Vern said as much out loud, and the teenager replied, At least I’m not brainwashed.
Seemed like she was to Vern. Little children who passed the homeless always stopped; if not to give, at least to look, to acknowledge. It was their parents who scolded them into looking away, ignoring, hating. People defended all manner of views inherited from their caregivers to the grave, all the while claiming to have reached these conclusions of their own sound minds.
So Vern vowed to eschew the outside world as much as she did Cainland.
She held each babe as she stood on shaking legs before the fire. Her nightgown rippled in billows around her. The pink fabric, warped by time, had the bleached-bloodstain hue of an overexposed Polaroid. No one could say it was a dignified birthing garment, but then birthing wasn’t a dignified affair. One need only consider the sheer animal humiliation of the act: shit, mucus, sobs. O, what a thing to be reduced to your truest nature, to be once more a dog whimpering in the night, clinging to battle-worn pups, the vessel of your body transformed into a tunnel for viscera. At least in these lowly moments the world became absent of airs. There could be no tea-sipping with a veiny dark placenta sloshing out of you.
Vern crawled with Howling and Feral into the temporary woodland shelter, desperate for sleep that she knew wouldn’t come without a fight. The wolves always flush out the runaways, the fiend had said. Had he put those sounds in her mind, then? Those feelings and smells? Meat-scented wolf breath and wolf slobber and wolf nails? She’d never had a haunting as full-on as that.
Vern huffed in disgust, sickened by her naivete. Distance from the Blessed Acres hadn’t rid her of hauntings because everything Eamon or Sherman had ever said about toxins and withdrawal causing them was a fabrication. With her own two ears Vern had listened to her husband preach that nonsense and believed it. Foolery. She was no different than the Cainites who’d stood idly by at her wedding, sucking up Sherman’s lies about Vern needing his husbandly guidance to save her soul. People said Vern was stubborn and hardheaded, but not stubborn and hardheaded enough to be immune to lies. She had proof now that the hauntings had nothing to do with withdrawal because she was miles and miles from Cainland, but it shouldn’t have taken all that for her to know the truth. The visions Cainites had weren’t society’s toxins oozing out. They were toxins being put in. Had to be. That was all Cainland was, Reverend Sherman putting bunk into people’s minds. Turned out he was doing it literally, too. Poisoning people. When she’d settled in these woods, Vern had thought she’d been the one to encroach on the fiend’s territory, but he’d revealed his hand when he’d said what he said: The wolves always flush out the runaways.
He had to have followed her here on Reverend Sherman’s orders. The dead animals were meant to scare her back to the compound. When that didn’t work, he poisoned her mind with a haunting. He’d put something in the river water she drank from, something that was in the same water back at Cainland.
Vern reclined against the tree trunk that formed the base of the lean-to, babes on her belly. The curious quiet of November reigned. It was the season of shriveling and cadaverous light. So many creatures would die this coming winter, and Vern counted herself among them.
This recent revelation proved it. Escaping the Blessed Acres hadn’t changed the most essential truth of Vern’s being: a misfit in the Land of the Living, she’d always been a dead girl walking.
2
VERN SQUINTED at the fiend below. She watched him from her perch high in a shortleaf pine. He wore an oversized hunting cap, shearling-lined flaps protecting his ears against January wind.
She needed to be more careful. Just minutes ago she’d been on the ground, headed toward a trap to check it for meat. When she’d heard the fiend whistling, she had only a moment to dash up the tree to hide.
Howling and Feral slept on either side of her front, tied to her in a double pouch she’d made from a brain-tanned hide. Neither had yet made a peep, but they’d been napping now for hours and were due to awaken. If they did stir, she’d not be able to sway or rock them back into a lull. To do so would risk creaking the branch and alerting the fiend to her presence.
Vern berated herself for ever thinking her life would be free from harm by following in Lucy’s footsteps and running away from Cainland. Things had a way of working out for Vern’s best friend in ways they didn’t for Vern. She wondered where Lucy was right now—surely not up no damn tree. No, Lucy was someplace living the life, probably sitting in one of those fancy big-screen theaters eating popcorn and slurping orange drink.