Foreverland Is Dead

They aren’t boots, aren’t made for roughing it. These are casual flats. And she feels the pebbles through the thin soles.
    She puts her foot on the first step. It feels like the house is pushing back. She wonders if that’s what it feels like to the others. She doesn’t want to go in there, she doesn’t know why.
    “Come on!” Roc says. “We’re going to starve before you get there.”
    Miranda grabs the railing. She pulls herself up–A high-pitched scream.
    It’s somewhere toward the dinner house. Cyn and Roc turn toward it. Miranda backs off. The girls aren’t in the garden. Cyn starts walking, careful to stay outside the fence. It’s hard to tell where it’s coming from.
    They hear it again. This time, two girls are screaming.
    Cyn starts running. Roc follows, but she goes straight through the garden, plowing a path through the rows and snapping plants off at the base. Miranda is all alone, one foot on the bottom step. The lamps stare at her—one on, one off—like the house is winking.
    Or got punched out.
    She leaves the safety of the fence, runs around the garden. Right now, the pack is safer than the unknown. The screams are coming from the trees.

3

    Jen stumbles out of the woods before she falls. She scrambles to her feet.
    Roc is there first, rushing to the trees. More screaming. Kat and Mad come out a little farther down. Cyn puts her arms around Jen. She clings to her. Her chest heaves with sobs.
    “What is it? What happened?” Cyn says.
    Kat and Mad fall behind Cyn. Their arms and faces are scratched and bleeding. Mad hides her face.
    “Settl e down, settle down.” Cyn peels Jen off of her, brushing away tear-streaked grime. Long welts line her face. “What happened?”
    “We were…” Jen swallows a sob, takes a deep breath. “We were just looking around. Mad saw it first and then…then I saw it, too.”
    Mad’s still hiding her face .
    “What is it?” Cyn asks. Neither of them answer. She looks at Kat.
    “I didn’t see anything. I hauled ass when Jen started screaming. There’s a little path in there but we cut through the trees, limbs tore us up.”
    “Where is it?”
    “Go down a bit, you see the opening. Mad’s the one that found it—”
    “I’m not going back there.” Mad’s shaking her head.
    “Me, neither,” Jen adds.
    The girls sit closely, huddling behind Cyn. Miranda stands several feet away. They’re watching the trees. Limbs begin cracking. Cyn creeps closer, her heart thumping.
    Something rushes through the thicket.
    Cyn backs up, arms out, like a mother fencing off her cubs.
    Roc jumps out, wiping spider webs off her head and arms, spitting.
    “ What’s in there?” Cyn asks.
    “There ain’t a trail, I can tell you that. B ut something’s back there. Something dead.”
    “Down there.” Jen points at the bunkhouse. “You’ll see down there.”
    There are black plastic cisterns on the back of the bunkhouse and the dinner house. They’re as tall as the roof and are connected to gutters to collect rainwater. Each must contain thousands of gallons. There are no windows on the back of either cabin, but there’s a door on the bunkhouse, right between the cisterns.
    Cyn wanders over, warily looking at the trees and back to the girls. There’s a narrow path starting at the bunkhouse door that cuts to an opening.
    Cyn’s gut s feel twisted, her eyes unblinking. She points at the opening and Jen nods. Cyn ducks under a low-hanging branch and enters the cool shade. Branches have been cut away. A dirt path swings around the tree trunks and, up ahead, turns to the right.
    Roc breathes loudly behind her.
    Cyn pauses, looks and listens. The wind rustles the tops of the trees but the air is dead beneath it. She reaches the turn and stops. The smell hits her. Something foul, something spoiled. It’s not a skunk. More like road kill baking on summer asphalt. She leans around the corner, pulls a branch down.
    Twenty feet away, right where the path turns, there’s something on the ground. Tan and ragged.
    Cyn takes a step and waits for it to move. Deep down, she knows it won’t. Pants. Those are tan pants.
    Two legs lay across the path, both mired in dirt and dried blood. There’s only one shoe. The other foot is bare, the sole caked with mud.
    “It’s a body.” Cyn says it louder than she intended to.
    Roc looks over her shoulder. “Told you.”
    Cyn covers her face with the bottom of her shirt. Roc does the same. The smell penetrates the