I threaded my way through the space in between and popped open the door to my car. From the center cup holder, the screen of my phone flashed blue. I leaned over, maneuvering my knee onto the seat so I could pull out the phone. I recognized Meg’s area code on the missed-call notification. My heart jumped. Finally.
I was entering the phone’s password when I felt a shadow cross me. A whiff of tobacco. Then a brush of hair on my cheek. I didn’t have time to scream before a coarse rag was shoved over my mouth and nose. The grip of strong arms hugged me to a stranger’s chest. Something sweet filled my nostrils, and a wave of nausea rushed up my throat just before the world disappeared.
THIRTY-SEVEN
A half-life will grow shorter the more energy that is released. Therefore, a vast quantity of energy is needed as a starting point to sustain Adam for a greater length of time. It would need to be a supersource.
* * *
Pressure filled the space between my temples in waves. I lay still as a possum and counted to five, then to ten, then to five again to see if the last surge had left me. When the pressure faded, I dragged my forehead from a hard wooden surface to a world where everything was blurry. Tilted. Unrecognizable. I tried to sit up. Somewhere outside dogs barked, and I briefly thought of Einstein. My arms scraped the wood. Splinters flaked off and stuck in my skin. I groaned. The back of my throat burned like it’d been seared with acid. My hands, I realized, wouldn’t budge. They were paralyzed. Stuck together. My feet felt as if needles were attacking them. They tingled, dead asleep. How long had I been lying here? I squinted through my eyelashes. An intricate knot looped around my wrists and ankles.
I jerked. My cheek scraped what I now understood was the floor, and I felt the fresh sting of raw skin. Panic seized hold of my lungs. I spent several long seconds writhing on the floor, trying to break my hands free. It was no use. The rope wore into my wrists, and the prickle of welts spread underneath it. Trying a new tactic, I dug my elbows into the ground and pushed myself into a sitting position. I was breathing heavy. Strands of hair fell over my eyes.
I made myself tick through the things I knew for certain. At some time before now, I’d been at the Queen’s Inn. Someone had drugged me. That someone must have brought me here. I swallowed back tears. It wasn’t much to go on. I glanced down at my clothes. My jeans were buttoned. My shirt appeared untouched. I didn’t feel like anything … indecent had happened. At least not yet, anyway. I thought of lost girls on national news programs and tried to imagine myself as one of them. My pulse pounded in my ears. I sucked in uneven breaths. Shallow. What was going to happen to me? The answer formed instantly.
The Hunter.
The words shot through me, igniting a fresh rush of horror. I yanked against my ties, using every muscle in my body to slide my hands out of the trap. My wrists screamed with pain, and I curled in on myself. “No,” I whimpered. “No, no, no.”
Slowly, I sat back up. Tears streaked my cheeks, and my hair stuck to them. Breathe, I commanded. Focus. It wasn’t doing anyone any good to dive into hysterics. I steadied my lower lip and forced myself to take in the surroundings. I was in a dim room, one that looked like it hadn’t been used for years. Dust covered the floor. A twin bed had been shoved against the wall. Moths had eaten through spots on the thin green quilt that dripped off the brass bed frame. A yellowing crocheted blanket covered the nightstand beside it.
The room smelled like the inner pages of an old, forgotten book laced with something else, something I couldn’t place but that felt unmistakably out of context.
At the foot of the bed, I noticed a curious trunk that appeared to be made of glass and filled with a pus-colored liquid that might account for the smell. I couldn’t imagine what could be inside, but whatever it was it seemed foreign to the haunting nostalgia of the rest of the room’s untouched decor.
“You see him now,” said a voice coming from a far corner.
I gasped and cast my gaze around, searching through the dust-speckled air between us. “Who’s there?” I said. I scrambled, driving my heels into the floor, until my back met the wall behind me.
It was then that I noticed the sliver of shadow beneath a small window that was part of an alcove cut into the wall. The shadow moved. No, the shadow was rocking. I heard the creak of wood. A shiver raced up my spine. As the chair rocked forward, the pale light from the window revealed a hand curled over the chair’s arm. Behind him, the sky was bleak.
“Look.” My voice quaked. “I—I don’t know what you’re talking about or who you are even, but we don’t have to do anything rash here. It’s not too late to let me go, and we can forget about this whole thing.”
I felt vulnerable on the floor so, with great effort, I wedged my feet underneath me and worked my way into a standing position by using the wall to support me.
“Look at him.” The man sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. I narrowed my eyes, trying to cut through the room’s murky depths, but it was like trying to open my eyes in the ocean.
“At who?” I asked. Then my eyes landed on the glass trunk at the foot of the bed. “But I can’t move,” I whispered. “You’ve tied my feet together.”
“Are you going to run?”
“No. I won’t run.” My knees knocked together. “I promise.”
He stood up. Meg’s gun glinted from his belt loop. He noticed me staring at it. “That’s right. You’re not going to run.” The shadow slid from his face, and standing before me was Old Man McCardle. He wore a camouflage vest with a utility belt tied around his army green pants.
I stammered. “It’s you. It’s—” But I couldn’t finish. Evil had roamed our school’s halls unnoticed and untouched. Fear left a gaping hole in my insides.
He didn’t answer. McCardle crossed the room. He bent down beside my feet. I saw that his left hand was wrapped in bandages. The smell of tobacco choked me. A blade flashed. I shrieked and shut my eyes, but then the ropes fell loose from my legs. I rolled my ankles, stretching them. At least one part of me was free. I wondered if his other victims had been so lucky and tried to tell myself that there was still time to win.
McCardle’s eyes were sharp and cunning. He pointed to the glass trunk. “And the Lord said, ‘Look upon my son.’”
I hesitated, then caught another glimpse of the gun. My feet still numb, I advanced slowly until I could see over the lip of the open glass casket. I brought both hands to my mouth. My knees buckled. Inside the syrupy liquid was the floating body of a teenage boy. Much of him had been decomposed. Bits of his teeth showed through the pruned skin of his cheeks. The nose had begun to recede into the skull’s abscess. Tufts of hair were missing from his scalp. But none of that was the most grotesque part.
The eyes bulged from the sockets. Crusted blood formed a ring around them. I thought of the boy with the missing eyes and knew at once that I’d found them stuck haphazardly to fit into the naked corpse. The first to decompose, I thought. The eyes were the first thing to decompose. My head grew woozy.
Each of the boy’s legs was a different shade of flesh. One was pale and the other olive-skinned. Jagged stitches attached the thighs to the hip joint. Between stitches, skin flaked from the wounds, and it was clear that the old and the new body had never healed together.
“The hand,” I said, and I wasn’t sure whether I’d meant to say it. Only that my eyes were glued to the floating cadaver festering in pustule liquid. “None of the bodies were found missing two fingers.” I stared at the boy’s left hand, where a new pointer and middle finger had been attached using the same barbed stitching. “There’s a body that hasn’t been found yet?”
I peeled my eyes away from the monstrosity to look back at McCardle. He held his left hand up, and I noticed now that the bandages ended in nubs on his left hand. He’d used two of his own.
I closed my eyes and breathed through my nose. “This is what you’re going to do to me? You’re going to use me for parts. You’re sick.” Then a piece of my memory clicked i
nto place. Paisley at the field party. Old Man McCardle, his son, and the tractor. I turned back to the corpse. The legs, which had been caught in the machinery. Perhaps his fingers had been, too. “This is your son. The one that died. You’re trying to rebuild him. You can’t fix him. He’s gone. You’ve gone mad,” I screamed. “You don’t need to hurt me to make him whole.”
“Of course not,” he said. His tongue slid over his lips. I didn’t know if he was playing some kind of joke on me. Toying with me as he would prey. The Hunter of Hollow Pines was standing right in front of me, and I felt the clock of my life winding down.
Thunder crashed overhead, shaking the walls and causing me to jump. I struggled with the ties on my hands again. “You can’t do this. You can’t.”
McCardle came closer, taking even steps toward me. I retreated until my calves were against the cool glass of what I realized wasn’t a trunk at all, but a coffin. “He was buried into death in order that he be raised from the dead by the glory of the Father to walk in the newness of life. So sayeth the Lord.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Then the Lord formed him of dust from the ground,” McCardle boomed. “And the man became a living creature.”
I shook my head. Mucus dripped from my nostrils. Tears flooded my eyes.
“Come ye the resurrection where the hunted are born again.”
I sniffled. My body froze. “What are you saying?”
He was so close now that I could make out a long scar that ran from his ear to his chin. “I am saying that I know.”
Static buzzed in my ears. I remembered the tire tracks, the shattered phone. And now my stomach threatened to betray me. I’d ignored all of it, and I was here.
“How?” I rasped. I squeezed my eyes closed and reopened them free of tears. “Where … are … we?” I asked cautiously. But as soon as I asked, I knew the answer. I knew it because it was the only possible answer. I peered out the window, and sure enough a short distance away was the highway. He had seen me. Then he had seen Adam. That night came rushing back. The farmhouse with its lights on. The barking dogs. A scream lodged in my throat. This felt like a nightmare. One that lived and breathed and bled into the day to torment me.
“Bring him back,” McCardle said.
My spine went rigid. Already pressed to the coffin, I tilted my head and stared down at the amalgamation. “I can’t. He’s … he’s a monster. He’s gone. I can’t do it.”
I cringed away from the body, but McCardle caught me by the wrist. He ran his bandaged hand over my forehead and down the bridge of my nose. “I suppose then that my boy could use a new nose. Maybe ears.” He crossed my face to the lobes. “Patches of skin. What do you think?” he hissed. His breath was sour like curdled milk.
“No.” I breathed. My mind began reeling. I needed time to figure this out. I needed to buy time.
He yanked me into him.
I bit my lip by accident. A small shriek escaped. The room was spinning. “What—what I mean is, I can’t do it here. I have to have … my equipment.”
“If you think I’m taking you back to your house, where you can call the cops…”
“No,” I added quickly. “Nothing like that. The lightning generators. They are … my father’s invention.” The spit was so thick in my mouth I could hardly speak. “Without those, the resurrection, as you called it, it won’t work. We have to go to them.” A part of me begged to collapse on the moth-eaten bed, but I remained standing. Time. That was what I needed. As much of it as I could get. “I can show you.”
Some of the gauze around his hand loosened, and I could see the spots of blood that had seeped throughout the layers. “I already know where they are,” he said. And a cold fever swept through me.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Coordinates: 33.6627589 degrees north, 95.7891265 degrees west
Take left at the lone oak
Forty paces to due west
Look for the clearing in the woods
* * *
How long had McCardle been following me? I wondered. My teeth rattled against one another as we forked off onto the country road that bordered the beginning of the Hollows. The rope still knotted around my wrists rubbed deep grooves there, and I winced every time we went over another bump.
McCardle knew where the generators were. The thought sent icy tentacles around my throat. We hadn’t been alone that night. We’d been right. The Hunter had been watching us, tracking us. Who knew what he might have done, especially if I’d gone alone.
I rode silently on the front bench of the blue truck that left no divider between us. A white rabbit’s foot dangled from the rearview mirror. Something told me he didn’t buy it at a gas station for a souvenir.
The sky was breaking. Drops of rain spattered the grimy windshield. The darkest clouds now hung directly above us, grumbling like monsters. The occasional ripple of lightning flashed through the clouds’ bellies, but I had yet to see one break free.
I stared silently out the window. Through the side mirror I could see the blue tarp that covered the glass coffin loaded into the truck bed. During the drive, I’d been waiting for a plan to come to me, but I was no closer to one than I had been when I’d first woken up, drugged and groggy, in McCardle’s creepy farmhouse. My only thought was to get to the generators and wait for an opportunity.
“We’re almost there.” He ran his hand over the steering wheel. Thumped the bottom with the base of his hand. He was anxious. Anxious could be good, I figured. I might catch him off guard. But anxious could also be unpredictable, in which case all bets were off.
I cleared my throat. “You know, it wasn’t your fault what happened to your son. It was an accident. Everybody knows that.”
He watched the storm swirl above. “It’s really starting to come down out there.”
I shifted in my seat. “Yeah,” I muttered. “I guess it is.”
We rounded a bend in the road where there was a small inlet large enough for two or three cars to park. I didn’t think I could ever go near that spot without thinking of my dad leaving me behind in his truck to go chase the lightning.
I inhaled sharply. Another car was already parked there.
“Who’s here?” McCardle’s voice was a bark.
I tensed. “I don’t know. I swear. I don’t know.” This was mostly true. I didn’t recognize the silver sedan, but the Oklahoma license plate gave me a good idea to whom it might belong. My spirit lightened. Hope fizzed in me. They’d gotten my message. Adam and Meg were here. I tried to keep my face neutral.
I glanced sidelong at the black hilt of Meg’s gun still tucked in McCardle’s waistband. Maybe it was selfish of me, wishing they were there, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted to survive.
McCardle pushed the gear into park. The rabbit’s foot swung and then stopped. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, climbing out.
I craned around to watch him pull the tarp off the glass coffin and roll it carefully, lowering it to the dirt. The mutant corpse now stared up at the sky with his stolen eyes. Next he loaded the box of tools I’d told him I’d need. For what, I didn’t know yet. I didn’t have a plan. “Not much longer,” I heard McCardle murmur to the body. “So close.”
I turned back on the bench. What did he mean it didn’t matter? He’d sounded so sure of himself. A vague uneasiness spread through my limbs.
He opened the door, and misty rain sprayed my cheeks. “Get out,” he said.
“You’re going to have to untie me.” I stared straight ahead, unmoving. “I’m not going to be much help if I have my hands tied together.”
Another spike of fear punctured my lungs when the buck knife slipped between my hands. There was a pop, and the ropes fell to the floorboard. I rubbed my wrists and moaned.
McCardle spat on the ground then took the gun from his waistband and flipped off the safety. “Well?”
I climbed out. The storm breeze flattened the shirt against my stomach. Even though the generators belonged to my da
d, the woods felt like McCardle’s territory.
“You move him.” McCardle wiped his nose on his sleeve and trained the gun’s barrel at my heart.
“Me?”
He nodded with the barrel, a language that translated universally. I went round to the back of the truck. McCardle had rigged a crude wagon, where the casket lay on a plank of wood with four wheels and rope tied to it. I shuddered to think where else he’d taken his son.
He grabbed a lantern from the truck bed. The yellow glow cast a short path in front of us. I strained my weight against the rope, and together we entered the forest.
My back tightened against the weight of the coffin as I pulled it over uneven ground, stumbling every few steps. My eyes kept scanning the trees for signs of Adam. The soles of my shoes dug into the soft ground. Only spare raindrops fell through the canopy. Icy cold, they stung at my skin. The rustling of brittle leaves from above drowned out all sound.
Nearby, McCardle stalked through the woods, walking heel to toe like a predator. He swept the surrounding area with his gun. I was breathing hard now under the burden of the casket. A monstrous curiosity caused me to keep looking back, to study the body with the bulging eyes, which was only a shadow now sloshing over the forest floor.
Thunder cracked overhead, shaking the trees to their roots. I chewed on my cheek and continued our crawl forward. With every step, I expected to see Adam. Where was Adam? He’d saved me from Knox. He’d stayed close when he thought I was in danger. I needed him now more than ever.
We were getting closer now. McCardle stretched out his arm, the one with the lantern. “Shhhh, do you hear that?”
I strained my ears to listen. My pulse thudded. “No.”
We walked a few more yards, then I heard it. It sounded like crying. I felt the beat of my heart like a ticking time bomb in my chest.
“Someone’s come to join us.” I didn’t like how he said that. “Watch your step now,” he said. “Follow right after me.”
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