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“Wake up,” Shauna hisses and Akilah reacts accordingly, legs spasming out and flipping onto her side, already looking for the danger.
Midnight casts a peculiar spell across the summer sunk wilderness. Their fire has shrunk down to orange embers and they sprawled around like a bunch of drunken idiots lost after a party, curled around the shadows of trees. Akilah likes where the wind passes through the archway of brush closer by the creek, air smelling a bit cleaner and less of smoke. That’s why she always ends up alone with the hood of her sweater yanked up, counting every second until she passes out into something resembling sleep. Everyone else prefers the direct heat and access of the fire, reeking of smoke by morning.
Shauna’s got no emotion on her face, but there’s a tiny smear of blood across the bridge of her nose. Akilah feels an immediate thread of fear lace through her heart, it pulsing wildly under the cage of her ribs. “What’s going on?” She asks, shifting back so she’s kneeling on the torn up grass. They’re down to bare minimum resources and she’s gotten creative, shoving as much loose grass under a blanket to try and resemble the feel of mattress, of comfort. “Is there— is it another hunt?”
Shauna’s mouth pressed tight for a moment. “No. Not right now. Do you have anything to sew with?”
Akilah scrambles to understand. “Sewing?” Her mom tried getting her and her sister into needlepoint. Her finger remembers the act of manipulating little loops of wilted looking flowers, the awkward bridging of thread up a stem, and those embroidered pillowcases are probably still on her bed back home.
“Come on. Just go and grab what you need.”
Her laces on her sneakers are undone so she trips before hastily ducking down and double knotting them. There’s a fish hook in a metal can by the fire and she snags it along with their only thread. Van’s face is tipped her way and with the faint light of the ashes, Akilah can see the scars along her mouth and cheek.
She’s done more than just a few lacklustre pillowcases.
Shauna’s waiting but Akilah has to squeeze her eyes shut and banish the memory of Van’s cheek ripped open from her mind. That had been awkward, pinching skin together and trying to stitch over and through, literally seeing her teeth clench down while she pulled thread tighter and tightest.
Her stomach twists and it takes a long minute before she gains the confidence to stand up. Shauna hisses her name impatiently like she's somehow forgotten the purpose of her task.
Could she say no and go back to sleep? Akilah doesn't think so. Shauna's coldly neutral to her, but she's the one who used her fists to beat Lottie black and blue, who scorched Jackie with her words alone.... provoking her doesn't seem wise.
They meet at the mouth of their camp and split off down a forged pathway. They’re aliens to the woods, definitely, but Akilah can recognize where they’ve woven desire paths through. The ground beneath them goes from hard to soft, clearly taking them towards a creek. The group takes water from it usually, boiling it over the fire to keep their drinking water safe. Easier than stomping up and down for the lake, anyways. She pitched the idea to boil it and it pisses everyone off having to do the extra work, but at least they're holding off on illness for now. Everything about their setup is barely functional. One more bad thing? It'll be a wrecking ball that they won't ever recover from. Shauna steers them further down a path before switching for a rockier passage, bypassing thick bramble, and she losses familiarity. The dark doesn't help, either. She slips and Shauna hisses at her to hurry up.
“What happened?” Akilah asks, voice a little thick from sleep. It feels like a trap. “Where are we going?”
Shauna doesn’t bother with a response. She just shoves a branch over and slips through, making Akilah catch it to avoid getting smacked across the face with it.
Thankfully, once through the dense brush, Akilah can see another fire. There’s a crude outline of a camp ahead. Travis, maybe. He tends to wander loosely around their main base and stays out of the way, isolated in his grief. Sometimes Akilah would see him sitting by the water and twisting the ring on his finger around in pointless circles, not quite pieced together from everything yet. Usually he drops right down to the ground and calls it quits for the day, ignorant to the idea of pitching a tarp or something for shelter.
But it isn’t his temporary set up at all.
Nat’s the one sitting hunched on a rock and the back of her shirt is slashed open. “I told you that I didn’t want an audience for this,” she sneers, turning to face them properly. “I’m fine.”
“Just shut up,” Shauna fires back, all molten anger suddenly dripping from her tongue.
Akilah's going to sew back together Nat's shirt, fix the tear...
Blood brings a sharp, sudden clarity. Nat’s black shirt is torn open from something sharp and there’s a quick flash of red on her skin, the shine of blood. Her head automatically snaps around to check for dangers. They’re not alone in the woods, not with wolves and bears, and it isn’t like the Yellowjackets are totally harmless in their pursuits of survival. Maybe something happened. A fight isn't just a fight anymore. Piss somebody off? Maybe the whole group'll get pissed. The wilderness claimed Nat somehow as a leader but that doesn't mean every decision lands evenly across the board.
“Did someone jump you? Jesus, that’s a lot of blood," Akilah says without thinking. She wants to jump ten feet away from them both.
Shauna hisses out a furious sigh. “Stitch her up and stop talking. And can you just cooperate? Let her try and make it better."
Nat narrows her eyes and glares, a little cool to Shauna’s heat, before complying. She yanks her shirt off and tosses it across the little clearing, the item of clothing landing neatly on blankets pushed together. Something has slashed right down from her shoulder.
“I’m not doing a thing until somebody fills me in on what has happened.”
“Use your head and figure it out,” Nat snarks back. “I ran backwards into a knife. What do you think?”
Akilah’s properly horrified when she realizes Shauna’s hands are covered in blood. She hadn’t noticed in the dark, but now the red was obvious.
“God,” she stutters out. There’s a sick feeling writhing inside her stomach and it feels like she might be tip over and vomit in the bushes at any moment. “You did this to her?”
“It wasn’t intentional,” Shauna says, looking embarrassed in contrast to Nat’s apathy. “Are you gonna fix this or what?”
“What about Misty?”
Nat groans. “No. Absolutely not.”
“I’m not a doctor, I don’t know what I’m doing,” Akilah says quickly. She’s tired of scrubbing blood out from under her fingernails. She doesn’t even know how Shauna manages the brutal work of hacking the bodies apart, the never-ending chore of rinsing her hands clean of it.
Shauna rolls her eyes and folds her arms across her chest. “I’ll just run for the nearest payphone and call an ambulance. Give me a quarter and I’ll even order a pizza for everyone. God, Akilah. I’m not asking for the moon. Just— just fix it, okay? Nat needs stitches.”
“I don’t need anything,” says Nat, countering her cooly. “It’ll heal just fine.”
“Shut up. It’ll heal when you’ve got stitched back together.”
Akilah expels a tiny sigh and looks at the scanty options. “I’ll need some boiled water to sterilize the needle. There’s nothing I can give to help with the pain.” Mari’s magic process of bottling berries hasn’t quite come to full transformation yet. They’re a few weeks shy of having booze again. “It’ll… it won’t feel good. And I told you, I’m not a doctor or anything.” Van’s face had healed around the rough, knotted looking scars, and Akilah could’ve traced the outline of them in the absolute dark with nothing to guide her. “Probably won’t be pretty when it heals up.”
Nat tips her face up and smiles roughly. “What’s one more ugly scar to the collection?”
“Water is starting to bubble now,” Shauna alerts them, bending down to examine the shitty, half melted pot that must’ve been yanked from the cabin. She must’ve staged it close to the fire before coming to retrieve help.
Akilah pats her pockets and finds a pair of tweezers. Using them, she dips the fish hook into the water and holds it there. “Should we get Lottie? Or someone else?” There’s a strange desire to have somebody supervising them, like they shouldn’t be stitching up flesh without an adult present.
“And tell them what? Natalie’s injured? You know what’ll happen. No,” Shauna says, shaking her head. “Just fix it tonight and don’t say anything to anybody.”
“Can you at least tell me why you cut her with a knife?” Akilah fires back. It feels ridiculous to be put to secrecy just because she can fumble her way through a French knot.
Nat vaguely covers a yawn with her hands and squints up at them like she’s bored. “I pissed her off by asking a shit ton of questions. Shauna’s got no mercy when she’s armed.”
The night won’t end until she complied. Akilah finishes sterilizing the hook and threads it awkwardly, using the full advantage of the firelight to guide through the loop. The rock Nat’s sitting on isn’t in the best spot for her to work, but Akilah isn’t going to waste time asking her to come closer. The faint light gathers across Nat’s pale shoulders, shows where her skin is stretched tight over bones.
And yes, Akilah realizes slowly.
Nat’s not a stranger to ugly scars.
She sucks in air to focus and prods the skin by the gash carefully, trying to examine the fresh damage sitting on top of old damage. They’ve never been friends, her and Nat, before the trip. Akilah was JV which meant she hung with Rachel and Kristen. Nat? Nat did her own thing. It wasn’t her business, even if she laughed at a few sly jokes, and they didn’t keep to the same circles around school.
But her hand on Nat’s bare shoulder? It feels intimate. The cut goes down her shoulder and down her back, curving over her ribs. Akilah fusses at what she can see before snapping for a damp rag or something to clean off the blood.
“Don’t go soft on me now,” Nat says, and it’s unclear if she’s talking to Akilah or Shauna. The late hour makes everything blurry.
“How does it look?”
“Ugly as ever,” Akilah states plainly. The blood vanishes under slow, careful strokes. She then drops the cloth and it ends up somewhere beneath her foot. “Don’t move, okay? It’ll get uglier if you’re trying to push me off.”
Nat makes an effort to relax. “Sure.”
The needle pushes gently against the skin and Akilah takes a second before shoving it straight through. It earns her a gasp, Nat’s fingers folding into fists, and she keeps moving. Teasing the needle through a little more gives her the room to pull the thread all the way.
The work would be easier, possibly, if Shauna wasn’t hovering over top of her. She bites her tongue and works through the first six stitches.
“Do you have enough thread?”
“Dunno.”
“And Misty’s got nothing for pain squirrelled away? I thought she had a few Midol left over.”
“Wouldn’t do much for this. Can you just shut up for a second?” Akilah tells her, and she’s apparently in charge because Shauna doesn’t say a word. Just hangs off her shadow, cold disproval radiating off of her, and silently glowers. It was obvious that Shauna resented the need for help.
A few inches down earns another choked sounding gasp. Nat’s left shoulder twitches violently, a badly smothered reflex to spin around and smack at Akilah for the hurt. She clenches her teeth together and the stitches slowly creep down the raw wound, dipping the needle a little deeper before pulling back through. The whole process is a little meditative once her hands figure the rhythm out.
The whole thing is a guarantee for a nasty scar. Akilah doesn’t have the right kind of thread for this and her technique is functional, at best. But that’s the thing about being stranded in the woods… none of them get to stay shiny and pretty. Akilah got to waste through the winter in her pyjamas, school sweatshirt, and a rotting fur. The rubber soles on her shoes was a little melted from the fire, but at least they were in better condition compared to Mari’s.
“Almost through,” Akilah lies. Shauna’s nice enough to hum in agreement. Which is fair, considering how the whole situation was apparently Shauna’s fault.
“Take your time.”
Akilah gasps suddenly when her blood slick fingers nearly lose the needle. She fumbles, pinches it a little tighter, and steadies her hand. Breathes for a moment, sound loud even with the fire crackling behind her. “Is this a thing you guys do? Take turns slashing and hacking at each other? Because it’s really weird.” Were they even friends? Nat and Shauna didn't seem capable of mixing with people properly. They once had Travis and Jackie, respectively, and now they had nobody. Akilah's mind felt fuzzy as she tried remembering when they started grouping together.
Crickets chirped. Summer makes the woods loud with activity. Travis had found some hungry looking rabbits in a snare the day before, barely enough to fill their metaphorical soup pot, but signs of movement was everywhere. It wasn’t just them plunging through the overgrowth. The two don’t say a word and the whole world trembles with a sleepy ambition.
“Okay, whatever. Keep your secrets,” she mumbles.
There’s enough thread to finish with and Akilah is wary enough to triple knot the whole thing for luck. It would be nice if they had a first aid kit with decent supplies like bandages and disinfectant, but they’ve got nothing. The lack of it all hurts. There’s a decent chance that Nat’s going to pull the stitches out by accident and restart the whole issue back to square one.
She stands properly and her back cracks as she straightens back up. Akilah scans around for water and notices what she hadn’t before: the bedding was two blankets tangled together.
Oh, she thinks. It looks like the nest Tai and Van have together. She's really been out of some kind of gossip loop lately.
“Do you have something I can…” Akilah holds her hands up weakly. She hates the colour red.
Shauna takes a second to process the blood. “Sure.” There’s a a plastic, crumpled water bottle that she pulls out of Nat’s hunting bag and she unscrews the cap for her, letting her use to wash her hands off and the needle. “Thanks for this.”
“Right.”
Nat stands up and goes directly for her shirt. She crosses through the direct light of the fire and it highlights how wasted she is from hunger, how prominent her bones are. She looks exactly how they all do and it feels a bit like studying herself in the mirror. Starvation is ugly, Akilah thinks. She’s getting smaller for nothing.
“I’ll walk you back,” Shauna informs her quietly. Her eyes don’t stray from Akilah’s face to look at Nat. Either not worth the effort or it’ll hurt. “Dark enough you might get lost.”
“That’s funny. We’re already pretty lost out here.” Akilah’s mouth forms a reluctant smile. “What could it hurt, straying a bit more from the beaten path?”
There’s a rustling sound as Nat crawls under the blankets and they leave her, abandoning her to the pathetic little campsite, and go back through the passage they came through. A few bones hang from branches, a crude doll pinned to a tree… they’ve transformed the woods to look gruesome, almost as hungry as they were. Everyone was being transformed and so they transformed their surroundings as well. Funny how people did that. Back home she stuck up posters on her walls and made her mom upset about the holes. Now they gathered around a set of antlers like it was a cross in a church.
Akilah misses her real bed. She misses her pillowcases with their lopsided flowers. Her attempts at a replica is pathetic. Everything she wants is so far beyond her reach that it burns.
“I had a dream,” Shauna says suddenly, interrupting the silence. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t even know I had a knife in my hand until I woke up and found her like that.”
“Shoot, Shipman. What kind of dreams do you have that have you going for a sharp object?” Akilah says, unable to summon better words. Her attempt of a joke lands flat, but she expected it to fail anyways. She’s tired. She just wants to lie down and go to sleep.
Shauna walks soundlessly. Moss carpets her feet, shrouds her in darkness. “I was dreaming about my baby. When I lost him. The way— the way he was taken from me.” There’s a pinprick of light coming ahead. “I have this image in my head of you all eating him, covered in his blood. I just wanted to save him this time.”
Akilah tries to suppress her guilt. It wasn’t her job to handle medical emergencies in the woods. Misty had been so enthusiastic at running around and setting up a triage, holding the role of medical officer so tight she was practically white knuckling it. And then shit kept getting worse, kept falling onto Akilah to handle… it wasn’t her job to figure out how to help Shauna. Everything about that situation had been miserable.
Just sucks that Shauna got the worse end of the deal.
She digs her hands into her pockets and struggles for the right thing to say. The tip of the hook pricks her thumb. All of her inadequacies leave her shoulders as slumped as Shauna’s look.
“Sorry,” she finally says. One foot cracks a stick clean in half, sound similar to a bone breaking.
“Sorry you got roped into this tonight,” says Shauna slowly. She tips her head back and looks straight at the night sky. Thousands of stars burn in pools of dead light above them. Akilah’s never really paid attention to stars before the plane crash. She’s seen velvety swatches of light pollution staining the sky at the city, totally blanketing the night out with a bronze colour, and Wiskayok never seemed that spectacular. This place? One thing about, she can admit, is that the sky never fails to show light. It is the one thing about their situation that doesn’t have blood on it. "She didn't want Misty involved with it."
“Just glad she’s in one piece,” Akilah manages to pitch in generously. She cares, sure. In a perfect world? Nat wouldn’t be a target for a sleep possessed Shauna. But this world?
Akilah knows there’s a bit of damage. If it comes down to it…
Jesus, she thinks critically. Anything to keep herself alive. She’s already thinking about how to use this injury to her advantage.
That’s the thing about the woods, though. They’re in a constant state of transformation. She’ll do the things out here that she never imagined before.
Shauna still looks disturbed, like the night has cost her something brand new. “Maybe you should let her sleep with the gun,” Akilah jibes, trying to soften the set of her mouth. “Put you both on even ground.”
“Maybe,” she says in cool agreement.
They’re back at the main camp. Her crushed blanket is waiting for her, the smell of sweet air barely stirring across it. “You gonna get back okay?”
“I can manage the dark fine. Just don’t talk about this with the others,” Shauna tells her, reaching out and squeezing her arm sharply. It hurts a little, the crush of those fingers around her bicep. They’re melting down to skin and bone, but Shauna’s got a wicked strength to her. “I’m serious. You blab? Something’ll happen.”
Is she threatening her? Akilah wrenches free and gives her a look. “Goodnight, Shauna.”
“Tell me you’ll keep your mouth shut.”
“I won’t, Jesus. Can you chill?” This is the problem when you’re stranded out in the woods. They’ve all gotten sick of each other. Sure, when Lottie talks pearls of wilderness wisdom? They shut up and listen, but pretty much everyone rolls their eyes in sync also. Akilah’s bone tired and can still feel blood on her hands. She's just waiting to lie down and shut her eyes, pretend like none of this happened. Like Shauna didn’t lose her baby, like they didn’t fuck up the whole thing after.
Like they weren’t girls in the woods sleeping with knives.
“Goodnight,” Shauna clips out after a fast beat of silence. Her eyes look black in absolute darkness. She spins off and shrinks into the trees and dark.
There’s an impression to where she had been lying before and Akilah finds it quickly. Her finger traces an imaginary line in the dark, the exact shape of Nat’s cut. She slowly drags it down to finish where it ended before turning over, spine to ground, and stares straight up.
Akilah ends up clutching the fatal Queen of Hearts in her hands after the next round of cards and choose to try and flee. The last girl didn’t do that. She just cried and trembled, mortified of having drawn the metaphorical short straw, and Akilah doesn’t want to go like that.
She rushes. The whole of the woods feels like a wall and she throws herself against it. Vines twist at her feet. Boulders splinter up, blocking her in. Everyone howls like wolves and she had been one of them, had been with them this entire time until now.
Lungs throb and burn. Akilah is running fast and doesn’t understand her shoe has come undone, that she’s tripped over the lace until she’s skidding across the ground. Her palms bark in pain and she’s skinned her knees, a ghost to when she was five and falling off her bike.
Ugly scars. She grew up around those marks on her knees, barely even thought about them until now.
Shauna’s the one who gets her. There’s a knife in her hand and she slashes quick across Akilah’s throat, preventing her from screaming properly. She doesn’t get another chance to run after that. She doesn’t get a better chance to fight, doesn’t even lift her hands properly to shove them off of her.
Her vision merely sinks dark and she stares up at the empty sky full of light and thinks that she can see blood in the sun, that the sun is bleeding—