Instead her lighter just adheres to a low wall of meat and hair, is upright enough that it’s still flickering a weak flame.
“Thanks,” Jade says to it, and turns on her heel, following Letha through the trees, Letha’s long legs eating up the ground, Jade’s limp still there so Letha has to stop, wait for Jade to catch up, then offer her a shoulder.
“You don’t have to,” Jade says, latching on.
“I’m not leaving you,” Letha says. “I know you think this is some big horror movie we’re in, and that you’re going to get to choose your death, but—this is real life. A tragedy, but it’s real, and it doesn’t have to follow any rules.”
Jade doesn’t argue, tells herself to let the unfolding events prove her case.
Now that she’s moving, though—
“I have to pee,” she says, stopping them.
Letha extracts herself, steps away, turns politely around but that’s not quite enough for Jade. She limps to a tree, pushes off it to the next, and the next, struggles twenty or thirty feet between her and Letha before feeling through the gore for the snaps and gummed-up zipper of her blood-matted coveralls.
When she’s shouldering back into them is when she hears the groan. She radars in on it, the rest of the world falling away.
A low, long shape maybe fifteen feet back in the trees.
Theo Mondragon.
Clamped around his leg—same one, different one?—is another bear trap. One he didn’t have the strength to push apart, apparently. Is he passed out from blood loss, from fatigue, from grief, what? Where’s his kneecap now?
“Doesn’t matter,” Jade says, actually out loud, just, very quiet. “You’ll get out just in time, won’t you?”
Unless it’s not him, Letha says in Jade’s head.
But still, right? Jade knows for sure and certain that he put nails in Shooting Glasses and Cody and Mismatched Gloves.
No way is she announcing him to Letha, so she can use her final girl determination to wrench the jaws of that bear trap open. This is a Let-Nature-Take-Its-Course situation if there ever was one.
“You okay?” Letha asks, meeting Jade halfway to crutch her along again, some part of Theo evidently cueing in that Jade’s close, so he should groan again, louder, longer.
“Are you?” Jade says back, then has to stop when Letha does.
“Hear that?” she asks.
“Mountain alligator,” Jade tells her, doing her eyebrows to show how much she doesn’t mean this. “I scared it, I think.”
But challenging Letha to call her on it, too.
Letha considers this, listens harder, and when the groan doesn’t come again, they move forward, Letha going from garage to garage to garage along the shore, coming out of each shaking her head no: all the boats they never even use are trashed. Not the engines, but the hulls. The boats are taking on water, foundering, the only thing holding them up their mooring lines or the straps looped under them.
“He wants us to have to walk it,” Jade says.
“You can’t,” Letha says back.
“You could swim it,” Jade says.
Letha nods, already knew that.
“The yacht,” she says finally. Again.
“No motors on the water for the Fourth,” Jade recites.
“I think this would be an exception.”
“Except I’m not going on that boat again.”
“Yacht.”
“Whatever.”
“Where’s that… the Umiak, right?”
“Hunh,” Letha says, looking around for it just the same.
“He already sunk it, didn’t he?” Jade says.
“There,” Letha says, and she’s right. The Umiak is drifting out between Terra Nova and Camp Blood. Not sitting quite level anymore, either. It’s the Orca now, after the shark’s been chewing on it.
Letha shakes her head in frustration.
“They’ll have hot dogs and stuff over there,” Jade says, about Proofrock.
“I don’t want to go through that… that old camp, cool?”
Letha says.
Jade nods, doesn’t explain that they’ll just be looking down on Camp Blood from the bluff.
“We’re gonna miss the movie if we don’t—” she says instead, but Letha’s silence and stillness stop her.
Jade follows what Letha’s staring at.
It’s… a head bobbing in the tall grass? An ostrich?
“You,” Letha says to the ostrich head, pulling Jade ahead with it. “Pedals only,” she narrates, “no motor.”