away from the ruined hillside. The forest looked different in the morning fog. Both more haunting and, strangely, more intimate, as if the world had shrunk to only the trail ahead and our little group.
Before we left, Alphie had assured us that the river wasn’t that far away, and it really wasn’t that long until we could hear it, the sound of churning water echoing through the trees.
The air grew cooler and damper, and it smelled of wet stone and earthy moss.
The forest itself seemed to hush, quieting the birds and the breeze so that the only noise was the relentless, rhythmic surge of the river.
“This is stupid,” Ryder said, suddenly. “We shouldn’t be going this way through the Revvers territory. We should go back and find another way around the landslide.”
“Rye, there wasn’t a way around it,” Leandro tried to reason with him. “You saw that yesterday.”
“The river is too dangerous!” Ryder shouted. “You can hear it through the trees! We’ll all drown!”
By then, we’d all stopped moving. Dougal and Fergus took the opportunity to have a sit on a nearby boulder, and Ryder stood with his feet planted in the dirt and his arms folded across his chest.
“We’re not swimming across,” Alphie told him. “There’s a bridge across it.”
“Has anybody been maintaining this bridge?” Ryder asked. “It’s probably not even safe!”
“The Revvers maintain it,” Alphie argued back. “And it’s not even that big. The Staulo River narrows as it curves up ahead, and it’s only fifty meters across. It takes a minute to walk it, two if you’re feeling leisurely.”
“We’ll have a look at the bridge when we get to it,” Boden said reasonably. “And if it’s not safe, we won’t risk it. But we can’t do that until we get there. Everyone okay with that?”
Ryder grumbled something under his breath, but he had no real argument against it, so we got moving again.
As we pressed on, the path sloped downward, and the roaring of the river grew loud enough to drown out any complaints that Ryder had.
Finally, the river came fully into view.
It was quite high and rapid, reminding me more of a raging flood than the placid water that the S.
S. Barbarabelle floated on. Even with that, the bridge was at least half-a-meter above the surging current.
The weathered planks were dark with age and damp from river spray, but they looked sturdy enough.
Boden stepped on the bridge tentatively, and when it held, he put on his full weight, then jumped up and down a bit.
“It seems good,” he decided.
“No.” Ryder shook his head emphatically. “No. You don’t know that.”
Boden frowned in confusion. “Okay. Alphie and I can go across to check it out, and then the rest of you could – ”
“You’re not listening to me!” Ryder yelled. “I’m not going across that fucking water!”
He’d been irritable all day, but he was angrier now than I had ever seen anyone before. His face had turned red, his eyes were bloodshot, and his lip pulled back into a snarl.
Boden got off the bridge and came over, putting himself between Ryder and most everyone else.
“Ryder, calm down,” Leandro said, speaking slow and deliberate. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. You know that, right?”
“Yeah, cause nobody can make me do shit,” Ryder snapped back, but he wasn’t yelling and seemed to relax a bit.
“That’s right,” Leandro agreed. “But would it be okay if I ask you just one question?”
Ryder grunted in response and shrugged.
Leandro must’ve taken that as agreement, because he asked, “Why don’t you want to cross the river?”
“I just don’t!” Ryder shouted, and he started pacing in a narrow oval. He put his hands up, hovering ] above his ears like floating earmuffs. “I can’t stand to be near it!”
“That’s fine, Rye, that’s okay,” Leandro reassured him soothingly. “We’ll be able to get away from here real quick, but I want to ask you one more thing.”
“Just fucking ask it!” Ryder yelled and kept pacing.
“How is your arm healing from that cut you got back at the cabin?” Leandro asked, and Ryder stopped cold.
Back at the cabin, when the zombies had attacked, Ryder had gotten a cut on his forearm. It hadn’t looked like a bite wound to me – it had been a straight gash – but I had noticed a smear of green blood on his arm. Infected blood.
There had been so much going on since then, I hadn’t thought anything of it, or the fact that Ryder had been wearing long sleeves even when the temperatures soared to summer highs. He’d been sick and rundown for as long as Dougal had, so everyone chocked it up to the bad meat.
“What are you saying, Leo?” Ryder asked, looking at his friend with dark, suspicious eyes.
“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t need to know,” Leandro said as apologetically as he could.
Ryder scowled, but he pulled up his sleeve, revealing a nasty gash. It wasn’t healing at all, and pus oozed through a green scab. The flesh around it was all puckered and red, but the veins beneath his skin looked pitch black, like spiderwebs extending out from the wound.
“Dammit,” Leandro said under his breath, and he pinched the bridge of his nose. Then he took a deep breath and looked over at Ryder. “Do you want me to uphold our pact? Or do you want us to leave you here?”
Ryder’s mouth twitched, and his jaw was clenching and unclenching. But finally, he nodded. “I’m sorry I waited so long to tell you, and I’m sorry I’ve been so angry.” He paused and his breath hitched in his throat. “I just don’t want to be one of them.”
Leandro put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “It’s okay. I won’t let you.”
Tears welled in Ryder’s eyes, and they were tinged red with blood. He smiled sadly at Leandro, and in a thick voice, he said, “I love you.”
“You are my brother in this world and the next,” Leandro replied, and suddenly Ryder’s eyes went wide.
I didn’t even notice until after it happened, Leandro moved so quickly. He’d had the dagger in his hand, and he stabbed Ryder straight into the heart. He was dead before he knew it.
Leandro lowered his friend’s body to the ground. His back was to us, and he said over his shoulder, “Go ahead and cross the bridge. I’ll meet you over there when I’m done here.”
“You don’t have to bury him alone,” Boden said.
“Thank you, but I do,” Leandro insisted, his voice low and resolute.
“Don’t be daft.” Fergus came over and put a comforting hand on Leandro’s back. “You bore the brunt of it, you did. Now let the rest of us help you to honor our friend.”
All of us set down our bags and got out camp shovels and tools. Dougal didn’t have the strength to dig, so he watched Fae, who napped on his lap. Together, without saying a word, we dug a hole and buried Ryder on the banks of the river.