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“I know it’s hard. Sometimes I have to just…,” Lottie breaks eye contact for a moment, peering out at the swarm of trees beyond the plane, “I don’t know. Forget, I guess. But you have to remember that this isn’t your whole life. It’s just a chapter.”
Shauna follows Lottie’s line of sight on instinct before returning to the hands placed in her lap. She sighs, exhausted.
“But I can’t forget. And it sure feels like my whole life. Like everything I’ve ever done’s just come back to haunt me, every single goddamn day.”
Lottie hums, acutely aware of the fragile distance between their fingertips. She thinks of what they’ve done, all the pain they’ve caused. She thinks of the torn flesh above her lip. How it still throbs. She remembers all of it, all of the searing, excruciating pain, yet she still wants to hold Shauna’s hand.
What do you call that?
It’s been like this lately. This…feeling. Lottie tells herself she doesn’t know where it comes from, that she doesn’t want to know, but it’s only a half-truth, crafted to disguise the horrid reality of her desire. The limitlessness of it. Bourne out of violence like everything else left standing.
Over these past few months, they’d all been growing closer, the warmth of summer casting glistening rays of hope around them. Lottie to Shauna. Misty to Akilah. Van and Taissa to each other (as always; a constant). Even Mari had begun to befriend Travis and apologize to Misty for her hostility.
But then came the incident. The turn of the dial, flipping everything on its head. Lottie can’t even think about it, much less speak of it. For fear of what she’ll say if she does.
“We’ll be okay,” Lottie finally says.
Shauna scratches the shell of her ear. It’s become somewhat of a habit. “How can you say that?”
“Because there’s no other option,” she shrugs, “and you know, maybe a part of me believes it, as stupid as that may be.”
“It’s not stupid. It’s…admirable.”
Lottie smiles weakly and pretends like she can’t feel her face heat up at Shauna’s words. Which surprisingly isn’t that hard to do, considering it’s already pretty warm outside (well, relatively speaking).
“I wish I could be like that,” Shauna admits quietly, like she hadn’t yet decided if she wanted Lottie to hear or not.
“You still can. We all can.”
There’s a pregnant pause from Shauna’s end that almost makes Lottie regret saying anything. She’d realized what the implications were, but it was still too much to actually speak into the universe.
“Lottie, I’m not-“, Shauna pauses, jaw unhinged, blinking her tears away, “There’s something broken in me. Something unfixable.”
Her breath stutters as she finishes, and it cuts Lottie. It cuts her deeper than the steel of Shauna’s fist ever could, because she can’t help her anymore. There’s nothing to be said or done, no offering up her body as a vessel for Shauna to release her rage onto.
There’s nothing to be done.
“I killed her. I killed my, my favorite thing in the world. I killed my only -“
Shauna’s body starts to wrack with sobs. Her back bends, folds over itself, and she’s falling, falling.
Nothing passes through then, nothing except the sound of her cries as they echo against the plane’s hollowed-out interior. Lottie listens to them and aches. They are beyond sorrow.
“I killed her, Lottie,” Shauna repeats, spiraling, “and I, I kill. That’s it. I just kill.”
Lottie doesn’t refute it. She wants to, tries to say anything to explain how it isn’t true, but the words evade her. She just sits there uselessly, rigidly, drained of all the former power bestowed upon her.
The truth was that they had all killed Jackie in their own way. And she’d died all over again when they ate her, reduced to nothing but bones in the shrapnel of the wreck. If there’s anything Lottie wishes she could forgive herself for, it’s that. That searing image of death, knowing she led the charge…
Misty’s voice echoes in the back of her mind: Lottie. You started this. It’s done.
It would never go away. It couldn’t. It rolls around, digging under her skin, burrowing itself in her psyche. Festering, like an open wound.
And for what? What was the purpose if this is just - if this is just it? All this agony wasted on more agony, compounded until it finally burst, destroying them like they had destroyed each other.
“I’m sorry,” Lottie says, and she is. For everything.
“It’s not your fault.”
Lottie shrugs, a vacant stare coming over her face, “I don't know that.”
“Well, I do. None of this is your fault, okay? We - we all did things. Together. Things I can never…,” Shauna inhales, scrunches her nose, “whatever. I’m just saying it’s not on you.”
“But I started it. The prayers and everything. I mean, none of that shit with Jackie and Travis would’ve happened if I’d just - and the, the baby, Shauna, I had everyone convinced that he was going to be our savior or something, I’m so sorry-”
To Lottie’s surprise, Shauna grabs her and wraps her in a hug, the back of her head cradled by Shauna’s trembling hand. She sinks into it, then freezes, visions of the attack flooding her memory.
She sinks further.
When Shauna eventually breaks away from the hug, she shudders, and messes with her broken fingernail, “Lot, do you know what I did? What I wrote?”
Lottie shakes her head.
“I said that I…that I missed it. That I missed the taste. And - and Tai, she saw it from over my shoulder or something, and then I guess she talked to Van, I don’t know. And it all just - everyone knew. Everyone was thinking about it. That’s where it came from.”
“It didn't come from anywhere. That - it’s in us. You know that.”
“Was it in Natalie?” Shauna asks, biting.
Shauna knows the words are cruel. And even though she doesn’t think Lottie particularly deserves it, there’s something in her that savors the way her face contorts, twists, becomes something else. It’s beautiful. Lottie is beautiful.
Natalie never went along with it, any of it. She’d heard of their plan in passing on a sunny day a few weeks ago and proceeded to throw up in the grass. Doubled over, wracked with a sickness she could not name or put a face to. Because what did it mean, that they would do something like that?
They were slipping away, and Natalie didn’t have the crown anymore, so no one would listen to what she had to say anyway; and if they no longer needed to rely on her for food, then what would become of her?
It never got resolved. They took Mari out to the back and strung her up and watched as the light drained from her eyes. I’ll never be clean, Nat thought, despondent, her face covered and eyes cloudy as she watched Shauna carve out Mari’s liver.
And Shauna’s hands always trembled, but this time they were strong, like they knew themselves, and that - above all else - was what terrified her.
She doesn’t tell them it’s August. That a mere week ago her and Travis had hunted and shot down a couple of quail, and that the meat was still right there. Still good.
But that wasn’t the point, she knew that, as much as it killed her inside. And Natalie spent a good portion after looking at dull faces she did not know, terrified there was nothing they couldn’t do.
You're not in charge anymore.
Nat, this is good. This is right.
You don’t have to look at us like that, you know.
Lottie just takes one of Shauna’s hands and places it over her own, ignoring the loaded question, and Shauna half-wants to cry again. Forever, maybe. There’s a fossilized dejection in their interactions, in her.
“Look, I only brought that stuff up to tell you that this isn’t about that. And that I have a lot more to be regretful of,” Shauna says in the most reassuring tone she can muster, trying not to get caught up in the vines lurking behind the words, “So don’t think for a second that you started any of this. You didn’t.”
Lottie is crying properly now, and she nods, because it’s all she can do. She doesn’t believe herself anymore. She doesn’t believe anything anymore.
**
“I heard you earlier. In the plane with Shauna.”
Natalie’s voice carries a gruff intonation that Lottie can’t seem to place. She only knows that their relationship has been tumultuous ever since the start of summer, for no apparent reason.
“Yeah. I was comforting her.” Lottie doesn’t know why she says it like she has something to defend.
“Right. Yeah, that’s what that was.”
Lottie furrows her brows, agitated, “Is there something you wanna say?”
She goes quiet, flushed. Wasn’t expecting Lottie to be so…forward about this.
“Nothing. It’s fine,” Natalie says.
Well, Lottie knows that’s a lie. Something in her gut flares, something different than hunger. It’s piercing, prickly. It isn’t dissimilar to what she used to feel with Shauna.
Shauna. Her beacon. The destruction of everything.
I’ll do anything.
Lottie wipes hands on her torn pants and stands up so she’s face-to-face with Nat.
“What did you hear? You clearly wanna talk, so.”
Natalie takes a breath, “What did you mean? No, seriously, what the fuck did you mean, Lot? Because this isn’t a fucking chapter. This is it. We’re going to die here,” noticing the way Lottie flinches, she tries again, “I just - she doesn’t need this right now. I know you’re just trying to help, but this isn’t helping, okay? Filling her head with lies and telling her that, that we’ll be okay after…after what’s happened, it’s-“
Lottie takes another step, eyes steely, “What’s happened, Natalie?”
“Don’t do that,” Natalie shakes her head, backing away, “don’t do that, man.”
A little voice in the back of Lottie’s head tells her to press harder. She wants to make Natalie feel what she felt, all those months ago, laying on the cold hard floor of the attic with welts on her eyelids, listening to Misty tell her the horrors of her own creation.
“I’m not doing anything. What happened is what always happens.”
Tears brimming in her eyes, Natalie chokes out, “No, no, this was different, we - we didn’t have to.”
“We never had to,” Lottie says decidedly, but it's a lie.
And Natalie reacts exactly how Lottie thought she would. Her face falls. All the color drains from it. This dark, endless drought washes over her - sinking, sinking. She can’t move.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?”
The venom in Natalie’s voice travels, pierces through Lottie like a bullet’s ricochet.
“I know you see it that way,” Lottie says in the most gentle tone she can muster, “but this isn’t any different, Nat. This - this is what we do. We feed It. We give it what it wants.”
Natalie scoffs and turns on her heel. “Fuck this.”
From the corner of Lottie’s eye, she sees Shauna making her way towards Nat. Something rattles inside of her, a rumbling, this warring of unrest. A hive mind, the queen’s court. Bellies empty. It wants.
Shauna locks eyes with her for a brief moment. Lottie feels everything.
“Do you think we’re all evil?” Shauna asks, “That you’re the only..that you’re some kind of saint? You did it too, Nat. The only difference is you’re the only one moping around and making the rest of us feel shitty about it.”
“What choice did I have?! You guys were gonna fucking kill me!”
Lottie shakes her head, interjects, “That’s not true. That’s not for us to decide.”
“Don’t give me that,” Nat says darkly, then directs to Shauna again, “I saw the way you guys looked at me. Van, she - and Taissa…they kept saying how this was to bond us together, how - we’d come out stronger, and they…they wanted it. They like it, Shauna. And so do you.”
So what? Shauna wants to say. So what if I do?
The indignance she’d felt boiling over these past few months, a rage stamped down by the quiet, cosmic mornings spent with Lottie in the plane, all coming to a head in this moment.
And to think it was exacerbated by the possession she feels, both of this place and of -- her sacrifice, her loss, the morbid desire with which Lottie and the others latched onto, wielding her grief into a weapon.
You made me a weapon, is what Shauna really wants to say. Of course, she doesn’t, just looks Nat up and down and flips her off before scuffling away.
“You’re fucking - you’re sick, man,” Natalie says under her breath.
Shauna stops in her tracks. She’s tempted to lash out, but Lottie steps up and places a hand on Shauna’s shoulder, and a silent beat passes between them, and when Shauna looks into her eyes she sees the expanse of everything.
**
Apparently Tai and Van were listening in on the conversation too. Lottie finds them in their hut, astray.
“Natalie?” Van asks.
Lottie nods in confirmation.
“She doesn’t understand. It’s bigger than us.”
Taissa hums beside her and leans in slightly. They’re always touching in some way. It makes Lottie wonder how much Tai actually believes - or if she’s still just going along with things for Van’s benefit.
But Lottie knows Tai, knows that there’s something in her - something tangible, something…sourced from the earth. Something that can reach what Lottie can’t.
“I think she knows,” Lottie starts, “She feels It too. But sometimes it’s hard to…you know. To let it in.”
Taissa swallows. “Yeah.”
Van shuffles and looks down at her shoes. Her face is inaccessible. Lottie doesn’t know what’s happened between them, but ever since the cabin fire…
Her face is starting to heal. The snow has almost completely melted. That godforsaken cabin is burned down. These are good things, Lottie tells herself.
Yet it stays. And stays. That lingering sense of wrongness, like she’s weightless, floating away, tethered to nothing.
And the others - Van, Shauna, Natalie - they grasp onto the nothing. The nothing that was once something, was once everything. But Lottie knows, even if they can’t contend with it.
Van comes to her one morning when Taissa is buried in a book on how to build shelter. She’s holding something in her hands, then hides it behind her back and digs in her pocket for something else.
“Hey. I, uh, I made some of these rock things from the…the caves and I was wondering if you could, um, christen it? I - I know it sounds silly but-“
“For what?”
Van looks slightly embarrassed. “For…protection.”
Lottie says nothing at first. Van’s somewhat bashful expression and trembling hands are just another reminder of what they’ve all been feeling since they lost the cabin - clinging on to some infinitesimal thread of life, thread of It.
“I can’t…”
“Van,” Lottie says with more emphasis, needing to get the point across, “I can't help you. Okay?”
“You already have. You saved me, Lot.”
Lottie shakes her head, refusing to look her in the eye, “I don't know what that was, but it's not - I'm not - I can't do it anymore. Any of it. I'm sorry.”
They never spoke of anything after that. Van, lost to this place, followed Tai to the end of the world.
And Lottie, needing something too, found it in the fragments of Shauna, the girl whose punches still reverberated around in her skull, the girl made of ice and blood and terror and the windmill of their violent corruption, broken-down stomachs primed for a different, dissonant chord - a new flesh.