MY BRAIN WAS glitching out—it had to be. The fear and the chase from the woods—it must have gotten to me. There was no way, after all this time, that my dad could be here. Here, in Millers’ barn, where just a week before I’d drunk keg beer around a fire thirty feet away.
But the evidence was right there, before my eyes. A fact. My dad was here.
“Penelope, what are you doing here?”
Dad’s voice was beyond stern, and disappointment crashed through me. Wasn’t he glad to see me? I’d found him. I’d found him.
“You have to get out of here,” Dad continued before I could find my voice to speak. “You have to get help. Now.”
“What . . . ?” That’s when I noticed the awkward angle of his arms, crossed in front of him. The metal circles around his wrist, the chain that led off into darkness. Was he hurt? Or something worse?
Infected?
Dad didn’t seem to notice my hesitation. He continued talking, his voice low and urgent. “He could come here any second, Penny. He—”
His voice cut off abruptly as a warm light lit up the barn. I turned briefly to see that Dex had found and turned on a small, battery-operated lamp, the kind campers use. But Dad wasn’t looking at Dex. He was looking just beyond him, his nostrils flaring.
“Dad,” I said, trying to regain his attention. “Who are you talking about? Who could come at any second?”
But Dad just kept staring beyond me. I turned around fully to see what he was looking at, fear tickling up my spine. Just outside the circle of light, Micah was standing and facing us, the sheriff lying still at his feet. For a moment, I thought my dad was afraid of the sheriff.
Then I saw the gun in Micah’s hand.
“Me,” Micah said, his voice low. “He’s talking about me.”
He held the gun loosely, looking down at it like he wasn’t sure how it got there. The sheriff’s holster rested against the floor of the barn, its inside a black hole still holding the gun’s shape.
“Good idea,” Reese said, her voice shaking behind a false bravado. “Go shoot that thing outside before it can come in here.”
“No,” Micah said. “He won’t come in here. He won’t hurt me.”
A pool of unease started spreading in my stomach.
“Micah? What’s going on? Who’s out there? What is out there?” I asked.
Micah still wouldn’t look up. He closed his eyes for one second, two. Finally, he opened them.
“My dad.”
Micah’s words bounced around the small space, but they wouldn’t seem to land in my brain.
“Your dad? But that’s not possible—”
“And I have to protect him,” Micah said, cutting me off as if I hadn’t even spoken. “There’s no one else who can do it, no one else who will.”
That’s when he tightened his grip on the gun and raised his arm.
I took a step back automatically, tripping a little as I did and holding both my hands out in front of me, half reaching toward Micah and half defending myself.
“Whoa, man,” Dex said. “Take it easy.”
“What the hell is happening?” Reese screamed.
Micah just swallowed, shifted from one foot to the other. “It wasn’t supposed to go like this. It wasn’t. . . .”
The gun waved, the barrel now aiming toward me. I yelped, a small noise, something I couldn’t control.
“Micah,” my dad said, his voice carrying an unnatural calm given the situation. “Put the gun down, son. You promised not to hurt Penelope. You promised to leave her out of this.”
Suddenly, Micah laughed, a strange, high-pitched sound. “As if I didn’t try! You know how hard it was to keep her from digging, from trying to find you? Leave her out of this,” he said in a low, mocking imitation of my dad. “Have you ever met your daughter?”
And somehow, with those words, my fear transformed into something else. Leave her out of this? Like my dad thought I was a child, one who deserved to be kept in the dark. Who deserved to be lied to.
He was wrong.
“Micah,” I said, lowering my hands to my sides. Fighting against every instinct in my body, I took a step toward him, toward the barrel of the gun. “Micah, it’s me. You can trust me, remember? You can tell me what’s going on.”
“No, Pen, you don’t understand. . . .” my dad started.
But I ignored him, stepping past Reese, who cowered against the wall on my right, and Dex, who still held up the camp light with one shaking hand on my left.
“I can help you, Micah. I know you’re a good person. Let me help you.”
“I tried before,” Micah said, his voice nearing a whimper. “I tried telling you everything before, and it didn’t work. I had to make you forget.”
“Make me . . . ?” And then I realized. My missing hours. The blank space of time right after I visited the plant. But how could Micah have caused that?
“I don’t know what I did before,” I said, forcing my voice to stay level. “But I know what I’ll do now. We’re going to get out of this together, Micah. But I need to know why my dad is chained up in this barn. And why you think that glowing-light thing out there is your dad.”
Micah stayed absolutely still, his eyes on mine. He pursed his lips together, as if he was seriously considering my request. The whole barn was silent. I didn’t dare turn back around to look at Dad, afraid that he might disapprove of my tactic, afraid that disapproval would shake my confidence.
“I can trust you?” Micah finally asked, his voice barely more than a small squeak.
“Yes, absolutely. Everything is off the record,” I said, forcing my mouth into a smile I hoped was believable.
At my lame joke, Micah’s mouth quirked upward on one side, and his shoulders relaxed, just for a moment.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I don’t know how it all got so bad. My dad was fine for years, and then . . .” He trailed off.
“Your dad was . . . fine?” I prompted, taking one more careful step forward.
“He didn’t really die, Penny. That’s the whole thing. The whole secret.” Micah sighed then, and I noticed that the gun dropped a fraction as he did. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Dex move—not much, just an inch or so—in Micah’s direction. His eyes never left the gun.
“I don’t understand,” I said, my voice light and calm.
“It was the meteorite,” Micah said. “My dad was right. He knew there was something strange going on at the plant; he knew it. Those government scientists didn’t move the meteorite out of town to study it, they moved it to the plant. Set up a whole secret lair in the basement. You were there.”
Another wave of anger crested up inside me as I wondered what exactly Micah had made me forget. I fought to keep calm.
“I remember,” I said. “The hallway with all the locked doors—”
“I had to keep them locked. That’s where my dad lived, where he had to live for years after what happened to him. After what they did.”
“What? What did they do?” Reese asked, her voice squeaking. Micah and I both looked over at her in surprise, and when we did, Dex moved just a little closer to Micah. I wondered briefly if Reese had drawn Micah’s attention away on purpose.
“They left him for dead!” Micah yelled. “They studied the stuff from the meteorite down there for months, in secret, making different things out of it in those labs. Dangerous things. The meteorite stuff—somehow they knew it affected people’s memories.”
Tommy Cray, I thought with a jolt. He’d discovered the meteorite, but had no memory of it. If the meteorite itself had caused his memory to disappear, had affected his brain somehow . . . scientists would want to study that. Maybe they’d want to use it.
“But their experiments got out of control. My dad was on to them. He was just a security guard, but he knew something was shady. He went to go gather information, to expose what they were doing right here in our town—but something went wrong. He never remembered it, what exactly caused the fire in room X10. But he was inside the room when it happened—trapped inside with their meteorite chemicals.”
I nodded, trying to keep up. Micah was on a roll now, the words pouring out of him quickly. He waved his hands around a couple of times during his speech, as if he’d forgotten he was holding the gun.
“Dad was so badly burned they could barely recognize him. Declared him dead right away. But he wasn’t actually dead. Just changed.” Micah sniffed, his voice thick. “He actually snuck out of his own casket, right before it went into the ground. Can you imagine what that must have been like for him? We knew if we didn’t keep him hidden, they’d come after him. Do more experiments. So we kept on pretending he was dead, and we hid him in our basement—for a while. Then the plant closed altogether. They just packed up and went away, leaving their mess behind. Blaming it all on my dad.”
The bitterness in Micah’s voice was heavy. I tried to focus on what he was saying, on all the pieces slotting into place, one by one.
“But half the town worked at the plant. They would have known about a secret lair, about the fire. . . .”
“No,” Micah said, shaking his head. “That’s the thing—one of their experiments worked. They actually made something from the meteorite that could affect people’s memories in small doses.”
“X10-88,” I breathed.
“They used it on the entire town.”
“What?” Dex this time, his voice incredulous.
“That’s how the drug works. You give it to someone, and you can make them forget a certain amount of hours, or you can plant suggestions that they think are true, and they become like new memories, pasted over the old ones,” Micah said.
Plant suggestions . . . new memories.
That line of dialogue jumped to the front of my brain, the one I’d heard repeated so often in the past week—by Cindy, Hector, even Mrs. Anderson. I’d asked all of them about the accident at the plant, and they’d all answered in a similar way . . . not just similar, but identical.
It’s best not to think about it too much.
The goose bumps were back, crawling up my skin. It wasn’t just a common expression, or one they’d read in an article. It had been put into their mouths. Planted into their brains.
“Oh my God,” I whispered.
“No one remembered what was going on in that basement or what really happened to my dad. No one.” Micah’s eyes were wild with anger. His voice got louder. “Do you know what that’s like? To have everyone think your dad is some fuckup who lost the town the plant contracts and all their jobs, when really he was a hero just trying to get to the truth? And I couldn’t tell anyone. If the agents guessed he was still alive, they would take him away. Or worse. So he had to stay secret. He had to stay locked up. The basement was too small, and the house is made of wood, so a few years ago, we moved him to the plant.”
“The house is made of wood? What did that have to do with anything . . . ?” I asked, shaking my head in confusion. Micah bit his lip, as if he’d said too much, and then it made sense. “You were afraid he’d burn it. You said your dad . . . changed? After the accident?”
Micah’s eyes fell again, and his mouth pulled into a tight line. For a moment, he looked like he might cry.
“Oh, he changed,” my dad said. I turned slightly to face him. His expression was grim as he kept his eyes on Micah. “I found a body in the woods a few months ago, a hiker. Something was weird about it, though. No one would believe me. Not that that’s anything new. But I thought I could catch the killer. I set up cameras in the woods. . . .”
“I know,” I said. “I found one of them.”
Dad looked at me then, with a strange expression. “You did?”
I nodded, and a strange look settled into the lines of his face. He looked surprised and almost . . . proud.
“I captured a strange image on one of the cameras. It was almost alien-like. Or at least, I thought so at the time,” Dad continued. I pictured the image I’d found on his camera my first night back in Bone Lake. The strange bent branch that looked like an arm. “That was the camera I’d set up in the woods not too far from the Jamesons’ place. I went to check it out, and that’s when I saw Hal Jameson, in the woods.”
“He started going out, wandering in the woods on his own,” Micah said, his voice strained, almost desperate. “I told him not to, but he . . . eventually he . . .”
“He killed someone,” Dex interrupted.
“He didn’t mean to!” Micah yelled, whirling on Dex. “You don’t understand. That meteorite stuff they were experimenting on—it changed him. Maybe he got too close to it, or maybe when it mixed with the fire, it . . . I don’t know exactly what happened to him in that room. But that stuff they were messing with, it burned itself into his insides. It, like . . .”
“Infected him?” Dex asked.
Micah kept going as if Dex hadn’t said anything. “For the first few years, he was just sick. He couldn’t move, couldn’t remember who he was most days. Sometimes he’d complain about being cold all the time, even though his skin was burning up. Then small things started catching fire when he touched them. Then he started getting out of the house at night. . . . That’s when we moved him to the empty plant, so he’d be safer. I didn’t know he was going to hurt anyone. . . . I didn’t know he could.”
“But you found out,” Dad said, his voice still cold. “When I found Hal out in the woods, you knew I’d put it all together. So you sucker punched me and locked me up.”
Micah just swallowed, not confirming or denying what he’d done. Dad turned his head to address me. “I woke up in the basement of the plant, and he injected me with gold liquid from a vial—X10-88. But it didn’t work.”
“It should have!” Micah exploded. “I was going to fix everything. I’ve seen how X10-88 works before. Before the accident, Dad stole some of the stuff from the plant. Mom was afraid of it at first, but when those agents came to use it on her . . . she recognized it. They still gave it to her, and she forgot everything. Everything my dad had uncovered, even the fact that he was still alive. When she saw him in the basement later that day, she nearly had a heart attack. I had to explain everything to her—all over again. What had happened to my dad, why everyone thought he was dead. It was so hard on her, keeping the secret. Keeping Dad in the basement when he was so . . . changed. Burns on ninety percent of his body. He couldn’t remember us most days, could barely move on his own for months, could never leave the house. . . .” Micah’s voice lowered to just above a whisper. “Mom started taking the stolen drug on her own sometimes. When she wanted to forget what our lives had become, even just for a little while. I couldn’t blame her, but it was so hard . . . taking care of everything on my own.”
Micah was unraveling now, and I felt a wave of pity for him. He hadn’t asked for any of this to happen to him—for the meteorite to crash here, for the government to do secret experiments on it in our town, for his dad to get hurt or his mom to lose her mind from grief and maybe something worse. His face was drawn in the dim light, and his shoulders were hunched. He was staring at me, out of everyone else, like he wanted me to understand. Like everything rested on me understanding.
But my dad was chained up behind me, and people were dead, and understanding was different from forgiving.
“So you used your dad’s stash of drugs on my dad?”
Micah blinked, disappointed. But not ready to give up. “It was going to fix everything. But I didn’t know how the whole suggestion thing worked. I couldn’t plant a new memory into his head like the agents could. I just had to give him enough of it to make him forget the past few days—forget seeing my dad. He’d wake up at home, and not remember anything. It’d just be like . . . a blank space. But there wasn’t enough of the drug left to make him forget more than half a day. I kept trying, but after all these years the stash was running low.”
“And you had to use it on other people,” I said. “Like me.”
“I’m sorry,” Micah said, but it was more of a whine than an apology. He still didn’t understand why I wasn’t siding with him. “I really wanted to keep you out of it. After we found Bryan and Cassidy, I saw how worried you were about your dad, so I wrote that email from his account so you’d know he was safe. But you didn’t stop looking. And then you came to the plant, and you almost found your dad in one of the rooms. . . .”
I shook my head. I remembered going down into the basement hallway, opening door X10 . . . and hearing noises in a neighboring room. I’d thought it was a raccoon again, but really . . .
“Dad was there?”
He’d been so close. . . . I’d been so close to finding him. . . .
“I saw you in the plant and I followed you. I told you everything,” Micah said. “I tried to get you to understand why your dad was in the plant, why you couldn’t see him yet. But you were so mad. You said you were going to go to the sheriff, that he was probably already on his way. So I used some of the very last of my stash to make you forget, and then I made your dad leave you that voice mail to help you stay away, and I moved him out here to the barn.”
I shook my head, torn between wanting to punch Micah in the face and knowing I had to get all of us out of here in one piece. Another small bit of information clicked forward in my mind.
“I wasn’t the only person you used the drugs on, was I?”
Micah shifted on his feet but didn’t respond.
“The sheriff. You gave him the drug, too. Was it just because he was at the crash site? Or did he see something else you didn’t want him to see?”
Micah pursed his lips. “The sheriff and I were both out in the woods for the same reason—trying to find the rest of Ike’s cameras. Reese told me that’s what the cops found near Bryan’s and Cassidy’s bodies: a camera of Ike’s.”
“I told you that in confidence!” Reese said. She looked slightly abashed at her outburst. “Not that it matters now, I guess.”
“If my dad had been captured clearly on any of those cameras, it would be all over,” Micah went on. “I had to find them. But my dad must have followed me out into the woods. He was getting harder to control, refusing to stay locked up anymore, no matter how hard I begged him . . . and when I got to the crash site, the sheriff was already there. He saw me—and my dad. I had the drug on me, so I just . . . I only used a little bit, enough to make him forget a few hours. I never found another camera.”
“We did,” Dex said. “But in the pictures we saw, the sheriff was just standing there, staring . . .”
“That’s how it works,” Micah said, miserable. “The drug makes you fade out for a bit, and then you forget. Or if you’re the government, you make people remember things that aren’t true. But I never did that.”
“I’m sure your medal’s in the mail,” Dex retorted.
“And there’s more, isn’t there?” I said, slowly realizing. “Mrs. Anderson. We found her in the street one day, and she was dazed and couldn’t remember where she’d come from. She kept talking about pie . . . that she’d just brought a pie to someone. It was you, wasn’t it?”
Micah’s face twisted in chagrin. “She came to our back door. She shouldn’t have done it. My dad was confused, wandering in our backyard, and she saw him. I only used a little of the drug on her, I promise. And she’s fine now! She only lost a few hours, right?”
“We had pie later, on our date. Was it hers? You drugged her and then fed me her pie?”
Micah bit his lip, and I took that as a yes. I felt sick. All that evidence, right there before me, and I hadn’t put any of it together.
A loud thumping noise made me look up. Reese had just stamped her shoe on the ground. “Pie? Who the hell cares about pie?” Reese yelled, waving her hands in the air as if trying to get us to see something obvious. All her cowering fear was gone. “Micah, you just admitted that your dad killed people. He killed Bryan and Cassidy, didn’t he? Didn’t he?”
Micah looked taken aback by Reese’s outburst and put his head down, as if he couldn’t face her.
“He didn’t mean to,” he finally whispered. “He’s in so much pain, and he gets so confused, and he can’t control it. I didn’t even know he could do that to someone until the hiker. And I hoped Bryan and Cassidy had just run off; I really wanted that to be true. . . .”
“But you were the one who found their bodies,” Reese continued. She waved a loose hand toward me. “Both of you. You knew then what your dad did. You knew what he could do, that we were all in danger. And you did nothing.”
“I was going to fix everything,” Micah said for the third time, like a mantra he couldn’t stop repeating. “When I saw those agents were back, I knew they’d have more of the X10-88, or at least know where some was. I just had to get some more of it, enough to make Ike forget everything. And then I was going to take my dad out of town, somewhere far away, where he couldn’t hurt anyone else.”
“That’s why you finally told me about the agents?” I asked. “You set me up to track them down, all so you could get your hands on more X10-88?”
“I didn’t want to get you involved, but since you were clearly hell-bent on figuring everything out—even after losing your memory at the plant—I figured I might as well use that to help set everything right. Once you found out where the agents were keeping the drug, I could go get more. Then everything would be fine.”
“It wouldn’t be fine,” Reese said, the rage still seething from her. “Nothing would be fine. Look at my dad! Did that . . . thing out there do that to him?”
“No,” Micah said. “I did.”
“What?”
“I had to keep people away from here! When I heard about the party, I called it in to the cops to get them to bust it up before anyone could sneak in here and find Ike. But the sheriff just couldn’t leave it alone. He went out looking in the woods, and I had to make sure he wouldn’t find my dad again. For both their sakes. I had to knock him out. And then I tried to get all of us to leave, to run, but no, you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“And that makes it all better?” Reese’s voice rose higher. “You knocked out my dad! Bryan and Cassidy are dead. And the monster who killed them? He’s out there right now.”
“HE’S NOT A MONSTER!” Micah’s face was so twisted up, he looked like a stranger.
I exchanged a look with Dex, who was only a few feet away from Micah now, closer to him than the rest of us. Another wave of fear jolted through me—I could guess what Dex was going to try to do as soon as he got close enough, and I didn’t want him to take the risk and get hurt. But I couldn’t communicate that without tipping off Micah.
As for Micah, he seemed a little shocked by his own outburst, and certainly unnerved by how scared we all were. He ran one shaking hand through his hair and took a deep breath through his nose. “My dad is not a monster,” he said, slowly and more calmly. “He’s my family.” He looked up at me then, and I saw again that look in his eye—that desperate wish to have me understand him. I kept my eyes trained on Micah as Dex slowly began inching toward him again.
“No dad is perfect,” Micah said. He waved a hand—the hand with the gun—toward my dad. “I mean, what about everything you told me about him? About how much he let you down? But you still went looking for him. Because he’s family.”
I kept stock-still, not wanting to turn around and see my dad’s expression. But my eyes darted to him unwillingly. I expected him to look angry, but he just looked confused. Like he was truly surprised by what Micah was saying.
And it occurred to me that for all the years I’d been angry at him, I’d never really gotten up the nerve to tell him why, or to demand a reason for his behavior. And why hadn’t I ever told my dad how I felt? Why hadn’t I told him how angry I was, about finding him with Julie Harper, and losing Reese, and the divorce, and the stupid black bear in the woods? The split between us had seemed so wide, and we’d fallen so far apart, that it hadn’t occurred to me to just talk to him. To hear his side, to tell him mine.
And if we didn’t figure a way out of here, I’d never get that chance.
Micah stared at me, waiting for a response.
“You’re right,” I managed to say. “We do a lot for family, no matter what. But, Micah, you said yourself your dad hurts people without meaning to. He burns them, somehow. And right now, he’s out there, and he could come in any second—”
“No,” Micah said, with a surety that surprised me. “I was the last one in, and he saw me before I came inside. He saw me, and he went back into the woods. My dad would never hurt me.”
“And the rest of us? Would he hurt us if he saw us leave here?”
“You can’t leave here. Not until I get this figured out!” Micah put his free hand up to his eyes and rubbed them, hard. He was coming apart. He wasn’t going to figure anything out—and even if he did, I definitely didn’t want to be part of his solution.
But I didn’t get a chance to think up a solution of my own. While Micah was rubbing his eyes, Dex made his move.
It happened so fast, I barely had time to register it, let alone try to stop it. Dex had maneuvered himself so he was only a couple of feet away from Micah. As soon as he was in reach, Dex lunged out, his long legs closing the gap between them, his arms wrapping around Micah’s upper shoulders to trap him in place. For just a moment, Micah stood frozen, stunned by Dex’s sudden move. His gun arm was pinned to his body, the barrel pointed at the ground. But then his jaw hardened in anger. His shoulder muscles bulged up easily. And Dex realized his mistake the same moment the rest of us did—though he had the element of surprise, and even an inch of height on Micah, he was nowhere near as strong as Bone Lake’s superstar quarterback.
It took less than three seconds for Micah to break Dex’s hold. The momentum sent Dex flying backward. He caught himself before falling, but then Micah spun around on him, the gun aimed squarely at Dex.
A scream tore out of me. I thought Reese might have been screaming, too, but I could barely hear it over the sound of blood rushing through my ears. Everything else in the barn was forgotten—Reese, my dad, the potential killer roaming just outside the flimsy barn walls. My whole world was narrowed to that small, dark gun barrel and the few inches of space between it and Dex’s chest.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Micah said.
“Don’t shoot him, Micah,” I begged. “Please, please don’t.”
“I don’t want to shoot anybody!” Micah said. With his back to me, I couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded pained. “I never wanted to hurt anyone!”
“Micah,” my dad’s voice called out. “Think about what you’re doing. Things have gone too far, son. There’s no fixing this. The only thing left to do is let us go.”
“I can’t!” Micah yelled. “I can’t lose him. Don’t you understand? I can’t.” The panic was rising in his voice, and his hand tightened on the handle of the gun.
My dad started to talk again, but I interrupted him, making my own voice louder.
“I know, Micah,” I said. “I hear you. Just . . . tell us what we can do. Tell us what you need. Please.”
Micah stayed still. One second passed, then two. Finally, his shoulders relaxed a moment.
“I need the drug. The X10-88. Did you find the agents, Penny?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did. And I can tell you where they’re storing stuff.” I didn’t remember seeing anything in the storage unit that resembled any sort of drug, but at the moment, Micah didn’t need to know that.
“I’ll tell you,” I continued, “but first you have to put the gun down. Let Dex go.”
The barrel of the gun dropped two inches, and Micah quickly jerked his head, indicating Dex could move. Dex’s eyes closed in relief, and then he quickly melted away to the side of the building, made his way back to where I was standing. I wanted to reach out and grab him up, to push him behind me and keep him safe, but I didn’t want to make any more sudden movements.
Micah slowly turned to face me.
“Thank you,” I breathed. “There’s a storage facility outside of town, off of M-66. The agents were there.”
“Okay,” Micah said, nodding his head quickly, thinking. “Okay. Everyone get out your cell phones. Toss them over to me.”
“What?” Reese sounded strangely offended, as though that were the strangest thing for Micah to ask of us that night.
“Do it!” Micah said, vaguely raising his gun.
Dex, Reese, and I reached for our phones and tossed them to the ground at Micah’s feet, where they landed with three distinct clatters.
Micah picked up the phones and put them all in his pocket. Then he backed slowly toward the barn door and opened it, keeping his gun trained on us the whole time.
“You can’t seriously just leave us here!” Reese called out.
“I just need to get more of the drug. Then I’ll come back, give it to you all, and everything will be fine again. It’ll all be fine.”
“But what about the monst—sorry, your murdery dad—right outside?”
“I told you, he saw me come in here. He wouldn’t hurt me,” Micah said, keeping one hand steady on the open door. I could see a patch of darkness outside, but nothing beyond that. It was impossible to know if lurking out there, somewhere, was a meteorite-infected man consumed by blinding fire.
“But you’re leaving,” I said. “What if he comes back for the rest of us?”
Micah paused for a second, his mouth moving quietly. “He won’t,” he finally said, but his voice lacked any conviction. “Besides, I’ll be fast. Just stay here.”
“Micah!” I called out, but the door had already shut behind him. I heard a key turning in a lock and realized, stupidly, that he hadn’t “found” the key as we were trying to get inside—he’d probably had it on him the whole time.
“Just stay there!” his voice called out from the other side of the wall.
I heard his footsteps moving away through the leaves, and then nothing. I quickly scanned the barn, but there was no window, no other way out.
We were trapped, alone in the woods, with a killer right outside. A killer who’d been infected by meteorite alloy that had been experimented on by the government.
As soon as the thought passed through my mind, I could feel something bubbling up in my throat, and at first I thought it might be a scream. But what came out was a single burst of laughter. The noise was startling in the small, enclosed space of the barn, even to me.
“Penelope?” Dad asked. “What is it?”
“I just . . .” I gasped, my voice rising as I struggled to speak, “I was just thinking . . . it was a zebra the whole time.”
“A zebra?” Reese asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When you hear hoofbeats, think horse, not . . .” I said, then broke into a round of panicked giggles that got stuck in my throat.
A split second passed, and then Dex’s face broke into a smile, too. “Zebra.”
“It was a zebra!” I felt my voice rising in a fit of panicked laughter, but I couldn’t stop it. I just threw my hands up in the air. “And who knows? Maybe aliens are real. Bigfoots, too!”
“Are you losing your minds?” Reese asked.
“Maybe!” I said, then turned to see Dad was watching me with concerned, wondering eyes. But he was also smiling.
“How is this funny?” Reese’s voice rose higher, its panicked pitch nearly matching my own hysterical one.
But her outburst only made me laugh harder. For just a second, the horror of the evening let up, my chest loosening a fraction.
But before that second could stretch into two, I heard the noise. We all did.
It was low but distinct, like feet dragging slowly through the underbrush. It was coming from outside the barn walls.
And it was getting closer.