Chapter Thirty One
THIRTY-ONE
Evening comes somehow, and Will hands out the last of the sedatives like a priest offering communion.
He doesn’t place them on your tongues, but he puts them in your palms with a solemn sense of duty.
When he’s done, you wash them down with musty, boiled lake water and immediately start thinking about food again.
You’re all mired in shock and grief, but your hunger cannot be ignored even in these circumstances.
Before you figure out what to do next, you need something—anything—in your stomachs.
You meet up just long enough to assign tasks, everyone nodding silently with tearstained cheeks.
Will wants to hunt with a homemade spear.
Maybe some small game or birds. Troy and the girls will try to forage again.
This leaves you with the most sophisticated piece of technology on offer: a long stick with a line and a hook.
Until this moment, you’ve been fishing exactly once in your entire life, a single afternoon with your uncle at a stocked pond in rural Iowa, but here you are: the group’s greatest hope for protein.
You manage to dig up a few spasming worms from a moist bit of dirt near the tree line.
And it occurs to you for a second that maybe your best bet is to cut out the middleman and just eat the bait.
But after the lingering memories of the grasshopper incident, you decide to roll the dice and spear a fat one on the tine of your whisk-turned-hook.
Then you take off your boots, roll up your pant legs, and wade out ankle deep in the murky lake, waiting for your final moment of pill-induced calm to kick in.
It’s sunset and the lake casts back the light, swallowing your feet in gold.
A half hour or so goes by in the repetition of movements, casting and waiting, casting and waiting, and eventually you can’t help it: Your mind starts to wander back to Silas.
What were his final thoughts before he died out here alone on the island forest floor?
Did he think even once about you guys? Or was he lost in his own story?
Was there any kind of final reckoning with the choices he made?
There’s movement on the surface of the lake, and you pull the line in, only to find the second of your four worms devoured whole.
Your strategy of tossing out the line only to sit and see if it moves is not working.
You know there are fish in this lake, because they are eating the bait.
They are so tantalizingly close, but they might as well be in the Arctic Ocean for all the good they’re doing you.
You step a little deeper into the water and stab another writhing victim on the business end of the whisk.
“C’mon,” you say.
You remember a neighborhood kid slicing a worm into five pieces when you were a child and saying they were all going to turn into new worms. Later that night, when your mom told you this wasn’t true, you cried and prayed for each segmented soul.
Now you say a prayer for this worm, who’s giving its pale body for a chance at stopping the gnawing hunger you can feel in every part of you.
You make sure he’s stuck fast, and even though you have never done this in your life, you make the sign of the cross over its squirming little form, and then you launch the poor bastard into the fray.
The worm arcs through the air and lands in the small waves, and this time you decide to try something different.
Instead of just letting it dangle there, you start inching it back toward you before a fish even bites.
You don’t know why exactly. It just seems like something you’ve seen before.
Old fishing guys perched on old bridges in town, slowly reeling in their line over and over again. Maybe they were onto something.
The first couple of times you try this, you get nothing but the same beleaguered worm coming back to you, a little more swollen and lifeless than before.
But on your third go-round, you feel a small shift in momentum, a tug from an underwater force.
You pull as hard as you can, and for two miraculous seconds, you see something that looks like a bass come flipping out of the water, bending in the air like a wakeboarder doing a trick.
In a moment of delirium, you drop the pole entirely and reach out your hands to catch it.
But this Hail Mary isn’t going the distance, and it lands with a belly flop about five feet away from you.
You sprint toward the fish, hoping foolishly that you can snatch it from the water, but within a step it’s already gone, blurring through the shallows.
Of course, the worm is gone too. Another lamb to the slaughter.
You stand in the glowing lake for a moment, trying to calm your breathing.
You can feel the Xanax working at the edges of your mood now, and it’s been a long time since you’ve had any help in the fight against your brain’s worse impulses.
Medication can’t do everything, but it can clear a path.
So you blink away your defeat and reach down for your last worm, popping the whisk tine through his guts without any invocation. Then you close your eyes and bat away the image of Silas gasping for his final breaths like a fish. You whip back the line and cast it out into the liquid sunset.
You guide it back toward the shore with a little more finesse this time, and within seconds, there’s another bite.
When you feel the pull, you grab the homemade fishing pole with all your remaining strength.
Two hands like you’re gripping a bat, your knuckles aligned the way they taught you in Little League.
And when you feel another tug, you pull on that line with everything you have left.
This time when you see the fish, you swear you look it right in its yellow eye as it soars past you—already much farther than the last one—and skids onto the beach behind you, turning angry flips on the rocks and sand.
“OH MY GOD!” you scream in a heavy-metal voice you didn’t even know you had.
The adrenaline that surges through you makes your whole body feel lighter.
“YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!”
You run toward the shore, tripping over your own feet, and just barely staying on them.
This fish is bigger; you can tell that already.
It’s sleek and long with a broad, flat snout.
And before you even get close enough to pick it up, you can see its rows of sharp teeth.
Its body shimmers with green oblong spots.
And when you pick it up with two hands, it goes slack in your arms. You’ve never been good at measuring things with your eyes, but you’re thinking it’s at least a foot and a half, maybe longer.
And when you carry it back to the campsite, dangling it from the hook, everyone who’s there—Will, covered in dirt and empty-handed, and the foragers with only a few paltry mounds of greens—forgets about their dire situation and their fear if only for a moment.
For the handful of seconds it takes to walk it toward the fire, no one is thinking about the body in the woods, or how much longer you have to make it to the drop.
“Holy shit,” says Troy. “That’s a northern pike!”
“Jesus, Case,” says Fran. “Did you have to chum the waters for that thing?”
Will, looking humbled and wrecked by his hunting expedition, just bursts into spontaneous applause.
And Diana gives you a cautious smile. You wonder if this is what it was like to be an early human bringing back fresh kill for your family after days without food.
You don’t have any idea how to cook and prepare this slimy vertebrate, but you know that whatever you do, it’s going to allow you to hang on a little longer.
Hours later, you find yourself shoving chunks of hot oily whitefish into your mouth with your hands, moaning with pleasure.
Troy and Diana had enough common sense to gut the thing (poorly) and impale it with a stick.
While it roasted over the dying coals of your fire, you went back to the lake and caught two more small fish.
A real fisherman would probably have thrown them back, but they add to the total portion of meat.
There isn’t an abundance per se, but everybody gets something, and as they gorge on their helping of charred skin and flaky flesh, a temporary calm settles over your island.
For now, you’ve eaten, and you’re medicated.
And it’s only when the final bites are swallowed that your thoughts return to the elephant in the woods.
You can’t avoid thinking about him for long because he’s not far away.
A hundred feet or so. Someone who was alive only recently and now is not.
Someone who died doing exactly what you’re doing now.
“What do we do with the body?” says Troy, peering back toward the east side of the island, where, you’ve since found out, he was the lucky one who stumbled over the outstretched legs of your former guide.
“We can’t take it with us,” says Will. “It will slow us down too much, and we’ve already lost time.”
Nobody disagrees.
“Can we bury him, at least?” says Fran. “I mean, if we leave him out, won’t animals…”
“Eat his face off?” says Troy.
“Yeah,” says Fran. “That.”
“We don’t have time,” says Diana. “It would take us all night to dig a grave with no tools, and we’d all be too exhausted to make up ground in the morning.”
You wait for someone to insist in spite of the effort, but again, nobody does.
“Well, should we at least say something?” says Fran.
“Time is running out, guys,” says Will. “There’s no one who can help us now if we don’t make that drop. What happens when the lighter runs out? Or your meds! If we were smart, we would be moving right now. Silas never cared about us.”
As he says this, the sun proves his point by disappearing behind the water. You have a day and a half, give or take, to make it. And you all know the stakes.
“Nobody is leaving this island in the dark tonight,” says Troy.
“We need sleep too, and this is a good place to get it. We have pills and there are no bears here. And look, I know Silas is the reason we’re in this situation, but he tried.
I mean he was trying before everything went horribly wrong. And he’s…”
Troy closes his eyes.
“He’s what, Troy?” says Will. “Your best friend?”
“One of us.”
The fire is nearly dead now, and the last of the coals pop. Fran takes a stick and gives them a stir.
“How do you mean?” she says quietly.
“He went on this trip, remember? This same trip! And he had anxiety just like us. What he did was super messed up and dangerous, but he’s not the first of us to self-medicate.
I use a vape at home ’cause it keeps me calm.
My friend Lenny from group therapy has his weed gummies.
Diana, you brought vodka on a hiking trip!
We’re all looking for some way to quiet our brains.
Silas made a stupid choice, but he was trying to battle like the rest of us. ”
The last line is the one that gets you.
And when you look over at Diana, you know she’s thinking the same thing you are: You both know someone else who made choices he could never take back.
Choices that ruined other people’s lives along with his own.
You stand up, and your body is woozy with exhaustion.
The back of your head throbs. Diana stands up too and starts walking into the woods.
“C’mon, guys,” she says. “It’s time to say goodbye.”