Chosen

He chose. He is going back.

He steps out of the boathouse light and onto the bank. The plank creaks once. The water keeps its slow lap against the pilings. The sound out past the dark does not change, and he does not wait to see if it will. He is done waiting.

He goes up the bank. He does not run. He moves fast and low, eyes up the path, breath held shallow. The camp is dark past the boathouse, the cabins black between the pines. He walks with the blood dried stiff over his hands and keeps moving.

Nothing comes at him. He cannot stop checking that. He is twenty-one and fast, and he has crossed the open ground of a camp where everyone else is dead, and not one thing has come at him.

He walks on through the dark, past the buildings.

The mess hall door is open. He went out through the back when the night began, and the first of them is still in the doorway where it fell.

The face is toward him. A counselor from the staff table — mouth gone slack and half open, eyes doing nothing. The blood is black across the boards in a wide spread. He steps around it. He does not slow down. He goes through the doorway.

The kitchen is beyond the serving window, and an old, sweet smell comes from it. He does not go in. He came out of here at the start, past the staff table. It is behind him now, and he does not turn around for it. He keeps his eyes ahead to the next building.

He stops to listen, hears nothing, and goes on.

The archery range is next, on the flat between the pine line and the water. He crosses the clearing to reach it, quick, and the bales stand dark down the line, the rack of bows a dark shape against the pines, the arrows in their slots. Caleb Reyes minded it, and Caleb never left a thing crooked.

Caleb Reyes was twenty-nine, the best archer in the camp, and he did not talk much. When Lu Di missed, Caleb came up behind him, adjusted his draw, and said, “loose the breath first.” Then he had him shoot it again. He told Lu Di what he had done wrong in two words, then stood back and let him fix it.

The body is at the target at the far end of the line, where the arrow should land. It is propped against the butt of the target, the head tipped forward, the chest toward the wood. A shaft sticks out of the chest, the broadhead buried in the target. A shot Caleb would have been proud of. The arrow went where it was sent.

He stops. It is the first time he has stopped since the water. He looks at the shaft a long moment, then at the body, then at the target. He does not touch it. He goes on.

The staff cabins are past the range. The door is still hanging open on that one black room. He passes it without a look in. The space between the cabins goes by him and he does not slow.

The quiet is worst here, where the cabins sit close, because this is where the noise used to be. At the end of a day the staff came off the fields and the porch was loud, and the loud was Dana’s doing more than anybody’s. Dana Barros ran this camp. She called everyone kiddo and meant it, and she saw through all of it.

He sees her. A hand on his shoulder. The pen through the clipboard. She pushed the hair out of a kid’s face with a thumb and told him to straighten up. She looked at him once, hard, the look she gave when she had caught somebody, and she said, “I see you, kiddo.” And then she said, softer, “I see you, and I think you’re going to be fine.”

He keeps the words. She told him he would be fine. She was wrong.

The building ahead is a pine cabin with a porch — the director’s quarters. The door is open.

He stops at the edge of the porch. The light behind the door is the first light he has seen since the boathouse, low and yellow, a lamp burning on Whitfield’s desk. The chair is empty. The room holds the lamp and nothing else.

The killer left them. He can go in, or he can go on. He stands in the dark a long time.

Then he goes in.

The room is Whitfield’s. The wall is covered with schedules and forms — shift times, a head-count sheet, a clipboard on the chair. The air is stale and closed. He has been in this room before, to be told the week’s schedule. He looked at this wall and heard Whitfield read the numbers off it — the head count, the shifts, the stations. He sees it now, and the man who read it is gone, and the schedule is still written on the wall.

He goes to the basin and washes the blood from his hands. The water goes red, then dark, then pink, then clear. He scrubs between his fingers and under the nails, and the tremor in him shows itself in the cold water — a fine shake he cannot steady, nothing in reach to hold against it. He washes until the water is clear, then dries his hands on a rag.

He takes the phone off the wall and holds it to his ear. The dial tone is dead. He presses the hook down and tries again, and there is nothing at the other end. He puts it back.

He turns the radio on. Nothing but static. He leaves it on — it is better than the silence.

The drawer in the desk holds the axe. He looks at it. He does not open it. The axe can wait. Everything else has waited. He leaves the drawer closed.

The ones who could have met it if they had seen it coming went first. The ones who led, who would have got everyone under one roof and called the count, went next. The ones who knew the ground and would have found him before anything found him went before the end. He is the only one left.

A force that went through everyone else kept him for last. He does not know yet what it wants him for. What he knows is that he was chosen.