Trogloxene by Lena Valencia
Max was home.
It had been ten days of sleepless nights punctuated by nightmares, ten days of television news crews in the front yard, ten days of headlines like 11-Year-Old Girl Still Missing in Cave and How Long Can She Survive? No Luck on First Expedition to Find Lost Girl, ten days of fast food for dinner (if there was dinner) after her parents’ long hours at Forrester’s Caverns, overseeing the rescue team. But now, after an additional three days of staring at her sister through plexiglass in quarantine at that dismal Phoenix hospital, Max was home—not home exactly, but back at their vacation rental in Quicksilver Springs—and Holly was looking forward to things going back to normal.
The first dinner after she was back they had spaghetti with meatballs and a kale salad. Holly watched, nibbling a piece of kale, as Max spooled one generous helping of noodles after another around her fork, shoving each into her mouth. When she was done with the pasta, she grabbed a handful of meatballs from the serving dish and took a bite before laying the obliterated mound on her plate and slurping the sauce off her fingers. Marinara bloodied her chin. It was all Holly could do not to gag.
“So hungry!” exclaimed their mother. “That’s good!”
“Well, there wasn’t much to eat down in the cave, was there, Maxie?” said their dad.
Max shook her head. Before the rescue team had found her and been able to lower food down, Max had survived—for eight days—on the four kind bars in her fanny pack.
There was something weird about Max’s face, thought Holly. Something off. Max had always been the pretty one, while adults used words like “unconventional” to describe Holly. But now Max’s eyes, once a crystal green, were dulled and bloodshot. Her shimmering golden hair had lost its sheen and hung limply around her face, which was sharper now, more angular. She twitched at every fork clank, sniffling and shifting in her chair.
“Can you turn off the lights?” Max asked.
“Of course, sweetie!” crooned their mother. They spent the rest of the meal in darkness.
After dinner, Holly FaceTimed with her best friend, Justine, back home in LA, as she did every night. In the middle of their conversation, Max walked into Holly’s room without even knocking.
“Get out of here!” Holly screamed. Their parents might have been letting Max do whatever the heck she wanted, but Holly sure wasn’t. Max started to say something but stopped when Holly glared at her. She retreated and left the room, thank God.
“Did she drink her own pee?” Justine asked. “That’s what you have to do, you know.”
Justine was always asking the grossest questions.
“No, disgusting,” said Holly. “There was an underground stream.”
“You know you are going to be the coolest eighth grader. Marie Jackson was asking me all these questions about you.” Marie Jackson was the daughter of a famous actor, and one of the most popular girls at La Brea Middle School. Justine and Holly hated Marie.
The conversation shifted, as it often did, to Justine’s crush on Sean, who was in her summer performing arts day camp. Sean was late for rehearsal today. Sean had skateboarded by Justine at the park and nodded at her. Sean had liked one of Justine’s posts. Who cares? Holly wanted to scream at her friend. But she never did. Through her earbuds, Holly heard a clatter coming from outside her room. Still holding her phone, she tiptoed down the hallway to the dark kitchen. In the dim glow of the digital clock on the microwave she could just make out Max’s slight silhouette at the counter.
“I’ve got to go,” she whispered to Justine. “Talk tomorrow.”
She flipped on the light. Max jerked her head up and bared her teeth. She was grasping a metal serving spoon, poised to eat cereal and milk from a large mixing bowl. It looked like she’d dumped the entire box in there. “Turn it off!” Max hissed.
Holly did as she was told. “What the heck are you doing?” she whispered.
“I was hungry,” said Max, between slurps of cereal.
Holly lingered for a moment. Something was up with Max, she could tell.
“What are you looking at?”
“Nothing, freak,” said Holly.
Back in her room, she listened to the spoon clinking against the metal and wondered what had happened to her little sister.
Those ten days that Max was gone had been scary and boring at the same time. That was what Holly had felt in the Forrester’s Caverns State Park ranger station: fear and boredom. Boredom while waiting for her parents to finish meeting with the park manager so that she could go in and talk to him. Fear while staring at the puffy, watery look on her mother’s face in the manager’s office. Holly sat down in the folding chair next to her dazed father, the metal cold on the backs of her thighs. Two police officers stood behind the park manager, a heavyset man who introduced himself as Ranger Garcia.
“I’d like you to tell the officers here exactly what happened.” He spoke to her in an artificially high, soft voice, enunciating each word, like someone talking to a small child.
One officer held a pen and notepad, expectantly.
She looked to her mother, who avoided eye contact. Her mother had said very little to Holly since the incident.
“Go ahead and tell them what you told us, Hols,” said her father.
So she did: that they’d been hanging back behind the tour group. Holly had been minding her own business, and when she turned to check on her sister, Max was gone. She’d called out to her, even shined her headlamp into the shadows beyond the dim green in-ground lighting that illuminated the stalagmites surrounding the walkway. When Max didn’t answer, Holly immediately ran to tell her mother. While she talked, the officer scribbled furiously.
Garcia looked as if he believed her, but it was hard to know for certain. He slid a laminated map of Forrester’s Caverns across the desk. “Can you show me where you were when you last saw your sister?”
The map reminded her of a diagram of the digestive system. She traced her finger through the cave entrance and into the caverns, all with dumb names. The Candelabra Room was where she’d last seen Max, but if she told them that, then her parents would know that she’d waited until the Hall of Echoes to say anything. She pointed to the Forrester Passage, which came right before the Hall of Echoes, and handed the map back to Ranger Garcia.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m sure this isn’t easy for any of you, but I want you all to know that my guys have made Max their priority. They will find her.”
Her mother began to cry again. Then it was time to go.
In the car, after they’d picked up Burger King for dinner—a rarity for the family—her mother turned around to face Holly for what felt like the first time since Max’s disappearance.
“This is your fault, you know,” she said. “You should have been watching your sister.”
“Lisa,” her father said, weakly. “Don’t.”
Her mother sighed and turned back around in her seat. The greasy fug of the fast food made Holly queasy as the saguaros whipped by on either side of them. Was Max beneath them at that moment, in some far-flung underground passage? She hoped the jacket her mother had forced Max into was keeping her warm in the cave’s chill.
Back at the vacation rental, Holly lay flat on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She could hear her mother in Max’s room, sobbing. It wasn’t until the next day that she realized her parents had left dinner in the car.
The morning after Max came home, their mom made pancakes for the girls, but only Holly was awake to eat them. She sat at the table, gloomily sopping up syrup as her parents traded glances in a coded language that Holly was sick of trying to read. When Holly asked what was going on, her dad said that the two of them should go on a hike before it got too hot and give her mom and sister some space. Holly tried to protest, but it was futile.
They drove to an “easy” trail along a wash. Holly huffed along, sweating beneath the stupid hat her father forced her to wear. They were each carrying a gallon of water in addition to their water bottles, “just in case.” Her backpack straps dug into her shoulders.
She was so sick of the desert. “You’ll like the Southwest,” their father had told her and Max, when he’d informed them that their family vacation this year would be to Quicksilver Springs, Arizona, two hours outside Phoenix in the middle of nowhere. “It looks a lot like that computer game you’re obsessed with.” He meant Colony, which was set on a desert planet. As it turned out, it was better on the screen than in person. Sure, she was into the giant rocks, and Max had found a tarantula in the yard one night. But the extreme heat was dizzying, and after a few days, she missed walking around the Third Street Promenade with Justine, eating churros and checking out boys. And then, of course, the cave incident had happened.
“Dad,” she said, “when are we going home?”
“Soon,” said her father. “The doctors want to make sure your sister is okay to travel.”
“Can I go home?”
He stared at her. There was a stripe of white on his nose where he hadn’t rubbed in sunscreen all the way. “Out of the question,” he said.
“I can stay with Justine,” Holly said.
“No,” said her father. “Believe it or not, your sister needs you right now.”
Holly doubted that. She’d felt something unexpected after Max had disappeared: the relief that came with being sisterless. People felt sorry for her, and she liked it. She liked not having Max there to steal her clothes; she liked not having her interrupt her FaceTime calls with Justine; she liked not having to call shotgun when one of her parents drove her somewhere. Max had it so freaking easy. People cooed over her all the time about how pretty she was, how “darling.” It was nice for Holly, with her lanky limbs and oily skin, to be the center of attention for once. But whenever this notion crept into her head, she pushed it away. It was evil, she knew, and she felt awful for even thinking it in the first place.
She’d felt something unexpected after Max had disappeared: the relief that came with being sisterless.
The terrain became rocky, the trail narrowed, and soon they were scrambling single file over boulders. Holly stormed ahead of her father, determined to get this death march over with. She was about to climb over a particularly large rock when her father yanked her wrist away. “Look out!” he cried.
Nestled in the handhold that Holly was about to grab on to was a scorpion, its shiny black tail curled to attack.
“I could have gotten stung and died,” shrieked Holly. “Can we please go back to the house?”
The dazed expression that he’d had the whole time Max was gone flashed across her father’s face. “All right,” he said robotically.
Later Holly came downstairs to find Max on the couch, watching TV, which was against the rules. The shades in the living room were pulled down. “How come Max gets to watch TV before dinner?” she asked their father.
“Why don’t you go help your mother?”
Holly groaned and walked into the kitchen.
“Oh good,” her mother said, hand in a chicken, “you’re here. I’m making a roast chicken for your sister, and the rest of us are going to have grilled cheese and broccoli. How does that sound?”
Holly despised broccoli, which her mother knew, but she wasn’t about to get into it with her. “You’re making an entire roast chicken for Max?”
Her mother washed her hands and dried them on a dish towel. “It’s what she specifically requested, and the man at the grocery store gave it to me for free. How cool is that?”
Holly didn’t say anything. She massaged her shoulder, sore from walking with the water bottles that morning.
“She’s not going to eat the whole thing. Stop giving me that look.” She picked up a bag of onions from the counter and handed it to Holly. “I need two of those, sliced. Then you can get started on the herbs.”
Holly sighed and began her work. The dull knife slipped each time she tried to cut through a bulb. Her eyes teared up.
“There’s a news crew coming tomorrow to interview us as a family,” her mother said, churning a pepper mill over the chicken. “I bought you a new dress. It’s on your bed.”
Normally Holly would have been thrilled at the prospect of being on TV. But the idea of spending another day in this miserable house made her want to retch. Plus she was sure that whatever her mom had gotten her was butt-ugly. “Can’t I just wear normal clothes?”
“Where did I put those giblets?” her mom said to no one, and wandered out of the kitchen. Typical. Leave me to do the work while you go off and dote on Max, thought Holly, wiping her nose on her sleeve. A scream came from the dining room. She dropped the knife and ran toward the sound. At the dining room table, their mother was trying to wrestle the bowl of chicken innards away from Max. Their father watched, helpless.
“Sweetheart,” shrieked their mother, “you cannot eat those raw!” Max didn’t loosen her grip on the bowl. “Charles,” she said, “do something.”
Their father crouched beside Max. “Give that back to your mother, please,” he said.
“But I want to eat it.”
“Maxine, that will give you a very bad tummy ache.” He reached his arm down to pull the bowl away. Max let out a snarl and gnashed her teeth at his wrist. Their father jerked his arm away just in time.
In a flash she’d shoved the glistening mess into her mouth and swallowed.
“Max!” their mother cried out.
“Oh my God, that’s so gross!” said Holly. Max flashed her a bloody-toothed grimace.
Their parents looked at each other, mouths agape. “Come on, Max,” said their mother. “We’re going back to the hospital.”
“Lisa,” said their dad, “let’s not catastrophize.”
“I don’t want to hear it,” their mother spat. “After everything—”
Holly tensed, anticipating a fight. Thankfully, their father held up his hands in surrender. “Fine,” he said. “Go ahead.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and grabbed Max by the wrist. “I’ll call you,” she said, slamming the door.
Holly and her father stared at the bowl that had held the glossy innards. Then her father picked it up with a frustrated sigh and dropped it into the kitchen sink. Holly found a paper towel and wiped the droplets of chicken liquid from the tabletop.
When Holly had first pulled her mother aside to tell her that Max was missing, her mother had told her the cave was no place for goofing off. They’d paid good money for this tour. She demanded that Holly go get her sister and tell her that since the girls had been so horrible all day, fighting over Holly’s silly sweatshirt, and now this, there would be no ice cream, no souvenirs from the gift shop on the way out.
“Mom,” Holly said in a trembling whisper, “I’m serious.”
Something wild lit her mother’s eyes. She called out Max’s name, running deeper into the cave. The tour guide stopped her lecture on cave geology and followed her mother, lips pressed to her walkie-talkie, shouting code. Her father went next, chasing after their bouncing head lamp beams. Holly stayed put, the confused voices of the tour group around her echoing off the walls.
No one knew how Max had gotten so far away from the group. She was found all those days later a dozen miles from where she’d run off, in a part of the cave that was closed even to park staff. The hypothesis was that she’d floated down the underground stream. It was a miracle she had survived.
How was what Holly wanted to know. But her parents had warned her not to ask Max questions about the cave, that she’d tell them in her own time. Holly had read up on Forrester’s Caverns during those days alone in the vacation rental. She knew about how the cave had been discovered by uranium miners, that the bats that lived there were called trogloxenes because they left the cave to feed, that cave fish had no eyes and were called troglobites since they lived only in the cave and never left. There were weirder things about the cave, too—conspiracy theories. UFO sightings near Mount Vista. A two-headed rabbit skeleton found at the entrance. Rumors of a thirty-foot-long snake seen slithering through the Hall of Echoes.
The websites that made these claims looked like they’d been built in the nineties, filled with capital letters and long-winded screeds. Most of them focused on creatures called mudmen: humans who’d gotten lost in the underground maze and become mutants who lived on raw flesh. It was the uranium-tinged water that was responsible for the mutation, apparently.
It was nonsense, Holly knew, but what if it wasn’t? Then what?
Though it was well after 9:00 PM by the time their mom shuttled Max back from the hospital, they gathered around the table to eat as a family because their dad had gone ahead and prepared dinner. Their mother recounted what the doctor had said. It turned out that raw chicken was only dangerous if it had salmonella, which, the doctor said, would have manifested symptoms by the time they arrived at the ER. “You gave us quite a scare,” she said to Max. The shadows on her face were intensified in the candlelight—a compromise, since Max had thrown a tantrum when Holly switched on the overhead light in the dining room. Across the table, Max was slowly breaking down the chicken with her hands, shoving the flesh into her mouth.
“Why are you letting her do that?” Holly said. It was truly disgusting, and Holly couldn’t believe that her parents weren’t saying anything.
“Holly,” said her dad, “just eat your dinner, okay?”
She pushed a mushy broccoli tree around on her plate. Her father should never be in charge of cooking. “I’m done,” she said before bringing her half-empty plate into the kitchen and letting it clatter loudly on the tile countertop.
Her father called from the dining room, demanding that she come back and help clean up.
“Make Max do it,” she yelled. She slammed the door to her room. She was astounded by the BS she had to put up with from her parents.
Holly eyed the Walmart bag on the bed that held her new dress. She took one look inside: pink. Why did her mother do this to her? She knew pink was Holly’s absolute least favorite color; Holly had told her a thousand times. She threw the dress to the side of the room and flung herself onto her bed, where she started up Colony on her laptop and wandered around the planet killing everyone she saw and picking up their supplies until her mother knocked on the door and told her lights out.
A yowl from the front yard woke her. She pulled aside the curtains and peeked out the window. The house didn’t have a yard, really—it was just a fenced-in patch of desert. The moon made the sand glow a dull gray. A rabbit darted by, followed by a dark blur. A coyote? The blur stopped. It was Max. She had the struggling rabbit in her hands. She lifted it to her face and tore into its skin with her teeth. Max looked up for a moment, seeming to sense Holly, but then returned to whatever it was she was doing to the animal. Holly lay back down in bed. There was no way she could have seen what she saw. She was dreaming, or something. She drifted into uneasy sleep.
In those days that fogged together after Max went missing, Holly’s parents would leave at dawn to meet with the rescue workers at the caverns. Holly cobbled together meals from pantry items left behind by previous renters: mushy beef stew out of a can, Triscuits and salsa, Cup Noodles, its Styrofoam container faded and yellowing. She spent hours on Colony, chatting with strangers, slaying demons. It felt good to be anonymous, to have nothing to worry about except where to find ammo. When her parents came home for the night, her mother would retreat to her room for the evening, leaving Holly and her dad to eat their burgers and fries alone, the crinkle of wrappers and the gentle pop of peeled-back condiment plastic the only conversation they could manage.
Ranger Garcia told them that keeping attention on the rescue meant resources for the rescuers, and resources for the rescuers meant they would find Max sooner. Her parents agreed to let the press photograph them as a family. They stood in front of the vacation rental in the scalding late-afternoon sunlight as reporters took their picture, her parents’ expressions stoic. A gold cross pendant glinted on her mother’s neck. She had let Holly put on lipstick and mascara, and Holly had even snuck on some foundation, hot and waxy on her face. Her mother’s hand clutched Holly’s shoulder, the first contact she’d had with her in days. Holly tried to focus on Mount Vista in the distance to keep from breaking down as the cameras clicked and flashed around her. Finally, her father wordlessly led the three of them inside, where they all disappeared into their rooms.
The photos had run in several major newspapers. Max’s plight had now turned viral, and Holly soon began to get messages from friends back home, from people at school who she hadn’t even realized knew who she was, asking how she was doing and sending prayer hand and heart emojis. They used hashtags on social: #SaveMax. #ForrestersCaverns. #CaveRescue.
Strangers were using those hashtags, too. There were theories. Holly pored over these. People had exhaustively analyzed the maps, posting their findings on YouTube, speculating where Max could be. Some said she’d run away from abusive parents. Some said the whole thing was a hoax, that her family had created a stunt for attention. Others assumed Max was dead, citing statistics for missing children. Holly clicked through videos and message boards. None seemed to offer anything resembling an answer.
By the time the news crew came, the house had lost the musty scent of dust mixed with putrefying garbage. Now it smelled like the coffee her mother had brewed. She’d woken Holly at dawn and tasked her with a sizable list of chores: getting rid of the containers of rotting flowers; taking out trash from the overflowing wastebaskets; washing dried tea bags and hardened black coffee silt out of mugs; disposing of the fast-food wrappers that littered the living room.
Sadie Jones, the reporter, was younger than Holly had expected her to be. She had straight black hair and flawless makeup. She’d be asking them questions, she said, and they could stop if things got too intense. There was a warmth in her voice that made Holly want to tell Sadie everything. A crew member turned on a light. Max hissed at him, but if he noticed, he pretended not to.
Holly wriggled in the stiff new pink dress between her mother and sister on the sofa. Because rousing Max had been an ordeal, Holly had not had the chance to tell her about her strange dream. Their mother had managed to wrestle Max into an equally itchy-looking purple dress and braid her hair just in time for the news crew. Still, the gray circles under her eyes made her look like one of the dwarf ghouls in Colony.
“Can you talk about the moment you realized Maxine was gone?” Sadie asked their mom, who had done a less-than-perfect job with her own makeup. There were streaks of poorly applied concealer under her eyes, and a dusting of mascara on her lower eyelids. She felt a pang of embarrassment on her mother’s behalf as she began to tell the story—the same one Holly had told to Ranger Garcia.
The dress became stifling, then. She imagined herself interrupting their mom, telling everything to Sadie: the fight, what she’d said to Max to make her run off. How she’d waited nearly twenty minutes before telling their parents about Max’s disappearance, because she hadn’t actually believed that Max was gone. Instead, she tugged on a loose piece of fuchsia thread in the hem of her skirt until their mother nudged her to stop.
Sadie’s eyes were glistening now. “How in the world did you get through the agony of not knowing where your daughter was?”
“Prayer,” their mother answered, to Holly’s surprise. Holly hadn’t seen their mother pray once and couldn’t remember the last time they’d gone to church. The reporter nodded, smiling warmly, and turned to Max. “And Maxine, that must have been very scary down there in that cave. What did you do to keep your spirits up?”
Holly could feel Max fidgeting. She smelled like sweat and moldy towels.
Holly doubted their mother had been able to coax Max into the shower this morning.
Then Max let out a long, whistling shriek—something between a cat in heat and a bird of prey. The same noise, Holly realized, that had woken her the night before.
For the briefest moment, Sadie dropped her reportorial professionalism, her mouth frozen in a shocked O, hand to her chest. Max stood and sauntered out of the room.
“Did you get that?” Sadie asked the cameraman.
“Maxie, honey?” called their mother, and followed after Max. “I’m sorry,” their father said to Sadie. “She’s probably tired.
Maybe we can reschedule?”
At lunch, Holly’s parents announced that the family was finally—finally!—going home. They would fly out of Phoenix Friday afternoon—the day after tomorrow!—and be in Los Angeles by dinner. Holly ran around the house singing goodbyes to random objects. “Goodbye, ugly painting,” she said to the portrait of the neon-green cactus above the television. “Goodbye, stupid sombrero,” she said to the hat hanging on the wall by the front door. “Goodbye, tacky house!” Her parents looked on with mild amusement. She was being a ham, as her mother would say. So what. For the first time in her life, Holly couldn’t wait to go back to school.
Holly ran around the house singing goodbyes to random objects.
“Chill,” said her mother. “Your sister’s taking a nap.”
“I. Don’t. Care,” she sang.
She FaceTimed Justine, but Justine wasn’t picking up. She scrolled through Justine’s social media: video after video of her on the beach in the red-and-white polka-dotted two-piece she’d bought with her allowance money, the one with the push-up bra that her mother had forbidden her to wear until she was in high school. Marie Jackson was in some of the videos, as was an older boy with patches of stubble dotting his chin and upper lip. This, Holly gathered, was Marie’s older brother. At least now Holly wouldn’t have to hear about Sean Levinson all the time.
Holly played Colony until her eyes grew itchy. Her parents hadn’t even bothered to check to make sure she was in bed. It was well past midnight when she shut her laptop and gazed out the window, half expecting to see Max outside. There was nothing but the desert, of course. But she thought she saw—no. It was probably just a plant, a man-sized cactus, far too big to be Max, in the moonlight. She walked down the hall and poked her head into Max’s room.
The mildewed odor that she’d smelled on Max earlier was tinged with a metallic stench. In the thin strip of light coming through the curtains, Max’s bed looked empty. Holly stepped inside and switched on the bedside lamp, flinching as her toe grazed something wet. On the floor was a bloody animal carcass—a rabbit, from what she could make out. She clamped her palm over her mouth to keep from screaming and turned to run out of the room. Standing in the doorway was Max. In her hand was another dead rabbit. She dropped it and ran to Holly, wrapping her arms around her waist, crying.
“Dude,” said Holly. “What is going on?”
Her sister spoke. “They want me to come with them. Tomorrow night. They’ve been sending watchers to make sure I do it. Or they’ll take me. Or I’ll—” At this, Max broke down, sobbing. Holly held her quivering body.
“Or you’ll what?”
“The sun kills us,” Max managed to choke out.
The cave must have been so scary for Max, who was, as their mother said, fragile. Now she was imagining things and acting out. Had she read the conspiracy theories online?
“No, no,” said Holly, stroking her sister’s greasy hair.
Then Max told Holly about what had happened to her down in the cave. How she’d tripped and slid down some shale, and when she realized she couldn’t climb back to the walkway had searched the tunnel for another way up. It was there that a group of creatures had found her shivering and wrapped her in furs, fed her dried fish and rabbit. At first, she was frightened, but as the days went on, she’d grown to love it down there in the dark with the mutants. She had a knack for hunting. She’d also been drinking contaminated water from the stream, which meant that her evolution had begun, they told her; she was becoming one of them. Once it was complete, she wouldn’t be able to survive in the human world. But then one of the rescue workers had found her and she’d been forced to come home.
Holly was truly impressed with her sister’s imagination. “This BS might work with Mom and Dad, but it’s not working with me,” she said, but as she looked around the room, littered with tufts of fur, she didn’t know what to believe.
Max pushed her away. “I liked it down there, with them,” she said. “I liked it better in the cave than in this stupid, boring house with you and Mom and Dad.”
“You ungrateful brat,” spat Holly, feeling unusually defensive of their parents. “You have no idea what we went through while you were down there.”
“You told me you wanted me to disappear,” said Max. “So that’s what I’m doing. And now I have to eat.” She pushed past Holly out the door.
Max’s words stung. She’d kept that from the park manager, from her parents: the fight. The sisters had been bickering all day because Max had stolen Holly’s yellow hoodie and spilled ketchup on it and Holly had snapped in the cave, calling Max a weirdo loser freak. “Get lost,” she’d commanded, her words echoing off the cave’s cold walls. “Just go away. Disappear!” Then Max had run.
Now, Holly swept up the tufts of rabbit hair and wiped the puddles of blood from the hardwood floor with a paper towel. She changed the red-spattered sheets, stuffing them into the closet. Doing everything she could not to throw up, she shoved the rabbit carcasses into a trash bag and took it out to the bins by the garage.
When she finally slept, she dreamed she was playing Colony, shooting grimacing elves that, on closer inspection, were Maxes. She woke with a wet face. She’d been crying in her sleep. She just wanted to be home where things were normal, but she was starting to think that normal wasn’t an option anymore.
The next day, Holly spent most of the time on her phone, scrolling mindlessly, lingering on Justine and Marie’s beach adventures. The rest of the time she spent checking on Max, making sure she was still there. Her sister, as usual, was asleep. Her parents kept asking Holly what was wrong, wasn’t she excited about leaving? She wasn’t, not anymore, not after the incident with her sister last night, not after she’d lost her best friend to vapid, rich Marie, but she said yes anyway.
Again, her parents let Max choose what she wanted for their candlelit dinner. She asked for In-N-Out and devoured three Double-Double burgers, Animal Style and two orders of fries. This time, her parents didn’t praise her appetite.
Max’s skin was pale and shiny, almost translucent, like the grilled onions she’d picked out of her burgers and placed in a greasy pile on her plate. Holly could see the veins in her temples pulse as she chewed her food. A shadow of fine black hair had appeared on the backs of her hands. Her yellowed nails seemed to have grown talon-like overnight.
Holly’s mother was making the pouty face she made when one of the girls was sick.
“When we get home, we’re taking you to Dr. Singh. This could be a thyroid condition.”
Max only grunted.
Holly couldn’t bring herself to eat.
“What’s going on, Hols?” said her father. “Is it a boy?” It was weird to have her parents notice her for once.
Holly shook her head.
Max glared at her.
“This time tomorrow night, we’ll all be sitting around our dining room table at home,” said her father. The joyful glow on his face made Holly furious. She wanted to scream at both of her parents, tell them that it was too late, that Max was lost already.
“No we won’t,” she said instead, doing her best to keep her voice from trembling. She felt a sharp kick under the table from Max’s sneaker.
“I don’t know where all this is coming from.” Her mother stabbed at her salad with her fork.
Holly tore a fry into smaller and smaller pieces. “Never mind,” she said.
After dinner, her father insisted that all four of them drive up to Mount Vista for one last desert sunset. It was a short walk to the peak. They watched in silence as the sky turned blazing orange over the valley. While her parents took pictures, Holly felt her sister’s hand grab her own, her long nails lightly scratching Holly’s palm. It was ice-cold. “I don’t have a choice,” whispered Max. “It’s not your fault.”
Holly said nothing. What was there to say? She pulled her hand away.
She tried to stay awake that night to listen for Max, but eventually she sank into sleep until the clank of the gate woke her up. Holly pulled her curtains aside. The sky was cloudless and the stars were dazzling. If she missed anything about the desert, she would miss them.
Max was at the yard’s edge. Next to her was a man, or something man-shaped. It wore no clothes. Its face was ghostly pale in the moonlight, its body caked in dirt. Where its eyes should have been there were black slits, narrow and gill-like. It put a hand on Max’s shoulder.
Now, now was the moment when there was still time to do something, screamed a voice inside her. She pulled on her hiking boots and stumbled down the stairs. If her parents heard her, so what. Once out the front door, she called to Max, who turned around long enough for Holly to see that there was something different about her eyes. Her bloodless skin shone silver. Then she and the mudman took off toward the mountains at an inhuman speed.
Holly ran after them, lungs straining, faster than she’d ever run in gym class, summoning every last bit of strength in her body. Coarse brush whipped her legs, but she surged ahead, Max’s stringy hair always just out of reach. She ran like she should have run back in the caverns, the first time Max had disappeared.
Her foot hit a rock or a branch or something, and Holly went flying. For the briefest moment she thought her speed had launched her airborne, and she was headed straight for the stars. But then she felt the sting of the gravelly sand as she landed hard on her palms and knee, the sticky warm blood leaking from her wounds. She tried to stand, but the pain was too much.
“Max!” she called again, as the two forms bounded away like graceful nocturnal animals, becoming smaller and smaller in the moonlight.
All around her was the cacophony of the desert at night: a din of whistles and chirps and cries of distant creatures. She gazed off toward the mountains, trying to catch a final glimpse of her little sister. There was nothing but miles of sand and boulders and shrubs. She’d lost her. Max was gone.
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