The Wilds meets One of Us is Lying in this survivalist YA thriller about seven teens who are stranded on a desert island, and the one who is out for revenge.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from No Accident by Laura Bates, which is out December 6th 2022.
No matter how you try to hide it, the truth will always come out . . .
When a small plane crash ends with a group of seven teens washed up on a deserted island, their first thought is survival. With supplies dwindling and the fear of being stranded forever becoming more of a reality, they quickly discover that being the most popular kid in high school doesn’t help when you’re fighting to stay alive.
And when strange and terrifying accidents start to occur all around them, the group realizes that they are being targeted by someone who was on the plane, and that the island isn’t their only danger. A terrible secret from a party the night before the flight has followed them ashore–and it’s clear that someone is looking for justice. Now survival depends on facing the truth about that party: who was hurt that night, and who let it happen?
DAY 6
It’s not actually as easy to carry a body as you might expect. Just disentangling Elliot from the greedy claws of the bushes that ensnared him and yanking him back up the rocks takes what feels like hours. Hayley shudders at the unwelcome thought that the island seems glad to have claimed him, that it doesn’t want to give him up without a fight. Like it has demanded a blood sacrifice for their trespass there, a price to pay for the vines they’ve trampled and trees they’ve torn, the unwanted footprints they’ve left in the sand.
The battered face of Elliot’s wristwatch, now hanging above his limp fingers, shows that it’s after midnight before they begin the dejected journey back to the camp.
First, they try carrying him slung between them like a sack of potatoes, four of them taking a limb each, bumping him roughly along the ground when their grip slips. But it’s awkward and impractical to move that way. The thick undergrowth and narrow spaces between bushes and trees make it hard to travel two abreast, let alone with an extra person hanging immobile in between. So Brian and Jason take turns heaving Elliot over their shoulders, clutching tightly to the backs of his thighs, his head hanging limply down behind. The group spreads listlessly out in a scattered, dejected procession: Shannon silent and tense; Jason spitting out swearwords like he’s releasing pressure from a gasket; May singing again, a perky, flippant pop song about embracing your booty, starting again from the beginning every time she runs out of notes, as if she’s scared to stop. Brian has gone very quiet, his head hanging low, his breath coming in short, jagged gasps. Nobody speaks about the plane. Hayley moves close to Jessa and realizes she is repeating a prayer over and over under her breath, saying the words so fast Hayley can’t even make them out.
“Shut up, Jessa. That’s not going to make any difference,” May snaps at her irritably, and Hayley sees Jessa flinch and recoil, hurt painted across her face.
“Well, Meghan Trainor’s not about to swoop in and save us either,” she replies with uncharacteristic anger. “But I don’t see you keeping your mouth shut.”
“That can’t be good for him,” Hayley frets, watching Elliot’s cheek bashing unceremoniously against Jason’s back. Following closely behind, she can hear Jason’s heavy, rasping breathing. Elliot’s face looks serene and somehow innocent, mouth slightly open so she can see the glistening shell pink of his inside lip.
“He’s lucky to be alive,” Jason replies curtly, pushing his soaked hair out of his face. “I don’t think he’s going to be too worried about a bruise here or there when he wakes up.”
“If he wakes up,” says Shannon, sounding terrified. She’s worrying at the edges of her nails with her teeth, more openly panicked than Hayley has ever seen her.
There’s a stark, eerie flash, and the trees around them are suddenly illuminated in bright white, the cracks and twists of their bark standing out in sharp contrast, before the cold, gunmetal- gray night sweeps in again. It’s darker than before, making it harder than ever to see where they’re going. The air tastes of metal too, a bloody tang that coats the sides of Hayley’s tongue, setting her even more on edge. A few moments pass between the lightning and the angry drumroll of thunder that follows. The thick blanket of leaves above holds off the worst of the rain, but now and then they step into the path of a mini deluge where the water pours like a waterfall through a gap in the canopy. The air smells like earth and electricity. Hayley watches Elliot flopping around like a doll.
“I’m tired,” May complains petulantly, flopping down and crossing her arms as if they’re not in the middle of a midnight thunderstorm.
Jason stops and unceremoniously deposits Elliot in a heap. “Oh, you’re tired? I’m so sorry, you poor thing. Can I interest you in taking a turn with this hundred-and-fifty-pound weight so you can see what actual tiredness feels like?”
May scowls.
“Maybe we should just leave him here,” Jason mutters angrily. “Are we sure we should all be going back to camp?” Brian’s voice is flat, subdued. “Shouldn’t somebody stay up there in case
the plane comes back?”
“It’s not coming back,” May whines. “They don’t know we’re here.”
“Which probably means they’ll cross this area off the map and never come back,” Jason adds darkly.
“Is he definitely breathing?” Hayley bends over Elliot, relieved to feel his warm breath flutter against her cheek.
May gives an exaggerated sigh and Brian turns on her. “I don’t know what you’re complaining about. If you all hadn’t left the camp this afternoon, the fire would have still been burning and they would have seen the smoke.”
“Oh, come on,” cries May. “If it had occurred to you that the girls might actually be good at something physical, or maybe even—shock horror—better than you guys, then we could have finished collecting the coconuts hours ago and gotten back in time to get the fire going again.”
“It’s my fault,” Jessa says, her voice tight. “I was resting in the shade, my arm…” She sighs heavily. “I should have kept the fire going. I’m so sorry.”
“There’s no point infighting about it now,” Hayley says, feeling a cold jolt as a stream of water unexpectedly finds its way down the back of her neck. With Elliot out of commission and the plane gone, she feels utterly defeated. Thoughts about being stuck here forever, about starving here, about never seeing her parents again—all the thoughts she’s been trying so hard to block out since the day they arrived—are crowding back into her head. Thoughts so heavy she feels like Jason isn’t the only one lugging around a dead weight.
“It’s my mom’s birthday tomorrow,” Jessa whispers, and begins to cry.
“Maybe they did see the island,” Hayley says, though she doesn’t really believe her own words. “Maybe they saw us, and they’ve gone to get help, and they’re going to come back when the storm has passed.”
“Yeah, right,” mutters May.
Shannon is sitting quietly, her legs crossed, staring fixedly into the dark forest.
“We’re never getting off this island, are we?” Jessa’s voice is beginning to rise, half sobbing. “If they were going to find us, they’d have done it by now. They’re going to decide that we’re dead, and then they’ll stop looking…and they’ll hold our funerals and bury empty caskets…and everyone will forget about us…” She is talking faster and faster, her voice increasingly shrill as the words start running into one another.
“Jessa, we’re not going to die of old age here,” Brian says, and she looks up hopefully, sniffing. “We’ll die way sooner of starvation or thirst or, like, a tick bite. Or something stupid like a cut that gets infected when we don’t have the basic antibiotics to treat it.”
Jessa looks up in horror, and Hayley’s isn’t the only voice that rises in a scream of “SHUT UP, BRIAN.”
“Jeez, touchy much?” Brian takes his turn hoisting Elliot up around his neck like a bizarre scarf, head and arms hanging down over one shoulder, legs over the other. “C’mon,” he grunts, starting to head back toward the camp, and the others have little choice but to heave themselves to their feet and trail after him. May and Shannon wordlessly lace their arms around Jessa’s back while Hayley follows alone.
On the beach, the wind is much wilder, whipping their hair across their faces and flinging the gritty sand into their eyes. The rain is torrential, drumming hard on their scalps without pause and streaming down their faces. It is too dark to see the sea, but they can hear it, like some hideous monster tethered nearby, snarling in its throat, threatening to break its shack- les, to leap up and devour them. And each lightning strike illuminates the crests of the waves surging forward, foaming and boiling toward the sky. Jessa has already taken refuge in her sleeping shelter, and the others scramble to do the same, Jason first shoveling Elliot unceremoniously into his own, his head propped sideways on a folded jacket. Shannon promises to check on him regularly.
It’s at least a little bit drier inside her makeshift tent, Hayley thinks, realizing with a tightening feeling in her chest that she might not get the chance to tell Elliot how well his shelters worked in the storm. But it’s harder to control her imagination in here, lying on her own in the dark. There’s just the wet-dog smell of the rain on the sand, the crashing of the waves, and the incessant drumbeat on the plastic meal tray that Elliot wedged into the branches above her to keep her dry.
She closes her eyes and tries to control her breathing, a trick her mom taught her years ago to calm her nerves before exams.
She can hear her mom’s voice, soothing and cool. “Breathe in for one. Hold for one. Breathe out for one.”
Her thoughts flit wildly, like grains of sand caught in the storm. “Breathe in for two. Hold for two. Breathe out for two.” “You’ll be valedictorian one day, you know that?” Grandma once said, neat hands curled around the tortoiseshell handle of her walking stick, smelling of lipstick and soap. “But don’t work too hard, my sweet girl. Save something for you.”
“Breathe in for three. Hold for three. Breathe out for three.” The sea fizzes and hisses. As if the seawater is boiling.
Elliot lying unconscious. Jason’s face, angry and taut. Jessa’s arm, heavy and useless, hanging from her body.The sticky remains of the iodine sparkling with slivers of glass.
“Breathe in for four. Hold for four. Breathe out for four.” “C’mon, Hayley, come out.” Nella, the girl who used to live next
door, shaking her tight blond curls, clutching a pair of walkie- talkies and perched astride her red bike with the training wheels. Pouting. “You never come play anymore.” Going back to her spelling homework, turning up the volume on her headphones.
“In for five.”
Standing quietly in the entrance at the South Florida Science Center on the fifth-grade aquarium trip. Trying to blend into the glass tank behind her. Watching the others easily obey the teacher’s command to get into pairs. Knowing she would be the odd one out.
“And six.”
Smoothing out the Oak Ridge Tribune and staring, staring at her first ever front-page byline. Smelling the fresh, crisp paper, the cheap ink transferring to her palms. Stroking it over and over.
“Now seven.”
“Come on, Mom. Do you think Woodward and Bernstein had time to go to their eighth-grade Spring Fling? Believe me, I’m missing nothing.”
“Breathe in for eight. Hold for eight. Breathe out for eight.” Ninth-grade prize day. Kids shuffling up to the stage to collect their awards. Most Improved. Best Effort. Then the list.
An unbearable seven subjects. “Math, English, history, biology, chemistry, French, geography…outstanding academic achievement in every single one goes to…” The longest pause in the world. “Hayley Larkin.” The snickers. Pride and shame. Biting the inside of her cheek. Walking up, shaking hands, looking straight ahead. Trying not to listen.
She never could get past eight.
The wind howls and a few sticks shift, leaving a gap above Hayley’s head. The sky is a deep, menacing gray. She can just make out the leaves of the palm tree whose trunk her shelter leans against, thrashing and writhing like wild things, trying to take off into the storm.
A squall buffets the side of her shelter, and a cold spray of rain stings the side of her face.
Her eye smarts and burns. Hayley blinks, trying to dislodge a grain of sand, feeling it scratch painfully against her eyelid. She wishes she had some fresh water to wash it out.
Fresh water!
Without thinking, without pausing, she is out of the shelter and running full speed into the trees. The storm is still howling in the distance, but it’s getting quieter here, muted, and the clouds have lifted enough for a little moonlight to leak through. Her sneakers slop and slap against wet mud, its stickiness seeping inside, her feet squelching.
The stumps crouch like squat sentinels in the gloom. She can see the plastic slung low between them, bulging now, stretching closer to the ground.
She plunges her hands into the icy water. Three inches, maybe. Cool and silky on her skin. She cups her hands and brings a scoop to her lips; it tastes somehow sharper and cleaner than she remembers. She gulps another mouthful, feeling the chill race into her chest while the rainwater drips from her nose and earlobes, like she’s being cleansed inside and out at the same time.
When she gets back to the beach, the wind has dropped and it isn’t raining anymore. She can see the pinpricks of stars piercing the velvet. There’s enough moonlight to make out the shape of Elliot’s shelter, his sneakered feet just visible at the entrance.
“It worked, Elliot! It worked!” She pats his ankles awkwardly, wanting him to wake up, needing him to share this, to feel the same rush she does now that something positive has finally happened.
“Okay, okay, you don’t need to shout,” comes a grumpy voice. “You’re awake!” She shrieks it so loudly that heads poke out of other shelters. The others gather around, grinning, as Elliot shuffles out like an ungainly caterpillar. They all look as bedraggled and soggy as Hayley feels.
“It worked, it worked! Elliot built a rain reservoir in the trees to catch water and it worked—there’s a few gallons in there at least!” Hayley babbles excitedly.
“I’m glad,” Elliot says slowly. “But it’s not our first priority.” He is carefully scanning the faces around him.
“What are you talking about? What else is more important than water?”
Elliot looks at her.
“Finding out who pushed me.”
They can’t get the fire going on the wet sand, so there’s no warmth, and there aren’t enough dry clothes to go around. They sit in a shivering circle, lit weakly by the gray beams of the moon, apart from May, who returns immediately to her bed after saying they’re all being ridiculous and nothing will change before morning so they might as well get some sleep.
“Tell us again, Elliot,” Shannon says, with the tone of a skeptical but patient teacher trying to get to the bottom of what she suspects might be a tall tale. “What happened, exactly?”
Elliot sighs, frustrated, and rubs a hand through his unruly curls, leaving them even wilder than before. “We were at the top of the hill. I was looking up, trying to spot the plane, doing everything I could to signal the pilot with the mirror. It was loud and windy and it all happened really fast, but I felt a pair of hands shove me, hard, in the small of my back, then I was falling. The next thing I remember is hearing Hayley’s voice and waking up here.”
“Elliot.” Jessa speaks slowly and quietly, like she doesn’t want to upset him. Hayley notices that she’s cradling her arm, sitting very still, trying to avoid any sudden movements. “Isn’t it possible that you just slipped? If everything happened so fast?”
“Yeah, it was super chaotic up there.” Jason latches eagerly on to this explanation. “I couldn’t hear myself think, everyone was shouting at once, and the storm was wild—”
“No. No.” Elliot shakes his head irritably. “I felt it. I felt somebody push me.”
“Okay, but we were all looking up, all trying to get the plane’s attention,” Brian chimes in. “Maybe someone did push you, but by accident? Like they sort of banged into you or shoved you by mistake?”
Elliot starts to shake his head, but Brian is in full flow. “I mean, most of us had never been up there, we didn’t know the lay of the land. I totally didn’t realize that drop was so steep.”
Elliot gets to his feet and turns around. “I felt two hands, here and here.” He balls his fists and places them on either side of his spine, just above his shorts. “It was hard and quick, definitely deliberate.”
He sits heavily back down.
“That’s silly,” Jessa says eventually. “Why would anyone want to hurt you?”
“I don’t know,” Elliot admits.
“I mean, totally apart from anything else, you’ve basically been saving our asses since the day we got here,” Brian chimes in with surprising warmth. “It’s not like we’d even have survived this long without you.”
Jason gives a tiny snort.
Suddenly, something else occurs to Hayley. “Could it have been about the mirror?”
Elliot frowns at her. “What do you mean?”
“What if they weren’t trying to hurt you, but they wanted to stop you from signaling the plane? Someone who doesn’t want us to get off the island?”
“This is ridiculous.” Jessa sighs impatiently. “Why are we talking about this as if it’s an unsolvable mystery? If one of us shoved Elliot, they should admit it.”
There is a long, uninterrupted silence. Hayley feels goose bumps rising on her forearms that have nothing to do with the cold.
“So…” Brian raises his eyebrows and jerks his thumb toward May’s shelter. “Then I guess…”
“Oh, shut up, Brian,” snaps Jessa. “May would never do something like that.”
“Well, someone did,” Brian says. “Apparently,” he adds, looking at Elliot a little skeptically. “Sorry, man, but you did bang your head hard enough to pass out. Maybe you’re just imagining it.”
“Or maybe someone was so angry with me that they wanted to punish me,” Elliot says quietly, and everybody turns to look at Jason. “Oh, sure, just because I pointed out his idiocy with the fire,
I must have tried to murder him,” Jason says bullishly. “Yeah, that makes lots of sense. I’m definitely guilty.”
Hayley recalls the fury that passed over Jason’s face, the spit in Elliot’s eyebrows, and doesn’t know what to think. Could Jason really have been so pissed at Elliot, so devastated that the plane wasn’t seeing them, that he’d lashed out? Surely not. Jason was all charm and bluster. He wouldn’t actually hurt somebody…would he?
They talk in circles, Elliot continuing to stick stubbornly to his story, the others trapped between his certainty and their own unwillingness to believe that one of them could have done what he described, Jason angrily maintaining his innocence.
“I’ve had enough of this,” he finally explodes, stumbling to his feet. “It doesn’t even matter whether you believe me or not, does it? It’s not going to change the fact that we’re never getting off this goddamn island.”
The silence he leaves behind is heavy, loaded with each of their fears and unspoken anxieties. Hayley runs her fingers over and over the deep cut on the back of her wrist, sealed over now with a thick scab. What if Jason’s right? What if that plane was their one real chance of rescue? She picks at the edge and feels the wetness seeping out.
One by one, tiredness catches up with them and they traipse off to try and sleep. And as Jessa settles in for the night, it is the first evening that Hayley doesn’t hear a soft, rhythmic murmuring of prayer coming from inside her shelter. Only silence.
The last thing Brian says before they leave the campfire does nothing to raise anyone’s spirits.
“Guys. I’ve been thinking about it every which way. My man Elliot says he was pushed.” Elliot raises his eyebrows, looking like he doesn’t know whether to be amused or grateful that his accident has suddenly made him far more popular with his teammate.
“Okay, so he was pushed. And each of us says we didn’t push him, right?” There’s a pause, some nodding. “Well, there’s another possibility, isn’t there?”
Hayley watches the others’ baffled faces. She thinks she knows what is coming; she’s been trying not to think it ever since Elliot’s bombshell.
“There might be someone else on the island.”
