A brief moment of silence stretched out, the two of them looking at each other, waiting for the other to react. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, they burst into laughter, a rollicking giddiness that made no sense, which just increased the giggles exponentially. They laughed and they chortled and they even threw in a few snorts. Newt couldn’t remember the last time something had struck him as so funny as saying what he’d said. The layers and vicious cycles of irony weren’t even worth thinking about.

Crazy person. He was a crazy person, all right. She was a crazy person. And they’d just scratched the surface. The crazy person level would just keep going up and up, and they’d be there to laugh like crazy people as it did.

“Who needs food, anyway?” he said through the hysterics. “You can’t feed crazy.”

“Right?” Keisha managed to respond. She was laughing so hard that Dante had fallen off her lap and lay sprawled across the floor, snoring like a little bear. This made both her and Newt’s laughter reach something that could only be called guffaws. He had tears in his eyes and couldn’t remember any of the horrors they’d experienced that day.

God help him, going insane wasn’t so bad after all.

Chapter Six

In the middle of the night, someone knocked at their door.

Newt had spent an hour or so writing in his journal before falling asleep in a corner of the small cabin, his back pressed against the joint of the walls. Keisha and Dante had been snoring softly since the sun finally sank beneath the horizon, their manner of deep breathing eerily similar to each other, despite their age gap. It had a soothing feel to it, like an oscillating fan—one of the many tiny memories that keep impeding on Newt’s mind.

Sleep had been welcome, those soft snores of his new friends turning into the soft break of ocean waves inside a dream, Newt standing on a beach. Nothing happened in that dream, nothing but the ocean water and blue sky and heat of the sun. But then the knocks came, steady and strong, as unwelcome in the paradise of his dream as if an army of scorpion-like crabs had erupted from the sand and crawled all over his body.

He opened his eyes to the darkness of the cabin, but it took a few seconds more for the dream to fade. The choppy surface of the water became the smooth, cheap plastic of the cabin floor, the blue sky the faintly seen ceiling tiles, the sweet ocean air the stale air of the cabin. The knocks came again and Newt was all at once awake.