Mark Adams's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Mark Adams had lost his daughter on this island, and now the thing that hunted her had her scent. He knelt on the dark gray sand outside the cave, splitting bamboo with a stone. His Hawaiian shirt hung in rags. His beard had grown wild. He needed a boat to carry his family off this place. But first he needed something to kill with. Eva crouched beside him at the worktable, a rough thing of bundled bamboo and rock. She was his wife, and she worked like a woman running out of time. Her hands bled where the stone edges caught them. She did not stop. "Sharper," she said. "It has to punch through." Mark dragged a flat stone across the bamboo tip. The point took an edge. He held it up. Thin, ugly, deadly. "It heard her last night," he said. "It knows where she went." Eva's jaw tightened. She wound cord around a spearhead and pulled it tight with her teeth. "Then we don't sleep," she said. "We find her first." They worked through the gray light. Mark's fingers cramped. He thought of Sarah alone in the trees, her pink backpack, the pocket knife she hated to use. He drove the stone harder. One spear. Two. Then a cluster of them, bound together, tips bristling. A sound came from the treeline. Not wind. A slow drag of feet through leaves. Mark froze. Eva grabbed a finished spear and stood. Between the trunks, a gray shape shifted. Tall. Wrong. It wore a rotted shirt and a necklace of bone, and it turned its ruined face toward the cave. It lifted its head and breathed in, tasting the air. It had the scent. It was following it. And the trail led toward their daughter. "Now," Eva whispered. Mark seized two spears and rose. His legs shook. The creature saw them and its mouth opened. It came fast, faster than a dead thing should. Eva threw. Her spear caught its shoulder and spun it sideways. It shrieked and kept coming. Mark met it. He drove his spear into its chest with everything he had. The stone tip punched through. The creature staggered, clawing at the shaft. Eva stabbed again, into its side. It fell against the worktable and crashed to the sand, twitching. Then it went still. Mark stood over it, breathing hard. His hands would not stop trembling. Eva touched his arm. Her face was pale. "We did it," he said. But Eva was looking past the body, at the ground where it had crawled from. She crouched. Small footprints ran through the sand there. Sneaker prints. Fresh. Leading away into the dark trees. Sarah had come this close. In the night, while they slept. And she had turned back into the forest alone, not knowing they were here. Mark grabbed the bundle of spears. "She's out there," he said. "Right now." Eva was already moving toward the trees.