Chapter 1 Riley #6
He turns and smiles and she sees the gaps in his back teeth. It makes the front ones look like fangs. ‘Hello, sister.’ His voice is deep like wood. ‘Something for the hungry?’
Oliver is gone from Riley’s arms. Half of her thinks, where is he? The other half thinks, good boy, smart boy.
Riley pulls a Powerbar from her pocket and tosses it at the man. ‘There. Now leave us alone.’
‘Travelling is better with company,’ he says.
He is close to her now though she hasn’t seen him move.
His breath smells of burnt hair. ‘You seem like a girl who doesn’t want to be found.
I know the trails round here, the places no one goes.
The caves, the gullies. Places no one will find you.
’ The reek of him is as heavy as bonfire smoke.
She thinks of Noon. He smells like her, of dirt and smoke.
Did Noon lure them to this place? Are they prey?
The man’s hand hovers above her knee, strokes the air there, squeezes it. He’s showing her what’s to come. She sees the bluntness of the stump where his little finger is missing.
‘Don’t touch me.’ She tries to keep her voice even but it comes out thready and high.
‘I wasn’t going to,’ he says, injured. ‘Just trying to help you kids out.’ He’s still wearing the costume of a person who’s being helpful. People only wear disguises in the wild when they want to do bad things – things their real selves can’t handle.
‘I’ll yell. I’ll scream.’ It is the wrong thing to say. Riley knows that as soon as she says it. He smiles. She really is prey, now.
‘Why would you do that? I’ll take care of you. No one would hear anyway. This trail is closed. Too many landslides. Nearly no one comes this way.’ He sounds genuinely sympathetic. ‘Where’s the kid?’ he asks. ‘Your brother?’
‘I don’t know,’ she says honestly. ‘He’s only seven, maybe he got lost.’ All the time she’s speaking, Riley thinks carefully about what to do next.
She waits until he moves his hand, as she knew he would, towards the knife at his belt.
This is where the world will change from one thing to another.
She reaches too – behind her, slowly – so slowly that she hardly seems to move.
She keeps her eyes on his. The man’s face is distant, occupied, almost like he has forgotten about her.
His eyes focus all of a sudden. Now he comes in close, the big body hovers over her like a cage. She smells every thought in his head. They are all there in his sweat, his hair, his breath.
Riley keeps feeling delicately through the leaf mould with silent fingers.
She keeps her eyes on the man’s wide brown ones.
It’s like they’re going to kiss. Riley has only ever kissed Jared Rubenstein and it tasted like Clearasil.
What a waste, she thinks, almost laughing out loud.
I’m going to die after just one kiss. Well that one and this one, if he kisses me.
He might not. He doesn’t need to, to do what he wants.
If this doesn’t work Riley hopes that she loses her mind. She doesn’t want to be in her body for what happens next.
Her seeking fingers brush lightly against the barrel of the gun. Her fist settles gently around the grip and she brings it swiftly forward.
He is almost too close, the muzzle brushes his nose in passing.
But the movements feel smooth and easy, as if with long practice.
She shoots the man twice, once in each eye.
She fires a third shot which doesn’t land.
The man doesn’t make a sound at first, just keels over backwards.
Flat out on the ground, he twitches. Legs full of dance.
Little gushes of breath come out, and the air is heavy with the scent as he soils himself.
Riley doesn’t take her eyes off him, she watches as he moves from living to dead.
Something red and hot is in her. I did that.
It’s terrible, but also her heart pounds with another feeling.
Riley takes the flashlight from her pack and trains it on the man.
She’s hungry so she grabs the Powerbar from the dead man’s hand and eats it in three bites watching his still face.
The stump of his missing finger twitches once, twice, faintly a third time. After it stops Riley watches for a few minutes to make sure. His eyes are red tunnels in his face. A creaking sigh comes from his mouth. It’s just his lungs giving up their last. He has stopped like a clock.
She kicks his booted foot because she can. He isn’t a he anymore but an it. She unwraps another Powerbar from her pack.
‘You can come out now, Oliver!’ she yells through her mouthful. I’m the lion now, she thinks. There’s a kind of dead fire in her.
‘Oliver!’
There’s no answer. Shock is beginning to settle into Riley, cold ripples up her spine. Her teeth clench then chatter. She presses a hand hard over her mouth.
A sound comes from a clutch of alder. She goes quickly.
Oliver is curled up behind the bush.
‘I hid when the demon came,’ Oliver says. ‘I tried to keep quiet.’
‘Smart, smart boy. You did right.’
‘Sorry, Riley,’ he whispers. ‘I didn’t hide good enough.’
‘It’s ok,’ she says. ‘It’s ok, Oliver Olive, he can’t hurt us now.
’ She goes to hug him. She sees it for a couple of moments before she understands – the strange angle he’s lying in, how he clutches his shin, the dark, wet stain seeping through his jeans.
Riley pulls up his pants leg. The third bullet made a neat hole in the muscle.
‘It’s ok,’ she says again stupidly. ‘Don’t move, Oliver Olive.’ She hunts through her pack, torch beam juddering. At last she finds the little medical kit. Gauze, baby Tylenol, water-purifying tablets, antiseptic, bandaids, sterile gloves. It’s not nearly enough to treat a bullet wound.
Riley pushes down her panic and puts on the gloves.
The hole in Oliver’s leg is leaking blood.
Not a lot, but a steady, constant trickle.
She can’t find an exit wound; the shot must still be in there, buried in his calf muscle.
He moans and weeps. ‘You’re brave, so brave, Oliver Olive,’ she says over and over as she swabs the hole with antiseptic and covers it with gauze.
She gives him a baby Tylenol with a swallow of water.
She finds him a sturdy branch to use as a crutch.
‘We’ll go slow,’ Riley says, bright. ‘There’s no hurry.’
‘What if there are more demons?’
‘There aren’t,’ she says. ‘That was the demon. I got it.’
‘Promise?’
‘Promise. Hey, look at the sunrise.’ Riley makes a shield of her palm, hiding the man’s body from his view. ‘Stay over there, ok? Look at the mountain.’ She thinks. ‘We have to leave some stuff behind.’
Riley supports Oliver as he hobbles back to the narrow trail. She sees how slow he goes, how much he leans on the crutch.
‘Rest, Oliver Olive.’ Riley sits him down on a rock. She takes the heavy stuff and throws it hard down the hill, to the bottom of the gully. The pans ring and clang as they go. Riley and Oliver can eat trail mix and dry food. Riley throws the gun down the hill too.
She looks once more at the dead man. In the pink light of dawn his face is young, much younger than it looked by the light of the moon.
He’s not a man, he’s just a boy – not much older than her.
He’s shorter, thinner than he looked in the night.
Riley peers at the thing the dead boy holds in his hand.
It’s an old-fashioned compass, gleaming silver in the dawn. It wasn’t a blade after all.
This is too big to think about. Riley lifts and pushes the dead boy, turning him, rolling him down the slope.
He is not stiff at all, which she had been expecting.
His upper lip has receded, curled up to reveal his teeth.
She looks away and rolls him. The boy’s body thumps heavily down the hill – down, down into the tangle of brush.
When he comes to rest Riley sees that a frond of fern has settled in his wet eye socket.
She reaches out a gentle finger and removes it.
Then she makes to close his eyes, to cover those staring red holes.
Her fingers meet only an open gash, fast cooling.
There are no eyelids to close. Riley’s fingertips are red and brown with slick matter.
Riley gets up quickly and stumbles as far as she can before she bends double and throws up the Powerbars.
When she’s done she closes her eyes and forces it all deep, deep down, what just happened. The boy, the red holes. She pictures it like a cool, deep cave, the place where the bad things live. She puts the memories down there and there they stay, suspended in the dark.
‘Riley?’ Oliver calls from above, voice high, near panic.
Riley tears a handful of leaves from a bush and wipes her fingers clean of the blood. ‘Coming,’ she calls. ‘Hold on, Oliver Olive.’
Oliver sits on the rock, mouth pursed with worry. He tries to get up and run to her. He sits down again, wincing.
‘You ready to go, bud? Does your leg hurt too bad?’
She strokes his dark head and he smiles up at her. ‘No,’ he says. ‘It’s ok.’
Some problems can’t be forced down into the dark place. They’re happening now and all around her. Riley knows that Oliver can’t walk through the wild for long. He’s going to die, she thinks, almost marvelling. I have killed my brother.