Page 12 of The Whispering Night
CHAPTER
5
Winnie never joins the bacterial tag mass that thunders around the indoor track, but she still gets in plenty of movement for the next few hours. In fact, Rachel’s regimen for her hunters makes Jay’s tutoring sessions look like child’s play. Like anactualchild playing.
Winnie punches bags, she grapples other Wednesdays, she jumps hurdles and climbs ropes, and she repeatedly wonders,Why did I want to do this?She goes for at least two hours until her new black leggings and tank top are soaked through with sweat, and until eventually, Rachel slows the whole show down with a hollered, “Forest loop!”
Winnie doesn’t know what that means, but she figures if she just follows everyone while they aim for the stairwell out of the Armory, she’ll get her answer soon enough. She slots onto the end, jogging at an easy pace. Rachel falls into step behind her. They are the caboose to a long train of hunters doing everything Rachel commands.
Soon Winnie is up the stairs, out of the estate, and stamping steadily over gravel garden paths. The final rays of sunset laser over the Wednesday rooftop. Night will fall soon, and with it the mist will rise.
Flowers in full bloom melt past Winnie. A Monet painting daubed with blues and greens and purples—and fractured by a bright orange construction crane as well as a smattering of half-assembled food booths, each one proclaiming a different sort of delicious cuisine for free tasting.
Winnie is still the caboose on the Wednesday train, and she’s okay with that. Her muscles are exhausted; her brain too; and not for the first timetonight, she dreams of her future dinner, which will probably be more PB&Js like her lunch.
Ohboy,peanut butter and jelly. It’s basically dessert masquerading as a meal. In other words: delicious.
At the garden gate that feeds into old-growth forest and newer trees, the hunters narrow into a single-file line… then re-form into a more diffuse blob once they’re on the path beyond. Winnie reaches the gate of wrought-iron bars attached to red brick. It wavers uncomfortably.
She shakes her head.
Soon, her boots stamp onto stepping stones. They’re not yet illuminated by the trail’s automatic lights. Twenty feet away, the stones fork into three paths. The right trail will circle Winnie to another trail. Left will loop back to the Wednesday estate. And straight will transport her to the forest.
Straight is where all the hunters go. So straight is where Winnie goes too.
Her breaths, which were labored before, now shift toward something pained. Something erratic. A cramp carves into her stomach, and for several moments, she thinks she hears music chasing behind her—a bass line trembling out into the night while magenta winks and glitters in the throng of hunters. Then suddenly it’s masks she sees, charcoal-colored and canine…
You’re fine,she tells herself.You’re just hungry. You just need food.
But Winnie has never been good at lying, not even to herself. Her body knows the truth.Number of people murdered one month ago? Zero. Number of people murdered now? Two.
You’re a murderer.
You killed them.
She makes herself keep going. The mist won’t rise for another two hours; the forest is just a forest, no nightmares to escape. No hunters on the prowl.
Hunters like Jay because today is Friday, and soon he will be out there in the trees, putting his life at risk to protect not only Hemlock Falls, but an entire world who has no idea he exists.
No. Winnie can’t think about this either. About Jay and how she almost lost him a week ago.Just focus on the ground. On your stride. Bilateral symmetry, bilateral symmetry.
Winnie doesn’t notice her feet slowing. Stopping. She’s just suddenly doubled over while the rest of the Wednesday hunters timpani-roll onward.Red stakes wink like wicked candles nearby, marking the edge of the sleeping spirit’s domain.
Rachel moves beside her, scooping a firm hand onto Winnie’s shoulder and hauling her upright. “Keep going,” she murmurs.
So Winnie keeps going. Although she doesn’t make it far before she says: “You should be dead.” She is panting. The words are strained.
“Yep,” is all Rachel replies. Then she thrusts a water bottle into Winnie’s grasp. She was clutching it in one hand while she jogged, and Winnie doesn’t miss that in Rachel’s other hand, she grips a small first aid kit—which she opens as soon as Winnie claims the bottle.
They are in the forest now. The nightmare forest, and although the last rays of pink try to knife their way in, here it is always shadow, always gray. Because this world belongs to the sleeping spirit. This world is infested with monsters.
Winnie sips from the bottle’s squeeze top. It makes her footsteps lose their steady rhythm, but the cold feels good sliding down her throat. So she sucks in more, more, until she has drained most of the bottle and the sweat across her skin turns icy.
Her pace is so disrupted now, it’s more walk than run. But since Rachel isn’t stopping, Winnie isn’t either. This is the way the mama bear goes, so the cub will follow.
“Eat this,” Rachel commands, and Winnie finds herself blinking down at a gel pouch that proclaims it isHi EnerG!In anAll-New Cherry Flavor!It looks about as appetizing asChrysomya megacephalamaggots on a dead body.
“You need the calories,” Rachel insists, and she rips off the top before Winnie can protest. The pouch presses against her lips and Rachel reclaims the water bottle. The gel turns out tasting as appetizing as the maggots probably would, but once Winnie gets it down, shedoesfeel better.
