How bad things can get a.., p.1
How Bad Things Can Get: A Novel, page 1
part #18 of Novels Series
How Bad Things Can Get
Darcy Coates
Published by Black Owl Books
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Copyright © 2025 Darcy Coates
Cover design by Sarah Brody/Sourcebooks
Cover images © Debra Jean/Arcangel, Mr Dasenna/Shutterstock, ded pixto/Shutterstock
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All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, locations and events is purely coincidental.
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Black Owl Books
PO BOX 3416, Tuggerah NSW 2259, Australia
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
…
…
1
“You have to die, Josanna. It doesn’t work if you don’t die.”
The voice echoed along the concrete hallways. It was beseeching and sweet, but beneath the sing-song tones was the poorly hidden bite of irritation.
Josanna crawled. The hallways were dark. The lights had been shut off, and even though she knew the compound as well as she knew the planes of her own face, Josanna didn’t dare stand. The halls were full of new obstacles. She’d already tripped over one, heavy and padded, and she didn’t want to risk it again. She couldn’t make any noise.
Not if she hoped to live.
And she did—she wanted to live so, so badly. As wrong as it was. As bad as it made her. She wanted to live.
“Come back to me.” There was a scrape, metal against concrete. The voice stayed sweet, but it simmered like a pot of sugar about to burn. “I’ll help you, dear one. But you can’t fail us now. You know how important this is.”
She crept forward. There were ways out of the compound. Narrow windows she could worm through, hidden doors, little hatches, loose boards. She wasn’t yet eight. She was still small enough to fit through the tiny gaps when she tried. She just had to find one they’d forgotten to seal.
Her hands were numb as she felt her way along the gritty floor. The heat had gone out at the same time as the lights, and the rooms were like ice chests. Josanna wore one of the adults’ coats. She didn’t know who it belonged to. She hadn’t been able to see them in the dark; she could only feel the fabric as she dragged the jacket off their stiff arms.
There was a door along this hall. The elders liked to use it to get into the private rooms in the east quadrant, and those rooms had a little square window to outside. Maybe they’d forgotten to seal it. She just needed to—
“Josanna, don’t you want to fix this? Don’t you want to save them?”
The voice bounced from wall to wall. The compound had never echoed before. It had never been so empty.
She reached out. Her knees ached as they shuffled across the hard floor.
And then her fingers touched something.
Not concrete. Not metal. Something that was both firm and soft, all at once.
Skin.
She’d touched skin—a person, someone who had fallen in the hall and had been left where they dropped. They were as cold as the frigid air.
She felt a nose. The corners of lips. The skin was tacky, and as her hands moved across it, she understood why.
Their face would be covered in red. Rivers of blood poured out of the cavities where they’d gouged out their own eyes.
Ruth snapped up, a gasp seizing in her throat, the air not making it to her lungs.
Aching from the cold, echoing, empty halls. The tack of drying blood sticking to her fingertips.
The sensations lasted for just a second and then crumbled. She inhaled again, more deliberately, and instead of the acrid tang of early rot, her lungs filled with briny air.
People crowded across the deck, dressed in bright colors and flowing fabrics, laughing. Music played from concealed speakers, drowning out the sounds of the ocean.
Her dreams were always vivid. Sometimes so vivid they bled into reality, but never for more than a few seconds. Just long enough to make sure she wouldn’t forget them.
She subtly rubbed her hands together, reassuring herself that they weren’t coated with tacky blood. As she did, she glanced across the row of lounge chairs that ran along the cruise liner’s deck.
Ruth froze. Carson was staring at her.
And his expression…
A woman shrieked with laughter. Ruth’s chair rattled as a group bumped her, phones held high on selfie sticks as they ran past. One of them shouted an apology as they wove through the crowd.
She looked back at Carson. He no longer faced her, but stared along the deck. His familiar grin stretched his sun-reddened face.
Ruth wiped at clammy cheeks with the back of her hand. She’d only known Carson for six months, but in that time, he’d been nothing but friendly and jovial toward her.
The way he’d been staring at her, though…
He’d seemed cold. Closed off.
The nightmare looped through her mind: the halls, the bodies, the distant, cooing voice.
He couldn’t have known what she’d seen. Those images lived in Ruth’s head alone.
He couldn’t know. He couldn’t.
A hand pressed into Ruth’s shoulder. Her pulse spiked, and she fought the impulse to flinch from the touch.
“Hey,” Zach said. He leaned down and held out a tall glass. Ice and pale liquid glittered in the sun, beads of condensation already trailing down the surface. “I know you said you weren’t thirsty, but I felt bad about you being the only one without a drink. You can leave it if you don’t want it.”
Drinks. That’s right. Zach and Hayleigh were going to get drinks.
She glanced back at Carson. His face lit up as he waved to Hayleigh through the crowd.
“Thanks,” Ruth managed, and took the glass, even though she felt breathless and queasy. Zach ducked in and quickly kissed her cheek, his stubble both scratchy and comforting, before dropping into the chair beside her.
She wanted to say something. But she didn’t know if she could. Zach and Carson had been friends since they were six. Ruth was the new addition to the group.
She was trying so hard not to ruin the trip. But she was afraid she was, anyway. Seasickness had dogged her for the two days they’d been on the water. That and the nightmares made it hard to sleep. She felt ragged and uneasy, and she couldn’t match the group’s energy.
Maybe that’s all it is. I’m tired and stressed, and I misread Carson. Maybe…it was a joke?
It hadn’t felt like one.
I only saw it for a second. He might not have even been looking at me. Don’t overthink it.
Hayleigh sauntered along the deck, swinging her Saran Wrapped hips in an exaggerated fashion as she navigated between the other festivalgoers, holding the drinks high above her head like trophies. Carson laughed and clapped as she curtsied, placing the drinks on the small ledge between their chairs.
“I return victorious,” she said, wriggling as she settled back into her lounge, her blond hair fluffing up against the towel. “The battle was vicious, but the prizes made it worth it.”
“My queen, the undefeated champion of busy bars.” Carson picked up his drink and clinked it against Hayleigh’s. His broad face was pink, his smile huge and infectious.
No trace of revulsion. No apparent hostility toward Ruth.
But, even when he turned to talk to Zach, he didn’t look at her. Not once.
She sipped the drink so she’d at least seem like she was doing something. It was the lychee mocktail, the one she’d had at dinner the night before. She’d liked it, and Zach had remembered. That brought a little spark of joy. Zach’s hand rested over the side of his lounge chair and she took it, wrapping their fingers together.
The music cut out. There was a click, and a woman’s voice flooded the deck, loud but pleasant.
“Good afternoon, valued guests,” she said, and the chattering voices fell silent as heads turned toward the concealed speakers. “I’m pleased to say we are nearly at our destination and will be anchoring in approximately an hour. A tender will bring you to shore. As you disembark, a crew member will pass out gift bags. In
A flood of murmurs rose through the crowd.
“Do you think they’ll have prizes?” Hayleigh asked, grasping Carson’s forearm, her eyes bright.
“It wouldn’t be an Eton game if they didn’t,” Carson said.
Ruth turned to look behind her. Only a thin railing separated her from endless, violently blue ocean.
A hazy landform had appeared at the horizon. Sweat bloomed on her palms and mixed with the condensation trailing down the icy glass.
She’d seen that silhouette before. Many times. The jagged outline had haunted her nightmares, growing larger and clearer with each new rendition.
The announcer’s final words settled on Ruth heavily, like a cold hand had blocked out the sun.
“Welcome, guests, to Prosperity Island.”
Petra released her hold on the announcement button. The script for their welcome message was highlighted on her digital pad, and she tagged and archived it with several quick taps.
One more task done. A thousand still to go. All of them urgent, most of them behind schedule, and at least a dozen of them on the verge of blooming into fully formed disasters.
She could juggle them, though. She knew how. She’d been juggling for her whole life.
The view from the bridge was phenomenal. Below, nearly all their six hundred guests mingled on the deck. Beyond that, white crests paved the way to the mass in the distance.
The island wasn’t leased. Eton owned it. She’d helped him navigate the purchase eight months prior, at the same time he’d started talking about hosting a festival that would never be forgotten.
She’d seen how much Eton paid for the island. A staggering amount, the kind of number that stopped feeling real. She could visualize ten thousand dollars. She could visualize a hundred thousand. But twenty-two million? Those were just words strung together. Game currency. No longer tethered to reality.
Being allowed to play with game currency was the privilege of very few people.
Eton stood behind her, looking younger than his thirty years, his posture easy and his smile lopsided as he stared at the distant island. He dressed the same way he always did in his videos—a cheap T-shirt and a red beanie that was fraying at the edges.
The rich could afford to wear whatever they liked, but Petra knew his clothing choices weren’t driven by comfort. It was Eton’s brand. The brand she liked to think of as Best Friend to All. It was what had helped him amass his millions of followers and billions of video views. And he almost never let that mask slip.
“We still need to assign a safety officer before the game,” she said, scrolling through her notes. “Do you want me to set that up?”
“Don’t worry about it, Pet; I’ll sort it out later.”
She felt a twinge of frustration, even as he smiled at her. Eton hated red tape, but he usually didn’t put up too much of a fuss as long as he didn’t have to be involved. But she’d been nudging him about this for weeks.
“It’s just that later has become now. If you want the first game to start before nightfall, we need to prep a safety briefing. The course is too dangerous to ignore—”
“Pet, it’s okay!” He laughed, easy and happy, and leaned over the dash to get a better view of the horizon. “Scratch it off your list and leave it to me. Right now, I just want to make sure all our guests make it to the beach.”
Petra looked back at her screen, each task tagged for category and color-coded by urgency. The shades blurred together.
She knew Eton well enough to see what he was doing.
Eton hadn’t been neglecting to name a safety officer because he didn’t care about it. Indifference wasn’t the problem.
He actively didn’t want one.
And she didn’t know why.
2
Ruth didn’t start breathing properly until her feet plunged through the surf and touched wet sand.
They’d spent two full days on the cruise ship that had brought them from New York to the Caribbean. Two days of an open bar and live entertainment and their choice of restaurants. And Ruth had suffered the entire trip.
Seasickness was supposed to be less of a problem on cruise ships, she’d been told. Their size dampened the ocean’s incessant rocking. But Ruth had never been on anything deeper than a lake. And, while the ocean liner had been bad, the small chugging boat that ferried them through the shallow water was so much worse.
Zach leaped off the tender behind her, crisp water splashing up his thighs. He placed a bracing hand on her back as they followed their group out of the surf and toward the welcome booth. “There you go,” he said. “Just breathe.”
Ruth swallowed. Her body still felt like it swayed. She looked up, fighting to fix her eyes on the landscape ahead. On something, anything, solid.
A crescent-shaped beach spread out around them. The sand was a clean, creamy white, contrasting against the jewel tones of the water behind them: emerald green in the shallows, sapphire blue closer to the cruise ship.
Above, the island’s ridgeline sawed across the late afternoon sky, blanketed in thick green.
The nausea rose up again, bile in the back of her throat.
She’d seen those jagged ridgelines in her dreams. They’d alternated with visions of the compound: the dark, the rot, the cold, followed by glimpses of azure blue and deep forest green and vivid red.
It shouldn’t have been possible for her to recognize the island’s silhouette. It had never been shown in any of the promotional videos—only glimpses of the jungle and the beach.
Stop. Don’t overthink. You’re tired, you’re sick, and you’re making connections where they don’t exist. You pictured an island in your dreams, and it was blurry and vague and approximately the right shape, but that’s as far as the similarities go.
Though…
Her eyes moved to the highest point of the island. A lopsided ridge, green on one side, bare rock on the other, like a flag.
That had been in her dreams too.
“Okay?” Zach asked, rubbing her back.
Ruth made herself smile. She was not going to ruin this. “Yes! Just excited to finally be here.”
“Me too,” Hayleigh gasped. She was a few paces ahead of them, one hand holding her wide-brimmed hat in place as she spun giddily, drinking in the sights. “This is amazing.”
Prosperity Island truly did seem like paradise.
Carson jogged after his girlfriend. By the time he caught up with Hayleigh, he was laughing.
The final guests had left the tender, and its motor rattled as it turned to make another trip back to the cruise ship. They were one of the last groups brought to land.
A queue led toward a small welcome tent. Beyond that, clusters of festivalgoers spread out across the beach. Rustic wooden shacks had been constructed just ahead of where the sand rose to meet the jungle, and banners hung on their eaves, advertising a bar, snack food, and an information desk that offered towels, sunscreen, and umbrella loans.
A stage had been built to the right, the sand packed around its edges, precariously close to the amplifiers. Ruth didn’t know any of the advertised acts, but Zach had seemed excited when he’d read the list to her.
“Name?”
Ruth snapped back to herself. The queue to the welcome booth had emptied, leaving her on the threshold. Two women stood at the bench, cartons of tote bags behind them, digital pads propped in front.
