Chapter Text
"Dylan, what the hell happened to you?"
Dakota’s already leaning away from his truck when she comes out of the trees, already moving towards her, and Dylan waves him off and falls down to the grass in a way she means to look casual. It doesn't. Her palms take most of it, dirt packing up under nails that are already packed with something else.
The world is tilted a few degrees. Everything she looks at has a grainy filter over it, and there's a ringing in her ears that hasn't stopped since she woke up face-down in the ferns with her nose bleeding.
"M'fine, Kota."
He drops to his knees in front of her and takes her face in both hands, turning it side to side, checking her over the way he does.Thumb under her chin. Tilt. Tilt back. His hand comes away with dark red blood after he wipes at her nose.
"You're not fine."
"I'm sitting up, aren't I?"
"That's not the bar." He pulls a leaf out of her hair and flicks it away, then another one. There are a lot of them. "You look like you slept out there."
"I think I got blackout drunk." She tries it out loud to see if it holds. I was drunk, or I had a concussion. Maybe even a late-night snack, ha ha. Did she eat a squirrel?
"That's believable," he says, and she's annoyed at how fast he takes it.
He gets a hand under her arm and hauls her up with no ceremony at all, the same as he'd move a cooler, and she's sore enough that she makes a noise and he makes one back, irritated on her behalf. He's in the white wife-beater and the cowboy jeans she makes fun of him for. His hair's down out of the braids, spilling over his shoulders.
Curls. His hair has brown curls, catching the summer sunlight.
Dylan looks at that for a second longer than she should. Her brother's hair is black and straight as rain and he has never in his life had a curl in it, and the thought comes up and then goes flat, smoothed over like a stone dropped in mud, the air bubbles slowly dissipating. Of course his hair is curly. It's humid. It's been humid all week.
"Sorry if I worried you. I know Mom and Dad said—"
"I don't care what they said." He brushes the dirt off his knees. "I care about you."
Behind him the tree line has gone very dark, and the cicadas have stopped.
There are four people standing in it.
Not moving. They’re spaced out along the ferns the way trees are spaced, one’s leaning against a tree, one in a hoodie the color of wet sand, one with something long and heavy hanging from his hand, one that stands so still, black waves of hair falling from her white hood.
"Kota." Her voice comes out wrong. "Kota, behind you—"
"Dylan." Soft. Dangerously soft, the way he gets when he’s worried, "what happened?"
He's still looking right at her. He hasn't turned around, and he isn't going to, and when she drags her eyes back up to his face, she doesn’t recognize him for a moment- it’s like something's off, the shape of his nose maybe? No, his eyes…they’re glowing orange. Not in a bad cgi way, but in a horrible dark way.
The ringing resolves into static.
"I don't remember," she says.
"You do," says her brother, and smiles with too many teeth, and the static comes up over her like water closing over her head-
.
..
…
"Bathroom break," Brian says, pulling me up onto my feet. He's wearing a black t-shirt. I blink the sleep out of my eyes and my heart is still going fast from whatever I was just dreaming, which is already coming apart in my mind, leaving me with pieces. Teeth. A treeline. The workers?
"What?"
"I said, it's time for a bathroom break."
He pulls me out of the open van's door. It's still dark outside, and when I look back towards the van, Toby and Tim are asleep. Toby's got his hood pulled all the way over his face and one sneaker up on the seat. Tim is reclined so far back that all I can see is the top of his head and one hand hanging off the wheel. Kate sits on the top of the van, her head tilted towards the stars.
"What state are we in?"
I look down at my clothes. The same thing I wore when I ate Seth three days ago, my black lace babydoll top and the tiered skirt, both rumpled and covered in stains. My gauze socks have turned into a dark yellow. I bet I look terrible.
"Kentucky, we're around six hours away from the cabin," Brian answers, unlocking my handcuffs and shoving me into the rest stop's bathroom.
"And don't try anything funny, I already scoped out the bathroom. There's no windows," he calls out towards me, and I close the door.
Fucking asshole.
The rest stop bathroom has a green hospital-isc light that makes everyone look like they're already dead. One of the bulbs is going out, clicking on and off. There's a cursive M carved into the stall door and somebody's phone number written under it in blue pen. Somebody in Kentucky wanted somebody else to call them, it’s cute but I see this kind of thing everywhere.
When I exit the dirty stall and run my hands under the chillingly cold water, I consider escape routes again. I could climb into the ceiling tiles, or drown myself in the yellowing toilet bowl.
He was right when he said there weren't any windows, but I'm not sure what the point of escaping even is anymore.
If we're really in Kentucky, that means I'm hours from home and Summer and Dakota are likely looking for me right now. I imagine my brother at the tower with the brick-phone pressed to his ear and his hair coming out of the braids, calling my parents, calling Seth's parents. Someone would have found the bench by now. The waterfall trail isn't exactly hidden. I try to picture the ranger who found it, some guy with a radio clipped to his belt, and then I stop picturing it, because my mouth waters and I hate myself.
Tennessee is the end destination, like Brian had said. Somewhere deep in the smokey mountains, a cabin where I'd probably be handcuffed to the wall and fed scraps of their little murder victims.
I look in the mirror. My eyebrow piercing has a crust of something around it that I don't want to name. My cheekbones stick out further than they did in August. I put two fingers on my wrist and count my pulse against the clicking bulb and get bored before I get a number.
My stomach growls loudly, and I figure it's time to leave the restroom and get back to the stupid van, maybe I could interrogate Kate about her motives.
I shut the water off, rubbing the remaining water on my hands onto my shirt where I had noticed stains. Then I open the door.
Brian waits for me with the open handcuffs, and when I look in his brown eyes, I notice that he hasn't been getting sleep at all, likely watching me sleep. There's a cup of coffee on the ground near his shoes, styrofoam, the lid still on.
He handcuffs my hands. My wrists look sickly and pale compared to his tan and broad wrists, it makes me wonder how the Operator likes his workers to be.
"Do I have to stay in the van? Can I sit outside?" I ask, even though it fuels my stomach with hate, having to act like a child, ask what I can or can't do.
"You know I have to watch you, right?" Brian raises an eyebrow as if I was the insane one.
"Can I?"
"..." He takes his coffee, then my arm and leads me towards an oak tree that glows orange in the streetlight. It's cold outside.
I sit on the freezing dirt, pulling my legs up and leaning my head against my knees, my handcuffed arms awkwardly surrounding my legs. The ground has that smell that means it rained here earlier but the leaves aren’t that damp so I take it as a blessing.
There aren't any sounds from where Brian is standing. I assume he's just watching me like the fucking weirdo he is. A truck goes by out on the highway and I listen to it for the whole time it takes to disappear, I wish whoever it was would’ve pulled into the rest stop and seen my handcuffs.
"You cold, Clearwater?"
I look up. My black hair is stiff, it barely moves. Brian is just looking down at me, and I finally read the text on his black shirt. Misfits, a white grinning skull in the middle of the shirt. Fuck. Dakota used to love the Misfits. He had the same skull on a pin he kept on his backpack in high school when he still lived with mom and dad, I was always really jealous of his style.
"Why?" I hide my shivers, pulling my chin up before leaning it back into my bony knees, then looking back up at Brian. "Why do you care whether I'm cold or not?"
Brian tilts his head and squints. "Are you usually this stupid or-" he laughs. This Brian seems different than the one that just dragged me around the rest stop, or the Brian that I've known in the van.
"I mean, you've been treating me like shit for days, and you kidnapped me, so it doesn't seem like you'd care." I wring my hands around in the handcuffs, looking around the rest stop. Kate is still watching the stars and the sky is slowly getting lighter along the bottom, just barely, we’ll be back on the road soon.
"Haven't you caught on? I told you it wasn't my choice. I mean…if the Operator hadn't found me, I'd probably be operating and forming surgeries right now."
I really couldn't care what Brian says, I mostly believe it's bullshit.
"Surgeries," I repeat.
"Pre-med." He says it flat, like he's reading it off a form. "Two years in."
"Sure."
"Believe whatever you want." He sits down. Not next to me exactly, a few feet off, with his back against the same tree so he can still see me without turning his head. His boots move the leaves around. "It's funnier if you don't."
"You listen to it though," I exhale a breath of white air.
When I move my eyes towards him, his smile looks too wide and sharp. With his muddy brown eyes, he reminds me of a shark leering in deep water.
"So? You do too…don't think I didn't see those missing posters."
"That wasn't my choice," I growl into my knees. "I didn't even really know it was me."
"Don't lie, you were ignoring the signs. There are always signs."
I don't answer him, because he's right, and because I'd rather chew through my own tongue than tell him so. I'd seen the blood under my nails. I'd seen my shoes. I'd read a poem in my own poetry book in handwriting that wasn't really mine and then I put the book in my backpack and got drunk on lavender gin in a lake. I knew.
"How long did it take you," I say instead. "To stop ignoring it?"
Brian takes the lid off his coffee and drinks some and puts the lid back on. He does the whole thing slowly, his moves are always sluggish for some reason, earlier he reminded me of a zombie, and now I wonder if he really is. Maybe the Operator makes it’s workers into zombies.
"I didn't ignore it," he says. "I went looking for it."
"What?"
"There was a group of us…we were filming things. It was sort of a project." He turns the cup around in his hands. "That's the whole story, so don't ask me the rest of it."
"I don’t believe you about that being the whole story."
"Yeah." He huffs into the air, a short sound that isn't quite a laugh. "I don’t think Tim would let me tell you the rest."
My stomach makes a noise then, a long low one, and I press my forearm into it hard the way I used to do at the tower, or at my parents house- like that'd shut it up. Brian's eyes go down to where my arm is and then back up to my face, and he doesn't say anything about it, the cannibalism at least.
"Tim's gonna keep buying you food," he says after a while.
"I know."
"He'll do it the whole drive. He did it with Toby for fifteen days." He drinks more coffee. "Just so you know what you're up against."
"Eleven days?"
"Toby doesn't feel pain." Brian says this like it's weather. "He'll tell you about it eventually. He tells everybody. The point is he didn't notice he was starving until he stood up and hit the floor, and now Tim counts everything that goes into him. So you're not special, if that's what you're doing. You're just the new one."
"I'm not doing anything."
"Sure."
The bulb over the bathroom door clicks on, then off, then on. I watch a moth work at it. Somewhere on the other side of the lot a semi lets out its air brakes and the sound rolls all the way over to us and dies against the trees.
Please notice me, please look over here and see my handcuffs and see these fuckers.
"Why does it want me," I ask. "If it already has four of you?”
His head swivels to the van, his mouth opens to form an answer but it closes.
Kate is leaning into the cold metal of the roof. She looks like she fell asleep.
His eyes widen and he launches up from the soles of his boots. "Stay there!" he shouts towards me before he runs in the van's direction.
I pull my head up from my knees, watching as the woman is shaken awake. She comes up fast, both of her hands going out, her head turning in panic before settling on Brian. He's got one hand on her shoulder and one flat in the air in front of her face, not touching, just there, and he's saying something low that I can't hear. She's saying something back and it's coming out in pieces.
They stay like that for a while. Long enough that I get really cold, I consider running but I know it’s not worth it. Especially not on this roadtrip.
Then Kate slides down off the roof and lands hard, and Brian walks back toward me across the lot with his hands in his pockets and his face rearranged into nothing, it’s the other Brian. Van Brian.
"Get up," he says.
"Is she okay?"
"Get up, Clearwater."
I get up. My legs have gone to pins and needles and I stumble and he catches my elbow the same way Kate did at the gas station, the same practiced grip.
"She fell asleep?" I ask, "that's all she did.”
Brian doesn't look at me. He's looking at the treeline behind the rest stop, the way he was looking at the highway that first night, checking for something that I can’t see.
"Yeah," he says. "That's all she did."
He puts me back in the van and cuffs my ankles again, which he hasn't done since Nebraska, and I don't ask about that either. Kate climbs in a minute later and sits down in her seat and picks her novel up off the floor. She doesn't open it. Her hands are shaking enough that I can see it from my spot behind her.
Toby is still asleep. Tim is still asleep. The sky's getting lighter by the minute now, grey coming up over a row of pines and six hours from here there's a cabin with four bedrooms and a loft and cameras outside. Thanks for that bit of info Toby.
I lie down and pull the quilt up and stare at the back of Kate's head.
Nobody sleeps on this shift. I really don’t understand why.
Does Kate have a reason? She looked pretty scared when she woke up, as if she wasn’t supposed to be asleep- but Toby and Tim sleep just fine, and Brian chooses to watch the van.
I mull over my thoughts for another twenty minutes, then Tim wakes up- he ruffles his hair, exchanges a couple of quiet words with Brian, and starts the engine- he heads to McDonalds first for a coffee. It's the same cycle of orders.
Tim gets a coffee and a breakfast sandwich, Brian gets a coffee and an egg bagel, Kate gets a coffee and biscuits and gravy- Toby wakes up and asks for hashbrowns. I tell Tim I want nothing. He passes back a brown paper bag with biscuits and gravy anyways, I ignore it.
Tim's radio goes on and on.
“I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?
I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain
Comin' down on a sunny day?”
I have a list in my head of thoughts and analysis of the workers and nothing to write it down with.
The bag of biscuits and gravy sits on the floor between my feet and goes cold. The grease comes through the bottom of the paper in a dark ring, the same way it did at Wendy's, the same way it did at the Burger King in Nebraska. The same way it did at a multitude of restaurants, he’s wasting his time and money. Tim doesn't take any of them back. That's part of his ritual too, I think. He buys the food and I don't eat the food and neither of us says anything about it, it’s become a cycle and I’m starting to enjoy the strength of the hunger that comes with ignoring Tim’s food.
Kentucky goes by green and folded. After the flatness of Nebraska it's almost a shock- there are hills again. Horses stand around in the fields not doing anything. There are barns with roofs caving in and barns painted bright red, right across the road from each other, it’s all farmland. Around ten a.m. Toby swivels his seat around.
He's got the notebook against his chest and the pen already in his teeth, and he holds up one finger at me like he’s telling me to wait, then he climbs back through the aisle and drops onto the carpet by my feet. The day before yesterday, he sat on my cushion but now he’s giving me space. He knocks the cold bag of biscuits over with his sneaker and rights it without looking, like it's furniture or trash.
He flips past our old page. I catch a glimpse of it going by, my handwriting and his, and it's strange to see that it's a real object that exists in the world now, a conversation someone could find.
did you sleep
I take the pen. The cuffs make my letters slant.
A little. I had a nightmare. You?
I always sleep. Kate says its unfair
What was the nightmare
I look at that question longer than I really should. Outside the window there's a billboard for fireworks, then another billboard for the same fireworks, then a third one, all of them promising the biggest selection in the state. The next billboard advertises an adult superstore, the midwest is cool.
My brother. His eyes were wrong and there were four people in the trees behind him. I think it was you guys.
Toby reads it. Something moves across his face that I can't get a good read on, and then he writes fast, pressing hard enough that the pen goes through the page a little.
that happens to everybody. dont freak out
What do you mean it happens to everybody
it shows up in dreams b4 it shows up other ways. mine was my sister for like a month. tim says its cheaper for it that way, like it doesnt have to spend anything to get in your head when ur asleep
Cheaper?
i dont know how to explain it better. sorry
No that makes sense actually
It does, is the horrible part. I think about the poem in my poetry book. I think about the drawing on the kids' menu at the diner, a tall pale figure in a suit, surrounded by blue crayon, that I made with my own hand while looking directly at my brother.
Toby takes the notebook back and chews on the pen cap and then writes something and covers it with his palm for a second before he lets me see it.
do you want to know about the cabin or do you want it to be a surprise
Tell me
- its on a lake. theres a dock but the boats gone so i just sit on the dock sometimes. kates room is the 2nd on the left upstairs, you get the bed by the window which is the good one. Tim plans on barring the window though so you can’t escape. the water heater is bad so shower first or last never the middle. tim cooks tues thurs sun and its actually good. theres no phone.
No phone at all?
there was one. brian did something to it
Of course he did
hes not as bad as he seems
He's exactly as bad as he seems
Toby makes a noise that's almost a laugh, and up in the middle row Kate says, without turning around, "What?" Her voice is kind, like she wants in on the joke.
"N-nothing," Toby says out loud, and then writes, see she does that. she hears everything. dont say anything about her in here
I look at the back of Kate's head. At the wolfcut and the shoulder of the red camisole and the arm of the seat where her hand is resting with the paperback still shut under it.
Is she okay? She fell asleep last night and Brian got upset.
Toby's pen stops.
He looks at what I wrote for a long time, he’s thinking-and his neck jerks once, hard, to the left. He doesn't react to it. I haven’t seen him react to his neck jerks, really.
she doesnt like being asleep when she’s not at the cabin. thats all im gonna say
Why?
I told you that’s all i’d say
He underlines it twice and then closes the notebook, and that's the end of that, apparently. He doesn't go back to his seat right away though. He sits there near my knees with the notebook on his own knees, watching the other workers and the window at the front, and neither of us says anything for about forty miles.
When he finally gets up he leaves the mp3 player on the quilt by my hand without making a thing out of it.
The border comes up at noon.
There's a sign, blue and white, and Tim taps the wheel twice when we pass it like he's knocking wood. Nobody announces that we’re in a new state, the last state. The air in the van changes, or maybe I'm making that up, maybe it's just that Brian sits up straighter and Kate finally opens her book and doesn't turn a single page for the next hour.
Tennessee looks like Kentucky at first and then it doesn't. The hills get taller and closer together and start crowding the road. The highway drops down between them and there are walls of trees on both sides now, dark green going to orange and yellow at the tops, and every so often there's a break where you can see out across a valley full of fog sitting low in it like water in a bowl. It's the first time since Oregon that anything out the window has looked like it could hide something.
I hate how much it looks like home. I hate that I'm relieved.
We come off the interstate around three and after that it's two lanes. Gas stations with one pump. A church with a sign out front that's missing half its letters so it doesn't say anything anymore. A place selling quilts and another place selling quilts and many trailheads on the side of the road for hiking. Then the road starts climbing.
It goes to gravel about twenty minutes in, and after that it stops being a road and becomes a series of turns. The van groans on every one. Branches come down low enough to drag along the roof and the sound is awful, a long scrape right over my head, over and over. Toby has his forehead against the glass. Kate has her eyes shut but she isn't sleeping, I can tell the difference now.
There's a chain across a side track at one point with a NO TRESPASSING sign hanging off it, faded almost white. Tim doesn't take that turn. Two miles later there's another chain with no sign at all, and he takes that one, and Brian gets out to unhook it and hook it back up behind us without a word being said between them.
It’s so damn quiet.
The trees close over the road completely. It goes dim, not dark exactly, just green and low, the kind of light I grew up under.
And then it opens.
The lake appears. It’s flat and black and bigger than I expected, with the far shore a long way off and fog already gathering at the edges of it even though there's still sun on the water in the middle. There are no other cabins. No dock lights. No boats out on it, no kids yelling, none of the Saturday noise that lakes are supposed to have. It's a big beautiful thing that nobody is using, and that bothers me more than I can put into words.
The cabin sits up off the shore on a slope, dark wood turned into a darker brown with weather, two stories and a stone chimney, with a porch that wraps around one side and a woodpile stacked as high as my chest. There's a truck parked beside it under a tarp. There's a satellite dish on the roof that's pointed at nothing.
And there's the dock, exactly like Toby said. No boat.
Tim kills the engine and the quiet is still there, I freeze.
For a second nobody moves. Four people who have been in this van for multiple days and none of them reach for a door.
"Home sweet home," Tim says finally, and it's the same thing Dakota said to me in June, standing at the bottom of the fire tower ladder with the cicadas going, and I turn my face into the leather seat so none of them can watch me react to it.
Brian gets out first and stretches, and I hear his back crack from inside the van. Toby is already half over his seat reaching for his backpack. Kate opens her door and steps down into the gravel and stands there looking at the water with her arms crossed, not going any closer to it.
Then Brian slides the side door open and the cold comes in, lake-cold, it feels like a mineral-woodsy sort of chill, and he holds out a hand for my ankle cuffs like he's asking me to dance.
"Welcome to Tennessee, Clearwater."
I count four cameras before he even gets me to the porch steps.