The Reckoning

“There’s more,” he promised. More carnage? Or bones?

A movement caught her eye. The darkness shifted over Luke’s shoulder. She squinted through the flames. Animal eyes flickered in and out of view. A shape climbed down from the trees, then another. The monkeys were descending, she thought. Becoming jackals.

“What do you want?” Duncan’s voice broke. He was afraid.

“It’s time,” Luke said.

Duncan didn’t move. “You don’t make sense.” His neck was stooped.

“We said we’d follow you to hell and back,” Luke said. “We did. Only it took this long.” Out of his mind, she thought, him and us. Possessed by the remains of war.

Why hadn’t she listened to Kleat? He’d warned them in the restaurant. He’d said the man was a predator. And yet Kleat hadn’t believed his own warning. It was he who had pushed the hardest to follow Luke into this limbo of trees with bleeding names and the labyrinth and the hiding bones.

“Leave her out of it,” Duncan said. He sounded tentative. His brow tensed. He was trying to navigate. Searching for safe harbor.

“Out of what, Duncan?” she whispered.

“I don’t know,” he pleaded.

“It’s almost over,” Luke said.

“It was you,” said Molly. “You mined the road.”

The fire sank under the downpour. For a second, Luke’s empty sockets stared at her. It was the darkness. Then the flames leaped up. His eyes returned.

“I told you to tell him,” Luke said. “He lost his place with us. Now Johnny’s not ever going to leave.”

“Johnny,” Duncan repeated, trying to remember.

“Leave him alone,” Molly said. She reminded herself that she was the one with the gun.

“Molly,” Luke whispered. But his jaw didn’t move. It wasn’t his voice. Us. They whispered from behind him.

The monkeys gained in size. They straightened. She was wrong. These weren’t monkeys, what she could see of them. Some were naked among them. Others wore rags. Some had skin. Not all of them.

She tore her eyes from the shadow shapes. They weren’t real. It was her fever.

The gun took on weight. It wavered. She slipped her arm from the sling to steady her aim.

“What do you want with him?” she said.

“Him?” Luke said.

They wanted her.

“What do you want?” She could barely hear herself.

“We’ve been waiting long enough, don’t you think?” said Luke.

The words came back to her, Duncan’s refrain at the dig.

Luke smiled at her, and she recognized them, the ruins of his teeth green with moss. Only now three more were gone, the three she’d plucked from his skull that morning. He hadn’t shaved his hair off. It was gone. She’d carried his scalp off in her pocket. Lucas Yale was no forgery. He was dead.

Molly pulled the trigger.

He had not made a move. He’d done nothing but smile. No witness on earth would have called it self-defense. And yet she fired. She killed his impossibility.

There was a cry, and the sound of a body pitching into the fire. Torches of wood catapulted from the flames.

The rain hissed. Steam and smoke pumped upward, sucked by the wind. The light nearly died.

“Duncan,” she shouted.

He looked at her, at the gun, at the body smoldering on the logs. He finished getting out of the hut. The shadow men—the monkeys—had fled.

Molly crawled from the hut with the gun in one hand. The rain whipped at her like cold stones. Her wound seemed distant, no longer clutched in the crook of her arm and held close to her face. It was, for now, beneath her attention.

Together, she and Duncan rounded the fire to the body. His clothes were too wet to combust quite yet. But there was that smell again, the stink of burning hair. What hair? And when had this rifle appeared across his back?

Duncan dragged the body, hair flaming, from the fire. They turned him faceup, and it wasn’t Luke staring at them with jade eyes, not with the crude tattoos along his arms and the gold teeth sparkling between his burned lips. She had just killed Vin.

Molly let the gun drop from her hand. In her fever state, she had mistaken the missing boy for a phantom. Or the rain had infected her. It was dark. The night was diseased with shadows.

Duncan picked up the gun.

She was too horrified to care.

He aimed the gun. She saw it through a foggy lens. Her mind was shutting down. The bang of shots rang in her ears. He was firing point-blank into the hut.

She had forgotten the jerry cans stacked inside. The smell of fuel reminded her. It was leaking downhill, toward the fire.

Before her eyes, he’d built a bomb.

“Run,” Duncan said.

She tried, and fell.

He caught her, and she thought he would carry her up the stairs. They would fly into the night, the typhoon for their wings.

But he was too weak. After a few steps, Duncan groaned, “I can’t.”

Her superhero lowered her back to the ground. He seemed frail, or injured. As they set off with her arm draped over his thin shoulder, Molly couldn’t be sure who was carrying whom.

39.

The clearing lit like a chalice of light. Like Lot’s wife, Molly could not resist glancing back at the destruction. Jerry cans pinwheeled out of the hut walls, whipping tails of flame. The hut was just fire squared on the edges, an idea of civilization. The ACAV glinted among the branches.

She looked for her phantom ape-men, but the light had banished them. All that remained was the body. She had imagined Luke, a dead man, even spoken to him, and then pulled the trigger. But in killing off a hallucination, she had murdered a poor lost boy. Blinded with stones. Or had she imagined his eyes, too?

She wanted to blame her fever, but feared the worst. Madness was built into her genes. Her birth mother had finally come home to roost.

“Climb,” Duncan said.

Another jerry can ignited. The faces of stone giants throbbed among the trees. Shadows fled and reassembled.

“We need to go back,” she said. “I need to bury him.”

Who were they running from except themselves? Luke was imaginary and she had killed a child and panicked this fragile hermit into detonating the fuel. It occurred to her that she might have imagined that, too, that she was the one who had emptied the gun into the jerry cans and destroyed their final hopes for survival. It was in keeping with the family tradition, slow suicide, only by jungle, not by snow.

“Climb,” Duncan whispered. “They’ll be coming for us.”

She forced him to stop, a matter of leaning on his shoulder. Where had all his strength gone?

“You saw them?” She spelled out her delusion. “Those others in the shadows?”

“I don’t know.” But his urgency was certain. “We need to keep moving.”

They were being hunted. Duncan didn’t speak it out loud. Maybe he thought she would stop functioning.

By midway up the stairs, the rain had drowned the scattered fires and the hut and their bonfire. The darkness