I booked it to the Shell station, gripping my makeshift crutch with white knuckles. I felt their eyes watching me—the skin on my neck prickled like a hot weight had settled on it.
Don’t look behind you, don’t look behind you—they would turn away just before I did, I knew.
The morning air was cold, and I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. Maybe I was freaking out about nothing. It could be nothing.
Keep your shit together, Josh. One phone call, and you can get out of here. Everything is going to be okay.
My inner voice lacked conviction.
At the ding-dong of an electric bell, the teenager behind the counter of the gas station looked up from his magazine with a mixture of confusion and surprise. Not a lot of early-morning visitors at the Bedal Shell, it would seem.
“Do you have a phone?” I asked, interrupting the bored “Can I help you?” coming out of his mouth.
“Uh . . . no.” A brief flicker to my dirty clothes, to the hiking pole in my hand.
“Not even a cell? Come on—look, man, it’s an emergency.” I snapped.
“Sorry, bro. Corporate policy.” He sniffed and turned back to idly leafing through his magazine, wishing I’d go away. Or at least, he made a decent play at it; had I been a little calmer I might have missed the way he kept peeking at my shoes, or the too-long way he lingered on a page with a deodorant ad. He was watching—they were all watching. No nineteen-year-old ever went anywhere without a cell phone. Not in this day and age.
“Well how ’bout a bathroom? Got one of those?”
“Outside, ’round the corner.” The teen jerked his head at the parking lot without looking up.
I couldn’t see inside the diner across the street, but a pale smudge turned away from one of the windows as I walked out of the gas station. Just in case, I waved and pointed around the corner. “Bathroom! Be right back!”
Totally normal, just shouting about taking a piss at the top of my lungs.
I limped around the corner of the gas station and hustled right past the steel door with a stenciled man and woman on it. I made a beeline for the road, safely out of view.
Ronnie Coors’s General Store sat kitty-corner to the Shell. The front windows were dark, and the closed sign hung lopsided in one window, but I wasn’t interested in trying to get in through the front door. For one thing, it faced the diner across the street and the patrons inside. If they saw me force my way into Coors’s shop, they would know the jig was up.
I crossed the street in a limping run, slipped behind a beat-up Chrysler and over a brick wall. A bird called from the trees across the way. A battered Prius trundled down the road, slowing to a courtesy rolling stop at the blinking light. Another totally normal morning. Nothing to see here.
Behind the store, a trash can-lined alley punched twenty feet into the block before ending at a chain link fence choked with a decades-neglected rosebush.
Still no cries of indignation or rage. Likely as not people were watching me sprint pell-mell across the street like an extra in a Jason Bourne movie for not a single goddamn reason.
A windowless steel door, set into the wall. I approached as quietly as I could manage, looking over my shoulder. I tested the doorknob . . . and it turned. It wasn’t locked.
Ronnie was an unmitigated piece of shit, but he didn’t strike me as stupid. He wouldn’t just leave his back door unlocked. Unless he did lock it and someone else had been here. Someone, maybe, who knew I would go looking inside, desperate for a way out of this town and these godforsaken mountains.
One of the trash cans thumped and rattled against the fence, loud enough to make me whip around in a blind panic—just in time to see the dark blur of a rat scuttle its escape down the alleyway. I sagged against the door frame, waiting for the bitter taste of adrenaline to fade from my mouth. A rat. Just a rat.
Pull your shit together, Josh. I slapped my cheeks, blinking. I took a deep lungful of dumpster-scented air, then another, ignoring the taste of rust and rotten garbage on my tongue. The sooner I found what I was looking for, the better. Everything would work out.
Against pretty much every single instinct in my body, I pulled the door ajar. I peeked around it. Nothing to block the door open—no piece of rock or brick. Nothing indicating a hasty exit, like someone loading a car who might have forgotten.
I looked over the silhouetted rows of shelves. The lights were off, the shades at the front drawn . . . everything sat silent and still. Waiting for an owner who would never return.
And the door was open.
I slipped inside and closed the door behind me with a click that echoed too loud in the large space. There was a deadbolt installed over the brass handle and I flipped that too, for good measure.
The golden light of dawn barely penetrated the heavy shades. Fishing rods, tackle, jackets, backpacks, and endless supplies stood in neat rows cloaked in shadow, looking like so many wretched-formed monsters lurking in my peripherals. My heart pounded and sweat dripped down my temples, but I took a few steps anyway.
I needed to get to the counter, where he kept that shiny new iPad. I crept like a burglar, down as low as possible, moving from the cover of one rack to the next. The open door was a fluke. Nothing sinister about it, old boy. If I was a burglar, I wasn’t a very good one—I slipped and fell in a crashing heap twice, trying to stay sneaky for no good reason, and once almost took a rack of Yaktrax down with me. The fourth time I ate it, I gave up and limped up the aisle.
The air smelled faintly of store-bought cleaners. But underneath the chemically clean smell something sharp and acrid lingered. Body spray used as a hygiene replacement, if I had to guess. It smelled like a locker room from high school, in all the wrong ways. It got stronger as I approached the counter: the ghost of Ronnie Coors, hanging in the air.
The countertop was bare, with not so much as a speck of dust in the single narrow strip of sunlight cutting it in half. I dropped to my knees with a grimace and started going through the honeycombed shelving underneath, pulling out invoices, catalogs, guides, and maps, shoveling it all to the floor with increasing frenzy. God damn it, where was that fucking iPad?
I pulled every single thing off those shelves, and it still wasn’t there. I sat in a pile of paper and plastic clenching my fists in frustration.
The shop crept in around me, hungry. I didn’t have much time—my absence must have been noticed by now. They would be looking for me.
I wanted to scream. Of course it wasn’t here; why would it be, in this Truman Show nightmare? I just needed a fucking phone or internet connection; it shouldn’t be that goddamn—
There, in the ceiling. A banister. It was tucked into the far corner near where I walked in, subtle. A second story. Of course—Ronnie owned the building, and his apartment would be upstairs. Yes! I scrambled to my feet, grabbing my hiking pole and making a significantly less-than stealthy beeline for the back of the shop. Where the banister met the floor were two sets of stairs, well-worn wooden ones leading up and sharp concrete ones down to a black basement. I didn’t even make a conscious choice—the last thing I wanted on this earth was to see what kind of monsters Ronnie Coors kept in his basement.
A length of chain requesting no one to cross ran the width of the first step leading upward, and I smacked it aside. I made it three stairs up when a thought stopped me in my tracks. I turned and straggled back down to the shop, hunting through the aisles.
Two minutes later, I found what I was looking for. I used the sharp end of a can opener to tear open the heavy-duty safety packaging and hefted the weight of my new camping knife in my hand. It was a big boy—six inches long, serrated on one section. It looked sharp; I didn’t have a spare hand to test the edge. It would do. I slipped it into a handy reinforced leg-pocket in my hiking pants in easy reach of my good hand. I didn’t care if it cut a hole in my pants; going upstairs armed with only my wits and a hiking pole didn’t seem like a great idea.
The upstairs was smaller than I expected. Three rooms shared a single hallway. A bathroom reeking of the same body spray, a bedroom ankle-deep in dirty clothes and empty beer cans, and a part laundry room, part closet, set farthest from the stairs. Someone had made an attempt at decorating; the bed had an actual frame, and there were posters of early 2000s movies I didn’t recognize on the walls, but the overall theme was one of neglect and poor hygiene.
I rifled through the one bedside table and closet, flinging clothes and boxes to the floor. In a box stinking of mildew I found an ancient laptop with no juice and (of course) no charging cord. I threw it on a pile of underwear and swore, tapping my makeshift cane against the floor. No time, I had no time for this shit.
This didn’t make sense. The iPad, his phone . . . he had the tech, knew how to use it. There had to be something else here, something I could use. A small table sat next to the bed with a folding chair beneath. A cheap desk, just lacking the computer. It had to exist; I wasn’t fucking crazy. Did he take it with him? Was it sitting in the back of the Jeep, way up in the valley with the Woodkin? If he did, I was fucked. Unless he had another computer around—something bigger than a laptop.
The answer, of course, was obvious. It was all in the basement.
I considered leaving. That’s how strongly I didn’t want to delve down those concrete steps into the darkness. I could walk back out into the alley, find a side street, and hobble my ass out of this nightmare town. I could hitchhike, or find a bus driver with enough sympathy to let me on board free of charge. Assuming, of course, I opened the door to the alley and Mike wasn’t waiting for me. Or the bus driver didn’t pull a U-turn and take me straight back to the diner.
Bedal closed in around me.
I had to go into the basement.
“God . . . damn it,” I muttered aloud. My voice sounded weird to my own ears—shifting and echoing in the confined space. For the third time I limped back downstairs. God, it was hot in here. The fake cork handle on the hiking pole was slicked with sweat. The vise at my temples ratcheted tighter. At the landing I fumbled in my pocket for my last aspirin and dry-swallowed it.
The stairs were steep, ending in black shadow. No light switch up on the landing, of course, and I didn’t have time to go back into the shop to find a flashlight. I made too much noise, going down. I didn’t care—the bang and rattle of my pole on the stairs was better than the gaping silence of the shop, sitting in wait.
In the half-light at the bottom was a door. I tested the handle, and it creaked open. I fumbled at the walls beside the door with a clumsy hand, groping for a light switch. I flipped it, and a flimsy yellow IKEA lamp flickered to life, suspended from the raw concrete ceiling by a bare wire.
It was everything an unfinished basement aspired to be—damp, cold, and lit like a torture dungeon. An ancient boiler ticked an irregular heartbeat in the corner, framed by rotting two-by-fours. The walls around the boiler were streaked with mold clawing up to the ceiling like fingers from a grave. It smelled sour and somehow green, but not a fresh green found in a forest; a putrid green, the green of rot and dying things.
Tick tick tick.
The boiler counted the seconds for me, reminded me that time wasn’t on my side.
Against the wall sat a sleek black-and-silver desktop tower and monitor. And, even better, another laptop, discarded to one side. My heart beat faster. Fucking finally.
I pressed the power button on top of the desktop with trembling fingers. The monitor hummed to life and began loading. Behind me the boiler ticked in too-fast measures.
The walls around the computer were covered with black-and-white photographs taped hastily into place. The quality was grainy and zoomed. Curious, though, was the angle—each of the pictures was taken from overhead and to the side, almost like a security camera. Women, wearing blouses or low-cut sweaters.
“Fucking charming, Ronnie,” I muttered.
A single login profile, and it wasn’t password protected, praise God. I clicked through to the Chrome app, heart in my throat. I was so close—I’d log into my Facebook and shoot Deb an instant message; I knew she kept her phone on her.
On the screen, an error message popped up.
No internet.
Tick tick tick.
I checked the corner of the screen, where the little ethernet picture had an X over it. Motherfucker.
Over my head, a floorboard squeaked. I froze, the sweat at my hairline turning cold. I told myself it was nothing, just another rat or the house settling around me, but the butterflies in my stomach whispered something else. One more, if I heard one more squeak I’d pull my knife, run upstairs . . . but nothing. Silence, and the ticking boiler in the corner. The heartbeat of the basement.
Tick tick tick.
I clicked through the usual suspects for internet access with trembling fingers.
“Come on, come on.” Network was active, ISP address connected . . . just no juice coming through the line. I pawed at the back of the desktop for the cable, maybe it came undone—no, it was where it should be. The neon-blue ethernet cable snaked down to the floor and followed the wall, leading behind me. Maybe it was unplugged at the other end?
The blue wire followed the length of the basement and ducked into an unfinished room off to one side. I practically ran, stumbling and haggard in my desperation.
“Jesus Christ!” I staggered backward, tripped over my feet, and fell flat on my ass. My crutch went flying, my foot struck something hard, and my head smacked against the floor.
The massive buck skull looked like it was screaming, crucified on the wall. Its antlers stretched six feet across, drilled straight through with shining silver studs. It pulled at me, snagged my vision. You know me, it said. Its mouth open, gaping dark and hungry.
Appletree, lying in a scarlet pool of his own blood, spilled by his own hand, already half eaten by the greedy dirt.
The angry boils covering Ronnie’s hand, outstretched in desperate hope.
Black smoke, pooling from the base of the dark rock slab like thick, poisoned honey, moving along the ground, swallowing the earth.
I closed my eyes, trying to not picture it all over again, but the black space between blinks was all too alive, happening in real time. Like I lived two lives. Stuck, trapped with no way out.
A link back to the valley.
—black smoke coiling, thick like molasses and moving upward to pool in the eye sockets—
“God damn it.” I sat up, wincing and grateful the blade I stuck into the side of my pants had, by some miracle, not gone sideways into my knee.
There, plugged into the wall, an ethernet cord. For a moment I forgot about it entirely, lost in the clutches of my nightmares. But I was here, I’d come this close to getting out of here for good; I just needed to reset the switch, and . . .
The blue cord lay in a slack heap on the floor, coiled around itself, plugged into the single pale outlet punched into the wall. And three inches from the wall, it was cut in a neat horizontal line. Not torn. Not unplugged and taken. Cut.
The last piece of the puzzle sank into place. I was funneled, like a rat in a maze.
“Well, well.” The voice came from behind me, and I spun to see Sarah standing on the stairs, the filmy yellow light illuminating a sly smile on her lips. Her eyes were lost in darkness.
“You got down here quick. Aren’t you the crafty one?” She still wore her blue apron.
My mind raced, trying to think through the details. I’d only get one chance, and if I fucked it up . . .
“We thought it would take you longer to figure it out. They usually take longer to figure it out.” Her grin spread wider. She didn’t move—she waited.
Waited? For what?
The rest of them. Shit. As long as she stood on the stairs, I wasn’t going anywhere. I swallowed. One of her, one of me. Soon, it would be several of them and still one of me. I had to take my chances, no matter how shitty.
“Get out of my way,” I said, hand sliding to my knee. “First and only warning.”
Her laugh was high and mocking.
“Okay—okay, I get it. Small-town murderers, is that right?” I said. “Maybe you get your jollies off, killing innocent hitchhikers. Well you won’t—”
She took two steps, and the words sputtered and died on my lips. She was still smiling, but her eyes were blank; they stared through me, through the floor, straight to the wriggling worms in the dirt beneath us.
“What the fuck? Can you see me?” I waved.
“Oh, we can see you, Switchback,” Sarah all but purred. There was something familiar in her voice, now. It resonated, echoed on two levels. Her voice, sweet and charming . . . and something high-pitched and angry. Like shattered glass. “We can see you just fine. You thought you could run from us.”
She took another step, and the grin on her face stretched even more. She stood on the bottom step, still blocking my way.
It wasn’t possible. God didn’t hate me that much.
“Clever little man. Running into the river. You thought that was it, right? Thought you could run from us.” She dropped off the step, her thousand-yard gaze pinning me to the ground. “Look at you—thinking you’re the first one to escape the Woodkin. So very proud of yourself. Amusing, to watch you flail and struggle. So many times you allowed yourself to hope. I love hope—it makes the fear sharper.”
The glass-voice grew louder now, overpowering. It was cold, it was angry, and it was very familiar.
“But here we are, at the end of the game. No one escapes. All must pay the balance. The Feast arrives.”
Sarah continued to smile, but it wasn’t Sarah, not anymore.
“Who—” My voice didn’t seem to want to work properly. The wriggling black tendrils beneath the slab. Her laughter was too loud for the small cellar; it boomed and echoed off the hundreds of imperfections and nooks in the concrete walls, cold and sharp.
I lunged for the stair, sweeping outward with the knife in my good hand. It connected with something solid, and she sagged backward with a deep grunt. The knife stuck on something and I let go, already fumbling up the stairs. Crutch, step, step. Crutch, step, step. My head down, focused on my footing; if I fell, if I faltered . . . my breath came in desperate wheezes, almost sobs.
A change in lighting announced the top of the stairs. I looked up—someone stood at the back of the shop, blocking the door to the alleyway. We noticed each other at the same time, his eyes wide in alarm.
“Hey!”
I ducked into an aisle and pulled down a rack of hand tools behind me with a crash.
The front door. I made a beeline for it, pulling anything handy, throwing shirts, packets of food, backpacks behind me. The slapping footsteps of pursuit didn’t slow—I was wasting my time.
I fell against the door, pulling on the handle, a high-pitched whine building in the back of my throat. He was right behind me, jumping over a large backpack, his face flushed and angry. The door was locked; I fumbled with the deadbolt with trembling fingers.
Ten feet away, then five—
The lock turned and I yanked the door open, throwing myself through it, missing his outstretched hands by inches.
The sun burned bright, too bright. I stumbled and almost fell off the porch, shading my eyes with one hand. The hardpan parking lot and street were lit with rays of slanted orange light over dark shadow, deep enough to consume me. I whirled in a panic, vague shapes and silhouettes dancing in front of me. Something hit my foot and I fell, scrabbling at the dirt as I tried to get back up.
Unseen hands grabbed me. They pinned my legs, hoisted me upright.
“Hey! Get off me, you—” I wriggled and tried to free myself. The guy from the diner—the man with the goatee—and Mike. I tried to kick him in the gut, but he batted my foot aside with no effort.
They held me, silent.
I heard the steps first, from the inside of the shop. Slow, steady. A scattering of leaves tumbled over the empty street. Bedal closed in, vacant and staring. Hungry.
It wasn’t Sarah. A man stepped out of the open door. A shimmering banner of carmine ran down the front of the blue apron, centered around the hilt of my knife buried in his gut.
“No.” The whimper escaped my lips like a prayer. It wasn’t possible. Not possible. His eyes found mine, black and dead as a shark’s.
“You can’t run from us, Switch.”
“You’re dead. You’re dead—I saw you die.”
“Life ain’t always what it seems to be, brother.”