Wild (8 page)

“He's probably our age. Brown eyes. Really dark hair, I don't know if it's black or brown. But it's in dreads. They go past his shoulders, for sure. Maybe as tall as Josh, I don't know.”

A high-pitched tone lingered on the line. It resolved into Sofia asking, “And?”

“And what?”

“Is he hot?”

With a sigh, Dara dropped her hand in her lap. “Seriously, Sof. I'm still traumatized, for real. He was torn to shreds. I was literally holding pieces of his chest together.”

Immediately penitent, Sofia apologized. “Sorry. Sorry. My whole week has been is she hot? Is he hot? Who's hot? Am I hot? Brain is still engaged in OrlandoVision, obviously. Is he okay?”

She only wished she knew. “They won't let me go to the hospital to see him. Family only, can you believe that?”

“I can't, that sucks.”

“It really does,” Dara said. Her promise to Cade at the ranger's station haunted her. Was he sitting up at the hospital, waiting for her to arrive? Was he afraid? Was he awake? She didn't even know that for certain.

Her dad wasn't all that forthcoming when she asked about him, and there was nobody else to fill her in. Every so often, he'd ask her again, did she know his name? Did she know him? That told Dara something important: they hadn't found Cade's family yet.

That meant he was all alone in the hospital. No one to sit next to him, or hold his hand. No one to reassure him that everything would be all right. It made her stomach churn.

Eager to change the subject, Dara asked, “Anyway, whatever. Is Orlando awesome? Tell me stuff. Are you having the best time ever?”

“Oh my god,” Sofia exclaimed. “The closest beach is an hour away. An hour away. Did you know that?”

“Are you telling me you haven't been to the beach even once?”

“No!”

“You went all the way to Florida for spring break and no beach?”

Practically yelling, Sofia said, “No! And I'm furious!”

Suddenly, Dara laughed. It rolled from her, low and soft. It felt so good, like it had released a pressure she hadn't realized was building inside her. Tucked into the sweet, dark corner of her closet, Dara escaped in her best friend's vacation for just a little while.

For the time being, that was the only escape she had. She wasn't about to let it go until she had to.

Twelve

I
t was too bright, and everything stank.

Struggling to sit up, Cade winced. His chest hurt, his shoulder, too. He started to rub it, but tubes jerked him short. They coiled around him, unnatural vines. They trailed from his arm to a metal hook above the bed.

Bags of yellow liquid hung there. One drip at a time the contents slipped into him, through needles fixed with filmy white tape.

He understood he was in a hospital. The buzz from the helicopter rotors still filled his ears. Bright flashes from the emergency room came back when he closed his eyes.

Chaos—his head was chaos. The memories were disjointed. He remembered people asking him questions. Pushing needles into him. Rubbing his hand when it got dark again. Until then, he hadn't felt anything. It was rush after rush. Bleary awareness followed by black nothing, unconsciousness instead of sleep.

Well, he was awake now.

Sliding to the edge of the bed, Cade stared at the floor. It was so smooth. Blue and brown tiles, triangles. They fit together in a pattern, and they were cold under his bare feet. A wave of nausea hit him and he lifted his feet a moment.

His mother had said that hospitals were the best place to get sick and die.
Staphylococcus aureus
,
Pseudomonas aeruginosa
,
Acinetobacter baumannii
—Mom made diseases in Latin sound like music.

They weren't musical anymore.

Eyes darting, Cade reeled. There were so many things he couldn't see. The bandages on his chest could have already been contaminated. The needles taped into his flesh might be feeding infection right into his veins.

Shuddering, Cade took a step. The motion reverberated in his chest. It hurt to move, but Cade ignored that. Carefully studying the tangle of equipment tethering him, he stripped himself clean. Piece by piece—the clip on his finger was easy enough. It shook right off. The IVs were trickier.

With a hiss, he peeled the tape off and flicked it from his fingers. Blood welled around the needle and a bone-deep hurt spiked through his arm. Better fast than slow, he pulled the IVs out. Sticky patches on his skin came off last, and that's when the alarms blared.

So many lights blinked. The sound punched at him, unnatural, mechanical cries. He had to get out; his skin crawled. Throwing the curtains open, Cade slapped his hands against the windows. Greasy, bloody handprints smeared the glass. Scrabbling, he dug around the frame, then realized the only way through it would be
through
it.

When he turned, a nurse strode into the room. Both startled, their screams combined. She rushed toward him.

“You need to get back in bed,” she said. She was young; she looked afraid.

Scrambling back, Cade knocked over the IV stand. A new alarm sounded, and set off a chain down the hall.

The nurse stopped. Her fear showed on her face, in the shadow on her brow. And the way she had to start twice before she managed to say, “Let's just lay down, okay? You're bleeding, let me help.”

Cade felt caged. Backing into the wall, he jerked away from it and measured the height of the bed. Could he jump it? “I have to go.”

“You need to lay down.”

She sounded more certain. Like she'd worked up her nerve. She walked toward him purposefully. Voices in the hallway rose and footsteps spattered. In a panic, Cade grabbed a chair. That broke her bravery—she screamed and ducked.

Cade felt a fleeting sense of guilt. He wasn't going to hurt her. He just needed to get out. The chair was for the glass; surely it would break the glass and he could climb down. He could get out, get back home to his cave by the bee hollow. Lie in running streams and let them wash him clean.
Home.

But that thought was erased by the blinding hot pain in his chest.

Instead of throwing the chair through the window, Cade dropped it. The crash echoed—down the hall, and in his ears. Head pounding, vision blurring, he stumbled. It seemed like the world had turned on its side. Catching the edge of the bed, Cade fell hard. Darkness swept up, soothing, sweeping away his sick stomach and his pain.

Just then, the tray table tipped. Ice water sheeted across his back, a clear river, cold and hard. His eyes snapped open when the cold shocked him back to awareness. He grabbed the bed again. He had one thought: get up. But the floor was slick. Skating, sliding, Cade fell again.

Before he recovered, strong arms hauled him off the floor. When he hit the bed, he screamed. The pain in his chest blotted out sense and thought. Hot sweat rose on his skin. All he could do was pant. Gasp. Try to ride it out.

“Thorazine,” somebody said.

Somebody else said, distantly, “Get some restraints and the biohazard team in here.”

Cade roared. He knew what biohazard meant. He wasn't safe. The room wasn't safe. He tried to wrench himself off the bed. A hard hand slammed him back down. Someone, a man, broad and imposing, hovered over him. Though his scrubs had little blue ducks on them, he wasn't friendly at all. His wasn't a sweet, familiar weight like Dara's.

Dara. Throat raw, Cade rasped, “Dara, where is she?”

“Quiet,” the man with the blue ducks said.

Suddenly, Cade was cold. He shook, his teeth chattering. The last of his adrenaline sputtered out. He was cold, and hurt and the weight on his chest made it hard to breathe. Everything blurred. No matter where he looked, he couldn't focus. Smeared, doubled people stood over him. Their voices were a jumble.

He heard someone telling him to hold still, and someone else yelling at him to calm down.
Calm down.
That confused him, because he
was
calm. He
was
still. Wasn't he? He was floating, didn't that mean he was still? A bright, silvery pain slipped into his hip. It was like an anchor. It tethered him to the bed.

“Please,” he said. But his tongue felt thick. And he didn't know what the please was for. Please let me go? Please help me? Please don't let me die? Whatever it was, he didn't have long to consider it. A new dark came over him. One that slipped over his eyes, a mask of blue.

He floated, dreamlessly, in space.

 

Sometimes, talking to her dad felt like a police interrogation. In this case, it actually
was
.

Dara pulled her sleeves over her hands. “Dad, for the millionth time, I don't know him.”

“But you know something
about
him.”

It hadn't been a million times, but it was pushing fifty, at least. Nobody—not even her family—believed her. A stranger swooping her away on a vine, it was ridiculous. It was a story that belonged in old books and cartoons. And boy, what a mistake to mention that she thought Cade might have been following her.

Slumping, Dara said, “He told me his name. He wanted to know how many people were left. And that's seriously, really, totally all I know.”

Dara's dad pushed his chair back. He had keen eyes. They weighed people's words, their expressions. He liked to tell Dara and her friends that he was a human lie detector. Which explained why Dara got invited to parties, but nobody ever told her the address. It was pickup and delivery only for the sheriff's kid.

An old clock ticked away on the wall. It buzzed, competing with the fluorescent lights. The itchy, tingly sound went on and on while Sheriff Porter peered at her expectantly.

This was a tactic, Dara realized, called “let the other guy talk first.” Unfortunately for her dad, she didn't have anything to say.

Slumping a little more, she let her gaze wander. The police station was almost as familiar as her living room. In December, a wobbly plastic Christmas tree stood in the corner. She used to make presents to put under it. Now, she brought cookies. People only needed so many tin-can pencil holders.

The bulletin board hung on the other wall. Lots of FBI fact sheets and Most Wanted lists. But weirdly, now a police sketch of Cade and a picture of his bloodied clothes hung there, too.

He wasn't dangerous, but he
was
most wanted. Since they'd come out of the forest by helicopter and ambulance, official people had a lot of questions. Like what Cade's last name was. Where his parents were. How they could be reached.

Dara didn't know. Cade wasn't telling.

It seemed to Dara like her dad, the human lie detector, should have realized she wasn't holding back on him. No, Cade was as mysterious to her as he was to the social workers and the police. And the rangers, and the Parks Department. Get attacked by a bear in a national forest, and a lot of people want answers.

The worst part was, school gossip was slowly turning into news. Lia's idiot friend Kit was running a Tumblr now. He'd cobbled together some of the stuff the police put out trying to identify Cade. There were pictures, of his face and his bloodied deerskin clothes. Somehow, Kit got ahold of an email from the Pulaski County Sheriff's office to another department in Nashville.

Nobody was supposed to see the email except for other police. So it looked pretty terrible, their theories written out in black-and-white. They thought Cade's babbling about infections and sickness meant something. Maybe he was a terrorist. It was obvious he'd been living in the woods for a while; was he growing drugs? Hiding a bomb lab?

Kit added his own messed-up spin on all of it. He turned it into a sideshow, complete with macros. They were all the same picture, some guy in a coonskin cap on an orange-and-red starburst background.

The first one read STEP ONE: FIGHT BEAR. STEP TWO: ??? STEP THREE: PROFIT!! Another one read BREAKING BEAR: ALL NATURAL METH. There were more, each of them stupider than the last. Dara made the mistake of asking Lia to get Kit to lay off. Two hours later, somebody added a stick-figure girl to the macro with the caption, LEAVE MY PRIMITIVE BOY ALONE.

Sheriff Porter pulled a folder from his desk. “He trashed his hospital room today.”

Dara's pulse stilled.

“The whole time, he was screaming for you.”

She felt sick. She'd sworn she'd see him, and she hadn't. Not for days, not since the paramedics had closed the helicopter doors between them. No matter how many times she asked, even when she explained her promise, the answer was always no. Guilt and responsibility nagged at Dara. She raised her head to meet her father's gaze. “Is he okay?”

“What's it matter if you don't know him?”

What a jerk. Gathering her bag, Dara stood. “He only saved my life.”

Pointing at the chair, Sheriff Porter said, “You're grounded. It's you and me until your mother gets off work.”

It wasn't a little bit of grounded either. Sneaking onto the landline was probably the last contact with the outside world she was going to have. They'd confiscated her car keys and her phone, her laptop and her iPad. The only reason she knew what Kit was up to online was because Lia couldn't stand keeping the hilarity to herself.

Dara wasn't sure why her parents had cracked down so hard. She was a good student. She didn't get in trouble; they never had to worry about her—not like they did about Lia. And what's more, they
knew
she was spending spring break with Josh. Sure, they thought it would be at Disney World, not Daniel Boone National, but so?

“I have homework,” she said, raising her bag.

“On the first day back?”

She ducked out of his office and planted herself at the empty desk near the filing cabinets. She lost herself in a book. Occasionally, her thoughts would interrupt. She really did want to know how Cade was. Screaming for her? Her dad could have been lying, but Dara wanted to see for herself.

Unnoticed at the back of the station, Dara read and plotted. What she needed to do was get her mom to volunteer for guard duty. Things were always so busy at the Pulaski County At-Risk Outreach. Even when Dara went in to help her mom with month's-end paperwork, Mom barely noticed she was there. Dara could break out for a visit, easy. No problem getting back in time for the dinner run home, for sure.

Dara turned a page of her book. She found herself looking over it, though. Glancing at the bulletin board again. Something in her chest tightened. The sketch was bad, but the pictures of Cade's ruined clothes made it all too real. The heat of his blood felt fresh on her hands. His wild, terrified look pierced her again.

She
would
get to him. Soon.