The hospital room felt stagnant, stuck in a loop of the same soft sounds: the steady beep of my heart monitor, the tap of the rain on the window, the shuffle of the nurses’ shoes as they walked through the hall. They rarely came in to check on me anymore. They were quick and silent when they did. They gave me pills to make the nightmares stop, pills to help me remember what really happened to me.
But the nightmares didn’t stop, and my memories didn’t change.
If I could just talk to the police again, they’d believe me. They had to. If I could just talk to another doctor, they’d realize I wasn’t imagining this.
I jerked my head toward the door, but it wasn’t a nurse who had just walked in. It was Marcus, his hands shoved into the pockets of his windbreaker, hesitating before he walked any closer.
“Hey, bro.” My voice sounded so weak. I needed water. I’d needed water for the last hour, but no one responded when I pressed the call button.
“Hey.” He came over to the bedside, his eyes roaming around like he didn’t know where to look. He’d always been a good kid: quiet, studious. Nothing like me. When Mom yelled, he didn’t yell back. There was a chair behind him, but he didn’t sit down.
“I’m surprised Mom let you come.” I tried to smile, to lighten the statement, but it still felt as heavy as brick. Mom hadn’t been here, not since the first day I’d woken up. Not since I’d overheard her conversation with the doctor in the hall, and heard her say desperately, “Well, how the hell am I supposed to afford that? Just having her here is putting me into debt, now I’m supposed to keep her medicated?”
“Mom doesn’t know.” He glanced back toward the door. He was only thirteen; he’d probably ridden his bike here. “Are you feeling any better?”
“Getting there.” I scowled down at the IVs in my arm. “I’d be a lot better without all these fucking needles.”
He was shuffling his feet as he pulled his hand out of his pocket, handing over a snack-size bag of Hot Cheetos. I grabbed it as if he’d brought me a bar of pure gold. “Nathan said that they wouldn’t let him have Hot Cheetos when his appendix was taken out, and I know how much you love these things…”
“Holy crap, yes!” I tore open the bag, tossing several of the puffed, spicy snacks into my mouth. “Oh my God. You’re a lifesaver.”
He smiled tightly, finally sitting down, perched right at the edge of the seat. “So, uh…are you…I mean…” He swallowed hard. “Are you feeling okay to come home?”
“I have to talk to the police again,” I said. “They thought I imagined it because of the acid, but it wasn’t the acid.” I shook my head. “I know what happened. I remember it, everything.” I nodded quickly, even though talking about it made my chest tight. The heart monitor had begun to beep more rapidly. “They’ll believe me this time. They will.”
Marcus was biting his lip. He wasn’t looking at me. My heart sunk. “You…you believe me…don’t you?”
His foot was tapping anxiously against the floor. “I don’t know, Juni. It’s…you know…everyone says…”
“Who’s everyone?” I snapped. “Who the hell is everyone, and why do you believe them instead of me?”
He looked stricken. He fumbled for a moment, and pulled out his phone. When he held up the screen for me, a video from the local news was playing. The heart monitor sped up even more. It was Victoria, speaking into the microphone held up to her face.
“She just ran off into the forest,” she said. Her eyes were wide, innocently confused. Her makeup was pristine. She was wearing a goddamn blazer. “We just wanted to experiment, you know? I thought it would be chill, but she started acting like things were chasing her. She was screaming at me to get away from her, saying I was trying to kill her. Then she started cutting herself, it was — God.” She choked up, covering her mouth with her hand. Fake. Fucking fake tears. “It was so awful. I just want her to be okay.”
I clenched my jaw as the video ended. Marcus still wasn’t looking at me.
“I didn’t do this to myself, Marcus,” I said softly. “Please. Please believe me. I didn’t.” He got up, his phone shoved back into his pocket. He walked fast, his head down, back toward the door. “Marcus, please! Don’t…don’t leave!”
He stopped. The fluorescent light above my bed was flickering, giving off an annoying buzz of electricity. Marcus sighed heavily. “It’s too late, Juni.”
I shook my head. “No…What are you talking about? It’s not too late, I —”
The light went out. I stared up at it, utterly confused as I watched the faint, lingering glow of the fluorescent bulb behind its thin plastic cover. The room was quiet. Way too quiet.
My heart monitor had stopped.
I stared at its blank, empty screen. Beyond the monitor, rain was no longer falling against the window. Instead, condensation was rapidly growing across the glass. The water dripped down, collecting along the sill, beginning to leak to the floor.
I could smell seawater. Mold. Wet dirt. I looked back at Marcus, and he wasn’t facing away from me anymore. He was looking directly at me, and his eyes were white…his jaw was slack. I screamed as I looked down and realized that thick gray tentacles were coiling up his legs, around his chest, engulfing him —
“No!” I tried to tear the IVs out of my arms. I tried to get up from the bed to help him, but I was strapped down. My arms, my legs. I couldn’t reach him. “Marcus, run!”
“It’s too late, Juni.” The voice didn’t even come from his own mouth. It echoed all around me as the tentacles pushed into his open mouth, into his eyes. “It’s too late.”
I jolted awake, panting, sweat chilling my skin. It was just before dawn, the wide-open sky colored pale yellow and cold blue. My back ached from having slept in the Jeep, but I was too tense to stretch. My heart was pounding. I was freezing.
I turned on the engine and cranked up the heater, leaning my head against the steering wheel. I’d slept early the night before instead of putting it off as long as possible like I usually did. But I’d been hungry and the money I had left covered my gas, but not food. Sleeping seemed like the only good way to stave off the hunger, but it meant I had more hours to dream.
God, I hated the dreams.
My hunger was back with a vengeance too. My stomach felt like it was trying to consume itself, but after that nightmare, the thought of food was nauseating. It would be better if I just started driving. Maybe after a few hours, my stomach would settle.
I glanced over at my phone, sitting on the passenger seat. A text notification greeted me on the screen and I picked it up with a frown. Probably some stupid spam message…
It was Mom.
My mouth went dry. I’d honestly thought she’d lost my number a long time ago. She never texted. She never called. I could have died years ago, and she wouldn’t have known or cared. I think, in her mind, I died the night I went missing in the woods.
Part of me didn’t even want to read her text. Part of me just wanted to ignore it.
Part of me really, desperately, hoped that maybe my own mother still cared about me.
I unlocked the screen and read.
I don’t know if this is even your number anymore.
Marcus is dead.
If you care.
Funeral is Sunday. Don’t cause any fucking problems if you show up.
I think I blacked out, there on the side of the road, staring at the vast fields surrounding me but not seeing them at all. I think I forgot how to breathe. My lungs closed up, and my mind emptied, and all I could see was my little brother, standing there helplessly, telling me it was too late as those tentacles wrapped around him.
No. No.
My fingers numb with dread, I looked up Abelaum’s local news and saw him emblazoned across the headlines.
“Abelaum University’s Promising Soccer Captain Found Dead.”
“Murder on Abelaum University Campus, Investigation Ongoing.”
“No Suspects in Brutal Campus Stabbing.”
The scream of rage that came out of me felt like it was physically ripped from my chest. The sobs that followed took the air from my lungs. They smothered me. They weren’t enough to release the helpless rage inside me. I beat the steering wheel with my fist until my fingers ached, until purple bruises began to bloom on my skin.
No suspects. No fucking suspects. Such absolute bullshit. My brother had been stabbed multiple times, in the middle of a university building, and they dared to say they had no suspects.
The police didn’t need to be suspicious because they knew. Marcus had always been good; he’d never gotten into trouble or gone running into dangerous situations like I had. But he was my brother, and when the God demanded blood, It would get blood.
The Hadleighs were behind this. I knew they were.
All these years I’d been running, I’d thought I’d outsmarted them. They’d never find me, they’d never track me down. As long as I kept moving, as long as I laid low, as long as I didn’t tell anyone my name, I’d survive.
But now…now I’d survived, and Marcus had died in my place.
The police would drop this investigation the moment they could. They were already in Kent Hadleigh’s back pocket. I knew how it went; I’d been through it. I’d told them my story again and again, until it was all mixed up in my head, and they told me it never fucking happened.
They told me the church never happened; there were no white cloaks and skull masks. They told me the mine never happened; the shaft had been boarded up for decades. They told me there were no monsters in the dark and no demons pursuing me; it was only the drugs, and I had a problem, and I needed help.
But they were wrong. It had been real. I had the scars to prove it.
It should have been me. As I dug my nails into my palms, sobs wracking my chest, that thought sunk its cruel claws deep into my head: it should have been me. It was supposed to be me.
I didn’t have to go back, but that was the direction I started driving. Dead was dead, and I didn’t want to see my mother. I didn’t want to cry at a funeral or see my brother’s waxen face in a casket.
I didn’t want to go back to Abelaum to mourn. I wanted to go back to do what everyone else refused to do. Accusations didn’t help. Authorities didn’t help. I’d been running for years thinking I’d gotten away, but God finds a way to take what It wants regardless.
It took my brother. The God, the Hadleighs, all their sick little followers — they operated without fear. They killed without hesitation. They hid in plain sight because they thought no one would dare defy them. After all, they had a God on their side. Who could dare defy a God?
Me. I could. I’d defied It before, and I’d do it again.
There would be no justice unless I took it myself.
