Shelby threw off her blanket and slid out of bed, dressed only in her T-shirt and a pair of ugly briefs. She rubbed the pad of waxy scar tissue on the heel of her left hand. The temperature had dropped and she felt uncomfortably aware of her balls, which were stuck to her thigh by sweat, and of the flush in her chest. She adjusted herself, wiped her face on her shirt, and let out a long, quiet breath. Gabe was sucking his thumb in his sleep, all his grown-up vanity melted away. John and Brady were both snoring.
It wasn’t hard to move the linens and slip down into the cobwebbed crawl space under the cabin. Loose, pebbly earth shifted under her hands and knees as she crawled through the darkness toward the alley between their cabin and the girls’. She felt for and found the movable section of plywood latticework, backing out awkwardly through the gap and into the bitter desert cold. A minute later she was wriggling through the trapdoor into Cabin Four. She lowered the hatch gently behind her, flushed and sweaty and already second-guessing herself as she squinted in the gloom, looking for Nadine’s bunk. Jo, face caught in a beam of moonlight. Felix sleeping on his stomach in the bunk under hers, legs and backside bare, blanket tight around the rest of him.
On the far side of the room Nadine lay propped up on one elbow, looking back at Shelby. Her expression was lost in the shadows of the empty bunk above her, but Shelby could feel the heat of her stare. She crossed the room in a crouch and slid into the bed at Nadine’s feet, just able to make out the other girl’s outline. Her heart hammered in her chest. She wet her lips, painfully conscious of her belly spilling over the waistband of her underwear, of her little nipples, hard like tight pink rosebuds, and the sparse, itchy stubble on her throat and jaw.
“Are you okay?”
Nadine shook her head. When Shelby, hardly daring to reach out, touched her cheek, she felt the hot, wet trails of tears. The other girl’s voice trembled. “I should have killed him,” she whispered. “Pastor Eddie, Dave, Enoch—all of them. I’m going to kill them. Gouge their eyes out. Bite off their f-fingers.” She sobbed, shoulders shaking. “I should have … I should have…”
Shelby kissed her. For a moment Nadine stiffened and Shelby felt a horrible certainty that she’d done the wrong thing; then the other girl’s mouth opened against hers. Her split lip had scabbed over but she still tasted like blood, hot iron and copper mixing with their spit, which caught the moonlight as they pulled apart and Nadine took hold of Shelby’s head and guided her down toward her naked crotch. The taller girl lay back, wincing as she wriggled into position, and Shelby smelled the deep, dark heat of her period in the moment before her lips met Nadine’s bruised and swollen pussy. She could hardly think. In her fantasies of slipping into Nadine’s bed she’d pictured stroking the other girl’s hair, cradling her as she wept; things you’d see on the cover of one of Stel’s weepy lesbian romance novels. She licked the soft, wet flesh in front of her, trying not to hyperventilate.
What if I eat pussy like a man?
“Like this,” Nadine whispered, pushing Shelby harder against her. “Use your whole tongue. Use your nose.”
The taste of blood was overwhelming at first, but Nadine’s hands on the back of her head made it easy to sink into the experience, to run the flat of her tongue over fragrant skin and nose at the other girl’s clitoris, which was bigger and firmer than she’d expected. The bunk was cramped, her feet against the footboard, Nadine reaching up to grip one of the slats above for balance, and as Shelby wormed her way deeper into the other girl she found herself unable to breathe, mouth and nostrils lost in musky, perfumed folds which slicked her face and gummed her eyelashes.
This is happening, she thought, a thrill pricking its way up her spine to where short nails clung to her scalp. It’s real.
Nadine wrapped her thighs around Shelby’s head, pulling her closer. “God,” she whispered. She ran her thumb along the edge of Shelby’s ear. Melting. Taste of life and blood. Her smell was everywhere. Her skin. The scabbed edges of the wounds on her backside rough against Shelby’s fingers. “My good girl.
“My good girl.”
Smith woke in the dark to a terrible smell. It reminded her a little of the stink that had led her to the body of her guinea pig, Peter Pan, who had escaped his cage one night and gotten into the walls of the house in Tucson. He’d died in there, and the smell of his tiny body decomposing, ripe and sickly sweet, had flooded the whole downstairs. In the end her father’s friend Jim had to cut out a piece of drywall to get to him. Not long after, Smith had seen them together behind the pool house, Jim’s big hand between her father’s legs, his mustache brushing her father’s throat. Even the memory made her feel hot and sick and flustered, distant from herself, like she was on her period.
She sat up, sleep falling away. It was warm, cloyingly so, and she was soaked in sweat, the T-shirt she’d slept in stuck to her skin like melted taffy. The ground beneath her was wet rock, slippery and furred with some kind of slimy algae or moss. The sound of water dripping echoed and re-echoed. It felt like she was in a basement, or a cave. Her stomach clenched with claustrophobic terror at the thought.
Gradually, Smith realized it wasn’t quite dark anymore. She was in a cave, and on the cavern ceiling pinpricks of bluish light were kindling slowly from the gloom, some still, others moving in slow waves. She thought they must be glowworms, or some kind of firefly. Alan loved watching nature documentaries. Smith thought they were boring, could find nothing moving about footage of howler monkeys scratching themselves and eating fruit, but it meant a chance to press her leg against Alan’s, and to see the blush rise in his round face, to hold his sweaty hand in hers. Everyone else called him Tabitha, or sometimes Tabby, but they were speaking to a ghost. Only Smith and a few friends at school knew the truth, had been entrusted to hold it between them. She missed him so badly. She wished they could have seen each other one last time before his family moved, but after her mother found them together it had been nonstop hellfire. Her new church was scary. Smith had heard other women tell her mother she’d been raped her whole marriage, that a faggot had profaned the sacrament to humiliate her.
More glowworms lit the dark. Smith screamed, the sound echoing monstrously as she scrambled back over slick rock and what felt like some kind of lichen. No more than five or six feet away, Dave and another counselor, a pockmarked woman of twenty or so whose name Smith didn’t know, were crouched among lumpen stalagmites, watching her in silence. Their eyes shone like coins, like the eyes of animals at night. More eyes gleamed beyond them, their owners’ faces too deep in shadow to make out. There were dozens of them. Smith’s back hit stone. The cavern wall. She froze, breathing hard.
Where are you going, insect?
The voice burned. It itched. It felt as though something had crawled up her ear canal and out into her brain, something soft and raw and many-legged skittering over the lobes and folds hidden away inside her skull, feelers swishing over her gray matter. The smell in the air grew stronger. She curled against the cavern wall, digging her nails into the sides of her head. It isn’t real. This isn’t happening.
Are you ready for me, Smith? Are you loose and wet and dripping? Did you touch yourself when you spied on Daddy and his special friend? Did you know he diddles little boys, Smith? They all do. I can show you, if you want to see.
Smith peeked out through her fingers just in time to see the people in the shadows scatter. The patter of their footsteps faded as they vanished in among the jagged spires of rock. Her heart pounded. She fought for breath in the close, humid air. Please, she thought, her nails beginning to draw blood from her forehead and cheeks. Please, make it stop.
Soon, Smith. Very soon it will all be over. You’ll never have to feel afraid again.
Something soft brushed Smith’s arm. She screamed, flailing in an ecstasy of terror and disgust, and ran headlong into the dark. Every step felt like tripping. Every moment she was certain she would smash her skull open on a stalactite, or slip and break her leg. Silhouettes darted around the edges of her vision. Her glasses were all fogged and grimy. Something ran across her path. The pockmarked counselor, a hideous grin splitting her features, sprinting bent nearly double with her arms folded tight against her chest. Smith broke right. Her foot slid on the slimy stones, but she caught herself on all fours and scrabbled forward, skinning palms and knuckles on rough rock, so terrified she could hardly think. One of her nails split with a sharp, sickening shock as she dragged herself up over a fallen stone.
Please Daddy please Daddy please please please help me, help me, I’m so scared.
She found a tunnel and squirmed into it without thought. More worms lit her way. Strands of silk beaded with luminous moisture dangling from their distant bodies caught in her hair and stuck to her face, stinging her skin. The tunnel narrowed. Whoops and screams behind her. The glimmer of water ahead. Her shirt tore on a protruding rock. A line of pain across her belly.
Poor girl. Come to me. Let me taste you. Wear you.
She forced herself through the choke point and into the gallery beyond, leaving skin and blood smeared over the rock. She was crying. She wished the other girls were with her, or handsome Felix, so tall and strong. She was useless. Stupid. Weak. She tripped over a ridge in the cavern floor, biting her tongue as her jaw hit stone. She tasted blood. By the time she got to her feet, the worms above had brightened enough that she could see the clots of matted hair and oddments of bone and keratin lying around the filthy water of the pool. She’d fallen close to one, and to her horror she could make out the faint outline of a body through its filmy skin. It squirmed. There were close to a dozen she could see. The cries from behind her were getting louder.
You’ll never be alone again. Poor girl. Darling girl. The flesh is warm. We’re waiting for you.
She forced herself to climb over the horrible cocoon. It shifted under her. Something tore with a wet pop and suddenly her arm was wet up to the elbow. She touched soft flesh. An arm. A breast. Pruny fingers caressed her wrist. She sobbed and pulled herself onward, putting her foot straight through another caul. A skinny leg flopped out onto the cavern floor in a rush of stinking fluid. She stumbled onward. Am I dead? Is this Hell? Jesus I’m sorry I’m sorry please don’t. She slipped. A blow to the side of her head. The water. Things in it. Squirming. Eager. Her glasses gone.
Never alone touch you feel you mine wear your skin stretch out your little holes baby worm before me bow, crawl in the dark blind fetus, little clot.
She fumbled after the glasses with shaking, bloody hands. Her fingertips found the frames. She put them on, blinking blood and condensation from her eyes, and as she did something reared up from the pool, something huge and pale and awful, all flaking skin and filthy hair and dirty, shedding feathers. Thought fled. Smith tore her glasses from her face and twisted them, broken glass and metal digging into her scratched palms. She heard herself screaming, or laughing, but it seemed a very long way away. The only mercy left to her as the thing seized hold of her and pressed her to the stone beneath its crushing, fetid bulk, fronds and tentacles unfolding from the lump of suet that was its head and feeling for her nostrils, her tear ducts, the canals of her ears, was that she had already lost her mind.
X MRE
The cows were the one thing at Camp Resolution Malcolm liked. Their big, dark eyes were soft and gentle, and they smelled like it did out by his aunt Charlotte and uncle Ruben’s place in Redding. Dry grass and dung and the spicy musk of their sun-warmed flanks. Today they were grazing in the foothills of the mountains a two-hour drive outside the camp, which at least meant there was some distance between him and Betty. She’d had a hard-on for him the last few days, ever since Nadine and Felix got the belt. The next day the graduates had all been gone, packed onto buses and driven off in the predawn glow, the air in the camp charged with a sense of sudden change.
Betty was getting worse. Just that morning she’d tripped Brady as he came out of the mess; the kid hit the ground so hard he’d lost a tooth, and no one had done anything. Digging ditches in the middle of the desert sucked, but at least the cows and the backbreaking work were a distraction after two days of looking over his shoulder for any sign of ginger. He’d tried striking up a chorus of “Sixteen Tons,” but Shelby and the Tighty-Whiteys had just looked at him like he was insane. So. Digging.
Corey and Garth had stuck around to watch them for the first few hours before taking off in the truck. He’d watched the plume of dust and grit it left in its wake snake away across the flat hardpan below until it vanished into the afternoon glare. The ditch’s parameters were marked out with surveyors’ stakes with ribbons of orange plastic fluttering from their tops.
“What the fuck is this even for?” snarled Vick. He threw down his shovel. “Fucking ditch in the middle of nowhere.”
“They’re gonna bring your sister out here for her next period,” said Malcolm. “This is like, you know, a spillway, like they have for dams.”
“Malcolm,” Gabe warned, shooting him a look.
Vick stared at him, face red and blotchy. “Say that again.”
Malcolm dug his spade into the ground and leaned on the handle, grinning, and launched into his best Foghorn Leghorn. “Ah say, ah say, boy, when ya sistah’s puss-ay gets ta gushin’, this heah trench goan absorb that theah ova-flow.”
John and Gabe caught Vick before he got to Malcolm, but only just. The olive-skinned boy struggled and stamped. “Let go of me! I’m gonna bust his fuckin’ head. He has it coming. You know he does!”
