The Wicked We Have Done

11

In the morning, the fire has gone out, and I’m so cold that every joint in my body is stiff. Smoke rises from the coals, giving off some heat. It’s my back that’s freezing—my back, where Casey should be.

Casey.

With a groan, I turn over. He’s gone. Tanner sleeps on the other side of the fire pit, hood up and drawstrings cinched tight.

He probably went to pee.

So I wait, first trying to go back to sleep, but the ache of worry is too much and I can’t nod off. Minutes pass.

He got lost coming back. That’s all.

I curse under my breath. Standing, I brush off my pants. The trees are still—not even a breeze disturbs the leaves. I study the woods closely in hopes of seeing movement, or hearing footsteps.

Nothing.

Tucking my hair into my sweatshirt, I pull up my hood and start to walk.

I can ignore almost any nagging feeling long enough to assess the problem, but this time it’s dizzying, a cold prick of sweat washing over my back.

“Please,” I whisper with every step. “Please, please, please.”

Farther from camp I venture. Tanner may wake up without either of us there, or Casey may come back and I’ll still be out searching for him. But my feet don’t stop moving.

My mind flashes to the noose that dragged Valerie away from camp. What if something similar happened to him, and I was out cold?

I can’t think like that. I can’t.

A rapid breeze picks up, washing over me. It ripples through the canopies, leaves turning up their discolored underbellies.

I listen closely as the wind dissipates and a faint male voice arises, musical and calm.

A voice that doesn’t belong to Casey.

My palms ache as fingernails dig into my skin, my heart pounding so furiously that it’s making me nauseous.

Slowly, I take a step toward the opening in the rock. And another. The voice warps until it resembles something familiar, and I recognize it. I recognize that I distrust it.

Gordon.

He says my name. “I see you.”

This is so very wrong.

“Evalyn,” he sings. “Come see what I have found.”

I could run. I could run, but my gut tells me the stakes are too high. Like an instinct—an intuition—more overwhelming than I’ve ever felt before.

I have to go into that cave.

I inhale, overwhelmed by the rank stench of death. A light ignites, dying to a soft yellow glow. The light of a fire—of a lamp—broken by his silhouette.

“Evalyn. Come see my prize.”

I can see his prize already, which is why I step into the cave. I don’t have any other choice.

The light isn’t enough to challenge the darkness, the blood splashed over the walls, the mangled, dismembered corpses. I remember now, his crime, in perfect detail. The media called it a cult, even though that’s not really what it was. Just a bunch of psychopaths finding each other over the Internet, giving themselves a platform for living out their desires, their fetishes.

The news called them Misery Eight. So melodramatic, but that’s what fear creates. A monster with a big name. They kidnapped teens and took them to abandoned buildings, where they tortured them—bled them, until their souls gave away and their mutilated corpses were thrown in the river.

DNA on a found body was what convicted Gordon. A boy whose crime wasn’t out of passion, but sickness.

And I know why he’s lured me into his lair, with illusions of corpses strung from the ceiling, their stench proving they must be real. A lair with empty meat hooks draped through the air like chandeliers. Medieval weapons line the walls.

His prize is Casey.

Wrangled by chains, Casey slouches in the corner of the cave, unconscious. I bite down on my lip to stifle my scream. I won’t give Gordon the pleasure of seeing me terrified.

“What do you want?” I try to order it, but the voice escaping me is weak and petrified.

“Hmm . . .” He pats the blade in his hand against his thigh. “That’s a great question.”

“You know they’re monitoring our every move, right? Knocking a boy out and holding him captive doesn’t necessarily keep your record spotless.”

He chuckles darkly. “Oh, I didn’t knock him out. The Compass Room did it for me. Wasn’t that nice of it?”

Why isn’t he dead yet?

He’s a kid—barely bigger than Tanner. But his eyes are old, like he’s seen too much, like he’s carried an exhausting burden. Yet somehow they dance with the light of an excited schoolchild, desperate to play a game.

He motions to the hanging corpses above. “And then it created this lovely display for me to perform my work.”

Work. My stomach lurches.

“You know this is a test, right?” I ask with a hint of nonchalance. As if I really don’t care what he’s planning. “They’re trying to see if you’re evil, and you’re stupidly falling right into their trap. You’re going to die.”

He laughs. “Oh, Evalyn. I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t think I’d last this long. And waiting patiently has never been a strong suit of mine.”

He begins to pace, meandering back and forth in front of Casey, whose head has rolled to the side. Beneath the chains that bind him, I can’t even tell if he’s breathing.

“I thought the end was near when I ran into an injured raccoon with a chain around its neck. I hadn’t seen any animals until that point, and being that a chain is my signature”—he reaches up and flicks one of the chains dangling from the ceiling—“I knew I had come to my test. I didn’t start out with people, you know.”

I swallow the bile rising in my throat.

“I was sad to uncover that the raccoon was not my test, even after I dismembered it. But finally, finally, after all these shitty nights on the ground, all of this god-awful food, it has come for me, and I’ve got to tell you, they’ve done a wonderful job.”

Something cold clamps around my wrists and tugs me backward. I stumble right into the cave wall, bound to stone.

“Amazing,” he says dreamily.

I struggle against the chains, but they only squeeze the air from me, cutting my flesh.

He isn’t afraid of death. He isn’t afraid of anything.

“What do you want?” I cry, hoping this is some sort of disgusting joke. At the sound of my voice, Casey stirs and moans.

“I want to have my last bit of fun before this is all over.” Gordon makes a fist around the handle of the blade.

“You’re playing into exactly what they need to kill you.”

“No, Evalyn, they already have what they need to kill me.” He pushes his forefinger into his temple. “Right here.”

“So, that’s it, then,” my voice trembles, eyes glued to the blade he waves back and forth with every flick of his wrist. “You have no desire to redeem yourself.”

“Evalyn?” Casey moans.

“Redeem myself! Oh, you really have no idea.” He strides to Casey and stands behind him. Reaching down, he cups Casey’s jaw with one hand. Casey tries to squirm away, but Gordon holds him still, cutting into his cheek.

Drawing blood.

I try not to react. So does Casey. My mouth opens, a scream lodged in my throat. Casey cringes, but he doesn’t give Gordon the satisfaction of so much as a groan.

Gordon’s psychotic smile widens. “Oh, now, what is this? A friendship—or something more? Two felons in love. I hope he’s pulling out. Your kids will have all sorts of fucked-up genes.”

“You don’t have to do this,” I whisper.

“You don’t get it. Cute little college girl, good grades, friends. A girl who wound up in the wrong situation. I saw your prime-time special. You couldn’t pull off a stunt like that. Look at you.” He shakes his head and drags the knife, nicking Casey’s jaw. Blood streams down his neck. “People like me don’t wind up in the wrong place at the wrong time. We were born getting off on this.”

He clenches the knife, driving it toward Casey’s neck.

“Stop!”

And then he does. He stops, inches away from Casey’s jugular, and shoots me a wicked grin. “So there is something here. This adds an interesting twist to our game.”

Casey’s eyes hold defeat, and then terror as Gordon shifts, moving toward me.

“Don’t you fucking touch her,” Casey warns, but his voice is stiff, groggy. Pathetic instead of threatening.

The metal binding me tightens. Gordon stands before me, lacing his fingers through my hair.

What if the Compass Room lets him kill me?

Prisoners die in jail, but this place is different. Erity didn’t kill Jace. The engineers have a way of stopping him.

They’re watching. They have to be watching.

I think of the chains anchoring me to the ground, chains that have taken on a life of their own.

Maybe I failed, and Gordon is supposed to kill me.

He rests the point of his blade on my lower lip. “Sometimes, with the girls, I force it in this way first. It’s sexier.”

“Motherfucker,” Casey growls.

I clench my teeth together as hard as I can when he tries to push it in. He clucks his tongue. “You know, the difficult ones are the most fun. Once you break their jaws, the knives slide in just fine.”

Anger bubbles in my stomach. I’m not going to play the victim. I’m not going to die afraid. I dare to speak, even with his knife on my lips. “Go ahead and try.”

He drags the knife down until I can feel the sharp point at the hollow of my throat. “How about right here, and your boyfriend can watch you choke to death on your own blood?”

Casey thrashes relentlessly.

Behind Gordon, someone tilts their head into the cave entrance. I try my damnedest not to react.

Tanner.

“Go screw yourself.” I keep my gaze trained on Gordon, but out of my peripheral vision, Tanner tiptoes into the cave and picks a knife up off the ground.

“Fine, then,” Gordon says, increasing the pressure of the blade at my throat.

I can feel every layer of skin ripping apart, feel the warmth dribble down my collarbone. Casey screams my name and the cave spins around me. I sense every individual bead of sweat that breaks through the skin on the back of my neck, my forehead.

Tanner races forward and plunges the knife into Gordon’s back. Gordon howls, dropping his blade.

And then, before Gordon even knows what’s happening, Tanner picks up a metal bar that’s half the size of him, heaves it through the air, and strikes Gordon on the head.

Gordon crumples to the ground, and the chains imprisoning me give way.

When Casey’s free, he crawls over to me and wraps me in his arms. I sit with him until I’ve regained composure. When I can stand, I walk over to Tanner, brave little Tanner, and fling myself around him.

“You idiot,” I sob.

He clutches my shirt, shivering. “I d-don’t like bullies.”

I laugh for a sliver of a moment before I burst into another fit of tears.

Casey hunches down by Gordon. He removes the hilt from Gordon’s shoulder with ease. The end is dissolved. Casey shakes his head. “Maybe we can’t kill each other, no matter how fucked up the other may be.”

I cross my arms. “Shame.”

“I could snap his neck,” Casey suggests. He may be trying to be funny, but there’s no humor in his voice.

I shake my head and look around, like I’ll suddenly see cameras that the engineers are observing us through. I don’t, though, of course. “Don’t risk your well-being for this pathetic piece of shit.”

We roll Gordon down a ravine.

It’s humorous and sadistic—the least we can do. He’ll be disoriented when he wakes up. If he wakes up.

I can only hope.

I wonder if my hateful thoughts toward him are dooming me. I don’t know what anyone would expect, though, really.

We decide it’s best to head to the only part of the prison that we haven’t traveled through—north of the lodge. At this point, we can only wander and do our best to search for food.

“Bastard didn’t get what he deserved,” Casey spits. He’s been picking blood out of his hair since we started walking. The cuts Gordon gave both of us were only surface, but on our faces and necks, they bled like crazy.

Casey hangs on to the thought of Gordon with every fiber of his being as we walk through a meadow on the brink of the groves that surround the lodge.

“He is sick.” I know Tanner’s not trying to validate Gordon, just attempting to remind us that he’s not all there, and probably has never been all there.

“We’re all sick,” Casey argues.

“No, Casey. He’s really sick,” Tanner says. “Does that mean that he deserves to die?”

“Yes,” Casey says.

I cringe. Casey and I committed our unthinkable crimes because we were so desperately in love with people in our lives. We felt as though we had no choice. But Gordon—maybe he was immune to the feeling of love. Maybe torturing people was the only way he could feel anything.

Doesn’t he deserve to die?

Nick deserved to die. He harbored the same twisted fetish, the same desire to create pain.

Tanner shakes his head, but drops it because there’s something up ahead. Laughter trickles through the air. Around the bend, two girls appear. They walk with a bounce in their steps, full packs on their backs.

Jace and Valerie.

August 23, Last Year

School

Our gallery was more beautiful than Meghan and I deserved it to be. We cared about our work, but it was the group we had that made it so professional—a committee of seven photographers and seven painters who partnered up and created masterpieces over the summer. What was most amazing was that it wasn’t some shit summer job they all half-assed, but a thoughtful endeavor. Every photograph was stunning and the reimagined painting represented the image, but also transformed it.

My favorite, other than mine and Meghan’s sunset image, was a spilt ketchup bottle on a diner table. The photographer had amped up the contrast of the image and the painter had replaced the ketchup with water and a fat goldfish that plugged up the mouth of the bottle. Everything else within the painting was almost identical to the photograph.

The gallery opening was busy. Not packed, but you couldn’t expect much from a college that was more sportscentric than anything else. People brought their girlfriends and boyfriends and study partners, and all of us artists stood in front of our pieces to talk about our inspiration and what it had been like to collaborate.

There was a man standing in front of mine and Meghan’s painting and photo for quite some time. He dressed professionally—nearly unapproachably—and I nudged Meghan in the ribs to get her attention. Her expression shifted to shock. “Holy shit.”

“You know him?” I whispered back.

“I—no—it can’t.”

I nudged her. “Spit it the fuck out.”

“That’s the dean at California Institute of the Arts.”

“No way.”

“I know,” she said. “I know, it can’t be.”

The man glanced over at us and smiled. “You two apply to grad school yet?”

I was too busy gaping to respond, so Meghan pushed back her mane of blonde hair and said, “I—uhh—no. To be honest, I wasn’t planning on grad school.”

“Why?” he asked brazenly.

“I can’t really afford the loans. I know I won’t be making that much money after I graduate.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” He handed us both cards with the CIA logo stamped on them. I must have been in such a state of shock, because the only thing running through my head was that I didn’t know the faculty of colleges carried around business cards. But there it was, with his name and title of “Dean of the School of the Arts” in fine italic script beneath.

“We offer both scholarships and TA positions to promising applicants and, more important, solicited students.”

Now it was Meghan’s turn to be dumbfounded, so I asked, “Who would be considered a solicited student?”

“Both of you. I will solicit you, if you are interested.”

From both of our mouths came some babbling form of “Of course we are interested! Absolutely! Wow! Thank you!” It may not have been as clear or concise as any of those things, but I think our point was made. Meghan held out her hand and introduced herself, and he said, “Yes, I know who both of you are.” He held up the back of another business card. Both of our names and e-mails were scrawled across it. He’d already written our info down from the panel next to our art. “You’ll be hearing from me.” He shook our hands. “It was nice to meet both of you.”

When he was out of sight, Meghan and I had as private a freak-out as possible. I could swear, as she talked about our work to strangers and people we knew alike, that her eyes were welling up.

Liam didn’t show up until the end of the gallery opening. He was going to take Meghan and me home. As we walked out onto the sidewalk together, she spun toward me and threw her arms around me.

“CIA . . .” She was trembling.

“Are you crying?” I asked in a voice that kind of sounded like I was crying, but I wasn’t. I was just so damn excited for us. For her, mostly. I’d only been painting for a handful of years, but she’d breathed photography since we were in high school, when she’d been working for the yearbook. It wasn’t a dream, it was her life. And grad school wasn’t something pretty to go on her résumé. It was a place for her to explore her work, a place for her to learn.

That’s what Meghan cared about most.

I started to laugh, and then she did too. It bubbled from our mouths and built and built until we were in hysterics, clutching each other on the sidewalk in the dark. Liam flipped the car around and she broke away from me, saying, “We haven’t even applied yet; it could be nothing. He might have just been in a good mood.”

“Shut up. You’re incredible, and he saw that.”

“He saw us.”

“And I hope to never fail you, because you need to get into that damn school.”

Liam rolled down his window. “The two of you done making out? I want to get some celebratory drinks.”

“Only a lemon drop would distract me from your girlfriend,” said Meghan.

“I’ll buy you both one, now come on.”

We had already slid into the back of Liam’s car when Nick pulled up. He’d missed our opening and it unnerved me, even though Meghan had told me in advance he wasn’t going to show. When I said, “What is he doing here?” I knew it sounded more hostile than I meant. They’d been dating for five months now. I needed to get over the fact that they were serious and she wasn’t going to easily let him go.

Since we’d gotten into an argument on the porch, I hadn’t brought up her relationship with Nick in a negative light. It wasn’t worth the few days we’d been upset with each other. And Liam seemed to like him well enough. It was probably just me who had an issue with him, jealous from the attention he took away from me.

That had to be it.

He parked across the street and swaggered over to us. Even before Meghan rolled down the window and I smelled his breath, I knew he was drunk. He opened the door. “Come on.”

“I was going to get some drinks with Ev and—”

“You’ve been with Ev all day.”

That’s your fault, I wanted to say, but I bit down on my tongue. I trusted Meghan. I knew her like I knew myself, and she loved this guy. He hadn’t seen her all day, and they were serious.

“Why don’t you come with us?” I said.

“It’s fine, Ev.” She turned back to Nick. “Only if you let me drive your car home.”

Nick shot me a look that I swore was full of fury, the kind you rarely see so intensely from a human. I verbally questioned the look later, when Liam and I returned to the apartment. It had been harrowing on the car ride over, but now, in a safe, confined space with Liam, Nick’s attitude was something that I had to force myself to bring up.

“I think he hates me.”

I giggled as he picked me up and sat me on the kitchen counter.

“I think he’s a creep and he hates everyone and Meghan shouldn’t be with him.” Liam’s fingers caressed my neck and slid down to the first button of my blouse, popping it. “But, to be perfectly honest, I’d rather pretend that he doesn’t exist right at this moment.”

My heart sped up. Liam peeled back the fabric of my shirt and slid in between my legs. He leaned forward, kissing the swell of my breasts. “I think that you accomplished something phenomenal tonight, so I don’t want to think about Nick. I want to think about you.”

“Do you?” I asked as slyly as I could.

“I’m your biggest fan.” He popped another button. “Unequivocally devoted to you and your work and your brilliance.” His tongue glided across my skin.

“By brilliance, you must mean breasts,” I said when he slid my shirt off of my shoulders.

I wrapped my legs around his waist. As he carried me to the bedroom, he said, “Your breasts are nice and all, but they’re not what really turns me on.”

It was the last time we ever had sex.

I wonder if that night was what made him so much harder to get over. Our last time wasn’t stale from five years of being together. He revered my body like it was the first moment he’d ever seen it, exploring every inch of my skin like new territory.

If we could still feel this way, it meant that we could always feel this way.

Unless, when I lay on my stomach and he kissed and licked his way up my bare spine, he somehow knew that this was our last night together.

If not, then the universe wanted my tragedy to resonate with every aspect of my life, including the fact that my final time with Liam was perfect.

When he fell asleep, I stayed up, wondering if every creak of the apartment was Meghan returning. It wasn’t until then that my mind traveled back to the look Nick had given me. Perhaps it was only a momentary figment of my imagination, my secret annoyance with Nick that had suddenly come bursting to life.

In prison, I had ample time to ponder that look for hours. And by then, I knew how real it had been.