(trigger warnings: animal death, swearing, animal cruelty, somewhat graphic stuff, lots of guns)
“Have you ever seen a deer with blue eyes before?”
Cory turned.
Emma hung back down the hallway, hands hidden in the pocket of her hoodie as she stared at the stuffed head above her.
They were everywhere in that lodge. The Wallisch family, it seemed, had a hard-on for taxidermy. Cory didn’t, so he turned his eyes to the velvet-green carpet beneath his sneakers and kept walking past the display until it was over before looking up again.
Wood-paneled walls towered above him, curving up and over exposed-wood beams, stained dark.
He and Emma had wood paneling in their apartment, but it screamed “outdated nightmare” instead of “American dream”.
The lodge itself was straight out of a Hallmark movie, or perhaps the Swiss Alps—except they were in Michigan, not Europe.
That was another thing that perplexed him about the Wallischs’. The money had to come from somewhere. Their stretch of Michigan was too empty to be profitable. Perhaps remote work?
“Jamie, have you ever seen that before? The deer, with the blue eyes. Back there.”
“No,” he replied. “That’s not normal, is it?”
“My guess is it’s some kind of albinism. The deer’s not white, though. Weird.”
Cory pushed his shoulders back. Their voices followed him down the infinite hallway.
“Maybe that’s why they displayed him.”
“Her,” Emma corrected.
“What?”
“That’s a doe. No antlers?”
“Oh—yeah, I forgot about that.”
Cory turned. “Guys, keep up.”
“What’s with these assholes, anyway?” Jamie asked, raising his voice a bit. “Why couldn’t they just meet us at the door?”
“I don’t know. And they’re not assholes, they’re our cousins.”
“Your cousins. Not mine. To me, they’re assholes.”
Cory scowled. Technically, Jamie was right. They were half-brothers, and because the Wallischs’ were on his dad’s side and not their mother’s, Jamie did not have a drop of Wallisch blood in him.
“Jamie’s right, I don’t see why they couldn’t have just met us at the door,” Emma’s face was flushed. “I mean, I get that they’re rich but this is ridiculous. Are they old?”
“No, they’re our age. Can you both just stop talking? I think we’re almost there—” Cory rounded another corner, then found himself face-to-face with a massive sliding glass door. Leaning over the balcony’s railing were the broad backs of their—no, his—newly found cousins.
“Don’t be embarrassing,” Cory said to no one in particular, then opened the door.
They both turned at the same time, their faces lighting up all at once.
Cory fought the urge to melt into the floor.
They glowed. It made logical sense: both of them had been given access to the best food and health care money could buy since they were in utero, but Cory’s stomach still flipped beneath the weight of their pale gaze. Twins, they’d told him over the phone. Identical.
And it was true—same wind-tossed blond hair, same tan skin, all of the same down to their perfect same teeth. They even dressed the same, in Bermuda shorts and tight-fitting t-shirts that showed off the same pectoral muscles. Cory tore his eyes away, face burning. What was it like to have that kind of time? That kind of energy, at the end of the day?
“Dude! Cory! So nice to meet you, man. Thanks for coming to visit,” One of them clapped his shoulder, smiling. His breath smelled of mint. “I’m Fletcher.”
“Amos,” the other one said, then turned to the grill.
“Don’t mind him,” Fletcher said. “He’s antisocial as hell right now. On this weird, uh, Stoicism kick. Right? Yeah. It’s all over Instagram right now.”
Cory wanted to hold Emma’s hand. He wanted something to hold onto. He looked behind himself, but she had disappeared.
Fletcher’s attention shifted to Jamie. His smile twitched, a bit. “Who’s this?”
“Jamie. My little brother.”
“Huh,” Fletcher’s head tilted, just a bit. “Not much of a resemblance.”
Jamie frowned, giving Cory a look. They’d dealt with a lot of this over the course of their lives. While they did have their resemblances, Jamie’s darker skin and curly hair set him apart. Cory had lost track of the amount of awkward conversations.
“We have the same mom,” Cory said, scrambling. “Different dads.”
“Well,” Fletcher’s grin split his face into something a bit more sincere, and he shook both of their hands. “Welcome to the family. And who’s this?”
Emma stepped out into the fading sunlight, her phone in her hands. “Hey,” she said, giving Cory a quick smile. “I was in the bathroom. Sorry.”
Amos and Fletcher didn’t try to hide the way they looked at her. Like she was a piece of meat. And Cory couldn’t exactly blame them—he’d asked her out for a reason. Soft blonde hair, perfect face, good tits. Sure, she dressed like she’d just rolled out of bed, but that didn’t hide her Victoria’s-Secret-model body.
Cory watched as his cousins looked her up and down, then looked back to him. The unspoken thought hung in the air—she was way out of his league.
“This is my fiancée,” Cory lied, taking Emma’s hand.
Fletcher and Amos looked away, not about to break bro code within the first hour. “Nice to meet you,” they said, then Amos turned back to his grill and Fletcher got them each an ice-cold beer.
They ate burgers out on the balcony. It was awkward for a while, and then it wasn’t: Cory found that the more he spoke with them the more common ground they found, for the most part. Save for Jamie, they were all fresh college graduates, twenty-somethings trying to carve a path. The division between them came from the fact that Cory and Emma were attempting to carve their own path themselves, while his cousins were strolling the only path that had been laid out before them: well-trodden and gleaming. Yellow brick road, or whatever.
Another key difference that quickly came up: Amos and Fletcher didn’t have to work, while Emma and Cory were starving for work, with Cory recently laid off from his job, and Emma unable to find one.
The money was tight. His savings were on the edge of running out. When Cory had gotten the invitation to spend a week at the Wallisch’s lodge, he and Emma hadn’t hesitated—putting their apartment up on Airbnb an hour after Cory called the cousins and nailed down the details.
A charming, historic apartment in downtown Chicago, they’d written, and within the next day they’d booked it through the entire week, which gave them just enough money to ensure that the rent was paid in full and buy the cheapest plane tickets they could get their hands on.
In contrast, Amos and Fletcher had spent the prior weeks vacationing in Barbados (which explained the matching tan) and then flying out to their lodge to get it ready for guests. This house, as they called it, was simply a vacation house, nothing more. Most of the year, it sat vacant.
Fletcher was in the middle of discussing his most recent car purchase when Emma checked her phone midway through the conversation, then let out a string of swears.
Amos and Fletcher looked up, eyebrows raised.
She raised her phone, the look on her face twisted into a concerned frown. “They just laid off a shit ton of national park workers.”
“Oh,” Fletcher said, setting down his burger. “Why?”
Emma tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear and gave him a mocking, polite smile. “I’m guessing you’re not into politics, are you?”
Fletcher didn’t catch on. “No, not really.”
“If you ask me,” Amos said, mid-bite, “Those budget cuts are a good thing.”
Jamie kicked him under the table. Cory looked up. Let’s go home, he mouthed, making a face.
“I’m glad you guys are here,” Fletcher flashed a too-white, too-straight smile their way a few minutes after the burgers had disappeared, whisked away by Amos. “Y’know, we’re going on our annual hunting trip in a few days, and we’d love it if you joined us. We can make the cash pool bigger, have a bit more fun this time around.”
Cash pool.
Jamie started to talk. “Oh, we don’t really—”
Cory kicked him underneath the table, then leaned forward on his elbows, trying to appear interested, but not too interested. “Where is it?”
“We have an island up in the U.P.”
Next to him, Emma choked on the last of her beer. “Hang on—you have an island?”
“A small one. Only a few miles across.”
Jamie folded his arms across his chest and sunk into his chair, his glasses catching the dying sun and sending pink streaking across Cory’s peripheral.
Cory pushed up his own glasses. “What’re you hunting for?”
Fletcher’s smile only widened. “That’s the fun bit. The island is a controlled environment, yes? Our family tracks and replenishes the game. Currently, there are three deer on the entire island.”
Emma frowned, leaning forward. She, unlike Jamie and Cory, had grown up in Michigan—had spent a hell of a lot of time out in those woods before heading off to college. “Three deer? You’re gonna need more than that if you want to populate it.”
“We don’t want to populate it,” Amos said, chair squeaking as he rounded the table and sat down next to his brother. “They aren’t there to repopulate. They’re there to be killed.”
“Geez, dude, lighten up,” Fletcher laughed. “Yeah, I mean, I guess. It’s kind of like a game. We’ve been doing this for a couple years now. ‘Digital detox’ sort of thing, yeah? We ditch our phones and everything. Speaking of that…” From his back pocket, Fletcher pulled out the latest model of iPhone, shiny and glinting in the sun. “Here’s the gear we use.”
Cory stared at the photo before him, at the old wood grain of the well-maintained rifles, the weathered navigation gear, the curves of the skinning knives. It was like looking at an exhibit in a museum, except…
“What, so you LARP as Teddy Roosevelt every year?” Jamie asked.
The cousins looked up, then at each other before letting out one singular peal of barking laughter.
“We go back in time, man,” Fletcher grinned. “It heals the soul. You guys should come. Three weeks out in the woods—away from emails and news and hearing the same stupid TikTok song over and over—no advertisements, no bullshit. Just us, the game, and The Game.”
“What were you saying about a cash prize?” Cory asked, pulse racing.
“Well,” Fletcher leaned back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “Normally Amos and I pick a number, and whoever kills the most deer gets the prize. With you guys, though… I think we’d do it differently, right, Amos?”
Amos shrugged, looking altogether uninterested.
“Maybe…three thousand for every deer you kill?”
Jamie, Cory, and Emma all stiffened.
“Not high enough? I could do five thousand, or even ten. Granddad gave me some extra money for my twenty-third,” Fletcher waved a hand in the air. “It’ll be fun. Like a competition. What do you say?”
“We’ll come,” Cory blurted out, right as Emma replied with, “We’ll think about it.”
“Ah, no pressure. Just let us know by the end of the week. It’s okay if you guys don’t end up coming, but the offer’s there. Happy wife, happy life, right?” Fletcher smiled, standing. He tucked his phone in his back pocket. He made direct eye contact with Cory, smiling. “Congrats on your engagement, man. I forget if I said that earlier.”
“Thanks,” Cory replied, squinting in the sun.
The cousins said their goodbyes and retreated from the balcony. Cory watched them go, unable to shake the feeling that if there was such a thing as destiny, the brothers were covered in it, and it was a miracle that he’d been able to get close to it at all.
That night, the three of them swam together in the Wallischs’ heated pool, gazing up at the carpet of Michigan stars above. They managed to avoid the subject for approximately ten minutes, before Jamie flipped over and smacked his arms against the concrete edge of the pool. “These guys are crazy, right?”
“Probably,” Emma replied, springing up onto a pool float.
“Guys, c’mon. They’re loaded. They offered us money, we just have to go…fuck around. Kill some deer, I guess.”
“Yeah, and how are you gonna do that? You’ve never shot a gun in your life,” Jamie retorted. “I think they’re gonna kill us if we go. They don’t like me, that’s for sure.”
“Well, maybe they’ve just never…”
“Never what? Seen a Black dude before? Jesus. Cory, I don’t want to go.”
Cory looked to Emma, opening his mouth and closing it. He looked dumb. He knew it. Jamie was, as always, right.
“I get what he’s saying but, for me, I’ve missed the woods,” Emma said. “And I really want to get off my phone.”
“You don’t need to go roleplay as Lewis and Clark with potential serial killers in order to do that.”
Cory sighed and hauled himself out of the pool, gravel scraping at his palms. No chlorine smell—saltwater. The good kind. “You guys don’t have to come. I’ll go by myself.”
Emma and Jamie gave one another a look.
“If we let you go by yourself, you’re actually gonna end up dead, somehow.” Jamie said, after a long moment. “I think we should all skip this, and go home, where it’s safe.”
“Is this a ‘majority rules’ thing now?” Cory asked.
“We’ll take a vote tomorrow,” Emma proposed. “Or maybe in a couple of days, once we get more of a feel for them. Is that fair?”
Cory and Jamie both shrugged, then nodded—a habit from their mother.
“It’s settled, then. We’ll vet these guys, try to see if they’re serial killers, or if they’re just that bored. I don’t exactly like them. No offense, Cory,” Emma slid off of the pool float with a splash. “Let’s get some sleep, though. I’m tired.”
The second they got back to their designated bedroom, Emma gave Cory a look. The next thing he knew, their swimsuits were on the floor and he had her bent over the edge of the bed, skin to skin. No words, like usual. They didn’t need them. Never had, never would—
“Why’d you tell them we were engaged?”
“Because I saw the way…saw the way they were looking at you.”
“And how were they—shit—uh, how were they looking at me?”
He gazed down at the expanse of her back, tanned and golden in the dim light, each muscle delicate but defined.
They’d never look at her like he did. Nobody would.
“Like—” Before Cory could continue, his body trembled and then he was gone, lost in it—all of it forgotten for a moment. He pressed his face against the soft angle of her shoulder blade until it stopped, and then there was silence.
“Like what?”
“…Did you finish?”
“No, you’ve gotta try harder than that,” Emma said, then looked back at him and laughed—light, quiet. That laugh blew any embarrassment and guilt he had out of the water, all of it gone. Wiped away in an instant.
Cory paused to catch his breath, unable to stop his own grin. “I love you,” he said.
“I love you, too.”
Later, after they’d both worn themselves out completely, Emma laid her head upon his chest. “I would like to, y’know,” her voice was small.
“Would like to what?”
“Get married.”
His heart rate picked back up again. “Really?”
“It would be good, I think. For both of us. We’ve been together long enough, but it’s more than that. I know…most of the time, in the past I mean, I would date a guy and just wish I was with someone else. But with you, there’s none of that. And I keep waiting to fall back into that old pattern but then I don’t, and…yeah. It’s you. You’re my favorite. You’re the one I’ve been wanting this whole time. My whole life.” Her body shuddered and she exhaled, clamping a hand over something that was between a sob and a laugh. “Sorry. Happy tears. I really, really love you, Cory.”
“Well, hell.” Cory stared at the wood beams casting lines across the A-frame ceiling, his face hurting from how hard he smiled. He wanted to remember this moment forever. Wanted to never leave it. “Let’s do it.”
“I was thinking about the trip,” Emma said, after a beat. “I think we should go. I think I could do it.”
Cory sat up. “What? Really? No one’s asking you to.”
“I can do it,” Emma said. “Let’s do their stupid detox thing, get the money, and then when we get back, we can start planning. How does that sound?”
Cory nodded, grinning. Then he broke down.
Emma pulled him into her arms and they both cried.
He had never loved anyone more.
Cory realized he was in over his head the second he saw the “outfits” the cousins wore the morning they were supposed to leave.
Fletcher and Amos had ditched their polo shirts with five-inch inseams for cotton, linen and wool, looking straight out of a clothing catalog from the late eighteen-hundreds.
“What?” Fletcher asked, being the first of the two to address their shock. “It’s for the immersion.”
“Polyester performs terribly out there,” Amos said, pulling on a pair of knee-high leather boots. “There’s an entire wardrobe’s worth in the next room. Pick out what you want.”
Jamie, Cory, and Emma passed one another a look before skirting around the corner and into the game room, where—true to his word—old clothing covered nearly every surface, laid out for selection.
“Okay, I know I said they seemed mostly normal a couple days ago, but this…I take it back,” Jamie whispered, making a face at one of the weathered jackets draped over a chair. “Is that a fucking Confederate uniform?”
Cory laughed, though nothing was funny. “No way. Let me see…oh.”
“Oh, indeed,” Jamie pinched the coat and let it fall to a heap upon the floor. “This is too on the nose for me. Can we go home?”
“Confederate uniform aside, it is pretty cool that all of this stuff is so well-preserved,” Emma said from across the room. She pulled an old cap over her hair, tucking it up and under. Some of it stuck out like pieces of straw. “Maybe we can go until we kill the first deer, and then ask to be helicoptered out of there early. I’ll pretend to sprain my ankle, or something.”
Jamie let out a sigh, then straightened up. “I’m serious, guys. This entire situation has red flags all over it. It’s not too late to back out.”
Cory frowned. “We can’t back out.”
“Why not? It’s not like we have a chance of actually killing anything. It’s gonna be three weeks of mosquito bites and misery, and that's the best case scenario.”
Emma gave Cory a long look, then straightened up. “Okay, Jamie, it’s not all futile. I used to go hunting all the time. Of course, if those morons knew that, they wouldn’t have invited me.”
“She’s good,” Cory interjected. “Really good. At the very least, we’ll end up with ten grand by the end of this. Split evenly, that’s three thousand, three hundred and thirty-three bucks for you.”
Jamie sighed. “Shit,” he said, long and drawn out. “You guys really think we can do this?”
They nodded.
“Are we sure we want to do this?”
Silence.
“We need the money,” Emma finally said. “It’s worth a shot.”
Cory finished picking out an outfit or two for himself. His heart thudded and skipped, fingers tingling against the rough wool coat he held. “You guys think they’ll let us keep our underwear?”
The cousins did, in fact, let them keep their underwear. They met up with one another in the foyer of the grand lodge, all looking like they’d stepped out of a museum.
Cory couldn’t help the buzzing that coursed through him, the feeling that he was on the verge of becoming someone important—someone like the cousins. On the verge of being touched by destiny. That feeling carried him through the discomfort of unfamiliar fits, the unfamiliar weights of the rifles on his back, the unfamiliar jostle of the plane and then the more-intense jostling of the helicopter as they soared over the glass-calm waters of Lake Michigan.
As they neared the island, Fletcher passed them all a wild grin and shouted through their headsets, “Are you ready? You will never see your old lives the same way, never again!”
Amos elbowed him.
“I’m serious!” Fletcher crowed. “This is what the masses are missing these days! Time! Leisure! Sport!”
“Shut the fuck up!” Amos yelled.
The helicopter descended.
Fletcher jammed his way into the tiny space between Cory and Jamie. “You get it!” He shouted into Cory’s ear. “You see it! This is why you’re one of us, yeah? I’m so glad we met, man!”
If Cory opened his mouth, he was sure to throw up. He smiled and gave Fletcher a thumbs up, then pretended to be intensely interested in the view outside—which wasn’t much to look at, just sparkling blue water that went on forever.
Eventually, finally, they touched down.
The helicopter took off, and they were left alone.
Cory turned. Towering pine trees stretched as far as he could see, thick and dark. The beach was rocky, jagged. Seagulls circled overhead.
“Okay, guys,” Fletcher said. “There’s a camping spot inland, where we go every year. It’s a mile or two in, not too bad of a walk.”
Cory was last in line as they began their trek from the beach. He paused at the edge of the treeline, looking back over the sparkling waters of Lake Michigan. Sunlight dappled along the rocks, too-bright and casting crisp shadows. Heat seared at the back of his neck.
Up ahead, Amos and Fletcher’s voices blurred into distant chatter, punctuated by the occasional laugh.
Taking a deep breath, Cory readjusted the rifle upon his back and entered the woods.
The first night was uneventful. They opened unlabeled cans of soup and heated them over an open fire before setting up a makeshift camp of cots and sleeping rolls. Cory’s body already ached just from the walk there, but the second he laid down, he was gone.
In the morning, Amos and Fletcher awoke them with the smell of oatmeal and instant coffee. Cory, Jamie and Emma joined them, bleary-eyed and half-dressed, out of their depths already.
Amos finished his food first and pulled out a map, which he laid out upon the ground. Red ink had been scribbled across it in a hurried hand, circled in some places and crossed out in some. An entire portion of the island was coated, the highest portion up north.
Cory tried to speak, but what came out initially was garbled noise. He cleared his throat and pointed. “What’s that?”
“We can’t go there,” Fletcher said. “It’s contaminated.”
“Contaminated?” Emma rubbed her eyes. “With what?”
“Right after our great-grandpa bought this place, he found out about it. Back when this place was completely empty all the time, some people were illegally dumping a bunch of shit. Arsenic, right?”
Amos looked up from the map. “No. Radioactive stuff. Refinery waste,” He met Cory’s gaze, held it. “It’s gated off, don’t worry.”
Jamie tipped back the rest of his coffee with a scowl. “You guys couldn’t have told us about this before we agreed to come?”
“It’s a small site,” Fletcher said. “No one in our family has ever had any issues with it.”
Emma gave Cory a look.
Fletcher brushed his hair back with a giant palm and took the map from Amos. “We’ll go hunting this morning. I’m guessing none of you have ever done this before?”
Cory and Jamie shook their heads.
Emma did not.
Amos’ eyebrows quirked up, just a bit. “You’ve been hunting?”
“I used to go with my dad,” Emma said, picking at her nails. “I’ve brought down some stuff.”
“Like what? Some bunny rabbits?”
Cory flinched.
Emma did not. She pursed her lips and looked up at Amos. “First buck, eight pointer. Then two twelve pointers and a ten pointer.”
Fletcher let out a low whistle. “Shit,” he said, spitting into the coals. “Okay! I see you! Why’d you stop?”
“Fletcher,” Cory interjected, his stomach twisting.
Emma held up a hand to him. “No, it’s fine—he passed. I haven’t been hunting since before he died.”
A long moment of silence.
“Sorry to hear that,” Fletcher replied, after a long while. “And sorry about this asshole over here—” he slugged Amos in the arm, “Maybe don’t underestimate our new cousin-in-law.”
Amos hummed and looked away, out of the clearing and into the trees.
“We know where they typically rest. You and Jamie will take this section,” Fletcher said, scooting closer with the map. “Amos, Emma and I will be in a line on the other side. You guys just have to scare the deer towards us, and then we’ll bring ’em down. Whoever makes the shot gets the money. Got it?”
Cory nodded.
“You don’t even need to try to shoot at them—just be loud, yeah?” He bent over and dug around in his pack, then handed them each a whistle to wear. “This’ll make it easier.”
The next hour or so was a blur for Cory. He had gotten so stiff from sleeping on the ground that every movement was agony, and by the time he ended up at his station he was ready to drop again. They left him alone at the edge of a field, the last of the summer’s wildflowers dying. About five minutes into it, he decided he really didn’t give a shit and sat down on the ground, resting his rifle across his knees. He laid back in the grass and stared up at the skies, Crayola-blue overhead.
A wedding. How much did those cost, now? He barely had a thousand in his bank account, and that dwindled down every day between his car payment, rent, subscriptions, everything else that had been manageable before he’d lost his job but now were leaks in his sinking ship, letting more and more water in.
Emma wasn’t faring much better. They’d both made the grave mistake when choosing their fields of study of choosing avenues that would end up being considered replaceable by greater society; Cory had gone into business administration and Emma into animation. After graduating that spring, Cory had lost his internship position to ChatGPT and Emma had not been able to find a steady job, and people had stopped contacting her for gigs.
All that being said, Cory did not know how the fuck he was going to afford a wedding. And he especially did not know how he was going to afford a wedding with Emma in particular, because she was the love of his life and he wanted to give her everything, had wanted to give her everything from the moment he’d first laid eyes on her.
Wind brushed over his skin, soft and cool. Birds flew overhead in lazy circles. He watched them for a moment, and then they distorted into wet blurs. “Not again,” Cory muttered, swiping his arm over his eyes and trying not to cry for real.
Crashing from his left.
He sat up, fast, only to see Jamie stumbling through the underbrush towards him. “Hey!” Jamie called, waving.
“Hi,” Cory groaned, and laid back.
Jamie’s scuffed leather boots entered his peripheral, and then his curly dark hair blocked out the sun. “You okay?”
“Yeah.”
With a grunt and popping of knees, Jamie sat down next to him. “You don’t look okay.”
He shrugged.
“You and Emma get into a spat?”
“No,” Cory sat up again, their shoulders pressing into one another. A breeze ruffled the thin grasses around them, sending waves and ripples across the surface. The woods were quiet. “We decided, um, we decided to start planning our wedding when we got back.”
“Hold up,” Jamie gave him a look. “I don’t see a ring on her finger.”
“I don’t have one,” Cory said, then covered his face with his hands. “I didn’t even get to pop the question. She’s the one who brought it up.”
Jamie hummed, wiping sweat from his brow. He’d ditched his warmer outer layers in favor of a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up and suspenders to hold up his pants. “You getting cold feet?”
Jamie’s tone was so gentle that it made Cory want to cry again, and when he did finally muster up the words, his voice was thick. “No, man, not at all. I just… I want it to be special. I want her to have everything she wants, but—fuck, dude, I don’t even have a job anymore. I don’t know what to do.”
“Knowing Emma, she won’t want much.”
“However much we win here—if we win anything—won’t cover much. I can’t afford anything. ”
“You and everyone else right now,” Jamie patted his shoulder. “Chin up. Maybe your Shining twins can help us out. And, hey, I can always chip in, too.”
“You work at fucking Starbucks!”
“I’m in the union—they pay me more now than they did.”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Worst case scenario I’ll bring whatever pastries we can’t sell to your wedding for dessert. You can get her a gift card, for the dowry or whatever. Maybe even bring her to my store for the honeymoon.”
Cory looked at Jamie. They sat in silence for a moment, then broke out into laughter.
“Okay, but in all seriousness, thrifted weddings are all over TikTok right now. A sign of the times, I guess. You’re gonna be fine.”
“What do I do about the ring?”
“Beg Tweedle-Elon and Tweedle-Trump for a family heirloom.”
Cory cackled, the sound ringing out over the meadow.
In the distance, a shot cracked.
Then two more.
Emma’s voice shrieked, loud and clear: “WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU GUYS?”
“Uh-oh,” Jamie said, helpful as always.
When they got to the others, one of the deer—a bright pink tag in her ear—lay kicking on the ground. The cousins crouched over her, visibly excited. Emma sagged against a tree, her face bright pink.
“What’s wrong?” Cory rushed past the others, fighting his own disappointment. Their first full day on the island, the first deer down—and Emma hadn’t gotten it. Ten thousand dollars, down the drain. Worse, still, Emma was hurt. “What the fuck did you guys do?” he twisted, looking back at them.
“She’s fine, it was just an accident,” Amos shot back, pulling his knife from the sheath on his hip.
“What happened?”
Emma shook, her teeth grit. “These fucking assholes almost shot me.”
“What?”
She turned, lifting her hand away. Deep red coated the off-white of her shirt. “I almost had her—missed, of course. Then these idiots barreled through and didn’t even bother to see where I was—one of their bullets bounced off a tree and now, this.”
“It’s shallow,” Amos called, blood coating his hands. “You’re fine.”
“It’s not about that, it’s about the principle of the thing!” Emma snapped. “What if that bullet had gone through my arm, what then? What if one of us needs help?” She looked down at herself, squeezing the wound. The bleeding had slowed. “I get that this is supposed to be a ‘trip back in time’ or whatever, but please, please tell me we can call the helicopter if we need to.”
Silence.
“Oh my God,” she said. “You guys are fucking morons!”
Amos got to his feet, shaking the blood off. “You shouldn’t have gotten in the way.”
Fletcher frowned, stepping forward. “Amos!”
“No. This is stupid. We shouldn’t have brought a girl on this trip, I tried to tell you—”
“Hey, if I had gotten almost-shot, I would be saying the same thing!” Jamie cut in. “You guys need to watch what you’re doing, for one, and also, what the fuck is up with not being able to call for help?”
Amos turned to Fletcher. “Why did we bring any of these people?”
“These ‘people’ are our family,” Fletcher shot back. “Quit it.”
“Some way to treat ‘family’. You guys are fucking deranged,” Emma’s voice broke, and behind the furrowed brow and clenched fists Cory sensed something deeper, more primal—fear. Before any of them could say another word, she turned on her heel and left.
Jamie looked at Cory. “Dude,” he said, with a heavy sigh. “If you’re going to get married, you’ve got a lot to learn.” Then he left, too, and Cory found himself alone with his cousins, and, of course, the dead doe.
“You guys seriously don’t have a way to call for help?” He asked, after a long moment.
“We do, but it’s the kind of thing we can only use once.” Fletcher dug around in his pack and held up a small device, orange and black. “PLB. It’s linked up with an international satellite network. Once we use it, the battery will need to be replaced, which is a whole ordeal in and of itself—so, I’d prefer if you kept it on the down-low from the others. Absolute emergencies only.”
“Right.” Cory crossed over to the doe. Amos was in the middle of field dressing it, a process he’d seen in survival shows but never real life. The smell was awful, and he had only just begun. The doe stared blankly ahead, her eyes already starting to cloud over. And…
Frowning, Cory knelt.
He reached a hand out to brush the deer’s hind leg, where small coily black hair pushed up through the fur in sparse patches, noticeable only if one looked closely.
“What?” Amos said, glancing up from what he was doing—in the middle of peeling skin and hair back. “Something wrong? Or do you want to help?”
Cory didn’t like the look on his face. He shook his head and stood up, rubbing his eyes. “Guys, just try not to freak Emma out in the future. She’s stressed as hell right now.”
“Got it,” Fletcher tipped back his water canteen, taking long swigs before pulling his own knife out to help Amos with the skinning. “Hey, cousin. I’ve got a proposition for you.”
Cory’s heart fluttered, unpleasant. “What’s that?”
“There’s two deer left on this island. Find a way to kill one, we’ll make sure our father puts you in the will.”
Amos and Cory both stiffened.
“What?” Fletcher grinned, cocking his head to one side. “I’m adding to the stakes. It’ll be fun.”
“Okay,” Cory found himself saying, though the word was heavy on his tongue, and he didn’t feel quite inside himself as it passed through his lips. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Good,” Fletcher said. “I hope you like venison.”
That night, Cory quietly informed Emma about the cousin’s ability to communicate with the outside world. She said nothing and rolled over, her back to him.
Things weren’t the same after that.
By the time the first week came to a close, Cory had dove headfirst into learning everything he could about the weapons he had been provided—correct form, maintenance, everything. Of course, he was shit at it. Neither he or Jamie could hit a target to save their lives.
Still, he kept trying. Convinced himself that if he could land a spot on that will, in addition to winning the cash, he could make it up to Emma.
Emma had spent the week disappearing for most of the day, yelling at him when he tried to follow her out of the campsite. She’d return at the end of the day with whatever she’d managed to forage or kill, covered in dirt and sweat just like the rest of them.
A couple of times, Cory saw her distant form sitting atop the wall of boulders on the west side of the island, looking out across the lake. He’d wave, shout her name—but she never looked down.
At the beginning of the second week, Amos found him trying his hand at the rifle again. “Hey, man,” he called out across the field, lifting up his arms. The fringe he wore swayed with the movement. It was funny, the differences between the two had become all the more apparent out here—Fletcher wouldn’t have been caught dead in the all-buckskin outfit Amos wore.
Cory lowered the rifle, then set it down. “Hi.”
Amos brushed a layer of sweat from his brow as he approached. “You’re not very good at this, are you?”
“Gee, thanks.”
“No, I mean… you need the money, right?”
He shrugged, then nodded.
“I’ve been watching you, kinda. I can tell that the gun freaks you out,” Amos tilted his head. The extra time out in the sun had brought out his freckles, the creases beneath his eyes. “Am I wrong?”
Cory sighed and looked down at where the rifle rested in the grass. The wooden handle glinted in the evening light. “No.”
“You ever tried your hand at bow hunting?”
He shook his head.
“I have one you can use,” Amos said. “Don’t worry, man. I get it. It took me a while to get used to the guns, too. And, honestly—I prefer a more silent approach. Fletcher’s the opposite.”
Cory nodded, looking out across the meadow. In the time they’d been there, the last of the wildflowers were starting to disappear.
“You and your girlfriend doing okay?”
“Fiancée,” Cory corrected. “And…I don’t know. Maybe this trip was a mistake. For us, I mean. No offense.”
“None taken.” Amos reached into the pocket of his coat and drew out an apple, shiny and red. With his pocketknife, he cut it into two pieces and held one out. “Girls are finicky. I don’t date anymore.”
“You don’t seem like the dating type,” Cory said, mid-chew.
Amos shook his head. “I don’t need to date. I just flash my Centurion and get all the pussy I want, easy.”
“Must be nice.”
Amos shrugged. “It’s all a rat race at the end of the day. Careers—sure, that’s the obvious trap. But dating, marriage, starting a family, whatever. I see it all differently than I did before I started coming out here.”
Cory spat an apple seed onto the ground. “How?”
“I mean, the expectations, all of it—it’s just filling time. At the end of the day this,” Amos gestured widely at the nature surrounding them, “Is what it comes down to. We pretend we’re different. We pretend we’re above it. But we’re not.”
“Uh…okay.”
“You’re down on the ground in the thick of it,” Amos said. “Once the money starts rolling in, once you no longer have to worry, once you get to revert back to the divine primal—that’s where the transcendence is.”
Cory looked down at his hands, blistered and red. He didn’t know what the fuck Amos was talking about.
“It’s the grand cycle, yeah? We, as in society as a whole, pretend we’re separate from it. But, God, it feels so fucking good to just give in. Anyway, I’ll get that bow for you.”
Cory, lost for words, nodded.
“For your sake, I hope you get to kill one. Money aside, it feels good, y’know. To indulge.” He yawned, then straightened up. “Okay. I’ll be back.”
The second Amos was out of sight, Cory took off running, not wanting to be found again.
Cory, unsurprisingly, was also shit at the bow. By the end of the first day trying to use it, his entire upper body burned. He had only hit the tree he was using as a target a couple of times, and just barely. The arrow bounced off, all three times.
Halfway through the second week, Cory and Jamie sat huddled around the campfire watching rice and venison cook while Amos and Fletcher mumbled amongst themselves, pouring over the map.
“I wanna go home,” Jamie said, for the hundredth time that evening.
“I know, man,” Cory stretched his legs out in front of him, then immediately regretted it. His entire body was on fire. “I want a bed, any bed. Fuck.” He glanced down at his pocketwatch, an old antique that had been included in his pack. “Emma should’ve been back by now.”
Fletcher glanced up. “You’re right.”
The concern on his face was genuine.
Cory’s stomach turned. He’d never seen the expression on Fletcher’s face before. “You think we should go—”
“Hey!” Jamie said, shooting to his feet. “Look!”
Emma staggered into the campsite, her face red from exertion. Tied around her waist was a length of rope, connected to a makeshift sled. The stiff body of a doe was tied atop. She stopped at the edge of the clearing, doubling over.
“Holy shit!” Fletcher beamed, all of his previous worry gone. “You brought one down! That’s ten thousand for you!”
Jamie cheered. Distantly, something in Cory stirred—pride, relief, whatever…but then he saw the look on Emma’s face and that dissipated. No victory could be found on her delicate features, only defeat.
They all rushed over to help her out of her makeshift contraption. Emma shuddered in the dusk’s breeze, her hair plastered to her face from sweat. She didn’t look at any of them.
“Good job,” Amos said, circling the doe. “Clean shot. I’m sorry for underestimating you,” he stuck his hands on his waist, the look in his eyes giddy and alive. “We’ve got enough food, we won’t need the meat. I want that tag, though.” Stepping forwards, Amos knelt, bringing out his wooden-handled hunting knife and sawing the bright pink tag off. He then took the rope from her hands and straightened up. “I’ll take her somewhere else.”
“I’ll come with you,” Emma said, still breathing hard.
Something sharp curled into Cory’s chest. He glanced between the two. “Emma, stay.”
“No,” she said, reshouldering her rifle. She didn’t look at him at all, and then was gone as quickly as she’d shown up—following Amos closely.
Cory cursed, kicking at one of the logs. Amos’ words echoed in his mind—I just flash my Centurion and get all the pussy I want, easy. “Shit,” he muttered, sagging down in front of the fire.
Fletcher went off to go pee.
“Jamie,” Cory poked at the flames with a stick. “You think they’re fucking?”
“No,” Jamie said. “I think you need to quit being an insecure dumbass and apologize to her.”
“Apologize? For what?”
Jamie looked at him over the rim of his glasses for a long moment, then let out a long sigh. “Dumb and Dumber haven’t exactly been nice to me or Emma, and you haven’t said a word to either of us,”
Cory scowled.
“I get it, I mean, you’re hoping you can get some money out of these guys. I’d be sucking up, too. But Emma doesn’t think like that. You’re gonna be her husband; you’re supposed to protect her. Instead you’re sitting around twiddling your thumbs while she’s doing the grunt work and getting shat on every step of the way by those two morons.”
“I don’t want to rock the boat.”
“Yeah, yeah. Dude. Your silence is rocking the boat.”
“Has she talked to you?”
No response.
“Jamie.” It came out sharper than he wanted it to. “What has she told you?”
Just then, the rest of the group emerged into camp once more. Amos held up the front, Emma in the middle, then Fletcher. He held up two massive bottles and let out a long cackle, the sound cracking off the surrounding pines. “Assholes! Guess what? I found my stash from last year, and holy fuck—” he opened one, took a whiff. “This shit is strong. What do you say we have a little celebration on behalf of Miss Emma here?”
“Fuck, yeah." Cory held up a hand. “I’ll drink to that.”
They ended up at the beach. It was a hot night, and soon they all ditched their outer layers and made a dash for the water save for Emma, who stayed on the shore nursing a bottle.
It had been too long since Cory had been drunk. And this was a different kind of drunk than usual—violent, vibrant, dizzying—whatever was in that wine was strong. He forgot about Emma, forgot about the money and the deer and the competition, forgot about what was waiting for him back home. The only thing that mattered was the pitch black underneath and above him, and the moon’s reflection in all of it, pale and white and huge.
The clarity set in the drunker he got, the longer he spent out in the water—they were right, of course. They always had been. This was what it was all about: indulging. Becoming. Melting into the landscape. Fuck, everything he had been before, everything he had done and bought and all the hours he had worked, none of it meant anything compared to this—nothing at all.
Cory closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, his heels brushed against the rocks of the shore, and then he threw up on himself, chunks of half-digested venison and beans floating in the lake around him. The cousins hollered and played out on a distant sandbar, and as Cory turned to wash himself off he saw Jamie passed out on the beach, which counted for everyone except—
Emma.
Cory stood, swaying. The waves were gentle, but he almost lost his footing anyway. When he finally got out of the lake he saw that Emma was right where they’d left her, perched up on a small pile of rocks.
“Hey,” he called, his voice slurred. For once, he was actually able to talk to her again, the knot that had stopped up his throat unraveling. “Emma, hi.”
She looked up at him, then took one last sip before standing up.
He reached her, rather clumsily. “Can we talk? Can we please—oh, fuck, what’s wrong?”
“Stop it!” She swatted his hands away, then pursed her trembling bottom lip. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”
“Why?” Cory said. “I know I—I know I fucked up, can we please just talk—”
“Yeah! Yeah. We can talk,” she brushed her own tears away and looked up at him, and suddenly he wanted to cry, too, because she had been waiting for him to say those words the entire time and he’d been too stupid to do it, and—
“There’s something wrong, I have to show you.” She took his hand and together they stumbled across the rocks and towards the woods.
“What is it? What happened?” Cory paused for a moment to dry heave. “Did you and Amos—”
“No!” She turned, her voice sharp. “Why the fuck would you think that? I’m not a cheater!”
“I don’t know,” his voice was high, whiny. Pathetic. Cory could hear it himself. “He’s a better shot than me.”
“That’s stupid.”
“He’s a better shot, and he’s hotter, and he has money—” Cory’s voice broke. Shit. Here was the part he always hated about getting too drunk: the waterworks. He swallowed hard. “I get it, I really do. He’s got muscles and uh, I don’t know, he says all the deep shit you like, and,” he dry heaved again, then threw up all over a patch of thistles.
“Cory,” Emma paused, looking back over her shoulder. She passed him her water canteen, from which he took long gulps until it was drained. She looked awfully good like this—drunk, messy, her shirt hanging off one shoulder and exposing the strap of her sports bra. “I’m sorry,” she said, after a long moment, their gazes meeting. “I’m sorry I’ve been gone.”
“Please tell me it’s not them.”
“No,” She folded her arms across her chest. “I needed to—needed to work shit out. Also I practiced a shit ton. And then there’s the stuff with the deer—”
“The deer?” Cory frowned. “They didn’t tell you they’d put you in the will too, did they?”
“No? What’re you talking about? No, I’m talking about…” she sighed. “Okay, it’ll sound crazy if I tell you so I just have to show you. Come on.”
Cory really did not want to go.
Still, he followed Emma deeper into the woods, then they made a sharp left until they ended up at the edge of a marsh.
The air, more humid here than it had been, clung against Cory’s skin. Fireflies dotted the landscape. The army of frogs that had been singing fell silent at their arrival, and Emma skirted the edge with Cory at her heels until she stopped. He slammed into her.
“What?”
“The doe from earlier,” she pointed to a lump on the edge of the water. “Come on.”
He followed her down, his heart pounding at the prospect of slipping.
She knelt by the doe’s head and reached out.
“What’re you doing?”
“Look,” Emma said, then peeled back the doe’s top lip.
“Uh…teeth.”
“Cory,” Emma looked up at him, meeting his gaze. Her eyes were wide, shiny in the moonlight. “Since when do deer have canines?”
He looked again.
“They’re human teeth.”
“No.” Cory blinked hard, hoping that the next time he opened his eyes the teeth would be longer, tougher. Human teeth looked so, so delicate in the wrong context, like thin porcelain. “That’s impossible,” he said, voice shaking. “Maybe she just has weird teeth.”
“But there’s more. I watched her, and the one before, for so, so long. She doesn’t…they don’t move, not like normal deer. They’re smart. She followed me. That’s how I found her.” Emma glanced up at him, her brow furrowing. “Don’t look at me like that! I’m telling you what happened!”
“Okay,” Cory took a deep breath, standing up. Chills traced along his neck, his arms. “Let’s go back. You’re drunk.”
“So are you!” she shouted, the sound echoing through the wetlands. “Why don’t you believe me? Something’s going on! And we’ve been eating them, Cory! Whatever did this to her is inside us! I think it’s the radiation, we’ve all been eating contaminated deer and now we’re all gonna get cancer—”
“Emma,” He put his hands on either side of her face. The touch alone made her break down into tears. His heart, hazy and muffled, lurched. “We don’t know what’s going on. We’ll come back in the morning when we’ve sobered up and look again, okay? We can bring the others.”
“We have to get out of here,” she sniffled, smudging at her eyes with her palm. “Something’s wrong, Cory.”
“I know.”
Cory and Emma stumbled back to camp in the dark. The others weren’t back yet, and they took the opportunity to hook up atop their sleeping rolls. Cory continued his winning streak and didn’t pull out in time.
“If you just got me pregnant, we’re eloping immediately after this,” she said, out of breath next to him. “No way in hell am I looking like a beach ball on my wedding day.”
“Fuck,” Cory’s entire body was heavy. “Okay.”
“I think I’m too stressed out to get pregnant.”
“I don’t think that’s how that works,” he said, rolling over and reaching out for her, his fingers catching her hair.
“Most pregnancies end in miscarriage,” Emma pressed her face into his chest and sighed. “I miss YouTube.”
“I miss you,” Cory said, mostly half-asleep.
“I’m going pee,” she replied, and then she was gone.
Cory rolled over onto his stomach and passed out.
In the early hours of the next morning, Cory awoke to find the space where Emma was supposed to be empty and cold. His fingers twitched in the stillness he’d reached into during sleep, finding nothing.
Bleary-eyed, Cory sat up. Two identical blurs knelt before the campfire. The sweet smell of instant oatmeal—maple brown sugar—hit his senses. His mouth watered.
“Guys,” Cory called, sliding his glasses on.
Amos and Fletcher’s backs came into focus.
“Did Emma leave already?”
Fletcher turned, holding a steaming green mug in his hands. “Yeah, man.”
“She’s not usually gone this early,” Cory said, flopping back against his bedroll.
“Maybe she’s going after deer number three.”
Amos stood, stretching. His spine popped, bone by bone, all the way down the length of his back. “You want some oatmeal?”
Cory did, in fact, want some oatmeal.
After he scarfed his bowl down, he set it aside, his brain clearing up a bit. “Are you guys sure that the radioactive shit hasn’t spread?” he asked, tapping his spoon against the plastic of his bowl. “’Cause Emma said that the deer she killed was acting really weird. And we went back and looked at it, and it had…it’s teeth, uh, they were almost like…I don’t know. They weren’t right.”
Fletcher’s smile stayed still a moment too long. Then, he snapped out of it, back to normal. “We haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.”
“Well maybe…maybe we could show you.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
Amos held out his hand, long fingers wiggling. “Want seconds?”
Cory nodded.
Amos turned his back to Cory, hunching over the campfire as he refilled the bowl.
Fletcher offered him coffee, but he declined.
The first of the sun’s rays pierced through the pines, sharp and distinct, illuminating floating dust motes.
Cory took the bowl back from Amos and dug in for the second time. “I feel so hungover,” he said, looking back at the two. “What kind of wine was that?”
“Shit,” Amos said. “I don’t even know. I think I just mixed a bunch of potent shit up. That was a couple years old.”
“Goddamn.”
“Hey, you had fun, though, didn’t you?” Fletcher asked. “Did Emma have fun?”
Cory’s spoon scraped along the edges of the bowl as he tried to get the last of it. “I don’t know,” he said, between final bites. “She was upset by the deer. She says we shouldn’t eat it anymore.”
Silence.
“Say,” Cory set aside his bowl. “Where’s Jamie?”
“Probably still sleeping by the beach. Lil’ dude was passed out,” Fletcher said, then laughed. “He’s so skinny, I didn’t think he could drink that much.”
Cory tried to laugh, but came out distorted and wrong, and in an instant every movement he made felt heavier than the last. His vision blurred. He tried to stand up and nearly toppled over.
“Woah!” Fletcher caught him by the elbows. “You okay?”
“I don’t feel so good,” Cory slurred, panic thudding through him all too slowly. His heart should have been pounding, but it wasn’t. “Where did Emma go? I need…need to see her.”
“She went that way,” Amos pointed towards the direction of the shoreline.
Cory made it maybe five yards before the dizziness dragged him down to his knees on the forest floor, pine needles biting at the soft flesh of his inner palms as he pressed his forehead against cool peat, waiting for the world to stop spinning. He breathed hard, long, everything requiring tremendous amounts of effort—
“Damn,” Fletcher’s voice rang out across the trees, distant and tinny. “It never gets old, does it?”
“Facts,” Amos replied. “She clawed me up, look.”
“Should put some antiseptic on that.”
They kept talking.
Cory didn’t hear.
When he came to again, it was pitch black. He curled in on himself, shivering, starving, all together too cold and too hot at the same time.
How much time had passed?
His throat was dry, tongue swollen. Tingling in odd places, buzzed and slow and aching all over, like he’d run ten miles. Cory pressed a palm against the rough forest floor and flipped himself over, landing on his back with a gasp.
Stars peeked down between the gaps in the tree canopy.
He laid there for a long time.
When Cory finally found himself able to move once more, the sky was dipping towards light pink and purple, the forest blanketed in dim blue light as the sun neared the horizon. Birds began to sing. He pushed his way upright, fingers snagging on twigs.
The world tilted one way, then the next.
He threw up.
After that, things improved. Digging his nails into tree bark, Cory pulled himself to his feet. His brain kicked on again soon after. The memories hit hard, and fast—the deer’s human teeth, floating on dark waters, the twins, the campfire, the oatmeal…
The oatmeal.
They’d drugged him, and in his last moments, they’d been talking about Emma.
Fuck.
“Emma,” he said, then louder: “Emma!”
Nothing.
Up ahead, a group of birds fell into songbird chaos, filling the forest with noise.
He tried to orient himself. As the sun rose, his surroundings became more and more recognizable, and he found himself able to breathe once more.
Maybe it had been some sort of sick prank, and Emma had truly just left early to go hunt game, maybe she was on her way back to camp or was on her way out of camp and they’d run into one another—
Camp.
That was a goal he could attain.
He took one lurching step forward. Then another.
By the time he reached their designated clearing, his feet felt like they were going to fall off, and the hunger gnawed at him, right down to the bone. Crashing through the underbrush, Cory stumbled forward, spotting the familiar green of his bedroll, but—
“Fuck.”
The camp was completely abandoned. The coals were cold, and from the looks of things, no one—not the twins, or Jamie and Emma, had been back for several days.
Sinking to his knees, Cory slid his water canteen from his pack and drained the entire thing in seconds, then tore into the rest of his rations meant to last the entire trip: crackers, granola bars, almonds, peanut butter cups, all of it gone as fast as he could handle.
After he’d had his fill, Cory stood and surveyed the camp. The other’s belongings sat untouched, save for their weapons, which were gone, along with his own—even his hunting knife, everything that could’ve possibly functioned as a line of defense had been taken.
Swearing, Cory changed his clothes and geared up as best as he could, digging through everyone’s leftover belongings to gather whatever could possibly prove to be useful at some point: Emma’s map, Jamie’s binoculars, his own compass, everyone’s matchbooks and first aid kits, a little bit of rations from all the packs.
He didn’t have a plan, not really. Find Jamie. Or find Emma, whichever came first, and get the hell off of that damn island.
Futile.
He pressed on, anyway.
Cory traced what he knew to be Emma’s foot path twice over but found nothing. Only on his way back did he notice something glinting in the grass by the marshy meadow, the one where she and Amos had dumped the dead doe.
His stomach sank.
Her rifle, the oldest one out of the bunch they had all chosen, complete with the scope she’d snagged from one of the cousins along the way. As he picked it up and turned it over in his hands, strands of light blonde hair that had been snagged in the strap fluttered in the breeze before drifting away completely.
For a moment, Cory forgot to breathe.
He wanted to stop right there and then, wanted to give up and quit moving, but there was a possibility that she was still alive, that he didn’t understand the situation at all—every second he remained still was a second that could be Emma and Jamie’s last.
“Move,” Cory whispered to himself, then again: “Move!”
He sucked down a few deep, gasping breaths, held back a sob or two, shouldered Emma’s rifle, and moved.
That afternoon, Cory found the cousin’s new camp on one of the westernmost points of the island, tucked into a natural dip in the forest’s floor, a place where the blanket of pine needles gave way to grey walls of limestone. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the place, not yet. But he had heard their voices, and smelled their campfire smoke.
By then, he had devised a plan—sneak in, steal the personal locator beacon, sneak off to a place he wouldn’t be discovered by the twins, and activate it. The authorities would come, and that would be that.
Now, Cory lay on his stomach atop the rocky ledge, listening. From his position, he couldn’t see much, but he would’ve rather sacrificed visibility for invisibility.
When they spoke to each other, it was in short bursts:
“You see any of them today yet?”
“No.”
“You think they’ll be back?”
“They never come back.”
By nightfall, Cory had heard so many clipped exchanges between the two as one of them arrived and the other left and so on and so forth, he found himself on the verge of nodding off. Sleep pulled at him, hard—but he was snapped out at the last second by the sound of dragging.
Amos’s voice was hoarse. “Last one. I got her down by the river.”
“Holy shit…she doesn’t look right. You used the sleepers?”
“Yeah. Out cold. She didn’t transform all the way, look.”
Silence.
Then, Fletcher let out a loud, long laugh, the sound bouncing off of the stone surrounding them. “Fuck! That’s fucked up. Wow.”
Amos spat. “It’s not as thorough as it used to be. I’m gonna go to the river, wash up. Can you deal with her?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“See you.”
“Bye.”
Sweat dripped down Cory’s forehead. He craned his neck, trying to see who, exactly, his cousins had captured. Emma, or the deer? It was hard to say, for the first couple of minutes, but then he caught a glimpse of a furry hoof through Jamie’s binoculars. Shaking, he let out a long, slow breath. Emma was still out there, probably. Maybe she was still looking for him, too.
He wasn’t sure when he nodded off. When he came to, the forest had gone quiet, save for a rhythmic squelching noise from the cousin’s camp. The second Cory processed the sound, every instinct in his body told him to get up, to run, to forget the PLB for now and just focus on escaping—
Jamie’s voice rang out over the clearing. “What the fuck are you doing to that deer?” he shouted, shaky but angry.
“What?” Fletcher called, casual. Friendly, even. “Pussy’s pussy, man. Want some?”
“Where the fuck is my brother?”
Cory’s entire body shuddered. Coldness, unlike anything he’d ever felt before, seeped into him. He slowly crawled up through the brush, just enough to poke Emma’s rifle through and be able to see over the edge.
There was Jamie, at the edge of the camp, Cory’s bow in his hands.
An arrow was pointed directly at Fletcher, who didn’t give a single shit. The fire illuminated a wet sheen on the small of his bare back. He shrugged, muscles rippling all the way down. “Cory’s around, somewhere. Ah, shit—” he looked down, “I slipped.”
The deer, tied for field dressing and very much still alive, screamed.
Fighting his own gag reflex, Cory raised the rifle and lined up the back of Fletcher’s head in his sights. He exhaled, preparing to make the shot.
A loud crack.
Gone again.
Rot.
It filled his senses.
When he opened his eyes, finally, Cory struggled to comprehend what, exactly, it was that he was seeing.
The dead doe, used, cut down the middle and open like a butterfly, russet fur catching the afternoon sun. Flies circled, buzzing around them both, dive-bombing his ears.
The camp was empty, Amos and Fletcher long gone.
His hands were tied.
So were his ankles.
Squirming around on the forest floor, Cory fought to roll over, only to come face-to-face with the empty eyes of his little brother, bullet wound right between them. His glasses were broken, shards littering the ground.
“Fuck!” Cory squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them again, the sight before him was still the same—bloated tongue, eyes rolled back, deep brown skin tinted purple-gray. Wrong.
He flopped onto his back, crushing his palms beneath his own weight. Glass bit at his arms, carving deep lines. The pain didn’t register. He cried until he couldn’t anymore, then cried again after that. All of it came bleeding out in those minutes—everything that had ever happened to him, everything that had ever led up to those moments and everything after, all of it spilling out of him and over him like a tidal wave, like a broken dam.
He only stopped when he ran out. When the adrenaline died and the hunger overtook him. Sunlight trickled down from the pines above, and caught on the broken glass around him, casting distorted beams of light across the dirt and leaves—
Broken glass.
Grunting, Cory struggled to sit up, scooting towards the biggest piece from Jamie’s glasses that he could find, cold mud building up against his backside as he scooted closer.
It shattered in his hands, the lens itself too thin.
Cory swore, scanning the campsite. His gaze landed on the dead doe, on the glint of the skinning knife set upon the stool next to her. If he could just…
Swallowing back his own bile, Cory set his jaw and struggled over to the scene. Blood had drained down into the dirt below, creating foul-smelling blood, and they had not bothered to tie off the doe’s entrails properly. She had leaked waste. Cory’s vomit joined the puddle, right next to where the blade ended up landing once he managed to kick the stool over.
He cut himself free. It took too long, though he didn’t know that part, not yet.
After getting up on his feet again, Cory didn’t even look in Jamie’s direction. He cried, again—couldn’t help it, though he tried to keep quiet, in case Amos and Fletcher came back. He took the skinning knife, Jamie’s bow, and Emma’s rifle, then ducked into Amos and Fletcher’s tent.
Beer bottles. Weed. Some white stuff that was probably cocaine. He didn’t care about any of that, though—Cory tore apart their packs, his fingers searching for the distinct orange and black plastic of the beacon. He found a car key, stuffed it in his back pocket for use as potential leverage and kept moving. “C’mon, c’mon…” Cory whispered, moving on from Fletcher’s to Amos’. He nearly tore past the file. He only stopped because Emma’s photograph fell out of it.
“What the fuck,” Cory tore it open.
Her photo, one screenshotted from her Instagram account, sat atop a stack of newspaper clipping. He thumbed through them, unsure of what they all had in common, aside from clipped-off text and uncentered photos—then he turned the stack over.
On the reverse side, they were all the same:
“MISSING: 6/7/2024”
“HAVE YOU SEEN ME? LAST SEEN 5/4/2022”
“MISSING PERSON”
“REWARD WANTED: DAUGHTER LAST SEEN 8/17/2023”
Over and over and over.
All women. All young, pretty, all taken from locations up and down the Wisconsin-Michigan coastline.
All gone.
The three on the top of the stack, just beneath Emma’s photo, caught his eye and held it. As he stared down at them, he thought he might throw up once more from the familiarity of them all—the first, her coily black hair in tight curls, the second one’s perfect, dental-magazine teeth, the third’s long hair, the same exact color of the doe outside the tent.
Cory dropped the clippings, Emma’s photo.
He staggered out of the tent. He remembered how the venison—tough, strange, had felt on his tongue, between his teeth. Going down his throat.
Amos and Fletcher entered the camp at the exact same time. They didn’t see him, not at first—and then they did.
Both parties froze, staring one another down.
Cory scrambled for his rifle. The barrel swayed, uncertain in his hands. He pulled the trigger, but when the shot quit reverberating through his body and he opened his eyes again they were still standing—of course they were.
Amos let out a long, sharp bark of a laugh. “Really? You think we’d leave you a loaded gun? We have every single bullet on the island in our possession.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” The words tore themselves out of him. He tossed Emma’s rifle aside, pulling out the skinning knife from earlier. It was tiny—a last line of defense. “What have you done?”
Fletcher spread his arms out, gesturing around them, the grin on his face wild, childish. Nothing like the practiced charm of when they’d first met. “This is our game. It’s nothing personal, promise.”
“You killed my brother!”
“In cold blood,” Amos said, looking rather bored. “Fletcher?”
There was no world where Cory could have reacted fast enough. The twins rushed him all at once, knocking the knife from his hand. His glasses went flying, his back hit the ground—hard. He tried to swing. They held him fast. The world above was a blur of dark green and blue skies, then Amos and Fletcher’s faces came into focus, a pair of grinning hyenas, blue eyes ice in the sunlight. Weight on his throat—Amos’s elbow.
“Let me spoil it for you,” Fletcher said, dimples cutting into his cheek as his grin grew wider. “You’re the last one alive. And you can run, but…”
Cory spat in his face.
He laughed and wiped it off.
Amos leaned a bit closer, cutting off most of Cory’s airflow.
He choked, deciding to keep talking. Buy himself more time. “I don’t fucking understand why you would do any of this—”
Amos let up, strong fingers grabbing his chin and yanking until they were eye-to-eye. Unlike Fletcher, his face was cold stone. Red gouges, five of them, ran down the side of his neck. “I’ll tell you why. You’re one tiny piece of meat in a sea of eight billion other tiny pieces of meat, that’s why. This is what I was telling you about: the divine primal. The prey and the predator. Everything in its place, just as God intended, right from the first conception of cellular life.”
Fletcher rose from his spot, his face blurring. “I think we’ve got some new prey to track. Amos, give the guy his glasses back,” He grinned at his brother, then looked down at Cory. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We’ll give you a head start.”
Amos set his glasses almost gently back into place, and offered Cory the first smile he’d ever seen from the guy before releasing him. “Hope you can run better than you shoot.”
The twins took a few steps back from him, shouting in giddy unison:
“Ten!”
Cory quit asking questions after that.
“Nine!”
He ran.
When Cory did the math, they had given him a much longer head start than ten seconds—either that, or they had let him get away.
Still, he kept going long after the sounds of their whooping cheers and laughter faded behind him, kept going past the point of his legs burning then succumbing to numbness, unsure of where he was going other than away.
He needed time. Time to devise a plan. Time to figure out how in the hell to get Fletcher’s locator beacon in his hands, time to press that button.
He heard them again some hours later, voices filtering through the trees in his direction.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Cory whispered, shoving the wrapper from one of Jamie’s granola bars in his back pocket. He sank down to his hands and knees, tucking himself beneath the underbrush, and began to crawl away from the voices.
He only stopped when he hit the chain-link fence.
Cory sank back on his haunches, looking up. “Oh, shit.”
Amos and Fletcher’s voices kept getting closer.
He didn’t know how, but they were tracking him.
He peered into the woods beyond the fence. They looked the same as all the rest, but he wasn’t fooled.
This was the scribbled-out part of the map, the one too contaminated with refinery waste to enter. He was as far north as he could go, and his cousins were closing in.
“I think I see him!” Fletcher called, giddy. “Oh, Cory!” He drew out the last syllable before dissolving into laughter.
Cory twisted to look, then took off, following the fence’s length.
Amos and Fletcher kept their leisurely pace. They weren’t bothered. They knew this island better than he ever would.
As soon as they were out of earshot and he could no longer see them anymore, Cory dug his boot into one of the holes in the fence, his trembling fingers into another, and hopped it.
Here was the one place the cousins would never look for him.
Cory’s stomach heaved. He stared down at the ground, then back at the rest of the island on the other side of the fence. Distantly, his brain churned and spat out the most unhelpful thought he’d ever had:
What’s a little radiation? I’ve already got microplastics in my semen.
“Goddamn,” Cory whispered, almost laughing at the absurdity of it all.
He looked out over the rest of the northern woods. If it was between dying from radiation poisoning and giving those idiots the satisfaction of killing him themselves, he wanted the former.
The cousin’s voices drifted closer.
He took off.
A small foot-path—maybe a game path—traced through the grass. He followed it closely, hoping it would lead to some sort of water (not that he really wanted to drink whatever water existed behind that fence). Instead, he ended up in a sparser section of forest, and the forest quickly dissipated.
He almost tripped over it.
The soft leather of his boots did nothing to protect his foot from the cold hard steel of the handle sticking out of the ground.
Cory stopped, looking down. “What the…?”
He knelt and shoved off the thin coating of leaves that covered it. A small window peered down into darkness.
Of course they’d have a fucking bunker.
Cory pulled and pulled at the handle, but it would not budge. Swearing and sweating, he scrambled to his feet and kicked at it in frustration.
Lake Michigan’s waves crashed in the distance, the first he’d heard of it the entire time. He looked up, out. Did a double take.
Was that…?
Cory dug Jamie’s binoculars out of his pack, set them against his face and turned the knobs until…
“Holy shit.”
A two-lane road wound straight out from the island across the water, disappearing as it traced its way to the less-than-distant shore of the mainland beyond.
A road.
A way out.
Cory nearly dropped the binoculars.
Without a second thought, he crashed down the hill, his pack bumping back and forth, all of his belongings jangling as he ran.
The road was new. He could still smell the freshly-poured asphalt. They’d built this recently, a custom highway just for themselves. Maybe this was how they…
Fuck.
He didn’t want to think about it.
In the middle of the road, Cory stopped to survey his surroundings. Why would they put a road running right through the contaminated area? Unless…that had been bullshit.
Back in the direction of the rest of the island, the corner of a shed caught his eye. He crept towards it. Nondistinct, old with peeling paint and a collapsing roof. Not the kind of building he’d expect to find out here.
He yanked open the door, half-expecting to find a butchery room.
Instead, he found a truck.
Deep black, lifted. Modded out. A Ram 1500, brand new. Horrible bright headlights and all.
“You really think he came this way?” Amos, distant but getting closer.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck—” No time to stare in abject horror at the thing anymore.
If he could just break the glass, maybe—
Fletcher’s response: “No, but he has my keys.”
Keys.
Cory slapped his back pocket, where his phone usually sat.
Sure enough, there they were.
He unlocked the car and slid in, praying to anything that could hear him that this truck was silent as he slid the fob in. Shaking, he flicked his wrist and started the thing.
The engine roared to life.
Fletcher shouted, loud and long: “My truck!”
Amos shouted something indistinguishable.
Cory peeled out of the shed and onto the road, then floored it.
Shots rang out. Something hit the left side of the bed, and in the rear view mirror he saw their forms scrambling down the hill towards the road.
The laugh bubbled out of him.
He turned his sights ahead.
The road wound through the woods. Fletcher’s truck took it like a champ, and though he sat tensed up, expecting them to show up behind him, they were gone—left behind.
The final stretch lay ahead.
There, beyond the last bit of woods, the road straightened out and headed right for the mainland.
Cory checked his rearview mirror one last time.
When he looked back ahead, a doe stood in the middle of the road.
His brain jumped to disbelief, to logic and discounting and theories, but his heart knew. The color of the deer’s fur—straw colored, almost-white where the sun hit it. The way it moved, the way it watched him.
The way she watched him.
Cory looked at the thing that had once been the love of his life.
Then, he looked past her to the freedom that lay beyond.
He floored it.
It was easier than one might expect—she was small, and her body went down beneath the truck’s giant wheels like he was going over a rolled-up carpet.
He expected to feel sadness.
There was only relief.
He turned his eyes ahead. The waters sparkled, bright blue and gleaming.
Movement in the rear view mirror.
Cory swore.
The doe lifted her head, struggling. A chunk of her midsection was gone. After an infinite moment, she finally rose, pushing upwards to rest on two hind legs and turn the bloody, meaty mass that was once a whole, complete body towards him.
Cory tore his eyes away, turning his attention back to the road ahead.
She watched him leave.
FINAL NOTES:
Dear Readers,
This story is very loosely inspired by my fantastic mutual
’s photo prompt, “Still, I Rise”. While I love the bloody final girl imagery in that prompt, I found myself most captivated by the words themselves.
After I first saw that prompt and while I was still turning it over in my mind, I was driving through the backwoods and saw a dead deer in the middle of the road. It was a busy section of road, too—cars coming and cars behind me. I had a split-second choice to make: hit the deer, or swerve around it.
I swerved, out of respect.
Then, I saw movement in my rear view mirror.
The deer lifted its head and tried to get up, shakily.
I had to keep going. I don’t know if it made it up and off the road. I think if it did, it wouldn’t have made it far.
Anyway, EMR’s prompt and the imagery of the deer getting up after the impossible collided in my mind, which resulted in Hunting Season.
I don’t ever write things set in the current day, but while I was writing this one I found that I enjoyed sliding stuff in there that will definitely date this piece later on. This story is kind of campy, over-the-top, please-suspend-your-disbelief, and it’s a product of its time.
I hope you enjoyed it, in all it’s rough-edged glory.
Thank you all for reading.
Yours,
A.D.
P.S: Originally, Fletcher’s car was going to be a 2025 Aston Martin Vanquish, but then I came to my senses.
The creepiness and the overall writing were great! Really good and well-written story. Keep writing, fellow horror writer!
You’re so creepy (positive.) I usually don’t care for horror for horror’s sake, and the way you added those deep rooted emotional stakes was so smart and deftly maneuvered. I read in a craft book about genre once that the root of horror is ultimately the battle of life vs death, and that the fear of non-existence is almost a religious one. You give real blood to Cory’s fears here: his fear of a “non-existence” of life without love, without money, without a chance at a future. Those fundamentally primal stakes are the key to this story breathing and I’m so glad to have read this