The trio moved slowly, stopping often to listen if they were being followed.
All they heard was screaming. Meadow’s screaming.
Sara walked with her shoulders rigid, her fists clenched, tucking Jack’s blanket up around his ears so he wouldn’t have to hear it.
Please, stop screaming.
Every wail was worse than a slap. As a psychologist, she knew about the mental processes involved in certain instances of child abuse—research she boned up on to better understand Georgia, who put a child in a clothes dryer. The trigger of Shaken Baby Syndrome was usually a frustrated caregiver who couldn’t take the crying, and began to resent the very life they were supposed to protect.
For God’s sake, just stop.
Then Sara had her son. She was in labor for eight and a half hours with Jack. Toward the end she was exhausted, wracked by pain, and just wanted the whole damn “miracle of birth” thing to be over with so she could get some sleep.
But then Jack finally entered the world, and when she was holding him in her arms and looking into his tiny eyes the implication of it all hit her harder than the labor did. Sara felt love like it was a physical force, and she swore she would do everything in her power to make this little person happy. It was an absolute joy she hadn’t ever experienced, before or since.
The idea that anyone could lose control and hurt a child was monstrous.
But after listening to Meadow’s screams for more than ten minutes, Sara began to lose control. She recognized it happening, knew the reason why, and still couldn’t stop it. Rage coursed through her, and it wasn’t directed at whoever was hurting Meadow.
It was directed at Meadow.
Just shut up, please just shut up. Why won’t you fucking shut…
And then the screaming stopped. Sara stood still, listening.
Crickets and nothing else.
The silence came with a real measure of relief. But at the same time, Sara feared it meant Meadow’s death. The fear trumped the relief, the weight of the realization threatening to sink Sara into the ground. Having one of her kids run away was bad enough. But Meadow actually dying? Dying when it was her job to protect him?
Oh no. Oh no no no.
Sara fell apart.
Laneesha sidled up to her. She’d been walking with her fingers in her ears, and in the moonlight her face glistened like a wet plum. Sara hugged the teen, who hugged back, and they spent a moment sobbing.
Martin touched Sara’s hair.
“We have to keep going, hon.”
“But Meadow… he’s…”
Martin pulled Sara in close, and she felt herself melt into him. “I know. But we have other kids that need our help. We have to be strong for them.”
Sara nodded, wiped a fist across her face, rubbing away tears, and began searching for the next ribbon. As she walked, she raged against the conflict going on inside of her. One part, grateful the screaming had ended. The other, angry at herself for being grateful. Add this shame to the horror of murdering a man, and Sara questioned her capabilities to counsel children, or anyone else for that matter. Her job description required empathy, along with the ability to dispassionately disconnect. Sara seemed unable to do either.
That made Sara even more disgusted. On top of everything going on, she had to throw herself a pity party.
“We should be there soon,” Martin said, coming up behind her. He spoke deliberately, a measure of pain in his voice.
Sara knew this was a completely inappropriate time to bring it up, but she did anyway.
“Martin. You haven’t signed the divorce papers yet.”
He was silent for a moment, then said. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to. But if that’s what you really want…”
“What I really want is you.”
In the darkness, his hand found hers.
“Then let’s not give up on us yet,” he said, giving her fingers a gentle squeeze. “Can I hold Jack? That screaming…well…it got to me.”
Sara understood completely. She gave her sleeping son a kiss on his head and passed him, sling and all, over to his father. Martin slipped the straps over his shoulders and patted Jack’s back. It was something she’d seen dozens of times before, and the thought of never seeing it again was devastating.
If—no—when they got out of here, she would do everything she could to make their marriage, and their family, work.
“How many ribbons have you counted?” Martin asked.
“Ten or eleven.”
“If we’re going in the right direction, the campsite should be very close.”
“Or we’re heading toward the lake, and will have to retrace all of our steps. We need to pick up the pace, Martin. If there’s any chance Meadow is—”
Laneesha’s scream cut Sara off. She rushed over to the teen, flashlight bobbling, and aimed the beam at the large hill of rubble the girl was facing.
The hill was well over ten feet high, and stretched on for dozens of yards. It was pale gray, made up of what appeared to be stones and branches.
Laneesha clutched Sara’s shoulder, hard enough to make her wince. It pushed Sara closer to the mound, and in a moment that seemed utterly surreal, Sara realized that those weren’t stones and branches.
It was a gigantic pile of human bones.
The boy wasn’t quite dead yet, but his meat was so tender it practically fell off the bone. They feasted, filling their bellies to bursting, fighting among themselves for the juiciest parts.
Though they hunted as a pack, they had no bonds with each other. Their broken minds reduced them to something less than human, driving them to fulfill their base needs at any cost. Higher mental functioning was gone, leaving only a compulsion to kill, to feed, to kill again.
If there were no strangers on the island, they showed no reluctance in attacking one another. For food. And for something just as primal; the unquenchable desire to hunt and kill.
This was a compulsion buried deep within all creature’s brains, as primitive as the first vertebrates to inhabit the planet, eons ago.
In most human beings, this compulsion was repressed.
In them, it had been liberated.
When the urge came upon them, they couldn’t control it. And if there was no fresh meat to hunt, they hunted each other.
But now there was fresh meat on the island. Plenty of it.
And though their hunger for food was momentarily sated, their hunger for death was not.
When Laneesha was a little girl, she wanted to be a big girl. Or more precisely, an adult. She found children her own age boring, much preferring the company of grown-ups. Dolls and games of tag weren’t nearly as stimulating to her as learning to cook, sew, and knit from her mother, change the oil on the car and spackle drywall like her father, bake like grandma, and repair appliances like Uncle Ralph.
Uncle Ralph wasn’t actually her uncle. He was a friend of Dad’s. He was also the nicest adult Laneesha knew, treating her as an equal even when she was as young as six. He never talked down to her, never reprimanded her, never was anything but 100% cool.
When Laneesha turned sixteen, she realized the next step in adulthood was motherhood. She babysat all the neighborhood kids, and wanted one of her own. So she decided to get pregnant. To accomplish this she sought out the one person who she knew would make an excellent father, and after riding with him to a house to install a satellite TV system, she seduced Uncle Ralph in the back seat of his repair van.
He resisted, at first. But she was legal, and insistent, and Ralph didn’t have a girlfriend at the time. The affair was short lived—a guilt-ridden Uncle Ralph broke it off after only three trysts. But three was enough. Laneesha, now pregnant, assumed that stand-up Uncle Ralph would do the right thing. She was mature enough to know he wasn’t going to marry her, but expected child support and shared custody.