
Cindy stirred at the sound of pans clattering to the ground. She forced herself up to see that Terri’s sleeping bag was empty, and there was already a lot of movement outside. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes didn’t do much to wake Cindy up after the slasher movie of a nightmare she’d just endured.
She fumbled her way out of the tent to find everybody but Winter already up and milling about listlessly from exhaustion. Terri stood at the cooking station, picking up fallen cookware with shaking hands. Cindy took a few steps toward her before hesitating. What was she supposed to say to Terri? What was Cindy supposed to say to anyone after the night before?
Another tent flap flew open. Winter had bags under her eyes but stood tall as she stretched. She scanned each and every one of them as though she were about to make an accusation.
“We need to establish guard shifts,” she declared as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “Now that they know we’re aware of them, we can’t take any chances. Then we begin combing the woods. A grid pattern should make that easy.”
“Winter, please. This isn’t funny,” Alex said, fidgeting with the dog tag he’d found. “It’s not a game.”
“It’s not a game.”
Diana rubbed her temples and said, “Please take this seriously. We need to call the Coast Guard and get out of here.”
“Nobody is having fun anymore,” Chris added.
“I am the only person here taking this seriously.” Winter pulled her hair back into a ponytail. “We can’t call anyone right now, so either we sit on our asses and moan about being ignorant, let our imaginations run wild with whatever explanation makes us feel the worst, or we act logically. I’m going to take what little control I can of the situation.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” Alex declared.
Roberto stepped forward and snapped, “Watch your mouth.” Chris tried to separate them, but Diana started babbling and drowning him out. Cindy covered her ears, trying to block out enough noise to let herself think.
She didn’t want to sit and wait for rescue, but answers meant that everyone would find out she was lying to them! Whatever was targeting them must have something to do with the transformation. But what were the odds it ended with her? All her friends were in danger; she could feel it in her bones.
Cindy glanced over at Terri, who was staring into an empty pot clutched so tightly in her hands that her knuckles were white. She knew the truth—as much as Cindy did, anyway—and she would make sure Cindy’s secret wasn’t exposed before it was safe to do so. But ten feet away was Winter, who looked like she might actually get something done.
“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” It hurt her throat, but screaming had managed to get everyone’s attention. “Winter’s right. I’m scared too, but I don’t want to feel helpless—be helpless. Whatever this is, I don’t really want to go looking for it, but not getting organized won’t make us any safer.”
“It’s still too dangerous,” Alex insisted. “We only know there’s someone else here because they slipped up. If they want to hurt us, they have a home turf advantage. What do we even gain by looking for answers instead of bunkering down and waiting for the boat to return? Guard shifts are one thing, but we’d be blindsided by someone attacking in the middle of the jungle.”
Winter showed her head. “I’ve been thinking about it all night. We’re not just target practice; anybody with a gun could have opened fire on us the first night when we were all drunk. They’re watching, but they don’t want us dead. Somebody on this island is hiding something so well that people are just allowed to camp here without incident most of the time. Until we have some idea of what, we’re completely at their mercy.”
She paused, but nobody said anything, so she finished, “We need to take the offensive and learn what we can as quickly as we can, before they tighten ranks, if only so we feel more secure while we’re sleeping. It’s Wednesday, and unless we can find a working phone, we’re not leaving until Saturday.”
There wasn’t as much agreement as lack of further arguing, but Winter really won them over by insisting that everybody but Roberto get some rest.
“Actually, Cindy—”
Cindy’s heart stopped.
“—breakfast will be done faster if Terri gets some help. You look like you got the most rest.”
She talked with Roberto briefly before pulling out a notebook and sitting down to scribble intensively. Roberto took a chair and placed it facing the forest, where he just sat. As much as Cindy didn’t want to talk to Terri right now, she didn’t really want to go back to bed either, so she followed Winter’s suggestion.
Terri made space for Cindy but didn’t say anything to her. She seemed to be in the middle of some egg and sausage dish. Cindy stood before the grill and turned sausages over with a pair of tongs. More than once, Terri dropped a plate or jar of seasoning that Cindy had to help pick up.
Finally, Cindy whispered, “What are we going to do about—?”
“Please don’t. This is too much right now. I need to get my head on straight.”
“We had to decide something. They know something is wrong with this place. If we don’t—”
“If you don’t give me breathing room, I’m going to scream.” Terri placed a bag of ice on the table with more force than was really necessary. “I don’t know what to do, Cindy. The last thing I want is to keep lying to everyone. It wasn’t even what I wanted to do in the first place, but you were going to have an emotional breakdown if I didn’t. I thought I’d have more time to figure something out. Now everyone’s on edge, and I have to figure out what I can even say that won’t make them lose trust in me forever, especially after that stunt you pulled last night.”
Terri’s hair was a mess, her teeth were on edge, and she kept rapping the table with her knuckles. Cindy stepped back. It felt like she was floating in the ocean, and what she’d thought was a life preserver turned out to be a cactus. She could hold onto it if she had no other choice, but…
Cindy sniffed, holding back tears, and turned to start piling sausages onto plates.
Now her hands were shaking, too.
Bringing food to everyone was a slow process of barging into their tents and shaking them awake. Everyone seemed grateful through their grogginess. Winter, who was still scribbling into her notebook and muttering under her breath, asked Cindy to make sure Roberto got a plate as well.
Cindy had all but forgotten about Roberto until then, and she approached to discover him whittling the end of a short branch into a sharp point. Several small stones were piled at the foot of his chair. He was wearing his glasses now, having either run out of contact lenses or given up on them to focus on this new task.
“I brought you food,” she told him. “What are you doing?”
“Whittling spears. We need to be able to defend ourselves if whoever is fucking with us gets closer.”
“I’m kind of surprised to see you like this. It’s a far cry from tinkering with electronics.”
Roberto paused. “I never thought I’d actually be in real danger, and for all the time I’ve spent crafting, I never thought I’d make a weapon. But it seemed like a smart move, so I didn’t stop to think about it too hard. This is probably the closest I’ve ever come to doing anything manly enough to meet my dad’s standards.”
Cindy stood there awkwardly with his food in her hands, glancing around like she’d find a door to escape this conversation through.
Her mouth hung open for a moment before she settled on, “You don’t have to live up to your father’s standards if you don’t want to.”
“I know that. I know that, but I want him to be proud of me. The urge is still there no matter how much it hurts to think he’s disappointed in me as a son.”
Cindy nodded. “It doesn’t have to be one or the other. You want to make him like you, but he’s not the one who’s making you rise to the occasion.” She hesitated long enough to lick her lips. “It’s not like he could place some magic spell on you that changes the person you are. Only you should get credit for your decisions.”
Roberto stopped whittling and finally seemed to notice the plate in her hands. He took it from her gently.
“Thank you. You’re probably right. Regardless of what my dad thinks, right now the most important thing is making sure everyone is safe.”
Instead of going back to her sleeping bag, Cindy sat down in her folding chair to drift in and out of sleep for the next few hours. She heard the voices of her friends come and go, warped and shrieking more often than not. Shadows chased her in the corner of her eyes as she ran aimlessly through unfamiliar woods. The sun hung high in the dark sky above while pebbles rained down on her. Teeth sprang from the ground to pierce her bare feet. Sometimes they would congeal into open mouths to whisper dark secrets of the universe that slipped her mind but left her chest cold; other times they just screamed.
Cindy didn’t feel any more rested when she finally opened her eyes. Roberto had pulled a chair up to the cooking station where he could fiddle more with the guts of his radio. Garbled noises still emanated from the static without rhyme or reason. Forcing herself to stretch and stand, Cindy ambled over unsteadily.
“What’s going on? Is everybody still asleep?”
“No,” he answered without looking up from the circuit board. “It’s a little past noon. Winter took a group of people to comb the forest for clues. Don’t know what she expects to find, but they have the pointy sticks with them, so they’re probably—”
The static cleared all at once, but the noises that the radio made were still borderline-unintelligible. It could have been words or music but not of any kind Cindy knew. A dense pit in her stomach grew with every second that passed as the sounds shifted closer to something she could actually pick words out of: hopeless, trapped, home, closer, coming, deep, cold, hungry.
“Turn it off! Please turn it off.”
Roberto didn’t need convincing. He looked as pale as Cindy felt. Even in the silence, though, Cindy felt the words vibrate in her skull and transform into shivers that ran down her spine.
The two of them sat in silence for a while longer before movement from the woods caught their attention. Cindy nearly screamed, but it was simply Winter, Diana, and Chris returning to camp. It was a relief to see that they all looked okay; even Diana didn’t seem as frazzled as she had the night before.
She was, however, pulling Clay’s suitcase behind her.
They have to come clean sooner or later… This may be not the best, but probably the least bad time. Especially if the others start thinking that Clay is either the one "pranking" them, or that he got killed by the villains.
Uh oh.