“Just write it like it happened.”
I sit at a desk by the windows—beyond the screen of Harp’s laptop is the blue of ocean. It’s early the next morning, and the sky is the pale pink hue that darkens every afternoon into an alarming, fiery red no meteorologist seems able to explain. I’m exhausted—Harp kept me up late, working out the details of her plan, and when I slept I slipped from nightmare to nightmare.
“Viv,” Harp says patiently beside me. “It’s not that hard. We can fix it up after you’ve finished, make it sound snappy. Just tell it like you’re telling it to me.”
I sigh and stare at the screen. Harp has already typed in a headline: THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CHURCH OF AMERICA. I look up at her.
“You’re sure this can’t be traced back to us?”
She nods. “Suzy set it up and she’s a genius. The Wi-Fi at this place is so well-protected, the FBI couldn’t track us down.”
Suzy has her back to us at another desk, typing intimidating-looking code. She turns, frowning, at this. “The FBI could definitely track us down, if they wanted to. But the Church won’t know how, and we’ll be in Los Angeles by the time they realize what you’re posting. That’s when the real trouble will start.”
“That’s extremely encouraging, Suzy, thanks,” I say, and she giggles.
“Look alive, Apple!” Harp grabs my head and turns it back towards the screen. “The fate of the world rests on your shoulders right now. No pressure.”
Diego was reluctant to approve Harp’s plan. Winnie finally convinced him that it couldn’t hurt—though I think she pushed for it mainly as a way to keep me out of trouble. Now, I stare at Harp’s headline. Picking carefully at the laptop’s keys with my left hand—my right still firmly encased in its splint—I begin to tell our story:
We found the place late at night in Point Reyes. There were several statues out front that confirmed it as a Church of America compound.
“What the hell?” mutters Harp in my ear.
“I can’t write if you’re literally reading over my shoulder!”
“Yeah, clearly.” She reaches over me, hitting delete until the screen is blank. “You can’t start at the end of the story. A lot of important shit went down before we got to the compound. You have to introduce yourself—that’s what’s going to draw people in, once they realize you’re one of the girls on the feed.”
“Okay.” I nod. “That makes sense.”
My name is Vivian Apple and I am 17 years old. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
You may be wondering why I am writing this blog post. Well,
I hear Harp groan and I look up at her. “What’s wrong?”
“‘You may be wondering why I am writing this blog post,’” Harp reads in pinched tones, pushing an invisible pair of glasses up the bridge of her nose. Then in her normal voice, she says, “Come on, Viv. It isn’t an assignment.”
“You literally assigned it to me!” I exclaim. “Why can’t you do it?”
Harp makes a face. “I can barely spell, Viv.”
“I’ve read your texts; you spell fine.” I stand, stepping away from the desk. “You’re the interesting one. You’re the one with two working hands. Why don’t you try?”
Harp stares at the laptop. After a moment she settles uncertainly into the chair. Her fingers hover over the keyboard for one long beat. She looks up at me.
“I don’t know how to do this! It’s going to sound dumb!”
But I don’t even need to encourage her. She turns back and begins to type. I watch the words fly easily onto the screen.
What up, America!
Probably you’re wondering what the deal is with those two teen girls on the Church of America’s newsfeed. Probably you’re like, “Better them than me, ha ha ha!” as you and your family shiver like little baby chicks in your homes trying to pretend you believe in the word of Frick so that the Church doesn’t come to your door to slap the stale bread crusts out of your kids’ hands and burn your wives at the stake for their prostitutely ways. COOL LIFE, BRO! But guess what:
I am one of the girls on the Church of America’s newsfeed, and I’m about to tell you how they straight-up faked that motherfucking Rapture.
Harp pauses and reads what she’s written. I see a little gleam of satisfaction in her eyes when she glances at me. “Too aggressive?”
I laugh and shake my head. “It’s perfect, Harp. Seriously perfect.”
Harp beams and keeps typing. I watch as she weaves our story: she begins with the Rapture’s Eve party, then the tense days immediately following our parents’ collective disappearance, Raj’s death, my return to Pittsburgh, Peter, every stop we made on our journey across the continent. It’s funny and quick and I begin to feel a sudden sureness blazing through my veins, because who’d read this story and doubt the girl who wrote it? How could anyone who read it not want to believe her? Maybe the blog won’t keep the militia’s attack from happening—I’m still not sure I want it to—but at least, for now, it makes us feel less voiceless. I feel like more than a face on the feed for the first time since the Church published my picture—I feel like a human being again.
Picture us, sweet reader: three bold and—dare I say—stunning (you saw the feed, you know we look like the stars of a romantic high school vampire soap opera; we are babes) American youths, standing there in front of Beaton Frick, who has just admitted to poisoning a(n unclear) percentage of the so-called Raptured. We are not pleased. We’re pretty much tearing through the seven stages of grief at warp speed, and my sweet buddy Viv (once a timid valedictorian type, now an increasingly fearless vixen and newly crowned make-out queen) is faster than anyone. She hits anger way before I do and how does she handle it? SHE STRUTS OVER TO FRICK AND BREAKS HER FUCKING HAND ON HIS CRAZY OLD MAN FACE.
“I didn’t break it!” I protest. “It’s only a sprain!”
“Poetic license, Viv. ‘Sprains her fucking hand’ doesn’t sound nearly as good.”
She types on, describing the Three Angels (“Mulvey, Blackmore, and a TBD creep, all of them in some seriously weak-ass angel costumes, like literally they’d just wrapped themselves in sheets. It was embarrassing.”) and our escape. She doesn’t share her doubts about Peter; maybe just for my sake she paints him as steady and noble, a romantic hero. She ends the post with an exhilarating plea:
I swear by everything in this world I hold dear—my dead brother Raj and parties and gratuitous swearing and my best friend in this or any universe, Vivian Harriet Apple (note: I do not actually know Viv’s middle name)—that this is true. Consider this: in your heart, do you honestly find it any crazier than the idea that your loved ones just beamed on up into heaven this past March, that if you kill enough sweet innocent gay boys, you’ll get cleared to beam on up yourself? You’ve let me down a lot these last few years, America, but even I don’t believe you’re that goddamn stupid. So ponder this tale, sweet reader. If you find yourself believing it, I ask you to do three things only:
1. GET ANGRY. We should all be so pissed at the Church of America that we’re willing to break our hands in the metaphorical punching of its metaphorical face. Take that fear you’ve been living with for three years—that distrust of your friends and neighbors, that nervous anticipation of September 24th, the supposed last day of this beautiful messed-up world—and turn it into unseemly stone-cold anger. Say to yourself, “The Church of America has fucked with the wrong citizenry!”
2. Tell someone else the story. Even if they don’t want to hear it—especially if they don’t want to hear it. The Church can kill me and Viv, but they can’t kill the story.
3. Help us find the missing Believers. Before your Raptured loved one disappeared, did he or she say anything weird(er than usual)? Any references to random locations, upcoming trips? “I hear Minnesota is lovely this time of year”? Anything inexplicable left behind? Pamphlets titled Things to Do in Denver Before You’re Raptured tucked inside their Book of Frick? Strange charges on credit card statements, confusing numbers on phone bills? We know first-hand from one Believer who escaped Point Reyes that she’d been summoned to California weeks before the Rapture, told to move in secret. By any chance did the Believer in your life let the secret slip?
OK, that’s it, you beautiful idiots. If you’ve got questions, leave them below. I’ve got nothing to hide except my current location.
xoxo Harpreet Janda, Fugitive
For over three weeks, we wait.
Harp had expected an instantaneous, explosive response, so we spend that whole first afternoon sitting by the laptop, refreshing the page, waiting for a comment. She shares it on her Twitter and her Facebook; she finds secular forums and subforums devoted to Rapture theories and posts the link in the comments. “The farther it reaches, the more people will buy it,” Harp says. “And once they buy it, they’ll pass it on.” But there’s no immediate response. Suzy shows us the stat counter she installed and we watch it faithfully, noting that there are in fact visitors—fifty-eight page views the first day, seventy-three the next. But on the third day, it drops to a dispiriting seventeen. Plus, there are no comments; no link-backs from other pages. Harp seems to be the only person spreading the story.
“It takes time,” she says hopefully, more than once, “for things to go viral. You have to make them get seen by the right people.”
Meanwhile, Amanda’s army relocates in shifts to the Los Angeles base she has secured. We’re to fully abandon Cliff House by the end of July. One night about a week after Harp posts our story, I wake to the sound of typing, to the now-familiar blue glow of the laptop screen. Harp sits in bed with her knees to her chest. The sky outside is black, freckled with stars, and the beds around us are empty—today Kimberly and Birdie left for L.A. with twenty others.
Harp sees me stir and quickly dims the screen. “Sorry, Viv! Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“Any comments?” I ask hopefully, pulling myself up on my elbow.
“Still nothing. I’m researching other Rapture theories. There are thousands, Viv. Blogs, hashtags, whole forums. Listen to this guy.” She reads out loud. “‘When will these sheeple accept what the rest of us have known since well before March 24th: that Beaton Frick and his ilk are extraterrestrial life forms who abducted the Raptured for their own nefarious purposes. They’re long gone, folks—they’re getting cut up like rare steak in a laboratory on Venus.’ There are one hundred-fifty replies to this guy, all praising his sound logic. I posted a link to the blog in the comments, but why would people like this ever listen to a story like ours?”
“I don’t know. Some people will go for the most outrageous answer, I guess. It’s a weird thing that happened—why not believe it’s part of something weirder?”
Harp sighs and pulls up a different page. “This one’s from a professor of psychology at NYU. She says, ‘The Church of America resembles not a system of belief so much as a cult. Various factors—its charismatic leader, dogmatic principles, elaborate system of reward and punishment—raise red flags for those of us in the psychological community. While it would be intellectually irresponsible to hazard a guess as to the fate of the missing three thousand, one is sadly reminded of such tragedies as Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, mass murders and suicide pacts orchestrated by leaders who suspected their hold on their community to be slipping.’”
I sit up, electrified. “Harp, write to her! Send her our story! She can help us!”
But Harp shakes her head. “I can’t. She’s dead. Apparent suicide, although her family has questions.” She looks up and I see the distress in her eyes. “It’s dangerous to say this stuff out loud. It’s dangerous to tell the truth and believe it. If it’s safer to say the Rapture was freaky alien shit—if believing that people did this could get you killed—why wouldn’t you believe the freaky alien shit? And even if you didn’t, wouldn’t you want to? It’s like the Believers: better to convince yourself you’re a good person, that someone’s going to save you, than to believe you might be as flawed as everyone else, and that in the end, you’re alone.”
“We can’t control what anyone else believes. All we can do right now is speak up and hope somebody listens.”
“But there’s no time!” Harp exclaims in a tight voice. “Here’s another article—a scientist from Iowa, who went missing last week. He says, ‘We’re dealing with alarming climate change across the globe, and it’s not an act of God—it’s man-made. We’ll make it past September 24th without issue, but after that our path is unclear. We have maybe forty or fifty years until major food shortages slowly begin to eat away at the global population, and that’s assuming something cataclysmic—an asteroid, a nuclear war, the explosion of the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone—doesn’t occur first. We could conceivably slow this destruction down, but it would require huge overarching changes in the structure of our society—the kind of change we’ll never achieve so long as we remain distracted by imaginary acts of God.’”
She stares at the screen a moment, then closes the laptop. I wait for her to lie down, but she doesn’t.
“We knew that, Harp,” I say softly. “We knew the Church doesn’t control the weather. You said it yourself—it’s definitely coming. Whether in three months or in three hundred years.”
“I thought it would be much closer to three hundred,” she whispers.
I don’t know what to tell her. I want our story to be the life preserver that keeps us afloat, but I’m starting to understand how little purchase the truth actually affords us in this world. I consider reminding Harp of the militia’s plan—if nothing else, we can at least destroy the people who have so confused our dying world. But I know that won’t bring her comfort. At the moment, it barely comforts me.
The next morning, I help Robbie pack supplies in the kitchen—he’s leaving for LA with some others this afternoon. I don’t know him well yet. Robbie’s got a thirteen-year-old boy’s surliness, plus the excuse of grief to keep him silent. Birdie told us his story—his mother went devoutly Believer and his father ran off, leaving him behind; Robbie left home shortly before the Rapture and doesn’t know where either of them are today. I’ve never heard him speak more than monosyllables before, but today, Robbie looks up from the pile of silverware to mutter, “I read your friend’s blog.”
“Yeah? Well, that makes one of you.”
Less than ten page views yesterday. We had Suzy examine the stat counter, thinking maybe it was broken, but she claimed the number was accurate. (“I think you just have a really unpopular blog,” she told us apologetically.)
“You think your dad is really dead?”
My body jolts, like I’m waking from a dream about falling. I haven’t thought of my dad in a while. “I can’t know for sure, I guess. I know he was at Point Reyes. I doubt he made it out.”
“But there are a lot of people missing, right?” Robbie’s dropped his monotone; he sounds curious, hungry. “Maybe he went somewhere else. Maybe he’s still alive.”
“We don’t know that the missing people are alive,” I remind him gently. “And even if they are … I guess I thought when I found my parents, that would fix things. I would find them alive—and I figured they’d be sorry. They’d become themselves again. But I don’t think it works like that. Because even if they had been alive, and sorry—that’s three people who end up okay. Out of six billion. And I don’t think I could be content anymore, to be whole when so many others are broken. You know?”
“I get you.” Robbie throws the silverware in a box with a metallic clang. “And even if they were all alive—they already made their choice. They chose Not Us.”
He glances up from under his shaggy hair with a defiant expression, but there’s a question in his eyes he still wants answered.
“Just choose your own family, Robbie,” I tell him. “Choose the people who choose you.”
We fall back into comfortable silence, broken finally by the sound of approaching footsteps. I look up and see Diego, looking weirdly unsettled.
“Vivian? Could I borrow you a second?”
I follow him through the main hall, into a cluttered back office I’ve never been in before. I’ve never seen him so uptight—he acts, more than anything, like a troublemaking student about to face the principal. Winnie stands just within the door, and Harp lounges in a chair, her legs kicked lazily over the side. Behind the desk in front of her is a woman in a wheelchair who can’t be much older than Winnie. She has raven-black hair and severe bangs brushing the tops of her eyelids; she scrolls through her tablet, looking as if she is literally biting her tongue.
“Vivian,” Diego says. “I’d like to introduce you to Amanda Yee.”
“Hi,” I say.
Amanda doesn’t look up. I turn to Winnie, confused, and she gestures to the chair next to Harp with pleading eyes. I sit. We watch Amanda for what feels like five full minutes before she folds her hands on top of her tablet and turns a piercing stare upon us.
“I’ve just been reading your blog. Very fascinating stuff.”
Harp and I glance at each other and I see my best friend wondering the same thing I am—is this a compliment? Before we can ask, Amanda continues.
“Here are my top three favorite things about it, in ascending order. One: I love the humor. So fresh, so clever. Two: I love that you spent so much time cozying up to Taggart’s son. Does part of me feel, like, why am I paying for these girls’ room and board when they had Peter Taggart in their back pocket but weren’t able to deliver him? I promise you I’m not bothered by the significant part of me that feels that way.”
My cheeks burn and I’ve opened my mouth to protest—his name is Peter Ivey, I want to say—but though I know Amanda sees me, she keeps talking.
“Three, and this is the big one: I love that you went ahead and posted this extremely incendiary missive on Cliff House’s servers. I love that I poured the better part of my fortune into the creation of the only instrument in the country that could theoretically take down the Church of America, and that said instrument is currently in jeopardy thanks to two fugitive minors who took it upon themselves to publish the sort of thing for which the Church murders human beings using the Wi-Fi for which I pay.”
“Suzy—” I start to explain.
“Suzy’s good,” Amanda interrupts. “She can keep you cloaked for the time being. But she’s not a miracle worker. And that’s what you’ll need once the Church sees this.”
“It’s the truth,” Harps insists. “It’s what we saw.”
“Do you think I doubt it? My point is only that you could have fashioned that truth into a far more effective weapon than the one you did. It’s more powerful as a secret. We could’ve blackmailed the Angels. But you gave it away and now it’s a toss-up—will the story gain traction? Will people believe you? If so, what will they do? Get angry enough to fight back? Because I think the best-case scenario is, you’ll get a couple hundred who say, ‘I’m never shopping in a Church of America megastore ever again!’ And get a couple hundred more who say, ‘I knew it!’ but keep shopping there, because it’s got everything, and for such low prices.”
I don’t like the reprimand, but I know Amanda’s right. I look to Harp—the blog is her baby; she’ll be crushed to realize we’ve ruined our chance with it. But to my surprise my best friend looks perfectly calm.
“You know what we need, right?” she asks.
“A time machine,” Amanda supplies sarcastically.
“Money.”
Amanda snorts, but she doesn’t interrupt when Harp continues.
“Let’s say you do, by some secular miracle, manage to kill everyone in the Church’s L.A. headquarters. How many people is that? Maybe two hundred? The Believers who remain will spin it. You’ll be terrorists; they’ll have the Peacemakers hunt you down. Then your money’s gone and so’s your army. And so, most importantly, is the narrative about who is the good guy and who is the bad guy. It seems—” Harp sounds sympathetic—“like a really dumb investment.”
Amanda taps her fingers on the table in a bored way, but I can tell she’s listening. “So what would you suggest?”
“I suggest you pour your money into me,” Harp says. “Into my fresh, clever voice. I’ve shared that post as far as I can, but I don’t know how to get it read. I bet you could buy its way into the right channels. You could put it on news sites. You could put it in tabloids. You could probably afford to get it carved onto the moon, for all I know.”
Amanda shakes her head. “It’ll still be your word against theirs. You must know the Church is going to find a way to retaliate. They can be clever, too.”
“They can say whatever they want about me.” Harp sounds a little rueful, and I remember my mom at Winnie’s door. “As long as I can keep writing. The only thing they’ve got that I don’t is an audience.”
There’s a long pause. Amanda stares at Harp through narrowed eyes and I feel Harp grow still beside me, like she’ll change Amanda’s mind if she so much as flinches. Just when I think the moment is about to end, that Amanda will demand we find another place to hide, she speaks.
“Okay. You keep writing your story, and I’ll make sure it gets read. But understand this: the attack is happening.” Amanda leans forward, gripping the table with her hands. She’s a slight woman, but I find myself drawing away, afraid. “You don’t get a say in that. Your new job is to get public opinion on our side. You’re going to make it so that when the building explodes, the country understands that it was the only way.”
Harp’s mouth drops open. “No! That’s not the point of the blog. That’s not why I’m telling our story!”
“It is now,” Amanda says evenly. “If you want to stay under my militia’s protection, that’s exactly the story you’ll be telling. Unless, of course, you’ve got somewhere else to go?”
The next day, Harp has eight hundred comments. Amanda has had the story reposted as an op-ed on all the major secular news sites. We wade through the responses together.
“‘Ur a dumb bitch and probably ugly and fat. Jesus hates you. Go back to Iraq I hope we drop a nuke on you God Bless USA,’” Harp reads out loud. “Well, that one covers all the bases.”
I read another. “‘This story is bullcrap lol tell your friend to watch her back no one does harm to the profit Rick and lives to tell about it long story short Ill kill her.’ The Profit Rick? Oh, oh! He means me. He wants to kill me!”
“Well, he’ll have to get in line. Pretty much everyone does. Wait, here’s a nice one—‘Lord help these heathens by drowning them in their own filthy lies and suffocating them on the scum that is their foul transgression.’ Signed UtahGrandma98.”
“This is awful.” I lean back in my chair after nearly all of the first hundred comments prove to be some variation on a racist death threat. “I didn’t expect the most positive reaction to your post to be ‘Saw ur pic on the Church’s feed ur hot msg me.’”
“I knew the first wave would be angry.” Harp scrolls through the hundreds of comments that remain. “It’s getting under their skin. There was nothing like this on the alien abduction forum. They’re mad because it seems possible.”
“Well, that’s a good thing! Right?”
But Harp looks unconvinced. I know she’s thinking of our meeting with Amanda—the justification Amanda wants Harp to provide. Now that Amanda has done exactly what Harp asked, and helped to spread our story at a level we’d never reach on our own, it seems as though Harp has no choice but to fill her end of the reluctant bargain. But my best friend is still set against the attack on Church headquarters. Reading the hateful bile of these Believers has done nothing to sway her. I’m far less sure. If the Believers across the country won’t listen to Harp, isn’t it possible they need something bigger, some drastic unimaginable action, to work as a shock to the system?
I decide to walk the trails on the opposite side of the cliff, to gaze one last time in the direction of Point Reyes. Ever since Harp voiced her crazy fears about Peter, I’ve had endless nightmares where he’s chasing me. Last night, though—I blush, remembering it—I dreamed we made out at a party in front of a room full of people, and when we pulled away, the other partygoers were filming us, streaming the footage directly to the Church of America’s newsfeed. I have to go and stare at the mass of land where I last saw him, to remember the person he truly is. Stepping outside, drawing my hoodie tight around me, I watch Winnie and Diego pull up. I haven’t seen either of them since this morning, when they left before sunrise on a mission they didn’t discuss. There are only seven of us left in Cliff House now: Frankie, Karen, Suzy, Julian, Diego, Harp, and me. The rest are in L.A. already. There’s something unsettlingly vast about the building now that it’s nearly empty.
“Where have you two been?” I ask as they get out of the car.
But Diego just makes a face, as if to say, You know I’m not going to tell you. He pushes past me to enter Cliff House. Winnie watches him go, spinning the car keys around one finger; after a moment she gives me a sad smile.
“We were moving Mara,” she tells me. I feel my blood go cold at my mother’s name. “She can’t come to L.A., but she can’t stay here—not in an apartment under my name, anyway. Amanda paid for a little house in the suburbs. We brought her there this morning.”
I look away, up at the rocky cliff side, trying to collect my thoughts. It’s not as if I imagined some tearful reunion—I’m too angry for that, still, and anyway, I can’t stray further than the area immediately surrounding Cliff House. But some part of me must have thought my mom would seek me out, that she’d sense my presence here at the edge of everything and come to find me. Because the knowledge that she’s no longer in the same city as me feels like an impenetrable wall falling down. I realize that I’ll never see my mother again.
“I’m sorry.” Winnie touches my arm. “I tried to arrange to bring you with us—to give you a chance to say goodbye—but Diego and Amanda thought it would be too dangerous.”
I shrug off her hand. “That’s fine. I didn’t want to see her, anyway.”
“Come on, Viv. Of course you did.”
There’s something gently insistent in Winnie’s tone. I bristle against it. What right does she have to tell me how to feel about my own mother? I remember the morning we met, how she scolded me to cut Mom some slack. Don’t forget you’re the one she kept, she told me. Like it was a competition: who did Mara Apple treat worse? But I’m the real daughter. I’m the one who thought for seventeen years that she was there for me. I’m the one who had to find out the hard way she wasn’t.
“No, actually,” I say, increasingly annoyed. “I didn’t. Do you seriously not get it? She left me alone to fend for myself. I didn’t know she was alive; I didn’t know where she was! I nearly got myself killed looking for her. And when I gave her the chance to save my life, to actually be my mother, she blew it. She cares more about getting on the Second Boat than whether I live or die.”
Winnie’s face blurs—I’ve started to cry. Embarrassed, I cover my face with my hands. I feel her put her hands on my shoulders to hold me steady, and I’m crying too hard to wrench away.
“I’m sorry I’m in the middle of this, Viv. I don’t want to be. I want to be neutral, okay? I want to be Sweden. You have every right in the world to be furious with Mara. She’s been rash and immature and unreliable. But she loves you, I swear. Her love is flawed—it’s really fucking flawed—but I don’t think it’s worthless.”
I take a shuddering breath, slowly calming down. When I lower my hands, I see Winnie’s face, close and troubled.
“But you know what?” she says softly, shaking her head. “She’s not my mother. Not really. You know best. So if you want to stay angry, stay angry. Just remember: you and I, we can be a family now. I want that, and at some point, I hope you’ll want that, too.”
I’m too stunned to answer, but Winnie doesn’t wait for one. She squeezes my shoulders, and walks into Cliff House. I make my way towards the trails. What Winnie suggests is exactly what I hoped for when I first learned she existed, exactly what I imagined as I climbed the stairs to her apartment the morning we met. Now the thought of it creates a weird, hopeful buzz inside me, but something else, too—a fear I can’t bring myself to fully contemplate.
I run through Point Reyes again, the leaves underfoot soft and slippery, the thin branches of trees lashing at my face and arms, slicing deep bloody lines into my skin. It hurts, but I can’t stop: I’m being chased. The night is black and impenetrable, and behind me I hear the thing’s heavy breathing, the thud of footsteps, the snap of wind at its back. But when I turn to catch a glimpse, I can only make out a shadowy outline. I try to lift my head, to look directly at it, but something’s wrong with my eyes—I can’t focus on its face. It gets closer, fingers slimy at the back of my neck; I feel the heat of it. I know I should run faster but I slow down, because I’m coming to a clearing I’ve been to before, where a figure lies limp with his eyes open. No, no, no. I try to slow down. Not again—
And then I’m in the passenger seat of my grandparents’ car on a blank stretch of sunny highway. I hear the buzz of Harp’s snores behind me, and when I look to see who’s driving, I feel a rush of pleasure, because he’s alive, he’s here, he’s whistling something sweet. He glances at me and though I can’t quite see his face, I can make out the parts of it that I like best—his lips and jawline and long eyelashes, and of course, that flash of bluest blue.
“Where are we?” I ask.
“California, of course.”
“Where are we going?”
“Anywhere,” he says. A cloud passes over the sun and the sky above us turns red as fire. “I had to get you out of there. You weren’t safe.”
Yes, I was, I’m going to say. I was with Winnie. But I feel something clasp around my throat, the fingers of the thing that’s chasing me, and choking, I turn to Peter to beg for help. He stares at my neck for a moment, without interest, then again he begins to whistle.
“Viv!”
Help Harp, I’m trying to tell him, she’s screaming. But then Peter’s gone and I’m awake in Cliff House, aware of something heavy pressing down on my throat. An arm. I hear the sounds of nearby scuffling and then, “Viv!” again, sharp and desperate. Harp is shouting my name, but then there’s a thump and she’s not shouting anymore. I hear a click and a light shines in my face.
“That’s the other one,” says the voice behind the flashlight. “Call it in, Randy.”