Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Even with the blazing cabin warming their cheeks, the cold bites at them, stings them, and they huddle together in the snow.

The fire will give out eventually. Groups of them trek into the woods every day, shuddering with cold, and bring back as many sticks as their frostbitten fingers can hold to throw into the flames. It won’t be enough, Shauna thinks every time they come back. The fire will burn out. 

She wonders, as she has so many times before, if Jackie, stubbornly curled up outside the cabin, knew at one point that she was dying. Maybe she was so petty that she wanted Shauna to find her the next morning and beg her to come back. Or maybe she knew that things were going to get much, much worse, that Coach Martinez impaled on a tree branch and Laura Lee exploding midair was incomparable to what was coming. 

They’ll all know, soon enough, what it feels like to freeze to death. 

“Do you think he hates us?”

Shauna looks up. There’s Mari, half sitting, half lying between Akilah and Gen’s sleeping forms. They’re all pressed against each other. There’s no such thing as personal space anymore, not when they’re more than a dozen people sharing half a dozen blankets. But was there really, even when they still had the safety of the cabin? Weren’t they all inching closer and closer together on the floor every night even then?

“Of course he hates us,” Shauna replies. “Why else would he have done this?” Natalie says Coach Scott is dead. She says there’s no way he could survive the cold on his own. As the flames tower over them, Shauna imagines what she would do to him if she found him. I just pressed play on a VHS tape, he’d said as blood gushed out of her in rivers. What would he think if she had the same indifference as he lay dying?

Mari’s eyes, like a deer staring down the barrel of a gun, peer at her through the darkness. “No, I mean Travis,” she says. 

Travis, Natalie and Lottie slept up against each other on the floor of the cabin, usually ending up in some tangled knot in their sleep, and somehow they’d end up looking like a devil and an angel perched on the shoulders of the person between them. Now out in the snow, Natalie has a blanket to herself, courtesy of being crowned queen, and Shauna tastes bitterness that can’t be Javi’s flesh, and Lottie, curled up with her back to Taissa, mutters in her sleep, and Travis is as alone as the biting cold can allow him to be. Shauna hasn’t seen him sleep. He does his part to help keep the fire going, and when he isn’t doing that, he sits with his back to all of them, staring off into the woods. And he barely eats, as the rest of them gulp down what’s left of Javi’s too small corpse.

Shauna remembers his screams from outside the cabin as he clung to Javi’s corpse so tightly they worried he wouldn’t give it up. He didn’t sound like she did when she found Jackie. She had been begging Jackie to wake up, still holding onto hope that what was in front of her wasn’t real, but Travis hadn’t sounded like a boy, he hasn’t even sounded human.  

“Shauna?” Mari’s still staring at her, shivering in that decrepit yellow hoodie. 

Yes, Travis hates them. But he loves them, too. Can Mari’s pea-sized brain comprehend that?

“None of us hate each other,” Shauna responds, because they won’t make it through the last of winter if they acknowledge that deep down, in their dirtiest, darkest core, they all hate each other so much.

Mari throws the door open. “You guys came!” she says excitedly.

“Happy sixteenth!” Jackie says, pulling her into a hug. Shauna hugs her too, a little less tightly. She’s pretty sure Mari only invited her because they’re on the same soccer team and she’s best friends with Jackie. Jackie’s the one who gets the first invite to everything, and Shauna always feels like she’s tagging along. 

The party’s already in full swing. Jackie said they had to be fashionably late. Shauna was worried they were being rude. She’d wondered on the ride here if Mari was gonna think they weren’t coming, which was stupid, because she’s not even very close with Mari, who mostly hangs out with the JV girls, Gen and that girl who’s always wearing a baseball cap, Shauna can’t remember her name for the life of her. But they’re teammates now, and Jackie likes her, so Shauna supposes she might as well befriend her, especially since they might actually go to Nationals this year. 

She and Jackie walk in arm in arm, but all of a sudden Jeff comes and wrenches her away, and they’re kissing sloppily, tongues roaming each other’s mouths like they’re the only ones in the room. Shauna looks away, a strange feeling in her chest. “You smell so good, babe,” Jeff says. “Like strawberries.” Jackie giggles in that way she always does when guys compliment her, so far from what her actual laugh sounds like. 

Shauna was the one who bought Jackie that perfume. It was a Christmas gift. Jackie had beamed when she’d ripped apart the wrapping paper because it was just the one she wanted. Jeff had gotten her some stupid bracelet that Jackie would never pick out for herself.

Suddenly Mari’s at her side. “Come do shots!” she says. 

“What about Jackie?” Shauna asks. She looks over at her best friend, still wrapped up in Jeff, performatively making out with him, almost like she’s going out of her way to make Shauna look at them.

Mari shrugs. “I wanna hang out with you.”

Okay. Weird. But Shauna goes with her into the kitchen, where various bottles of alcohol are displayed on the counter. The JV girls and some other kids Shauna doesn’t recognize are mixing what appears to be Malibu and milk, and Shauna’s a little intrigued by it.

“Hi, Shauna!” It’s the hat girl. “Want one?”

Shauna nods wordlessly, and someone pushes a glass of Malibu and milk into her hands. Hoping she won’t throw up from how disgusting this will undoubtably be, she downs it. It’s not as bad as she thought it was going to be, and everyone cheering for her makes it easier. Her cheeks flush as she’s handed another glass.

At the back of the kitchen is Coach Martinez’s son, an always glowering boy who looks like he’s never been to a party before, turning over a bottle of beer in his hands. Gen snickers. “What’s Flex doing here?”

Mari rolls her eyes. “My mom made me invite him. She’s like, best friends with Mrs. Martinez. Me and Travis were friends, I guess, when we were in kindergarten.”

“Travis and I,” Shauna corrects automatically, too used to doing that to annoy Jackie.

Mari flashes those bright brown eyes at her. “Oh yeah, you’re smart. Like, Ivy League smart.”

Shauna feels her cheeks heat. “Basic grammar skills doesn’t make me ‘Ivy League smart’.” She thinks of the essay for Brown she’s halfway through writing at home. They won’t accept her in a million years. She’ll never have to tell Jackie that she even thought about deterring from their perfectly laid post-secondary plans.

Mari shrugs. She takes a sip of her own glass, then exaggeratedly gags. “Hell no. I’m getting my parents’ wine.”

Winter stops just as quickly as it started. They wake up one morning, bleary-eyed and limbs tangled with one another’s and there is no longer snow falling from the sky. 

“What do we do now?” Mari mumbles. They look at the burnt husk that was their home. No one says anything. Shauna chews on the what was once Javi’s ear until it turns to mush in her mouth.

They hole up in the remains of the plane. The others get busy. They are determined to survive. Misty rips the leather from the plane seats. She has all sorts of clothing ideas for it, she says. Taissa is the most useful. She says they won’t have to stay in the plane for long, and then she begins to collect sticks. They regret making fun of her for taking woodworking back when they were highschool students. 

Shauna sleeps on the floor of the plane. When sunlight peers through the cracks, she dreams of burying her face in sweet, rose-scented skin and hair. But when she opens her eyes, the smell is gone, so is the soft skin and the hair because Jackie isn’t just dead, she’s gone. They ate her. Taissa ate her face and Shauna ate her heart and all that’s left are her bones that Natalie laid to rest.

“You okay?”

Shauna’s head snaps up, hackles raised, but it’s only Mari sitting across from her, fingering at the grass growing between the cracks in the floor. “I’m fine,” she mutters.

Natalie steps out of the plane and Misty bounds after her. “Can I do anything?” she asks. They don’t hear Natalie’s response as the two walk away.

Mari smirks, and she doesn’t look like a starving husk of a girl now, she looks like her old self, bitchy and funny at the same time. “Do you think she’s gonna drug Nat next?” she asks.

Shauna feels a matching smirk pulling at the corner of her mouth, but she doesn’t say anything. 

The world tilts and the trees loom over them as Shauna tackles Mari, slamming her so hard into the ground that they’re both momentarily winded. 

Then she grabs her, yanking her across the forest floor. Mari gives as good as she gets. “Fuck you!” she yells, and there’s something delicious about how she fights back, something that makes Shauna want to be even more aggressive. She holds Mari down, forcing her into the dirt,  pressing their bodies together with so much force that Mari squirms and kicks even harder. “Get off me, gaywad!” she yelps, and Shauna, without really knowing why she does it, grabs a lock of Mari’s shiny hair and yanks, not so hard that it comes out, but hard enough that she forces Mari’s head up until she can feel the heat of her cheek against her chin for a moment. 

They tussle for the piece of deer bone Mari has clutched in her fist until Shauna digs her teeth into Mari’s knuckles as hard as she can, tasting earth and sweat and slick, salty skin, and Mari, of course, screams like she’s being murdered until the others come and pull them apart. 

Shauna can still taste her after. Jackie watches her through the trees. She doesn’t say anything, but she gives a small, knowing smile. 

The snow is heavier than usual. It piles up on the windowsill on the other side of the cabin window. Shauna is bundled in one of Dead Cabin Guy’s jackets, he must have been a large man because it fits her swollen frame. The cold is seeping through the walls. It creeps under the door. Was it Taissa that warned them early on that dying would soon feel like falling asleep? It makes Shauna wonder if Jackie lay dreaming outside as the cold took her. 

It’s too cold outside for Lottie’s little cult today. They sit around in a circle on the floor, more devout to the wilderness than even Laura Lee was to God. Shauna ignores them. Lottie leads a prayer for her baby, and anger flickers inside her. None of them have any right to her baby.

When the cult disperses, Mari suddenly appears beside her on the couch, like a fly Shauna can’t get rid of. “You should talk to Akilah,” she says. “Her sister had a baby.”

Shauna snorts. “Wow, we sure have a lot in common.”

“Hey, do you really want Misty Quigley to be the sole deliverer of your baby?” Mari asks. “She’d probably give you a C-section as an experiment.”

The image of one of the rusty kitchen knives sinking into her belly makes Shauna feel queasy. “Don’t,” she snaps.

To her surprise, Mari gives her an apologetic smile. Mari, who thinks she’s always right. “Look, you shouldn’t be scared, okay?” she says. “Women have given birth in, like, way worse conditions. The wilderness won’t let anything-”

“Really?” Shauna interrupts. She’s tired of hearing about what ‘the wilderness’ will and won’t do. “Then why did it let Jackie die?”

Mari goes quiet for a moment. Jackie is a touchy subject. They all try to avoid saying her name, especially around Shauna. “For us,” she says finally. “For you, I guess. So you wouldn’t starve.”

“I know you’re dumb, Mar,” Shauna starts, and Mari knits her eyebrows together, offended. “But you’re not dumb, are you? You really think there’s anything in the woods that cares what happens to us? Just because Lottie says so?”

“It’s not just because Lottie says so!” Mari insists. “I can feel it. You’d be able to feel it too, if you let yourself.”

“Fine, maybe,” Shauna replies, just so Mari will shut her mouth. She doesn’t believe in any of it, and seeing the other girls fall at Lottie’s feet like she’s Jesus only makes her more determined not to. But still, envy prickles in her stomach at the way Lottie commands them in her soft, placid way. 

Shauna will never feel want like she felt for Jackie again. She wanted Jackie in every way she could have her, but more than that, she wanted to be her. She wanted to look like her, smell like her, talk like her, she wanted Jackie’s bedroom and Jackie’s clothes and Jackie’s boyfriend and Jackie’s influence. There was nothing as cathartic in the world as eating her, stripping her flesh from her bones and almost choking on her. 

Mari prances around their camp like she owns it, just as Jackie pranced around the halls of Wiskayok High. She’d offer Shauna a soft, blink and you miss it type of smile from time to time when they were holed up in the cabin and the baby making her stomach churn, like she wanted to befriend Shauna, but Shauna had ignored her because she had Taissa and didn’t need anyone else, and Mari was too wrapped up in Lottie’s prophecies for Shauna to take her seriously. Mari doesn’t do that anymore. She has a snide comment to make every time she sees Shauna, seemingly begging for Natalie’s attention, yearning to be coveted by their leaders.

That’s what Shauna expects when she spits in Mari’s bowl of deer-broth soup, thinking of how Mari played her for a fool that day in the woods, she expects the other girl to complain to Natalie like she always does and be brushed off like she always is. 

Mari looks up at Shauna, her slim body draped in plane seat leather, her dark hair blanketing her face, and something comes alight in her eyes, something that replaces what was triumph a moment ago. She looks angry and humiliated for a second, and it makes Shauna’s nerves buzz with excitement, but then Mari steels her shoulders and sets her jaw and takes a long gulp of the soup.

Shauna freezes. This was the last thing she expected. A strange feeling washes over her, something she hasn’t felt since she stood over Jackie’s charred body, knife at the ready. Mari looks back up at her, the picture of innocence. “Something bothering you, Shipman?”

“No,” Shauna responds after a moment, because she can feel eyes beginning to settle on them. “Bon appétit.” 

“Thank you,” Mari says sweetly. “It’s delicious.”

Chapter Text

A cool breeze picks up through the trees, and Shauna shivers in her blue little dress she could barely get into. She can’t wait to get out of it. She borrowed it from her mom, and thinking about her mom out here makes her sad, just as thinking about how she’s going to have to explain her swelling stomach to her mom who didn’t even know she was sexually active when they see each other again makes her nervous. If the see each other again. 

In the middle of the clearing, Jackie sways with Travis to no music but Lottie’s off tune little hums to herself. Every so often, she looks over her shoulder at Shauna, who takes a sip of her stew and pretends not to care.

Mari approaches her, seemingly chipper despite the circumstances, but she’s someone who can find humour in anything. “You like the stew?” she asks, because she’s been addicted to praise since Shauna’s known her.

“It’s not bad,” Shauna admits, because it isn’t. “What’s in it?”

“Ferns, half a rabbit, more ferns, and these mushrooms Misty found,” Mari says. She sits down on the stump beside Shauna’s. “Misty’s not as much of a freak as I thought she was.” She scrunches up her face like a bunny, thinking. “No, she still is. But she’s pulled through for us. I totally thought she was gonna murder all of us after she cut Coach’s leg off. I was, like, ‘Wow, this is how I die, Misty Quigley puts an axe through me in the middle of wherever the fuck we are’.”

“Shouldn’t you be with Akilah, or something?” Shauna asks, staring down at her Converse. She’s never quite understood why Mari insists on approaching her when she does. 

Mari shrugs. “It’s way more fun watching you pine over Jackie.”

“What?” Shauna snaps, defensiveness rising up her in. She is not pining over anyone. And even if she was, Mari’s not smart enough to figure it out. She couldn’t even clock that Taissa and Van were a thing when they snuck off together at least twice a day.

“Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mari says, raising her hands in mock surrender.

“You always mean something by it.”

“Okay, maybe you’re pining over Travis, now that he’s fair game. I don’t see it, personally. I’d say he’s like my brother if he wasn’t such a huge asshole. But you do you,” Mari says. She looks down into her half empty cup of stew. “I feel kind of… weird. Do you feel weird?”

“I don’t know,” Shauna responds. She feels weird all the time, and most of it is probably because she has a tiny little human growing in her and throwing her hormones out of whack, and anything else is probably just because she’s slowing starving like the rest of them.

“I feel like I wanna dance,” Mari decides. She jumps up. “Akilah! Dance with me!”

It’s amusing watching them for the first few minutes, bouncing and shimmying around on their makeshift dance floor, but then Shauna starts to feel weird too, a new feeling that can’t just be the baby, and it reminds her of that one time she smoked weed with Natalie and Van under the bleachers after practice because Jackie was busy making out with Jeff in his car, the same relaxed, blissful feeling, but about ten times more powerful. 

She’s lying on the forest floor, and somehow Mari has ended up beside her again. Maybe an hour has passed. Or has it? Now that Shauna thinks about it, time is not nearly as linear as people pretend it is, less of an idea than a solid construct.

“It’s crazy that you’re, like, gonna have a baby,” Mari says. “I can’t believe you were having sex. I always thought you were the kind of girl that was waiting for marriage. Is Randy really the dad? Please say you were lying about that. You’re way too hot for him.”

“God, just shut up,” Shauna groans. She doesn’t have space for all this blabber. There’s a tiny human growing inside her. She can feel all his little limbs, his fingernails, his hair… would he have hair yet? She doesn’t know. She should he paid more attention in the reproduction unit in biology instead of just sitting in the back and giggling with Jackie. “I never had sex with Randy,” she admits. “It was Jeff.” She doesn’t want to say that Jeff is the father. Her baby doesn’t have a father. He’s all hers. She thinks she can hear him breathing, but that might just be her own lungs inflating and deflating. 

“Oooh, finally some good gossip,” Mari says. Her arms are raised, reaching for the tops of the trees. 

Shauna closes her eyes, letting the darkness swallow her. “Don’t tell anyone.”

“I got you,” Mari replies. “You didn’t snitch me out when I ditched practice to hang out with Danny. I owe you one.”

“And then he dumped you for his cousin,” Shauna sighs. “That was sad.”

“It was his second cousin,” Mari corrects her as she always does. “You should have a baby shower when we get home. Can I come to your baby shower? I’ll bring non alcoholic champagne.”

“You really think we’re gonna go home?” Shauna asks. She opens her eyes again, looking over at Mari’s flushed face right beside hers, only inches away. She can feel the heat radiating off the other girl despite the chill in the air. She can feel everything, even the trees breathing. 

“Yeah,” Mari replies. “They’ll probably find us soon.”

It’s uncomfortably warm and sticky in the air when Shauna lays her baby to rest away from the other graves, away from Lottie’s ramblings and Mari’s snide comments and that strange light in Taissa’s eyes like something has possessed her.

There is her son in the soft earth, in a hidden grave, his tombstone nothing but a rock she found in the woods. Her nameless, faceless child. Sometimes she still thinks her teammates ate him. She knows they didn’t, she held his body in her arms and buried him herself, twice in fact, but some part of her will never forgive them for it.

Shauna lets herself break for a moment, here in the privacy of the trees, lets her chin tremble and her breathing go shaky. Then she hears a rustling in the bushes, something that can’t be an animal, and she turns around sharply and catches a glimpse of dark hair between the leaves.

“Who’s there?” she calls. Is it Lottie again, coming to tell her what the wilderness whispers to her? But no, it’s Mari that stands up, looking like a guilty dog. “What the fuck are you doing?” Shauna demands.

“Nothing,” Mari says quickly. “I was just collecting berries.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Ibarra,” Shauna says, stalking towards her. “What did you see?” Mari has a big mouth. She’ll run back to camp and tell everyone where her baby’s grave is. He’ll never just be hers.

“Nothing,” Mari says again, but she’s looking past Shauna, looking at the makeshift tombstone. Her throat bobs as she swallows, the throat that Shauna would very much like to rip open with her teeth. Her face falls a little. “Is- is that…?”

Shauna doesn’t waste any time grabbing Mari by the shoulders, slamming her against the nearest tree. “No one has any right to my baby,” she hisses at her. “Especially not you.”

“Everyone’s scared of you, you know,” Mari says, and all of a sudden she’s grinning, like this is fun to her, like this is exciting. “I’m not.”

Shauna grabs her by the hair, throwing her onto the ground, then jumps on top of her before she can scramble to her feet. Mari squirms under her, trying to push her hands away, but Shauna pins her down. What is she going to do now? She didn’t plan this far. She didn’t plan at all. All she’d known was that she was angry, that she is angry. She leans down close to Mari, breathing on her face. “What, aren’t you gonna scream for Nat to come rescue you?”

Mari doesn’t scream. Instead, she wrenches her head up and presses her mouth to Shauna’s. She pulls away a split second later, and they stare at each other. Shauna thinks her brain might have shut off. Not a single coherent thought comes through. 

“Don’t look so shocked, Shipman,” Mari says, rolling her eyes. “But I guess you never noticed me looking at you in the locker room because you were too busy looking at Jackie.”

Shauna’s hand closes around her throat, ready to squeeze the life out of her. “Keep Jackie’s name out of your mouth,” she snarls. 

Mari grabs the back of Shauna’s head with her now free hand, pulling her towards her, and their mouths meet again, longer this time, hot and wet just like the forest air, their rotting teeth banging together. Shauna lets herself get lost in it for a moment. Then she yanks herself away, remembering who it is she’s kissing. 

Mari gasps, a soft little sound, when Shauna presses the knife that lives permanently in her pocket now to Mari’s throat, just hard enough against her soft skin to draw a little bit of blood. “Run,” she says, and so Mari does.

The forest is dark and screeching, and she’s chasing Travis, a stag head replacing his human one. The forest is white and ominously silent aside from their animalistic howls, and she’s chasing Natalie. Then the lush green trees return and she’s chasing Mari once again, and Shauna wants to gut her, she wants to bleed her dry, most of all she wants to eat her alive. It would be best for Mari if she didn’t let Shauna catch her. But Shauna really, really wants to catch her. 

She’s so close now. Mari’s ponytail bobs a few metres away from her as she scampers like a deer through the trees, and Shauna’s lungs burn as she forces herself to run faster, as she reaches out to grab her. Then Mari shrieks as the ground under her gives away, and she disappears. 

Shauna slows down, stopping just before the edge of what she realizes is a pit, deep enough to trap someone, what looks like protein bars, and oh, it’s been such a long time since she’s seen anything like that littered at the bottom. Mari lies in the middle of them, making sounds like a wounded animal, pitiful little cries that make Shauna’s mouth water.

“Help me!” Mari cries. “Get me out of here!” Shauna looks down at her. Mari is completely at her mercy here. She could do anything. “Shauna, please,” Mari sobs. “My leg is fucked, I can’t get out.”

Something, no, someone is approaching them. A strange set of footsteps, slower than any of them. Shauna looks around, trying to spot who it is. They make eye contact just before he ducks behind a tree. He looks rough, rougher than he did those last months in the cabin, and about ten years older.

“Shauna?” Mari calls from the pit. “Shauna, don’t leave me!”

Shauna ignores her, staring down the man that walked away when she pushed out her dead baby, the man who was so disgusted by what the wilderness turned them into that he turned to the quick solution of getting rid of yellowjackets- burning their home. “Coach?” she breathes. 

“You know, you should really work on your lying skills,” Jackie says.

Shauna sighs, pulling her coat around her more tightly as the freezing air drifts through the meat shed. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean,” Jackie replies, rolling her eyes. Somehow death has made her more beautiful, her eyes are bigger and brighter and her skin glows. “I can’t believe you thought you could get me to believe that your little bundle of joy was conceived at Mari’s birthday party. I mean, you were hanging out with her, like, half the night! You totally blew me off.”

“I didn’t blow you off,” Shauna argues. “You obviously wanted to hang out with Jeff, so I let you. God forbid I talk to anyone but you.”

“Ugh, Jeff,” Jackie groans, leaning her head back and touching it to the rickety wooden wall behind her. “I can’t even get away from him in the afterlife.” She looks back over at Shauna. “So, what was it like having sex with him?”

“It was okay,” Shauna mumbles.

“Come on, Shipman, give me all the dirty details,” Jackie says, grinning widely, and her teeth are even whiter than they were when she was alive. “Did he smell like me? I bet he did. My perfume was always all over him. Did you make him call you my name?”

“It wasn’t like that,” Shauna says, blushing hotly. 

“Sure it wasn’t.”

The door swings open, and Shauna flinches, looking over her shoulder. “You were supposed to come with the meat an hour ago,” Mari snaps, standing in the doorway. Everyone’s on my ass about finishing dinner and I’m just stirring herbs around in a pot.”

“I’ll be in there in a second,” Shauna says, picking up the bear meat she was preparing and wishing Mari would go away, but of course she steps inside. 

“Ugh, it’s creepy in here,” Mari complains. “And cold. I don’t know how you stand it.” She looks over at Jackie’s discoloured corpse, hunched over against the wall. “Damn. She’s looked better.”

“Get out of here,” Shauna snaps, getting up and standing in between them so Mari can’t look at Jackie. 

“Why?” Mari asks. “It’s a free country. I can stand here if I want.” Shauna grabs her by the forearms, herding her out of the shed. “Jesus,” Mari squawks. “Chill out, that hurts!”

“Stay the fuck out of the shed if you know what’s good for you,” Shauna hisses at her, getting right up in her face. 

Mari doesn’t back down. She moves even closer, and their noses bump together. “Why?” she repeats lowly. “So you can mess around with Jackie’s corpse while we all starve inside? Don’t fuck with me, Bateman. You know how much I like to talk. I’m gonna tell everyone who’ll listen that you were fucking straddling her when I walked in and I had to drag you off-”

Before Shauna can slam her fist into Mari’s pretty little face and break it in half, the door to the cabin opens with a squeak and a voice calls through the darkness. “Are you guys coming in?” It’s Van, her scars haunting in the moonlight, arms crossed tightly over Taissa’s sweater she’s draped in. Shauna can see she’s narrowing her eyes suspiciously at them even through the darkness. “Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” Shauna says, stepping back from Mari who’s still glaring at her. “We were just on our way inside.”

Chapter Text

Shauna wonders if Natalie is lonely in her hut, if she misses sleeping pressed up against Travis and Lottie’s warmth and the crown they’ve placed on her head has isolated her. Shauna doesn’t get to be lonely in her own hut very often, because Jackie likes to show up and taunt her.

“Mari?” Jackie says, sitting down casually at the side of the hut like it’s hers. “Really?”

“Go away,” Shauna mumbles, but she doesn’t pull her blanket over her head, she wants to keep looking at Jackie.

“I mean, she’s pretty,” Jackie says thoughtfully. “I didn’t know you were the kind of girl who just goes for pretty. I thought you liked more substance than that.” She grins wickedly. “I had a lot of substance. I kept you all full. You, especially. You were choking on me. It’s not very ladylike to eat like that, you know.”

“You sound like your mom,” Shauna mumbles.

“Mari’s fun,” Jackie says. Any mirth in her face is gone now. She looks chastisingly down at Shauna. “I don’t think you should get to have fun. Then you might forget me.” 

“Coach is alive and you came to talk about Mari?” Shauna snaps. She doesn’t want to think about Mari and her soft lips and hot breath and strangled sobs from the pit. She’d rather think of Coach Scott awaiting his trial in the animal pen. He shouldn’t even get a trial, or a lawyer for that matter. Damn Natalie and her soft heart. Why did the wilderness choose her?

“You sound crazy,” Jackie tells her abruptly, because Shauna can’t hide anything from her, not even her thoughts. “The wilderness isn’t real, remember? But that doesn’t matter when most of you think it is. The rest of them are so dumb. You could get them to do anything. Even vote against what they believe in.”

“Are those your thoughts or mine?” Shauna whispers.

“What’s mine is yours,” Jackie whispers back. Her cracked blue lips form a smile. “I think I’ve figured it out. It’s not because Mari’s pretty. It’s because she calls you Shipman.” 

Shauna presses her shaking hands into the snow, hissing in pain as the cold comes into contact with her raw skin and Lottie’s blood pools and stains the whiteness. 

It terrifies her, how satisfying it was, how she kept going even as Lottie was slipping in and out of consciousness and the others were whispering and rocking on the balls of their feet and staring at her like they’d never seen her before. It wasn’t Lottie under her anymore. It wasn’t her teammate, it wasn’t her friend. It was just a bag of blood and bones. 

The cabin door creaks open, and Shauna doesn’t look up. It’s probably Taissa coming to herd her back inside before she freezes. Taissa won’t ask her about what just happened. She won’t say a thing about it. 

But of course it’s Mari that sits down on the steps. “That was fucking crazy,” she breathes, shuddering from the cold and crossing her arms over her stomach. “I know she said you could, but… fuck.”

“Do you still think Lottie’s God?” Shauna asks her roughly.

“I don’t think Lottie’s God,” Mari responds, earnest for once, eyes like a beacon in the darkness. “I don’t think God’s out here. I think He’s abandoned us with the wilderness and Lottie’s the best we’re gonna get.”

Shauna sits back in the snow, looking down at her aching hands, some of Lottie still splattered on them. “You sound like how Laura Lee probably would if she’d lived,” she says. Faith in their old life doesn’t get you far out here. Faith in anything but Lottie is a death wish, it seems. 

Mari shrugs a little. “My parents are Catholic,” she offers as an explanation.“They used to drag me to church with them, it was boring as hell, until I was, like, thirteen and… I guess I decided I was too impure to go.”

“Was that around the same time you chipped a tooth on your vibrator?” Shauna asks before she can stop herself. 

“No, that was later,” Mari says automatically. Then she groans. “Wait, I meant that never happened. Forget I said that.”

“What do you want, Mari?”

Mari looks over at her, biting her chapped lower lip for a moment. She doesn’t look afraid, not how the others did. “I don’t know,” she says. “Can I see your hands?”

And so Shauna shows her, without really knowing why. She watches the emotions dance across Mari’s face until it morphs into something that looks like a mixture of intrigue, disgust and almost lust, similar to how Misty looks at them when she’s stitching them up. Not bedside manner, something perverse that’s far past care, nothing tender about it. Pushing that aside, Shauna lowers her hands again, pressing them back into the snow.

“I’m sorry about your baby,” Mari says quietly. 

Shauna doesn’t reply. She’s too exhausted. 

“Mel’s jealous,” Mari whispers in Shauna’s ear, grinning widely.

Shauna thinks of Jackie draping herself all over Jeff and Travis and staring Shauna down, as if daring her to say something. Is that what Mari’s gleefully doing to Melissa now? 

Whatever. Shauna doesn’t have time for JV drama. Especially not tonight. Not when she’s successfully convinced the hesitating girls to vote in favour of their coach’s death, that despite Natalie’s tears and Misty’s protests, he’s going to be punished for what he did to them, for what he did to her.

“It won’t bring your baby back,” Jackie says quietly, sitting down beside her, and now she’s got Mari on one side and Jackie on the other, but only one of them is real. She has to keep reminding herself that even as she wants to drive her fist through Jackie’s half-corporeal form, but she could never hurt Jackie, not really. “It won’t bring me back either,” Jackie adds. “Or Javi.”

“It’s time,” Shauna says, maybe louder than necessary, but she really wants Jackie to shut up, even more than she ever did when Jackie was alive. 

Mari peers at her through her hair, hanging limply in front of her face, much too close, her leg pressed up against Shauna’s on the rickety log. “Can’t you just take his crutch?” she asks in a small voice, sounding like a little girl. Shauna’s pretty sure Mari only voted to save their coach to spite her. 

“That’s not enough,” Shauna tells her. “But I guess you don’t care about making him pay for what he did to us. Since you thought he should live.”

“Well, sorry if I don’t think we should just murder people,” Mari snaps. She sounds like Jackie. Jackie’s disappeared now, but she’s probably somewhere between the trees, laughing to herself. 

“We’ve killed before,” Shauna reminds her. She thinks of Javi, gasping for breath as he tried to keep himself above the water, crying for Natalie. She feels cold all over as she remembers how light he was, how easy it was to carry him back to the cabin. 

“It was the wilderness that took Javi,” Mari says stubbornly. A strange look flickers in her eyes, a desperation for comfort and reassurance more raw and more sickening than Shauna’s seen before on her, even when Mari clung to her after Shauna dragged her out of the pit. “It wasn’t really us, it was this thing out here, this god-”

Shauna grabs her chin roughly, yanking Mari’s face so close to her own that she can almost feel the girl’s eyelashes tickling her cheek. “There’s no god out here, remember?” she hisses. “No ghosts. No spirits. There’s just us.”

Mari wrenches away from her, glaring. Then she almost seems to smile, but it’s a little shaky. “Fine,” she says. “I’ll go with you. Just to make sure you don’t cut his other leg off.”

An owl hoots somewhere in the distance as they step into the animal pen, and Mari shivers despite the warm stickiness of the air as she limps after her. Shauna holds the knife tightly, feeling the rough wood of the handle against her palm. There he is, looking worse than he ever has, staring up at them in utter defeat. 

“What are you doing?” Coach Scott asks quietly. His eyes zero in on the knife. “Shauna?”

“We can’t have you running off,” Shauna says. She can feel her blood rushing through her veins, pumping and hot and ready. He’s not their coach. He’s just a bag of blood and bones. She knows what to do. 

“Mari, Jesus, don’t let her do this,” Coach Scott says in a strangled tone. “Come on, you didn’t vote for me to die. Mari, you know I would never hurt you.” Mari looks between the two of them, wringing her hands a little. Doubt doesn’t look good on her. She was much prettier with blind devotion in her eyes. 

“I think you should do it,” Shauna says, turning to Mari and holding out the knife. 

Mari stares at it, eyes widening. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” she whispers. 

Coach Scott begins to scream for help, and Shauna relishes the fear and hopelessness written plainly on his face when he realizes no one is coming to help him. She feigns a disappointed expression and watches Mari falter. “Maybe I should just get Melissa instead,” she says. “Unless…”

Mari snatches the knife out of her hand, just as Shauna knew she would. She can’t stand the idea of being useless, of being replaced, and that makes her easier to manipulate than she thinks she is. 

He’s still screaming when they leave the animal pen, Mari walking on shaky legs. It hasn’t made Shauna feel alive, not really, not like she used to be, but she’s close enough, and it was thrilling watching someone else do her bidding for her, it was a relief not to be the butcher for once, to force it on someone else. 

“You don’t have to enjoy it this much,” Natalie says, mistaking Shauna’s smirk for pure bloodlust when it’s so much more than that, pretending they haven’t all done much worse.

“And you don’t have to act like such a fucking saint,” Shauna replies. She takes Mari’s bloodied hand in hers, half expecting the other girl to push her away, but Mari holds on tight, though she doesn’t meet Shauna’s eyes. 

Chapter Text

Natalie looks very much like a tragic saint when she stumbles out of the animal pen as the sun rises, blood staining her delicate features that have despair written all over them, and Shauna might stop and stare in awe at this image, she might finally kneel at the feet of their queen if she remembered how to worship another girl, and if it wasn’t for the dire circumstances.

Coach Scott was never going to be their bridge home. To put it brusquely, Akilah is probably brain damaged from huffing cave fumes and has no idea what she’s talking about, well on her way to being a second Lottie, but hope is a powerful thing out here in this godforsaken place. Shauna hasn’t known hope since Javi, since her baby, maybe even since Jackie, but if her teammates’ hope has been crushed, if they all believe Natalie’s royally fucked them over, they won’t need to be pressured into voting one way or another this time, it’ll be a unanimous agreement that Natalie should no longer lead them. They won’t even need to have a trial. 

Natalie doesn’t fight back when the others shove her down, when they scream in her face. She’s been through it all before, they know that. Shauna waits patiently for the worst of their rage to pass. Mari comes up beside her, quietly. “What happens now?” she whispers, her breath tickling the back of Shauna’s neck, and she sounds upset too, like she also believed in the ‘bridge home’ bullshit.

Shauna thinks of the night when they cut Coach Scott’s Achilles heel. It was Mari that actually did it, but she likes to think of it as a team effort, because Mari wouldn’t have done it, wouldn’t even have thought of it if it wasn’t for her. She remembers the others’ eyes zeroing in on their clasped hands over the fire, realization and something like fear dawning. She thinks of the two of them in her hut after, Mari saying she was sick in the head, Mari climbing on top of her and kissing her until their faces were numb-

The others keep yelling, bordering on hysterical now. Mari looks over at the animal pen and swallows hard. “We’re really fucked, aren’t we?” she murmurs.

Shauna doesn’t say anything. She looks down at Natalie on the ground, at the others around her, wondering if they’ll tear her apart like an angry mob if no one intervenes, or if they’re not all so far gone yet. After all, it’s easy to hide behind others in a group, easier to keep guilt at bay when the blame is shared. They all learned that from Javi’s death. From his murder. From the accident. Whatever they want to call it. It won’t matter when they make themselves forget.

Mari grabs Shauna’s arm, shaking her slightly. “What do we do?” she asks. She used to look to Lottie like this. And before her, it was Jackie.

“We put her in charge, and instead of doing what was right for all of us, she did what she wanted to do,” Shauna says loudly, speaking over the mob. Maybe she should just kill Natalie right here, just to ensure that the queen position is empty. “I think it’s obvious what happens now,” she says, and Mari stiffens beside her, they all do, because they know what Shauna sounds like when she’s about to butcher someone. It won’t be hard, she tells herself. Natalie isn’t her teammate, she isn’t her friend, she’s just prey. Just meat. Shauna knows what to do. It won’t be hard.

But then Taissa steps in front of her, half a head taller with that cold determination in her eyes that she gets when she’s about to shoulder the other team’s defense and send them sprawling. Taissa can be so sweet, but she might’ve lost that ability, it might’ve burned away with the cabin and she might be looking at Shauna like she’s the other team now. But Shauna’s not scared. She can get through any of them if it means getting to her prey. 

“Shauna will lead us,” Lottie says softly, stepping through them to the centre where Natalie lies. She looks at Shauna like she’s asking her quietly if this will satisfy her. Nothing will satisfy her, nothing will make her full, she hasn’t been since Jackie. But this is good enough. Finally she’s getting what she deserves after everything she’s lost out here.

They don’t look at her like they did Lottie, like they did Natalie. They don’t crowd around her and wait for her words to guide them. They don’t bow in front of her and kiss her, they don’t worship her. They’re all glancing at each other, worried. They think she’ll lead them to ruin.

Mari should be happy. This makes her a princess. This makes her important, and she loves to be important. But she keeps her head down, stays in her place at Shauna’s side without a word.

Travis helps Natalie up as the rest of the group disperses. He glowers at Shauna as Natalie hurries away to lick her wounds. “I guess you finally got what you wanted,” he says. “I bet you’re really happy Ben’s dead.”

“Travis,” Mari says softly, still in her place.

“Don’t,” Travis snaps. “I can’t believe you two are-” he shakes his head, disgusted. “I thought you knew better, Mar.”

“Don’t you want this too?” Shauna asks, before Mari can think about what he’s saying. “You’ve lost so much out here, just like me. Wouldn’t you want to finally get something for it?”

Travis doesn’t answer, just turns on his heel and heads in Akilah’s direction, the only place he goes these days.

Mari touches Shauna’s arm. “He’s right about one thing,” she says. “You finally got what you wanted.” 

“Don’t cry, Nat,” Shauna says, as they stand over Coach Scott’s body on their makeshift table. She reaches over and wipes some of his blood off Natalie's cheek with her thumb. “You’ve never looked more beautiful.” But Natalie flinches away. Maybe she only likes it when Travis and Lottie call her that. Maybe she sees now how gruesome Shauna’s job is, how the corpses they’ve passed off to her have left a rot in her that will never go away. 

“It helps me to cover my eyes,” Shauna says. She doesn’t know why she tells Natalie that. She thinks of Javi’s little body coming undone under her knife. 

Mari dresses her for the feast. She places the old antlers and deer skull from the cabin’s wall on Shauna’s head, the ones Lottie adorned herself with for their makeshift homecoming dance and Natalie wore briefly for the trial. 

“I think she did the right thing,” Mari says suddenly, as she stands over Shauna, adjusting her headdress that’s heavy on her skull and feels a bit ridiculous. 

“You don’t really think that, do you?” Shauna asks. Maybe she would’ve thought that too, a year ago. She was so soft, then. Everything buried so deep within her. 

“I don’t know,” Mari admits. “But maybe we all misunderstood what Akilah saw. Maybe his death is the bridge home. Or maybe the wilderness is just taunting us, and we’re never gonna go home. Van said it was lonely before we came, Lottie said it loves us. Maybe it doesn’t want us to leave.”

Shauna wants to tell her that Van’s making things up to keep herself sane and Lottie’s been full of shit since they crashed, but then Mari will pout and refuse to talk to her, and everyone will wonder why her currently most loyal acolyte wants nothing to do with her, and then they’ll decide she isn’t good enough for them after all. 

“We’ll find out what it all means eventually,” Shauna says, a safe, neutral answer, because she’ll throw up in her mouth if she she has to start talking about what the wilderness wants and doesn’t want. Even if there is something out here with them, she doesn’t care what it wants. It’s taken too much from her to ever have her respect. 

“I guess you’re team captain now,” Mari says. She runs a hand over one of the antlers, and it should feel intimate, it should feel like an extension of Shauna’s body, but it all just feels empty. She’s still hungry.

This isn’t like when Jackie was captain. The others weren’t afraid of her. They didn’t worship her either. She had influence, she could persuade them, but she didn’t lay down the law. Jackie wouldn’t have wanted to lead like this. It would have disgusted her. 

“Don’t you think it’s good he isn’t suffering anymore?” Mari asks her, so damn earnest. 

“Don’t be boring,” Shauna replies.

Shauna climbs the ladder to the attic, trying not to look at her hands as she does, at the split skin, trying not to remember how they smashed into Lottie’s face over and over again until she wasn’t pretty anymore.

It’s good that she’s checking on Lottie, she tells herself. It’s what everyone expects of her. It’s the right thing to do. This is who she is. She always checked in with her teammates after games, made sure their skinned knees or occasional twisted ankles weren’t bothering them too much. She carried Advil in her purse just in case anyone needed them. She doesn’t feel like that girl anymore, beating Lottie satiated her anger but didn’t make it go away.

They say she’s pissing blood and can barely sit up without help. It’s mostly Mari that shares this, with a good deal of complaining mixed in, but everyone can see the fear written across her face. Shauna thought she would die in the night at first. Then she’d officially be a murderer. Really, she already killed Jackie, but this time she wouldn’t be able to hide behind any technicalities. 

Misty’s not up there, to Shauna’s relief, because now that Crystal’s disappeared into the blizzard, there’s no one to distract Misty, which means she never stops talking, and that includes all the gory details of Lottie’s condition. It’s just Mari, sitting on the floor beside Lottie’s still form. She looks up when Shauna enters, surprise in her eyes, then judgement.

“What are you doing here?” she snaps.

“I brought Lottie a blanket,” Shauna says, holding it up, feeling awkward and like she doesn’t belong. Then she feels angry, because Mari shouldn’t have that effect on her. 

Mari stands up and walks over, snatching the blanket from her. “Nice of you to care,” she says. “It only took you two weeks.”

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Shauna snaps. 

Mari carefully places the blanket on Lottie, then crosses her arms over her chest. “Great. You came. You can go back downstairs now. I’ve got this. Lottie doesn’t need you.”

“You have to be the only one she needs, right?” Shauna asks. “Do you think she’s gonna fall at your feet and thank you when she wakes up?”

“Fuck off, Shauna,” Mari snaps, blushing hot. “You- you can’t just-”

“I can’t just what?” Shauna asks, stepping forward. They’re a little bit too close to each other now. One of them should take a step back, but neither of them do.

“You can’t just barge in here when you’re the one who hurt her,” Mari says. She seems to be pretending she wasn’t staring at Shauna’s Lottie-stained hands with perverse fascination after it happened. But they’ve all gotten good at lying to themselves out here. 

“Then make me leave,” Shauna says. She takes another step forward, just a small one. For a second, she thinks Mari glances down at her lips before looking back up at her eyes, but that wouldn’t make any sense.

Lottie stirs beneath the blankets. “Shauna?” she mumbles blearily. “Is that you?”

“I’m here,” Mari says quickly, kneeling down beside her. “She was just leaving, I’ve got you.”

“No,” Lottie says, sounding a little stronger. “No, I want Shauna.” 

Mari stands up, shoving her hands in the pockets of her hoodie. Shauna thinks she sees tears building in her eyes as she pushes past her and out of the attic, and part of her wants to call after Mari and tell her to come back, but she doesn’t. She sits down beside Lottie, looking at the wounds on her swollen face. 

“You can barely open your eyes, how’d you know it was me?” Shauna asks. Maybe she should apologize. That would be the right thing to do. But it doesn’t feel like something she’s done wrong that warrants an apology. Lottie offered herself up, a sacrificial lamb, and she wanted it, needed it.

“I knew you would come,” Lottie whispers. “I felt the wilderness when you lay beside me after… I heard it in your breathing. All its wrath is in you.”

“You’re delirious with fever,” Shauna says. She pulls the blanket tighter around Lottie. “Just sleep.”

“Mari submitted so eagerly,” Lottie murmurs, already drifting off. “The wilderness needs her, but it needs you more.” Shauna wonders if this means I need her, but I need you more. It doesn’t feel good to be needed. Not like this. It’s heavy.

Without really knowing why she does it, Shauna leans down and presses her lips to Lottie’s temple, where her old scar lies between the purple bruises. Then she catches movement in the corner of her eye, and looks up just in time to see Mari peering through the crack in the doorway before she hurries away. 

Chapter Text

Jackie will come back inside soon. She isn’t that stubborn.

Shauna curls up in her mess of blankets, head still a little woozy from last night. She’s never tripped before, and it wasn’t at all what she’d expected. But she supposed it’s good practice for college.

Mari climbs up the ladder and half crawls into the attic with her. “I don’t think I’ve ever been this hungover,” she groans. “Not even after me and Gen did shots of Everclear last year.”

“What are you doing up here?” Shauna asks. “This is where me and Tai sleep.”

“I’m pretty sure she’s with Van in the bedroom,” Mari says, waggling her eyebrows suggestively. “Fixing her bandages,” she adds with air quotes. Then she collapses next to Shauna on the blankets, not quite as close as she’s slept beside Jackie or Taissa, but close enough that the sleeves of their shirts brush. 

“Why do you always seek me out?” Shauna asks quietly. She wouldn’t usually be so straight forward. Jackie says it’s better to leave people guessing. But she feels empty and wrung out after their fight. 

Mari shrugs. “You’re interesting,” she says, as if it’s that simple.

Warmth pools in Shauna’s stomach. No one ever thinks she’s interesting. Maybe Jeff did, but he’s too much of a teenage boy to ever have told her so. Jackie’s always the interesting one. She’s the one people seek out. But maybe not anymore. She’s been dethroned out here. Lottie’s the one they go to now, their prophet of some kind, and Natalie and Travis are the useful ones, their hunters. Jackie’s the one who’s still holding on so desperately to how things were. And Shauna doesn’t know who she is. If she’s not Jackie’s best friend, does she just cease to exist?

“I’m sure Jackie will come back inside soon,” Mari says. “You guys’ll make up.”

“What if we don’t?” Shauna asks. She’s almost too afraid to say the words, but they spill out anyway. “What if I don’t want to?”

Mari blinks in surprise. “But you guys have been best friends since, like, first grade,” she says. 

“Kindergarten,” Shauna mumbles.

“Yeah, exactly,” Mari says. She sighs. “Everyone’s losing their best friends out here. Akilah lost Rachel. Lottie lost Laura Lee. You’re losing Jackie.” 

Mari rolls over on her stomach and twists a lock of shiny black hair through her fingers. She has beautiful hair, Shauna realizes. “Can I braid your hair?” she asks. 

Mari doesn’t seem surprised by the question. “Sure,” she says. Shauna sits up, taking Mari’s soft, silky hair in her hands. 

“Your hair’s so smooth,” she murmurs. She thinks of herself and Jackie in Jackie’s perfect bedroom, doing each other's hair. Shauna’d had kind of short hair in their freshman year, but she’d grown it out just so Jackie would have an easier time styling it.

Mari snorts. “It’s the grease. Isn’t it weird that Misty’s the only one without greasy hair right now? And her curls are, like, basically perfect. I think she’s stealing hair products from the dead girls’ bags.”

Shauna laughs, her chest feeling a little less hollow. “I wouldn’t be surprised.” She tugs the elastic out of her own loose ponytail to finish off the braid. It’s a little lopsided, Jackie’s better at this sort of thing. She lies back down beside Mari, staring up at the ceiling. “Maybe I should just go get her.”

“Ugh, enough about Jackie,” Mari groans. “It’ll be fine. Just stop thinking about her.”

“How do I stop thinking about her?” Shauna asks. Some part of her is always thinking about Jackie.

“Think about someone else, duh,” Mari answers. 

“Who else would I think about?” Shauna asks, puzzled.

Mari rolls her eyes like Shauna’s the most clueless person she’s ever met. Then she sighs. “Like… I don’t know, Jeff. Don’t you ever think about Jeff?”

“Not really,” Shauna admits. “I don’t even really like him. I wouldn’t have had sex with him if he wasn’t Jackie’s. Is that bad?”

“Maybe,” Mari says. “If we were at home, it would be pretty bad. But we almost killed Travis last night. That’s definitely worse than stealing your best friend’s boyfriend.”

“We?” Shauna echoes. “I’m the one who had a knife to his throat. I’m the one who was about to do it.” It’s somewhat freeing to be able to say that. Jackie would be disgusted if she could hear Shauna right now. But it’s just Mari here, and she understands.

“Yeah, but you wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t for the rest of us,” Mari argues. “None of us would have.” 

“Maybe you’re right,” Shauna says, half to herself. “Maybe we all turn into something else when we’re together.”

“You know I’m right,” Mari replies. “What was it Coach said? Wolves can take down anything if the pack’s big enough?”

“We’re not wolves,” Shauna says, rolling her eyes. “We’re a bunch of teenage girls stuck in the middle of nowhere.” She sits up. “I should get Jackie. What if she’s cold?”

Mari reaches out and takes her wrist. “We slept outside last night, and it was fine,” she says. Her hand is warm, her skin soft. She looks at Shauna imploringly. “Don’t go.”

Shauna lies back down, bemused. She can never figure out what Mari wants from her. They were sort of friends before the crash, though not exactly close. Shauna didn’t exactly tend to let anyone that wasn’t Jackie get close to her. But here was Mari, Mari who loved to antagonize people, softly asking her to stay.

So Shauna stays. They lie side by side and stare up at the wooden beams of the ceiling. By the time snow starts to fall, they’re fast asleep.

Coach Scott doesn’t taste like Jackie or Javi. Javi was soft and there wasn’t a lot of him, and as for Jackie, Shauna’s found that eating a girl is a different experience, one she can’t quite explain. Coach is all tough and muscular, and it takes a lot of chewing to swallow a piece of him, probably his last revenge against them.

The JV girls sit around her, wearing smiles that don’t reach their eyes. Everyone else sits around the fire. This isn’t like when they ate Jackie, when they all dove on her at once, mouths on her skin, ripping pieces of her perfect skin off, the closest they’d ever come to worshipping their team captain. Everyone who’d envied her got a piece of her that night. Now they all sit around, mostly in silence, and choke down chunks of Coach Scott. 

Mari should be at Shauna’s side, basking in the candlelight glow, but at some point she’s slipped away and gone to sit beside Natalie of all people. Their mouths move. Shauna wonders what they’re talking about. It makes her feel twitchy and hot like she has a fever, watching them. Mari clings to Antler Queens, but Natalie isn’t in charge anymore. 

Mari looks up, locking eyes with Shauna. Then she looks back at Natalie, and reaches over to squeeze her hand. Natalie whispers something to her. 

Fuming, Shauna stands up and shoves her chair behind her. She doesn’t know which one of them she’s so angry with. Maybe she’s angry with all of them. But if she lashes out at Mari, she may lose her. When she lashed out at Jackie, Jackie went outside and never came back in.

Shauna shoves Natalie off the log she sits on without a word. Natalie scrambles up to her hands and knees, instincts quick from all the hours she’s spent hunting in the woods. “What the fuck?” she sputters. “What was that for?”

“You know what,” Shauna says, staring hard down at her. “Don’t talk to her.” 

Misty hurries over, helping Natalie to her feet like she can’t stand up herself. “Shauna-” she starts in a squeaky, nervous voice.

“Stay out of this,” Mari snaps, standing up and wiping her hands on her plane seat garment. Misty wilts and turns away. She remembers what happened last time she pissed Shauna off. At least one person does.

Natalie has the nerve to smirk as she stands across from Shauna. “Oh, I remember this,” she says. “You were just like this with Jackie. No one else could have her attention-”

Shauna shoves her again, harder this time, but Natalie’s ready, and she doesn’t fall. Now the others are starting to walk up. Taissa and Van crowd around Shauna, trying to get her to step back, but clearly her newfound leadership makes them hesitant to actually put their hands on her. “You don’t need to do this,” Taissa tells her evenly. “Just sit back down.” 

“You don’t get to tell me what to do!” Shauna shouts, pushing her away too. “You abandoned me-”

Natalie’s fist meets her face with a crack, hard enough to make her stumble. Shauna looks back up at her, her lip stinging from the blow, and Natalie looks almost surprised at her own strength. Before Shauna can retaliate, Mari’s jumped right in front of her and grabbed her face, kissing her hard and smearing the blood onto both their mouths. 

Mari pulls away, staring at her with blazing eyes and breathing hard. She presses her forehead to Shauna’s, and it’s too intimate for them, it makes Shauna’s breath catch in her throat, but she doesn’t pull away. “Would you kill her for me?” Mari whispers, just low enough that the others don’t catch it. Shauna nods in response without really thinking about it. If she killed Natalie, would it be for Mari or for herself? Would it be because they all put the knife in her hand and now she just can’t stop? “Don’t,” Mari breathes, a disappointment but a relief. 

Lottie’s screaming interrupts them, making them jump apart. Everyone turns in alarm, but their former queen sits calmly on her tree stump. “Sing,” she says.

“God, it’s always something with her,” Shauna mumbles. Mari snickers. The others look at them worriedly.

But Lottie continues her animalistic screeching, this time with some kind of tune, and eventually they all join in. It’s fun, admittedly, screaming into the night, prancing around Coach Scott’s head. Mari grabs Shauna’s hand and pulls her around and around the fire. Travis and Akilah strip the flesh off an elbow bone and feed it to each other, something that ends up looking like the frenzied kisses Taissa and Van shared with Jackie in their mouths. Around and around the fire they go, crying into the night, hugging and licking and dancing with each other.

It becomes a chase, Shauna and Mari around the flames. Mari looks over her shoulder, grinning and slowing down just enough that Shauna almost reaches her, until Shauna finally catches her off guard and tackles her, forcing her down into the dirt and climbing on top of her, pulling her hair and her clothes like there’s no one else here. For a moment, everything is perfect. They are all one. Shauna can almost feel the wilderness, that thing that Lottie and Travis and Akilah all claim to have heard, to have touched.

Then the strangers come. 

Shauna ends up in the meat shed again, even now that Jackie’s not in it. 

She sits on the floor with her knees up to her chest, shivering and trying not to cry. The last time she sat in here, she’d kissed Jackie’s cold lips and smeared her pink lipstick, and then she’d gone outside and vomited in a bush. 

She looks down at the ends of the sleeves of her coat, where Javi’s blood dries. It was difficult when she couldn’t see what she was doing, when she had to feel along his freezing skin, but she couldn’t bring herself to look.

She never gets to be alone in here. If it isn’t Jackie's ghost, it’s Mari peeking around the door. That’s who it is today, and she’s hugging herself, shivering. “I don’t think we can come back from this,” Shauna says to her quietly. 

“We didn’t kill him,” Mari replies. “Right? The wilderness chose him over Nat. This was what it wanted.”

“It wanted me to peel the skin off a thirteen year old boy?” Shauna asks, voice cracking.

Mari winces. Then she bursts into tears. She slides down the wall of the shed and buries her face in her knees that she pulls up to her chest, mirroring Shauna, and sobs. 

After a moment, Shauna crawls across the floor to her. She doesn’t know how to comfort Mari. She has run out of reassuring words. She’s steadily forgetting how to make other people feel better, and when she looks at Mari, when she looks at any of them, she sees her baby’s blood smeared on their faces, she sees them greedily shoving pieces of Jackie into their mouths. But she puts her hands overtop Mari’s, even though she hopes that Mari will keep crying so loudly that she can’t hear her own thoughts.

“Oh god, what am I gonna say to his mom?” Mari wails. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” Shauna says. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.” It was. It was all of their faults. They killed a little boy. They watched as he drowned, they watched the life leave his eyes. She can’t comfort Mari, not really, but she can lie to her. “It just happened so fast.”

“We all just stood there,” Mari sobs. “How could we do that?”

“It was him or Natalie,” Shauna says. “And we need her.” This all happened because she couldn’t do what she needed to do. Natalie looked her in the eyes, so human, so alive, and Shauna couldn’t do it. 

“Yeah,” Mari says, wiping her face hard. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. Thanks, Shipman.” She stands up suddenly, pulling her hands out of Shauna’s. “I’m gonna go get the pan heated up. Bring the meat in soon.”

The meat. That’s all Javi is now. 

Chapter Text

It’s late in the evening when Mari begins to scream.

She’s been complaining on and off about the dripping sound she hears for a while, and they’ve all been brushing her off. Hunger hallucinations aren’t a new thing around here. Shauna talks to Jackie’s ghost, hallucination or not, she hasn’t figured it out, Akilah talks to a little pile of bones, Lottie talks to… herself? None of them can be sure who Lottie is whispering to at night while they’re all trying to sleep to escape the pains in their stomachs.

“They’re dead!” Mari screams, stumbling backwards across the cabin. “They’re dead, they’re dead!” Van grabs her, trying to comfort her, but Mari wrenches out of her grip. “Can’t you see it?” she cries, gesturing to the wall.

“It’s the hunger,” Van says gently. 

Mari was never one of the faster girls on the team, but she’s out the door before anyone can stop her, in nothing but her yellow hoodie and shorts, emitting groans from the other girls.

Shauna puts her journal down, tucking it safely away. It’s a bit of a struggle, getting to her feet with the weight of the baby in her. “I’ll get her,” she says. 

“Thanks,” Van says, sitting back down. The others exchange glances, some of them worried, some of them curious.

Shauna imagines walking out of the cabin and getting Jackie before the snow fell. Jackie would have been stubborn about it, probably. She would have pouted and crossed her arms and refused to acknowledge Shauna standing right beside her, asking her to come back inside. Shauna would have apologized. She would have grovelled. Jackie would have accepted it and followed her in. Or maybe Shauna would have dragged her in. Either way, by the time the snow fell, Jackie might have been safe from it if Shauna hadn’t been upstairs braiding Mari’s hair.

Shauna grabs a blanket from the floor and leaves with it, just in case. She shouldn’t blame anyone but herself for Jackie’s death, she reminds herself. Jackie wants her to blame herself, she tells Shauna it was all her fault almost every time she shows up. Maybe she’ll stop coming if Shauna ever tries to shift that blame or, even worse, forgive herself.

She shudders at the cold wind as she steps out of the cabin. Of course Mari’s not sitting on the steps, that would be too easy. Shauna follows her footprints through the snow, feeling heavy and awkward as she practically toddles after them. But she’d rather be this pregnant for the rest of her life than give birth out here. 

The footsteps lead to the edge of the forest, and then they get harder to find. “Mari!” Shauna calls. Her voice echoes, and somewhere in the distance, birds shriek. “Mari?”

Mari peers out from behind a nearby tree, arms crossed and shivering. “I’m not going back in there,” she says. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Shauna snaps. “Oh wait, that’s the only thing you’re good at.”

“Fuck you,” Mari retorts, stomping over to Shauna, wincing as melting snow slips into her sneakers. “Did you just come out here to insult-”

Shauna cuts her off by wrapping the blanket around her. Mari makes a small, startled noise, but then she accepts it. She grips the blanket tightly, shivering a little less. “I don’t feel safe in there,” she says in a small voice. “There was blood flowing down the wall…”

Shauna groans. “There’s no blood, Mari, I swear.”

“I saw it,” Mari insists. “And I’ve been hearing it drip for weeks and no one’s listened to me! Everyone listens to Lottie when she sees something! What if it’s the wilderness speaking to me?”

“You sound like an idiot,” Shauna tells her. “Just come inside.”

“You go inside,” Mari says. “You’re, like, super pregnant, you shouldn’t be-”

“I’m not gonna leave you out here to freeze,” Shauna interrupts. “So I guess we’ll both just have to stand here.”

So they do. They stand there across from each other, arms crossed, shivering, both stubbornly refusing to back down. Shauna’s beginning to think this is useless and she might as well just let Mari come back in on her own, when Mari backs down. “Okay,” she says, hanging her head. “I’ll come in.” 

They trudge back to the cabin. The weight of the baby makes Shauna embarrassingly slow, and her feet drag through the snow. Mari puts her arm around her, a little cautiously, and Shauna leans on her shoulder.

When the strangers come, it becomes apparent pretty quickly how bad this looks for them.

“He died of natural causes,” Misty squeaks, tossing one of Coach Scott’s rib bones over her shoulder.

Shauna, still straddling Mari in the dirt, almost laughs at the ridiculousness of it all, the irony. Now that they finally come across others out here, a fragment of civilization, they no longer belong in it. 

The man in front doesn’t get to say much more than a shocked exclamation at Coach Scott’s severed head before Lottie has caved his in. It’s even more ironic that Misty used that same axe to cut Coach Scott’s leg off. Shauna can’t help but laugh, then. Leave it to Lottie to make things exciting. 

The next few events happen in quick succession. The two other strangers run off, and Melissa, who was in fact, one of the faster girls on the team, is the first to react, which gets her a bolt through the shoulder from the other man’s crossbow. Everyone begins screaming, their hunting screams, and they stumble over each other to follow.

Mari shoves Shauna off, sending her sprawling. “No, no, no,” she chokes out. Shauna watches as she crawls towards the still twitching corpse on the ground. She desperately grabs the pools of brains spilling onto the ground and starts trying to scoop them back into his head. 

“Mari, get up,” Shauna says roughly, grabbing her arm and trying to drag her to her feet as Melissa cries in pain behind them, Gen at her side. “We have to go after them.” But Mari’s hysterical, sobbing as she holds her hand over the chasm in the man’s head. 

Lottie kneels beside them, a vacant look in her eyes. “Eat him with me,” she says. “It wants us to consume him.” 

She places her hand on Mari’s shaking shoulder, but Mari shoves her off. “Why the fuck did you do that?” she cries. “You’ve ruined everything!”

Shauna grabs Mari’s face, turning it towards her. She needs Mari’s full attention, she can’t have Lottie coming to steal it. “Nothing’s ruined if we find the other two,” she says. “So come hunt with me.”

Mari gets up, a little reluctantly, unsteady on her feet. They look down at the man’s corpse just as Lottie leans down over him, teeth sharp and ready. Then they head after the others, ready to be animals. 

Shauna slams the door to the girls locker room so hard it rattles on its hinges.

She’s never embarrassed herself on the field like that before. She’s not the kind that loses her cool. Lottie’s been carded more than once for shoving, and Taissa plays pretty ruthlessly too, and several of the JV girls, while they don’t often get physical, are known for taunting girls on the other teams. Especially Mari, because she can never keep her mouth shut.

Shauna didn’t mean to do it. She’s always good at keeping her cool, keeping a steady head on the field, so much that Coach Martinez has commemorated her for it more than once, and everyone knows how difficult it is to get praise from Coach Martinez. But that girl started it, that awful blonde snub-nosed girl who was twice Jackie’s size and had shoved her down like she was nothing. She’d sent Jackie sprawling into the grass, and Shauna had seen as Jackie’s pink mouth had formed an O shape and her eyes had widened, a flash of pain crossing her face as she’d collided with the ground. Jackie had gotten up again of course, she’s their captain for a reason, but not before Shauna had slammed her elbow into that horrible girl’s face as hard as she could. 

For a moment it had felt good. Something had taken over Shauna as she’d done it, the urge had been all consuming and she couldn’t have stopped it even if she wanted to. 

And then it was over. Her elbow was stained with blood and the ref was yelling at her to get off the field. Coach Scott had given her a sympathetic wince. Coach Martinez hadn’t looked at her at all. 

Shauna slumps down on the floor, leaning her back against one of the lockers. She thinks about wiping the blood off her elbow, but she can’t bring herself to get up. She thinks of what one of the girls on the other team yelled at Jackie. “Call off your guard dog.” Sometimes Shauna does feel like Jackie’s dog. She follows her around like she’s on a leash.

Ten minutes later, the door swings open, and Shauna winces. It’s probably someone else that’s come to yell at her. Even worse, her teammates have come to celebrate the victory they earned without her. But only one set of footsteps enters the locker room. Shauna looks up, and sees that none other than Mari has walked in, cheeks flushed and braids coming undone, probably high on adrenaline from the win Shauna wasn’t there to see. 

“You okay?” she asks, looking down at Shauna pathetically huddled up on the floor.

“I don’t feel like dealing with you right now, Mari,” Shauna mumbles, pulling her knees up to her chest. 

Mari raises her hands in mock defense. “Hey, I’m not here to bitch at you. I swear. I just…” she trails off, then bites her lip, looking down at her cleats. It’s weird to see her at a loss for words, even for a moment. She sits down on the bench between the rows of lockers, tapping her fingers on the wood.

“Why are you being so quiet?” Shauna asks after a moment, when the silence grows unbearable. “Don’t you usually have a thesaurus in your head instead of a brain?”

“I dunno,” Mari replies. “I don’t want to give you an excuse to…” she mimes elbowing someone, then grins. “I’ve never seen you get mad like that before, what happened?”

“She shoved Jackie,” Shauna says quietly.

“So?” Mari asks. “Everyone shoves.” 

“It’s Jackie.”

Mari shrugs, because she just doesn’t get it. “Jackie’s tough,” she says. “I mean, she freaks out when her shoes get a little dirty, but she doesn’t need a guard d-”

“Don’t,” Shauna spits. She can feel it again, that insatiable urge building, and it scares her. Violence is never the answer, that’s what her mom’s always said, so what is it that makes her so desperate to inflict it today?

She thinks of her and Jackie’s last sleepover. “You need to learn how to kiss,” Jackie had said suddenly, sitting up on her knees in the bed and placing her perfectly manicured hands in her lap. Shauna had protested that she does know how to kiss, but Jackie had insisted that she needed to be ready for her future boyfriend. And for a moment everything had been perfect, and then it had been ripped away when Jackie had pulled back and said she couldn’t wait to see Jeff the next morning.

“Sorry,” Mari says, but she isn’t, she never is. She swings her legs absentmindedly. “That girl totally deserved it, though. She was a bitch. I would’ve broken her stupid pug nose too.”

“Her nose isn’t really broken, is it?” Shauna asks, guilt rising like bile in her stomach.

“Oh, no, it’s probably just bruised,” Mari says quickly. “She’ll be fine once she gets an ice pack.” Shauna knows she’s lying because Mari’s so bad at it, but she appreciates it nonetheless. 

“Is Jackie mad at me?” Shauna asks. The thought of this makes her feel even worse.

Mari rolls her eyes. “Is Jackie mad at me?” she mocks. “You got a red card and that’s what you care about?”

Shauna glares at her. “I thought you said you didn’t come in here to bitch at me.”

“My bad, it’s a natural instinct,” Mari says. “No, Jackie isn’t mad at you. You’re her favourite person in the whole wide world, just like always. And she’s yours.” Is Shauna hallucinating, or does Mari sound pissed off about this? It’s no secret she wants Jackie’s attention, but why would she want Shauna’s too? They’re barely even friends. Mari hops off the bench so suddenly that it startles Shauna. She kicks Shauna’s leg lightly. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself, we still won,” she says. 

“I’m not feeling sorry for myself,” Shauna says, glowering. 

“Sure, whatever,” Mari says. “You’re still coming to Tai’s party tonight, right?”

Shauna doesn’t particularly want to, but Jackie will probably worry about her if she doesn’t, and she doesn’t want Jackie to start thinking she’s anything less than normal. Not when she’s already broken a girl’s nose today. “Fine,” she says.

“Cool,” Mari says, skipping over to her locker. “I’ll bring Malibu.”

Shauna never wanted to bring the strangers back to camp. She’d much rather have gutted them in the forest and put their heads on spikes. These woods belong to the Yellowjackets now, after all. Lottie said they shouldn’t be here, and a broken clock is still right twice a day.

The woman has large round eyes like Jackie. She says her name is Hannah and Shauna has strands of her hair tucked away in the pocket of her cargo pants that were once Travis’s before the idea of ownership changed out here. She ran those thick dark pieces through her fingers as they hunted, and Mari had looked at her quizzically, but she hadn’t said anything about it.

“I don’t know if I can help you get home,” Hannah says tearfully. “I don’t even know where I am.”

“You don’t seem to know a lot of things,” Shauna says coldly before any of the others can start up their stupid questions again. Mari huffs from beside her, arms crossed. She’s stuck to Shauna’s side since they went into the woods last night, her steady breathing keeping Shauna from pressing her knife into Hannah’s gut. The supposed frog scientist woman looks soft. She looks like she would be easy to chew on.

“Are you like the team captain?” Hannah asks, looking up at her. Team captain. They haven’t called it that in a long time. If only Jackie could see her now. 

“She’s not the captain,” Natalie says.

“Yes, she is,” Mari snaps, speaking up for the first time. “And you’re not.” Natalie blinks, confusion and hurt blooming on her face. She should know by now that Mari’s loyalty is fickle. 

“Maybe we could get home if the other guy was here,” Hannah says. “He’s our guide. He might know how to get out of here.”

“What the fuck are we waiting for, then?” Shauna demands. “Let’s go find him.”

Their excitement about going home dwindles when Lottie stands up, blood still smeared down her front, and speaks after her hours of silence. “We can’t go home,” she says. “We don’t belong there anymore.”

Her words send whispers of “she’s crazy” and “don’t listen to her” through their little group, but Shauna feels a little bit nauseous when she realizes that Lottie’s right. Maybe they can never go back home after everything that’s happened out here.

“I can’t wait to leave,” Mari says eagerly, shoving clothes haphazardly in her backpack. “As soon as we get home, I’m getting a blue raspberry slushie. And then I’m getting a bacon cheeseburger. And then-” she cuts herself off, looking down at Shauna who’s hesitating to pack her journals, wondering if burning them would make her forget everything. “Are you even listening?”

“Yeah,” Shauna says. Luckily for her, Mari’s a fucking idiot, so she doesn’t need to be more convincing than that.

“And then I’m gonna go to Olive Garden and get the breadsticks,” Mari continues. “And I’m gonna go to the gas station with, like, a bucket and just fill it up with as much Diet Pepsi as they’ll let me.”

Natalie’s as gentle as she can be when Lottie decides she wants to stay. When it’s Shauna, that disappears. “I’m not staying for you,” Shauna tells Lottie, watching her cautious smile fade. “Or it.”

“Why the fuck would you stay at all?” Natalie demands.

She doesn’t understand, none of them do. Shauna’s baby is buried here. She can’t leave him all alone. It’ll be winter again soon, and it’ll get cold. The ground will get hard. He’s defenceless and he needs her to stay.

“I don’t know,” she says.

Taissa throws her bag down, and Shauna feels her almost forgotten love for her resurfacing. Lottie’s right, in some way, they belong here with their teammates’ bones. 

Mari steps up from beside Gen. “Shauna, no,” she pleads. “We’re supposed to go home. We have to go home.”

Shauna shakes her head. “No. Not with these two.” Maybe not ever, because what if Jackie’s ghost doesn’t follow her out of these woods?

“If you’ve all lost your minds, then we’ll just leave without you,” Natalie says, throwing her hands up in exasperation.

“No one is going anywhere,” Shauna says, her grip on the gun tightening. They don’t get to run from this if she can’t. They don’t get to go home and pretend to still be human. 

“You don’t get to tell everyone what to do,” Mari says, stepping even further forward, chin high. 

“You’re supposed to be on my side,” Shauna says angrily. Hours ago Mari was calling her their captain, and now she thinks she can just leave without her?

“I am on your side, when you’re not trying to get us all killed!” Mari retorts. “We can’t go through winter without the cabin!”

“What cabin?” Kodi asks, smirking like something about all of this is funny to him.

Van rubs her forehead. “Mari, you fucking dumbass-”

“I’m your leader,” Shauna says, speaking over her. “That means that if I say we’re staying, then we’re staying.”

But Mari has seemed to decide that she wants to rebel today, that slushies and whatever the fuck she was talking about are more important than what she’s best at, which is following the leader, because she stands tall, just as stubborn as she’s always been. So Shauna raises the gun and points it right at the centre of her chest. 

Chapter Text

Shauna can’t believe she ever wished the baby in her womb would just disappear.

Now that he’s here, the guilt threatens to overwhelm her, and she’s already so weak from the birth that one more strong emotion might kill her. She didn’t know how perfect he would be when she was on her back on the forest floor with the underwire from her bra between her legs. She didn’t know how much she would love him when she was crying herself to sleep in the attic, wishing she’d never had sex with Jeff so Jackie would still be here. 

But it’s worth it now. It’s all worth it because she has him.

Everything is so shiny. The world outside does not exist. When Shauna looks out the window, she realizes she can’t see the trees anymore. Everyone looks cleaner too, brighter. They’re all beaming at her with teeth that are a little too white.

“He’s perfect,” Taissa whispers, stroking Shauna’s hair, tears in her eyes. “I told you everything was gonna be okay.”

“Yeah, you did,” Shauna says, wiping tears out of her own eyes. She hadn’t believed Taissa at the time, because it seemed too good to be true that this would go well. Shauna doesn’t get to have nice things, after all. She’s never been allowed to. Jackie was always the one who got everything she wanted.  

“He looks like you,” Mari marvels. Shauna doesn’t where she she came from. She doesn’t know how the three of them ended up in the bedroom. But it doesn’t matter. It’s more comfortable in here. No wonder Coach Scott likes to sleep in here. Where is Coach Scott, anyway? That doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but her baby nestled up against her.

Shauna looks down at him. He doesn’t look like anyone, really. He looks like a wrinkled little potato. But now that she looks closer, maybe he does have her nose. “I guess so,” she says.

Mari sits down on the bed across from her, legs criss-crossed. “He reminds me of my baby cousin,” she says. “She looked like that when she was born too.” Shauna’s pretty sure she hears a tinge of sadness in Mari’s words. What was it that happened to her cousin? She vaguely remembers a week of middle school when Mari wasn’t in class and the rumour mill began when someone saw her in the local hospital’s waiting room, and their teachers told them not to pester her with questions when she came back.

Shauna wants to ask what happened now, but the words dry up in her throat. She’s nothing but dry. She can’t even feed her baby.

”I brought you something,” Mari says suddenly. Not another weird, spiky cradle decoration, Shauna thinks, but instead Mari hands her a tiny, dried up piece of what looks like beef jerky. “It’s a piece of Jackie’s skin,” Mari says. “I was saving it for… I don’t know. Akilah says you can’t make milk because you don’t have enough nutrition, so maybe it’ll help.”

Shauna takes it from Mari’s outstretched hand. Maybe Jackie will be the reason her baby survives. Then it’ll all be worth it.

Everyone freezes when Shauna points the gun at Mari. A few of them let out soft little gasps. Taissa puts her hand on Shauna’s arm, like she thinks she can still talk Shauna out of her bad ideas, but Shauna shrugs her off.

Mari’s the only one who doesn’t look shocked. She glares Shauna down over the barrel of the gun. “You won’t do it,” she says. “You’re too chickenshit.”

“Shauna, what the fuck?” Natalie hisses. “She didn’t do anything to you-”

”Shut the fuck up!” Shauna yells, the gun shaking a little in her hands, and they might as well all be wasted and arguing at a post-game party, except this time she gets to be the aggressor.

“Shauna talks in her sleep, by the way,” Mari says loudly, drawing everyone’s attention over to her. “She sounds like this: Jackie, oh, Jackie.” She puts her hands over her heart, swaying a little. It’s remarkable how she can still mock someone even with a gun pointed right at her. 

“Shut up.” Shauna grips the gun even tighter, and her pent up resentment exploded out of her. “It’s your fault she’s dead! If you hadn’t been up in the attic distracting me, I would’ve gone out to get her!” 

”No, you wouldn’t have,” Mari says.

“Yes, I would’ve!”

”You can keep saying it, but no one’s gonna believe you. Everybody knows she’s dead because of you-”

The shot is so loud that everyone jumps. For a moment, Shauna thinks Mari will crumple on the ground, blood leaking out of her. Then they both look down at the little hole in the sleeve of her hoodie. Mari, for all her bravado, is shaking. Akilah and Gen hurry over to her, like they can do anything to fix all of this. Shauna can’t help but grin. Who’s chickenshit now?

The forest is quiet as Shauna kneels by her baby’s grave. “I won’t leave you,” she tells him. “I promise.”

She half expects Mari to come sneaking out of the flowers as she did last time, either with a biting comment or a half-smile, because it can always go either way with her. But she’s all alone this time. That’s what she deserves, anyway. She’s made sure that everyone who cares about her wants nothing to do with her. 

Well, almost. But these days Shauna doesn’t know if Mari actually wants her anymore or if whatever they are to each other has become some twisted habit to her, like biting her nails or pulling out her hair, something that hurts her but she sticks to it because she’s used to it. 

Mari’s in their hut when Shauna returns to camp, casually thumbing through a withered old magazine she must have hidden away before the paper could be used for their lanterns. But Mari gets what she wants, courtesy of being coveted by Shauna. The best meat, the best furs. Not that she ever acts grateful for any of it.

Mari doesn’t look up when Shauna enters. She’s still wearing that old hoodie, sporting the bullet hole in it like it’s something to be proud of. Maybe it is something to be proud of. She went head to head with Shauna and lived to tell about it, after all.

Shauna would be impressed, if she still trusted Mari.

”I saw you talking to Misty,” she says. 

“So?” Mari asks, still not looking up. She turns a page. 

“You don’t talk to Misty if you can help it.”

”I had a rash I wanted her to look at,” Mari says with a shrug. She turns another page, not even bothering to pretend she’s reading. 

Shauna’s seen basically every inch of her. Mari doesn’t have any rashes anywhere. She sits down, frustrated. “If the others were planning something, you’d tell me, right?” she asks. 

She waits for: “And what if I don’t, are you gonna shoot me?” because Mari’s never gonna let that go, she uses it as a trump card to win every argument between them, and they’ve been having a lot of those lately, more and more savage each time. They usually end with Mari telling her to go fuck herself and storming out of the hut and into Gen’s, where Shauna is very aware they talk shit about her all night. But Mari doesn’t say anything like that. She just puts the magazine down and climbs into Shauna’s lap, smirking down at her as she runs a hand through her grimy hair. “Don’t be so paranoid,” she says. “It’s not cute.”

Shauna’s eyes are still burning from the fire in the plane even now that she’s out. The world spins around her, everything is green as far as she can see. Where the hell are they? She can hardly breathe from all she smoke she inhaled trying to save Van. She knows why Jackie dragged her out, but she’s still angry about it. 

Mari collapses into the grass beside her, choking and coughing. “Holy shit,” she gasps. “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”

Shauna grabs her arm, pulling her into a sitting position. “It’s okay,” she says, even though it isn’t. “You’re okay.”

“Rachel,” Mari says, tears running down her face. “Rachel, oh my god. She was impaled. Is she dead? Is Van dead?”

Shauna can’t answer that. She doesn’t want to. She grabs a water bottle from the forest floor that’s rolled out of the wreckage of the plane and hands it to Mari, putting a hand on her trembling knee. “Just breathe,” she says. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”

Mari’s shaking so badly she spills half the water on herself as she drinks it. “I saw Coach Martinez fall out of the plane,” she says. “I don’t think he’s okay. Oh god, poor Travis. And Javi, he’s just a kid-”

“Hey,” Shauna says firmly, covering Mari’s hands with her own. “Don’t think about that, okay? You can’t do anything. Here, put your head between your knees. It helps.” She guides Mari’s head down until it’s between her knees, her hair blanketing her legs. Slowly, she begins to breathe normally. Slowly, the screams around them subside.

They want her dead. Taissa, her fiercest ally out here. And Van, whom Shauna risked her life to try and save when they crashed. They want her dead.

She can tell they’ve fucked with the draw somehow. She can tell by Taissa’s expression, the finality on her face, the confidence in knowing she won’t be chosen. She can tell by the way Van’s breathing. Van, the little hypocrite, always on Lottie’s heels when the snow fell for the first time, talking about the wilderness wanted. Clearly it’s never been about fate, about chance.

So this has been the others’ plan. Shauna kept expecting to wake up to a knife to her throat, even as Mari’s been insisting that nothing’s going on behind her back. Maybe she wouldn’t have fought it. She doesn’t have anything to live for, after all. But no, they’ve been playing the long game. She refuses to be hunted through the woods like an animal. She won’t go out like that.

Shauna steps forward. She won’t let them do this. Taissa freezes. “Shauna,” she says slowly. “Go back to your spot. You don’t need to take any extra risk.”

”I trust what the wilderness wills,” Shauna says smugly. “Don’t you?” She stands between Taissa and Mari, who’s determinedly not looking at her.

Misty looks at Taissa hesitantly, like she’s the queen, like it’s Taissa’s permission she needs to proceed. “Go ahead, Misty,” Shauna says. “We don’t have all day.”

After giving Shauna her card, which is very much not the Queen card, Misty looks over at Hannah, just once. The terrified woman who’s shown them she’s capable of violence to survive. And that’s when Shauna realizes she was wrong. She realizes just as Mari takes her own card, just as Van’s breath hitches.

To her credit, Mari doesn’t cry when she holds up the card. She doesn’t beg. She doesn’t protest that this wasn’t supposed to happen, that Hannah was the one who was supposed to raise this card. She just stays quiet.

Shauna’s stunned for a moment. She doesn’t know what to say. But maybe it was always going to end like this. She clutches the cool metal of Jackie’s necklace in her fist, then steps towards Mari.

Mari’s close enough to kiss as Shauna puts the necklace around her neck, but she pulls her head back, refuses to meet Shauna’s gaze. One last act of defiance. Fine. If that’s how she wants to go out, then fine. 

“One,” Lottie starts softly. “Two…”

Mari’s hands meet Shauna’s chest, shoving her hard and sending her sprawling into the snow. She’s angry. She thinks Shauna did this on purpose. Shauna’s met with the overwhelming urge to tell her that she didn’t, as she stumbles to her feet, no one bothering to help her up. But she’s not that weak, not that desperate, so instead, she starts counting too. 

“You deserve everything that’s coming to you!” Mari yells before she takes off running.

Shauna watches from the water as Jackie sits down next to Mari. She tries to read their lips, to figure out what they’re saying, but someone splashes her before she can. Shauna laughs it off, wiping the cold lake-water from her eyes, but her stomach twists a little as Jackie looks over at her, just once, with a blank expression, before turning back to Mari and smiling.

She knows Jackie’s mad that Shauna voted to leave the crash site. She didn’t want to upset her. But Shauna always votes for what Jackie wants. She always agrees with her. Isn’t she allowed to have a different opinion this one time? 

Bur no, apparently she isn’t, because now Jackie’s punishing her by ignoring her and talking to Mari instead. For a moment, Shauna has the urge to stalk up there, grab Mari by her hair and shove her head under the water. 

She needs to chill out. This isn’t Mari’s fault. She doesn’t know she’s being used as bait. Or maybe she does. But it doesn’t matter. Shauna’s good at silently seething.

Melissa wades over to her, not wearing her backwards hat for once. “Wanna go diving and look for pretty rocks?” she asks. She sounds like she’s been rehearsing the sentence for at least ten minutes.

Shauna looks over her shoulder at Jackie and Mari one more time. They’re both looking at her now. “Sure,” she tells Melissa. Two can play this game.

Shauna runs through the trees, Travis’s words still echoing in her mind. Jealously. Betrayal. Slumber party makeouts. He couldn’t know that. He must’ve been bluffing and just happened to strike gold.

Her boots thump against the snow. She can feel Taissa eyeing her. She can feel all the forests’ eyes on her.

“Shauna, wait,” Taissa grabs her, stopping her. “Do you really want to do this? I mean, she’s your-” she stops. “If it was Van, I wouldn’t-”

“You didn’t have to worry about it being Van,” Shauna snarls, stepping closer to her. “I know you two fucked with the draw.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Taissa says, drawing up to her full height.

”Whatever,” Shauna says, pushing past her, remembering that she doesn’t have time for this. If Mari must be hunted, then Shauna will be the one to catch her.

It’s not long before she stumbles on Mari’s pants, bright and pink and standing out against the snow. Her boots are there too. Why would she take her boots off? She’ll freeze before they catch her. She’ll freeze just like Jackie. Shauna picks the clothes off the ground and brings them with her, just in case. Just in case someone else is chosen, like when they hunted Natalie, and Mari needs her clothes. But she doubts it. Who would sacrifice themselves for Mari?

Lottie sits in the snow, humming to herself. She doesn’t seem to notice when Shauna comes across her. She doesn’t react when Shauna takes her by the shoulders and shakes her. “Jesus, Lottie, get up!” she yells. “We’re supposed to be hunting!”

“Akilah says it’s all my fault,” Lottie murmurs. “I thought she understood. She doesn’t understand.”

Shauna goes still. “Lottie… where is Akilah?”

Lottie doesn’t look at her, eyes glazed over and unfocused. “She’s learning to hear it.”

“What does that mean?” Shauna demands. She shouldn’t be here, trying to make sense of this nut-job’s ramblings. They’re losing time before the sunset.

“She’ll learn soon,” Lottie says softly. “When she’s been down there for long enough.”

Shauna lets go of her, standing up shakily. Someone is crying in the distance. “Did you leave her in the caves? Lottie? It’s poisonous, she’ll die down there, you idiot. Lottie, I swear to-”

A flash of white sprints by them, and then there’s blood on the snow. Mari trips over a root and stumbles to the forest floor. Her foot is bleeding, she’s whimpering and shaking as she struggles to her feet. When she looks over her shoulder and sees Lottie and Shauna staring at her, any determination left in her face turns to fear.

“Mari, wait,” Shauna says. “Akilah’s dead.” Maybe not yet, but she will be, and then Mari doesn’t have to die. Then Shauna can keep her. 

”Don’t fucking lie to me!” Mari yells, getting up. “I’m not dying like this, not because of you!” 

”You’ve been here before, Mari,” Lottie says softly, smiling. “You could let it be different this time.”

“Oh fuck off, both of you!” And Mari’s running through the trees.

Shauna goes after her, determined to catch her, tackle her to the ground, drown her in the snow. Determined to just make her stop, to listen to reason. To look at Shauna like she used to. “Mari, wait-”

A scream up ahead stops her in her tracks. 

It was always going to end this way.

They drag Mari through the snow, her blood leaving a long trail. Lottie’s still humming. Van cries into Taissa’s shoulder. Gen puts her hand over her mouth when she sees the corpse full of holes, eyes wide open and unseeing. Akilah’s missing, but the only person aside from them who would notice is Travis, and he’s too far gone to even realize that Mari is dead.

The rest of them stand side by side and watch silently, their masks hiding their hunger. They can’t pretend they don’t want to eat. 

Shauna thinks of the first time Mari fell in the pit. The way she cried for Shauna to help her. The way she begged Shauna not to leave her. She’s silent now. Mari’s never silent. It’s not right for her to just lie there in the snow, no longer twitching, no longer making any noise. Shauna stared down at her for a long time before they dragged her out of the pit, limp as a doll. 

Natalie, face hidden by her hood, steps forward with the butcher knife in her hand. Something about her is different, something Shauna can’t put her finger on. Her mannerisms, her gait. But it doesn’t matter. The woods change all of them.

“I’m doing it,” Shauna says, ripping the knife of her hands. “Get out of my way.”

Mari comes apart easily under the knife. There’s not a whole lot of her. She’s always been small and slim, and the hunger stole most of the meat on her bones. But she’ll feed them anyway. She’ll fill them up. Mari’s always wanted to be wanted. Now she’ll get her wish.

Eventually, Mari becomes unrecognizable on the butchering table, just as they all do. Her blood pools in the snow. Drip, drip, drip. Soon, there will be nothing left of her. Shauna can’t have that. She slices off Mari’s long hair, letting the strands run through her fingers. She’ll have Jackie’s necklace and Mari’s hair, and eventually her costume will be nothing but bits of other girls. No one really dies out here, after all. 

Mari roasts slowly. Shauna watches the flames crackle and spit sparks. The others are quiet. Too quiet. There aren’t enough of them, but no one vocalizes it, no one asks why two of them are missing. Shauna can’t bring herself to care if someone else has lost themselves in the woods or the caves. She’s doesn’t send anyone to collect Akilah’s body. She just watches as Mari cooks above the fire. 

Misty serves her. None of them will eat until Shauna lets them. She looks down at the scorched meat on the wooden plate in her lap. They let it cook for too long. Mari wouldn’t have.

Shauna looks around at them all, head heavy from her crown of antlers, watching them through the netting hanging around her face. She wonders if they still see her like this, or if they see Natalie now, if they see Lottie, if they see Jackie. She wonders if their leaders still have faces or if their eyes are blacked out like on the Queen card. 

But none of them are real people anymore. She was right not to let them go home. 

Shauna reaches for a piece of meat. She takes a bite-

“Get up, Shipman, I wanna get going,” Jackie whines, kicking Shauna’s leg.

“I’m coming,” Shauna replies, smiling. She knows Jackie will take another ten minutes chatting with everyone, so she doesn’t bother dragging herself off the bleachers. 

A moment later, Mari jumps up onto the seats in front of her. “Ooh, The Handmaid’s Tale,” she says, looking at the title of the book in Shauna’s hands. “We’re reading that in English.” She’s bright-eyed and still running on adrenaline from practice, practically bouncing in her seat. 

“I didn’t know you could read,” Shauna replies.

“Har har,” Mari says, rolling her eyes. “That never gets old, does it?”

“Nope,” Shauna says. 

Mari starts to say something else, but then Jackie calls again, more insistent this time. “Shauna! I’m gonna leave without you!”

Shauna knows Jackie isn’t going to leave without her, but she gets up anyway, throwing her book and her water bottle in her bag and standing up. “See you at practice tomorrow,” she says to Mari.

“Yeah, see you,” Mari replies, a little quieter than usual. Shauna looks over her shoulder a moment later as she walks off the field, arm in arm with Jackie, and sees that Mari’s still sitting there, alone, watching her leave.

Chapter Text

“Don’t tell me you’re hungry again already,” Mari tsks. 

The voices of dead girls don’t make Shauna flinch anymore. She looks down at the so called food in her lap, pulling her furs tighter around her. Nothing but strips of meat left for them now. The animals are all dead and eaten. Hannah is dead, the traitor who thought she could play both sides. She was fun to hunt. Gen wasn’t. She didn’t beg.

Jackie tends to show up whenever she feels like it. Or when Shauna wants her. Mari only comes when she’s really, really hungry.

”A great thing about being dead is that I don’t get hungry,” Mari says. Shauna does her best not to look at her. Mari’s ghost has an endless supply of blood, and it drips in the snow, letting Shauna knows she’s there before she actually spots her. “I don’t even remember what it feels like. But I guess it drives a person crazy, huh?”

Shauna still doesn’t say anything, alone and freezing in her little hut. She doesn’t like talking to Mari’s ghost. Jackie’s is tender sometimes, but Mari’s never is. But Jackie doesn’t come around anymore. Sometimes Shauna spots her in the corner of her eye, but other than that, it seems like Jackie has better things to do. Maybe she’s following Natalie around, wherever she is these days. Starving and freezing somewhere in the woods like she deserves.

“Oh, come on, Shipman,” Mari groans. She tucks a strand of her now short, uneven bob behind her ear with a bloody finger. The gaping black holes in her hands look like Jesus’s wounds from the cross. Dead girls turn into saints out here. “I’m bored,” Mari says. “Death is boring. It’s just like the wilderness. No music, no potato chips.” She sinks to her knees, blood-stained dress pooling around her. “But what I miss most, is the feeling of your lips on mine. I would dream about it if I could still dream.” 

“You’re not funny,” Shauna says. The wind howls outside her hut, almost sounding like screams of hunted girls. The others are all huddled together like penguins in Natalie’s abandoned hut, the cold drawing them closer together as she eats the last pieces of Gen by herself, weak and small from hunger. Her penance, maybe. If she still believes in that.

Mari straightens up. “Well, I have eternity to work on my humour. You know what another great thing about death is?”

“Not being cold?” Shauna guesses. Mari likes to tell her about how much better she’s doing than Shauna, somehow turning purgatory into something to envy.

“Waiting for it to happen to you, too,” Mari says. When she turns her head to look at the falling snow outside, Shauna can see her teeth through the hole in her cheek.

“What do you want?” she asks. Jackie never answers that question.

Mari glares at her. “I want my hair back, bitch.”

Robin and Britt are gone one dark morning. Shauna doesn’t care, doesn’t ask about it, but Misty hurries up to her like a page boy to a king to give her the details. “Taissa says they went to look for Akilah,” she says, the freezing wind blowing her curls all around her face. Shauna doubts it. No one is ever going to find Akilah. Lottie is the only one who knows where her body might be, and she’s been mute since Mari died. “I think they’re deserters,” Misty says importantly, pushing her cracked glasses up her nose.  

“Then we’ll kill them if they come back,” Shauna says. They won’t. They’ll get lost in the caves or freeze on the way. It seems that some of these girls would rather choose certain death than having her as a leader. But Shauna still doesn’t care. There’s an emptiness to being a queen without a consort. If the rest of them walked away into the woods right now, she might not even look up. 

No one meets her eyes as they all push belt soup around their bowls, courtesy of the plane’s seatbelts. Shauna doesn’t care if they fear her, if they hate her. It’s all the same out here. She sees them grow weary, watch in the distance for Natalie. Maybe when they lose their faith in her, they’ll crawl to Shauna for guidance. But the only one who ever believed she might be able to guide them is gone, all that remains of her are the sleek black pieces of hair fastened to Shauna. She never takes off that costume now.

Shauna gets off her tree stump and heads for the woods. She feels light-headed and her vision swims, her body rejecting the monstrosity they call a meal. “Shauna?” Melissa calls. Maybe Shauna should start letting Melissa hang around her. She might be a good distraction, someone who can worship her. But she doesn’t know if she has it in her. Not after Jackie, not after Mari.

She vomits in a bush, wiping the slime off her chin after. If she walks a little further, she might come to the clearing, but the snow is so high now that she probably won’t be able to find her baby’s grave, and there will be no one there with her this time.

Drip, drip, drip.

Why does it have to be her? Why does Jackie never come? 

“My soup never had anyone throwing up,” Mari says from behind her. “You should try to keep it in your stomach if you’re planning on surviving the winter.”

“I thought you wanted me to die,” Shauna replies.

“I didn’t say I wanted it, I said I was waiting for it,” Mari says. “Keep up, Shauna. I bet you’d be paying more attention if I was Jackie. But that’s nothing new.”

“Where’s Jackie?” Shauna asks. She refuses to turn around, refuses to look at Mari. She needs Jackie more than ever. 

“Dunno,” Mari responds. Shauna can hear the frown in her voice. “She mattered more when I was alive, too. You always think about her. I’m the one who’s here. Well, sort of. In a non-corporeal form. At least, I think. I don’t really know how this works. You can try touching me and seeing if it works.”

“I’m not gonna touch you,” Shauna says. She can’t touch anyone, not with the spiky antlers that protrude from her head and stab those that get too close. Not with the hooves she has for hands now.

Mari tuts. “You’re hallucinating again, Shauna. You still look human. You’re definitely some kind of mythical monster on the inside, though.” She snaps her fingers, the sound echoing even with the howling, screaming wind. “Look at me.” She sounds frustrated. “You think I like being stuck here, watching you eat my friends? We were supposed to go home. Then you killed me. And you won’t even acknowledge me half the time.” 

So Shauna does. She turns, slowly, looks at Mari standing barefoot in the snow just like the day she died, gaping holes that never stop bleeding all over her body. “I wish you’d leave,” she says. She’s too tired to try and defend herself. 

Mari’s face falls. “If that’s what you really want,” she says.

At first, there’s silence, darkness. Then a whirring, a vibrating all around her that makes Shauna aware of her body again, realizing that the pain she felt a moment ago is gone. Everything around her is gone.

Maybe it was a dream, being stabbed through the heart by her own daughter. The daughter she never wanted, who always scared her even when she was only a baby. Shauna doesn’t remember the moment well, even though it just happened. She saw Jackie holding the kitchen knife, then Callie, then Jackie again, like switching through TV channels. Jackie had looked resigned. Callie had trembled, dropping the knife and stepping away from Shauna. Jackie had shaken her head in disappointment. 

Shauna supposes she has herself to blame for it. You don’t provoke a cornered animal. And teenage girls can be so murderous in the right circumstances. Callie had shook just like Shauna had when she butchered Javi, but she’ll grow into it.

Shauna forces her eyes open. She’s alone in the middle of the aisle, her seat rocking and banging, shoving her back and forth. The emergency lights flash, but there are no oxygen masks. 

She can’t be back here. Not after all these years. Hasn’t she done more with her life? Hasn’t she grown out of this? She can’t still be the girl on the plane, not after so long. Her years of being a quiet housewife can’t be for nothing, not even after she abandoned it in the end for her true purpose.

Shauna realizes she isn’t alone on the plane. A girl she’d carved up until she no longer existed sits beside her, hair in a ponytail, journal on her lap. She looks up from it, almost shyly. “Don’t be scared,” she says.

“I’m not,” Shauna replies. She’s survived a plane crash before. She looks around, trying to catch another familiar face, trying to spot anyone she might want to see, but there’s only one person walking down the aisle towards her, someone she hasn’t seen since they were rescued.

Twenty-five years have not aged Mari. She stands before Shauna a teenager still, no longer bleeding and barefoot with chopped up hair, but in that yellow hoodie Shauna shouldn’t still remember, looking just like she did the day they left for nationals and never made it there. Impossibly young, enviously undamaged. 

“Well, shit,” Mari says. “Somebody sure peaked in the wilderness. You were all scary in your deer costume the last time I saw you.” She looks Shauna up and down, clearly unimpressed. 

“No,” Shauna breathes. “Not you.” She hasn’t thought about Mari in years. She’s forced the girl out of her mind, written her off as a mistake, something she misinterpreted and misremembered, a shadow of what she’d really wanted.

”I said I’d be waiting,” Mari replies. She seems unperturbed by the rocking plane headed for certain doom. Then again, she has nothing to be afraid of when she’s already dead. “So, I guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, right? But you never really gave Callie a chance, did you? Cute name. Is it short for Jacqueline? Was that Jeff’s idea, or yours?”

“Where’s Jackie?” Shauna demands. “Where’s my baby? Why are you here, of all people?” She tries to wrench away, to get out of her seat, but she can’t move, can’t look away. 

Mari rolls her eyes as if this is all trivial to her. She gets into the seat beside Shauna, stretching out her legs casually. “Just relax,” she says. “It’s gonna be a rough landing.”