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“Hey, guys?” Mel calls back. She and Jeremy have halted. “Look.” She points. In the distance, near where the mist swallows up the water, is a woman. Long red-brown hair hangs tangled around her shoulders, a red-and-black plaid shirt is tied around her hips. She shuffles and lurches as she walks, dragging a waterlogged messenger bag behind her. She’s coming toward us. Not directly, but if we keep walking, her path will intersect with ours. She gives no sign that she’s seen us.
“What do we do?” Mel asks.
There it is again. Panic. So many ways we haven’t even discovered yet that this road could destroy us, but that one worries me the most. “It’s okay,” I say first, trying to come up with a reason why that’s true. “She doesn’t look...” I pause. “She looks more like Isaac. Like us.”
She’s still moving toward us. Lurch and drag. What happens if she reaches us? Is she even on the road? Is she going to come straight toward us, and if she does, do we run? Do we move aside? Or is she just another traveler like us?
“Let’s get closer,” I say. “Get a better look. If we have to run, we run, but if we can go forward instead of back—”
“Yeah. Not sure we want to try backtracking,” Anthony agrees. Even Jeremy nods.
“I’ll take lead,” Jeremy says.
“Me, too,” Anthony chimes in.
“Our brave protectors,” Trina says, but with only a hint of sarcasm.
We reshuffle. Mel and I are in the middle, but I press forward ahead of her—still in reach if we have to grab hold of each other, but closer to Jeremy and Anthony. For a while there’s only sloshing. The young woman’s features grow clearer as she approaches. She has a long nose and prominent cheekbones dusted liberally with freckles. She wears glasses with black rims and a T-shirt that hangs oddly on her. Her mouth gapes open slightly, like she’s breathing hard.
“Hey,” I say. She’s twenty feet away now, and the angle of the road has shifted so that we’re facing each other. She’ll reach ussoon. Anthony and Jeremy have stopped. At my back I can feel the tension of the others deciding whether to run.
It’ll be hard to get past her, if it comes to that. The road’s too narrow. But I don’t want to find out what happens if we try to go back.
She’s closer, and closer still. She’s going to walk right into us, and still she stares straight through us, her drag-shuffle steps never breaking their stilted rhythm.
“Hey!” I say again, loudly this time. “Who are you? Do you need help? Are you—”
Suddenly she veers to the side, her body canting as she follows the curve of the road.
Nottheroad. Her road. She walks parallel to us, feet slushing and sloshing through the water, and as she draws level with us, Mel lets out a scream.
Most of her back is gone. Huge furrows rip through her flesh, gouging through skin and bone and tissue from the side of her ribs to the gleaming, exposed column of her spine. There’s no blood. No blood—but her organs glisten inside the cavity of her torso, obscenely exposed. Another gash rakes along the base of her skull.
She cannot be alive. And yet she’s breathing. I can hear it, a labored but steady sound. And still she’s walking, one foot in front of the other, the bag dragging along behind her.
“She must be one of the others,” Kyle says, voice too loud and too fast. “One of the ones who was with Isaac, right? She must—”
“One way to find out,” Jeremy says, and before I can stop him,before anyone can stop him, he pushes past me, drawing up beside the shuffling woman, and steps out to her.
One foot. The other still planted firmly on the road, and Mel and Trina and I all grab for him, wrapping our hands around his arm as if we expect him to be wrenched away. But his other foot hits solid ground, and he leans out, snags the strap of her bag, and yanks.
The strap catches. She swings around at the tug and stands swaying, arm extended. Jeremy swears and unwinds the strap from her wrist. It comes free and we jerk him back. He holds the messenger bag to his chest, panting, wide-eyed, like he can’t believe what he just did.
Neither can the rest of us.
The woman hasn’t moved. Her hand is still outstretched, not quite pointing. Her eyes focus. It’s a slow process, her pupils contracting, her gaze lifting centimeter by centimeter until she’s staring at Jeremy. She gives a tiny gasp, a hiccup of sound. Her index finger rises, pointing straight at him. And then she whispers, sharp and urgent, “It’s coming.”
Crows burst from the trees. Dozens, hundreds hidden within the shadowed limbs of each one, and now they stream screaming into the sky. And thundering through that cacophony is a sound, a horrendous, bone-shaking sound like boulders being sheared apart.
“Go,” I say, but I didn’t have to. We’re already moving, a stuttering, stumbling run as we push forward as fast as we can, our feet greedy for the unseen road beneath our feet. The crows wheeland clamor in the sky, and that sound comes again. Did I say it is like stone? It’s more like metal, steel girders twisting out of shape.
I look back. She stands where we left her, hand outstretched, eyes tracking nothing.
Behind her, in the mist, something moves.
At first I don’t understand what I’m seeing. A tree, I think, but it looms above the trees. A man, a giant shrouded in mist—but there is something about the shape of it that is wrong, arms too long, fingers too sharp, a tangle of shadows above where its head must be. It’s still lost in the mist, still indistinct, but it’s coming toward us.
In the rear, Jeremy halts. He looks at the thing. And then at the girl.
