The Wicked We Have Done

14

Tanner is dead. Gordon is dead.

The Compass Room is pregnant with sin. Not the ghost of our crimes, but real, pungent sin.

Beneath the green of the sky, the blood coating my hands is black.

“Gordon deserved to die,” Casey says.

We’ve regrouped around Tanner. Valerie turned him faceup so we can say good-bye. I brush the bangs from his forehead. Nothing outside my skin feels real.

“You know the Compass Room doesn’t see it that way,” Valerie says.

Actually, I don’t know what the Compass Room sees. Weapons were supposed to disintegrate when the owner had the intent to kill. I thought Tanner was going to make it out.

Or, at the very least, not die by the hands of our resident psychopath.

But he didn’t. But he was only a boy, a boy apologetic for what he’d done. He didn’t deserve the death given to him.

Two of my tears fall onto Tanner’s lifeless body. He doesn’t look at peace, more like a baby. A frightened baby.

“Jesus.” I cover my mouth.

Why is this justified?

The Compass Room should have killed Gordon after he proved his intent to kill Tanner the second day we were here.

The Compass Room should have killed me.

I crane my neck up to the dusky turquoise sky. “HEY! ARE YOU EVEN FUCKING SEEING THIS?” I scream at the top of my lungs. “GET US OUT OF HERE!”

My voice echoes endlessly through the air, but there is no response. Rage builds inside of me, my blood boiling.

At the very front of my mind, a memory emerges of Tanner asking me how emotionally connected I was to Casey’s crime. It was only then that he mentioned the clause in our contract about the Compass Room malfunctioning. Casey’s dad beat Meghan with the shovel, but Meghan emerged without the help of my desk.

I conjured Meghan from seeing Casey’s shovel, and by doing so, I made a part of the Compass Room shut down.

“What do we do? Do we wait? Do we sit back and do nothing?” Jace cries. “Why aren’t they listening to us? Why can’t they see what’s happening?”

I attempt to calm myself. “I don’t know, but we can’t be here anymore. We need to make them listen.”

I tell Casey, Valerie, and Jace my plan.

“The green lighting means the Room is malfunctioning, I’m sure of it,” I argue when I see the skepticism from all three of them. “We need to get out of here before anyone else dies.”

“But how do you know that forcing the machine to malfunction will get their attention?” Valerie asks. “How do you know they’re even watching?”

“I don’t.” I glance down at Tanner. We should have done something like this hours ago, when the sky hadn’t changed back. I should have acted on my instinct that something was wrong.

Every time I wait, people die. No more waiting.

“There is nothing else we can do,” I continue. “I’m not going to sit around and wait to die.”

Valerie nods in response. I think the truth has sunk in that none of us are safe anymore. It’d be one thing if every man was for himself, but that’s not the case. We were all stupid enough to start caring about one another. “Let’s do this.” Valerie plants a kiss on Jace’s lips.

“I c-can’t,” Jace says.

“You have to.”

“I’m scared.”

“For Tanner,” says Valerie. “For Evalyn. For all of us.”

Casey nods and takes my hand. “For Tanner.”

This might not work. I have to keep reminding myself that this might not work.

But that thought doesn’t stop my fire. We make brief plans, plans that don’t give too much away to anyone listening. We each take off toward the direction of our partner’s object. We find it.

And then we see what happens.

I think that Tanner believed Casey’s trigger object malfunctioned because somehow, we confused it. Maybe the trigger read my guilt as being similar to his. Maybe it’s that, over time, I grew to care about him and became as emotionally affected by his crime as he was, causing both of our chips to activate. Whatever the case, I believe that finding Casey’s trigger object and sending him to mine, Valerie to Jace’s, and Jace to Valerie’s may cause a mass malfunction. If we can create enough fireworks, they’ll have to pay attention and get us out of here.

They’ll have to.

My desk appeared in two places. Not knowing how to reach the one in the cave, Casey’ll run toward the second one we found, west of the lake.

He grabs my face and kisses me, and I grip the fabric of his shirt, trying my hardest not to hyperventilate. “Run as fast as you can. See what happens and meet back here.” He says it loud enough for Jace and Valerie to overhear. “And while you run, pray with everything you have in you that this works. I need you to make it out.”

“You don’t. You don’t need me, Casey. You’ll live through this and whether I survive or not, you will have an incredible life.”

“I need you because I love you.”

He breaks away from me and I stand there, stunned. He doesn’t let me respond. He gives Valerie and Jace a parting glance and grabs my hand. “Let’s go.”

Within a handful of feet, I second-guess myself. Casey loves me.

I can’t think about that now. I can’t be distracted.

Just keep telling yourself that there’s nothing to be afraid of, Ev.

If we can time it right, we’ll break it in all the right places. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll survive this.

I run. I run so fast that I can’t feel my legs. I try to keep up with Casey, who sprints, dragging me to my feet when I trip, clawing at the branches in our path with his free hand.

We stumble through the foliage for a mile, at least. When we reach the part of the creek where we’re to separate, we release each other.

“I’ll see you soon,” he says.

He turns and takes a few steps before I say his name. He stops.

“I love you too.”

With his back to me, he says, “Don’t you fucking die on me, Evalyn.”

I say nothing, because I can’t. I keep walking down the hill and toward the shovel. The shovel that might be my only hope. What I saw last time didn’t hurt me. But that doesn’t mean I won’t be torn up inside.

Don’t think about her. Don’t even imagine her name.

Steam from the hot spring twists and curls in the air. The last bits of sunlight fall onto the shovel.

I know it takes a few moments for anything to show up. A whimper escapes my throat.

This isn’t anything you can’t handle.

I count the passing seconds.

You’ve been to hell and back.

Nothing happens. I stare at the shovel and nothing happens.

The itch of silence burns in my ears.

It didn’t work.

I don’t know what to feel. Part of me was so desperate to avenge Tanner and get the rest of us out of here in one piece, to save Casey—to save myself. So why am I relieved?

I sit cross-legged on the ground. Such a simple object. Such a symbol in Casey’s life. The shovel, the desk, the baby doll, the keys. These objects will always bring back the grief, the reminder of what we’ve done. Every time we see one. Even if we do escape this place, we’ll never be completely free. Not any of us.

I know we won’t be.

The ground in front of me breaks, dirt spewing everywhere. On first instinct I think it’s an animal.

I creep forward on my hands and knees, closing in on the flesh-colored object that continues to jerk and seize. The sprawled digits, the fleshy palm.

A hand. A hand stretching toward the sky. The skin melts away, exposing rotting muscle and yellow bone.

I scurry backward and jump to my feet. But I don’t run. I’m too entranced by what’s happening, the ground decomposing right before me. Dirt crumbles away, a gaping black hole emerging around whatever reaches out and grasps at the ground, rotting elbow jutting into the air.

They sprout like flowers, the earth disintegrating around them. Fingers, hands, green flesh crawling toward me, until their mangled, balding heads appear from down below.

I’m within the graveyard I created.

A moan escapes my lips as I stumble backwards. Jason Earhart emerges, the wound from his eye socket leaking pus and blood. The others surface, half-eaten faces of my victims gnashing their teeth in rage.

“Zombies.” My victims have turned into zombies. They’ve come back to eat me.

“No,” someone says from the darkness. I know who she is before she steps forward.

I’ve memorized that voice.

She swaggers toward me, so very unlike Meghan. And she isn’t wounded either. She looks as alive as the day before her death. She walks past the shovel, snatching the handle. A glint rests in her eye, and along with her smile, familiarity creeps through my mind.

What am I still doing here?

The field of hands and wrists bend toward me.

“Zombies crawl.” She has the exact same drawl to her voice as Casey’s father. A drawl that shouldn’t be there. “Zombies hobble.”

The world around fast-forwards. Bursts of dirt fly through the air, and bodies rip away from the ground and hunch on all fours, like spiders. Bent elbows, curved spines, standing on their crooked fingers and toes. All fifty-six of them.

“Put me in the ground,” she drawls, “but I can still fuck with your head. I can still break you.”

Casey’s dad bursts through her. And this illusion isn’t passive.

The module isn’t shutting down.

We were so wrong to attempt this. I’ve created a monster.

I dart to the right and jump over one of the ghosts, a woman with eyes dangling from their sockets. Her hand latches on to my leg and I tumble backward. I scramble back, but it’s too late. They swarm around me, limbs skittering on the ground. One pins my arms down with cold, bony hands. Another claws at my hair, dragging me to the earth.

I scream.

“Stop,” Meghan says, bored. And they do. Except for the one holding my hair. A man with no jaw.

They cower backward, clearing a path for her. Her dead eyes lock on mine, and she raises the shovel. “I’m the one that’s supposed to drag her to hell.”

Meghan heaves the shovel over her head.

When it strikes me, my muscles give out. Oxygen won’t enter me. I curl into a ball, coaxing it into my lungs.

The shovel slams into my arm. I feel nothing this time, only the tingling that shoots though my entire left side.

Metal collides with my ribs.

I wait until she attempts again. Reaching up, I catch the shovel’s handle. We struggle, but not for long. I can’t be overtaken—can’t let terror cripple me. Infused by adrenaline, I rip the shovel from her and bounce to my feet. My body screams with the ache of freshly cracked ribs.

“You’re not Meg.” I swing with all of my might. The pressure of her head against my shovel is my entire world imploding all over, but I have no time to mourn.

When she hits the ground, I swing and swing, bashing in the already-loose brains of my attackers. Chunks of tissue and jets of blood fly through the air. My victims who shouldn’t be suffering anymore yelp and howl.

Not my victims.

Nick’s victims.

One final swing clears a path, and I run through the bodies and toward the direction of the closest inmate. Valerie’s test happened near our old camp. Jace should be close by. I need to warn her.

Every one of my wounds make themselves known. My legs have gone numb, and I have no idea how I keep myself upright.

Growls of the dead sound behind me. Meghan—the vision of Meghan—was right. These dead aren’t some contrived cartoon monster. They are a creation of a high-tech prison.

They have no boundaries.

Between every one of my gasps I hear them ripping up the ground. Voiceless animals. What part of my subconscious were these creatures created from?

I have no time to reflect on my own question, because I’m running the wrong way.

I’m trying to find Jace, but I’m running the wrong fucking way.

Valerie’s crime happened on the other side of camp. I had the entire map turned on its head. I’m running in the direction I just came from, toward Jace’s own trigger object. Better than nothing.

I’m losing steam, my lungs unable to keep up with my pace. But I can still hear those monsters right on my tail, ready to take revenge, to feast on my soul.

Jace’s crime happened at the base of the burned lodge. After endless minutes of fighting my way through forest, I cross the path.

I take the risk of turning my head. Their shadows bounce around the woods.

I find Valerie.

I forget that I’m running from something when I see what the Compass Room has created for her. Around the stump she sits on, a baby crawls. It shrieks—the cry of an infant being tormented.

And it bleeds from its eyes.

She hugs her knees. She doesn’t even react when she sees me. The sound of the tortured child fills the air around us.

I can’t hear myself think.

Her pants are torn, legs bleeding. “I can’t move! It’ll gnaw my legs clean off!” Her eyes widen, and she screams, “Behind you!”

For a split second I think that my rotting victims have caught up with me until the beams of headlights brighten up the woods, catching on the red tears of the infant. A car revs. I turn slowly, the headlights blinding me enough so I see only a face behind the wheel.

A melding of mine and Jace’s crime. Nick, ready to run me down.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

I’m creating illusions here too.

I didn’t need to know every physical detail of Casey’s crime. I just needed to care about him, and the guilt of his crime grew within me. I care about Jace enough to be skewing illusions here too.

“Move, Ev!” Valerie screams.

Nick’s going to run me over. He said he’d be back for me. I guess he’s trying to keep his promise.

I won’t let him.

I extend my hand, and Valerie sprints forward. Nick floors it.

“The trees!” I scream. He can’t reach us.

On the incline, Valerie trips and takes me down with her. We roll together, shovel head banging me in the nose so hard that blood gushes from my nostrils. When we stop, I drag Valerie into the brush, elbows and knees digging into the dirt, twigs scraping my face. We duck behind a trunk, hopefully wide enough to—

BOOM.

The ground shakes as heat flares up behind us, and Valerie holds me tight. I turn my head enough to see orange flames eating away at the crunched metal, and a man on fire steps out of the car.

“GO!” I scream.

Valerie and I jump up and run back the way we came, toward the monsters from my illusion.

One of them charges.

Not just one of them. The man I shot. Jason.

He isn’t real.

I swing the shovel. On contact, his head explodes, gray matter flying everywhere, just like it flew from the back of his skull the first time I killed him.

Here we are, committing the same crimes to save our own asses.

“Holy shit!” Valerie screams.

I stop, shaking so badly the shovel drops to the ground, and clutch my torso.

“Ev? Ev, what is it?”

“Maybe we do deserve this.” I’m fighting so hard against death. I fell in love, and what’s it worth?

I’m still guilty as sin. I’ll always be.

Valerie grabs my shoulders. I can hear the howls of rage and agony from my rotting victims that lurk out in the forest.

“No one deserves this,” she says. “No one.” Maybe I’ve spent all of my empowerment on her, because she suddenly becomes as strong as I once was, strong enough to drag me along, back to our old camp. Back to the place where Casey and I were spit up from the ground, where the five of us spent a handful of peaceful days realizing that we weren’t thrown into a pit of hostile criminals. That the five of us were equally human.

The sky flashes green.

Module eight, disengaging.

The brightness of flame disappears behind us.

“It worked.”

“It fucking worked!” Valerie screams, and laughs.

We can still do this. We can get out of here tonight.

“Let’s go find Jace,” I say.

She takes my hand and we run, up the incline to where our old camp used to be. My legs burn and threaten to give out.

We near the clearing, the space around us still. No frightening illusions, no screams of terror.

“Jace!” Valerie soon chimes in. We call her name all of the way into the clearing, until we understand why she isn’t responding.

“No.” Releasing my hand, Valerie runs and drops to her knees near the motionless girl.

She screams.

The world becomes clouded. Fuzzy. I stumble to them, my blood pulsing in my ears. I kneel next to Jace, whose eyes are wide and terrified and lifeless, a bloody noose around her neck, her fingernails caked in blood from trying to claw her way free.

The other half of the noose hangs loosely, ripped wires sparking in the air. They killed her. They killed the most innocent, guilt-ridden, broken one of us.

Valerie screams and I cling to her, cradling her close to my chest. We were preparing for all of us to die—every last one. But no amount of preparation can help me with this—for living when Jace isn’t.

She finally wanted to live. She wanted to love.

“I did this.”

“No,” I sob.

“I did this to her!”

The shriek dies and suddenly the prison is silent. The Compass Room has paused for once tonight, giving us a moment to grieve.

Half a minute to grieve.

Everything glows deep, vibrant green. Deeper than ever before.

The ground, the trees around us, even the dusky sky. Green bleeds from everywhere and nowhere at once.

The booming voice tells us, Evacuation procedure in process. Please remain where you are.

Valerie collapses on top of Jace.

Evacuation procedure in process. Please remain where you are. Module one, disengaging.

I trace Jace’s cold lips, then coax her eyelids down. She is beautiful. Even in the green light, she is so beautiful.

Please remain where you are. Module two, disengaging.

“Find Casey.” Valerie rests her head on Jace’s chest. “You find him and you bring him back here.” Her voice trembles. “You make sure they don’t take him too.”

Casey.

“They’re telling us to stay put.”

“When have they stopped you before?”

. . . Module three, disengaging.

“I’ll be okay,” she whispers, cheek still pressed to Jace. “Go.”

“Valerie . . .”

“GO.”

. . . Module four, disengaging.

I leave the girls in the clearing and make my way through the green world. The voice continues to narrate as different modules, whatever they are, shut down.

PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.

We broke the Compass Room.

Module seven, disengaging.

CANDIDATES CANNOT BE SAFELY EVACUATED UNTIL ALL MODULES ARE SHUT DOWN. PLEASE REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE.

I’m numb to the demanding voice. The prison has entirely succumbed to the harsh, alien light. It feels like hours before I wander through the second place where my desk showed up. My subconscious must have remembered. My subconscious needs him.

When I spot the desk, I find him slouched against a tree, his face a sickly white in the evacuation light. He smiles expectantly when I reach him.

My name slowly rolls off of his tongue.

Dropping to my knees, I pry his blood-soaked hands away from his stomach.

“God . . .”

“Shh,” he says.

“Please, please . . .”

“That boy shot me. . . . I was trying to run. He wanted to kill me.”

Blood squelches as I press my hand to his wound, trying to stop the flow.

“What happened?”

Module eighteen, shutting down.

He nods over my shoulder. A silver sphere rests in the grass.

“Turned into that.”

“Stay with me,” I plead. “I was so wrong. We shouldn’t have done this.”

Jace is dead.

Casey is breaking beneath my hands.

“So wrong.”

The green light fades, and the forest submits to twilight. I help lower him to the ground. He shuts his eyes.

This isn’t happening.

I shake him. “Can you hear me? Casey. Casey!”

His lips fall limply apart. “Don’t cry for me. Just stay.”

This is the end. Hot blood squelches past my fingers. He’s losing too much.

“You need to be brave.” He finds my hand and squeezes.

I dissolve into tears. “No.” I don’t want to be brave anymore. I was alone for too long, and now I have to go back. I’ve realized too late that this plan was a mistake. Without him, life on the outside will be solitary. And I will carry the burden of this place on my own.

“I don’t want to be brave.”

I sense his soul drifting. I push harder into his side, like I can keep his life pinned to the ground, keep him from floating away. His wet, ragged breath is far too shallow.

“Please, stay.”

My fingers slip from his hand to his cold, pulseless wrist.

“Casey?”

A spotlight illuminates his white, translucent skin. The wind picks up, a monster from above growling loudly, drowning his words.

“I’ll never leave you.” His voice evaporates to nothing, and his eyes glaze over.

I cry his name, voice mute beneath the roar of the monster.

Hands grasp my waist and yank me back. I scream and thrash until glove-covered fingers clasp over my mouth. Four figures in blue medic suits rush past me and kneel around him.

The man who holds me jabs something into my neck. My jaw aches.

Everything is soft and dark.