“One,” Brandon calls down to his friends.
Two people get out a day. So two people have to get out tomorrow, and it won’t be Mack and LeGrand. He can give them that. Because he’s not just a thing. None of them are. He’s a person, like his grandma taught him to be. A kind person, and a good friend. He doesn’t want to live in a world where he’s a thing, or where he’s a bad friend, or where monsters are real.
Brandon stands up, taking a deep breath. He steps to the edge and looks down. Mack and LeGrand are waving and shouting. He waves back down, then takes one last long look at the perfect blue of the sky.
“Two,” he says, loud enough for them to hear. He steps off the platform.
* * *
—
Mack stares down at the mess. It feels callous to think of two people—one she liked, one she didn’t—as a mess, but that’s the only way to describe it. Maybe something is broken in her, too, but she doesn’t look away. It feels important to witness.
Brandon is clearly dead. He tipped as he fell, neck snapped on impact. She can’t understand why he did it.
“Two a day,” LeGrand says, solving the mystery. He’s not looking at the mess, but staring into the trees, watchful.
“He’s making sure they’re easy to find.” Mack closes her eyes at last, cutting off the view of Brandon’s empty stare. “Giving us an extra day.” She knows she’s talking about him in the present tense, like he’s not already past tense, forever. But it’s better to think of him like that, like he’s still playing the game, still playing it for his friends, still the same sweet guy who offered to let three strangers come live with him just because he had a house, because he could help.
He’d figured out a way to help now, too. She wouldn’t have asked this of him. And she wouldn’t have done it herself. She knows death is coming for her, sure. Long overdue. But she’s going to let it find her, not rush to meet it.
Besides, she still has to figure out a way to let LeGrand win. Thanks to Brandon, now she has an extra day to do it.
A terrible gurgling sound rips her eyes open, and she turns to the jumble of bones and burst skin and pooling blood that once was Jaden. Still is Jaden. He’s not dead. His fingers twitch as he claws at the ground, his goal unclear. Bloody bubbles ooze out of his mouth, and Mack is sure that means something medically, but she has no idea what.
“Dammit,” she whispers. Because Jaden got her Ava killed, but he didn’t know. Not all the way. And even if he did, this seems crueler than the universe should allow. In this state, odds are he won’t even survive until tomorrow. There’s no hope of help coming, no potential for rescue. For medical intervention. Even if there were, she doesn’t think it would matter.
Mack looks at LeGrand, who is equally horrified. Jaden has started groaning in a low chorus of agony.
Mack knows if she says it out loud, she’s asking for permission. And she shouldn’t make LeGrand complicit. He’s got to get out, after all, and save his sister. He’ll need to be whole for that. Mack doesn’t need to be whole, and besides, has she ever really been?
She searches the ground for a big rock. The area they’re in is littered with small rocks and unidentifiable trash, but nothing as heavy as she needs. She’ll probably have to find one of the sections of collapsed wall. Get a chunk from that. “Go into the trees,” she says to LeGrand. “I’ll be right there.”
“Mack,” LeGrand says.
She doesn’t want to argue with him. It’s the only kindness she can offer Jaden, the only—
“Mack!” This time there’s a quiet warning in LeGrand’s tone, a quality of fear that makes her go still.
That’s when she hears it. The soft padding of something drawing near, the long, slow sounds of something inhaling deeply. Of something following a scent. LeGrand backs away, melting into the trees, and Mack looks at Jaden, suffering. Then she takes a step backward, and another, and another, her eyes on the path they had come from.
The walled walkway curves sharply, hiding the full length from her. But the sounds are getting closer, and she wonders how she could have ever attributed them to a person, or even to an animal. She takes another step backward.
Another.
Another.
She should be running, but she can’t make herself do more than creep backward, timed to the steps she can hear shuffling ever nearer. One step forward, one step back, a careful choreography.
And then her dance partner is revealed.
“Oh,” Mack breathes out, because as soon as she sees what’s coming, she realizes what she expected to be revealed. She expected a person. Not just any person, either. Some part of her expected to see her father come around that bend, knife in hand, thin lips a grim line, eyes blank and emotionless, here at last to claim her.
So she can’t quite understand what it is she’s actually faced with.
She stands still, watching, as it shuffles forward, turning its head side to side as the wet snuffling noise continues, the flat broad snout of it searching, two tear-shaped nostrils flared. Above that, where eyes perhaps once were, are a patchwork hatching of poorly healed scars, pink and gray, a story of violence.
Violence, too, in its hands, almost human but too large, each finger a blunt, thick instrument, tapering to claws that are jagged, broken, crusted in blood.
It’s the blood Mack can’t look away from. Is that the last of Ava, her Ava, crusted and drying into flakes on the ends of the monster’s hands?
It stops, swings its head to the side. Its nostrils flare bigger, and it takes a deep, lingering breath. Her eyes drift up to massive horns erupting from its head, five of them, almost elegant in comparison with the rest of it. Gray at the base where they sweep out from the head, then curving back toward each other, tapering to white tips that nearly meet in a single point eighteen inches above its skull.
Ivory, she thinks, remembering a nature program she and Maddie watched about poachers. It made them both cry with such desperate snotty gasps that their mother ran in and turned the TV off, scolding them. Mack could never understand why she was in trouble for being sad about the cruelty of the world.
Maybe even then their mother knew what her fate held, what both her daughters’ fates held, and was only trying to spare them for as long as she could. To lie to them about what the world lets happen. But their mother’s protection, even her own body, wasn’t a strong enough dam to hold back the coming violence.
One hoofed leg slides forward, a long strand of spittle falling in slow motion from the monster’s mouth to the matted, filthy hair of its chest.
A hand clamps down on Mack’s shoulder and drags her backward. The monster, suddenly spurred into action, lunges forward with surprising speed. But it stops at the gasping remains of Jaden, left there for it by Brandon.