Hide and Shriek

by Alison Hughes

  “The Scumbags aren’t home, so we can’t spy on them,” Dylan said.

  The brick house at the end of the alley was dark. Pitch dark, like a house avoiding giving out candy on Halloween. Not even a glimmer of light peeked through a chink in the garbage bags covering the windows.

  “Well, we have to do something. I’m sick of sitting around,” said Tess. “Hey, let’s go down to the river.” She stood up, dusting off the back of her jeans.

  “Yeah, good idea,” said Cam. “Let’s go. Let’s move.”

  As I stumbled after the others I started to worry. It was one thing to play hide-and-seek in the alley behind our house, in our own neighborhood. It was another to walk halfway across town, through the trees and down the dark ravine to the inky river. Plus, the river at night was way scarier somehow. Darker. Quieter. Wilder. Weirder.

  But I couldn’t say anything. I knew that tonight of all nights the others wanted to stay out. To make the point that we could. To give the finger to the new curfew. Cam and Tess were feeling determined, reckless—you could just feel it. Actually, I didn’t know about Dylan. He was hard to read, and he hadn’t said much.

  We walked slowly down the back alleys. Our block, the next, the next, the next. We hid every time a car’s headlights swung our way. When the car had passed, we’d come out, laughing.

  “Close call,” one of us would say. “Almost got us.”

  Pretty soon we were at the edge of town, searching for one of the paths leading into the forest. Tess directed the tiny flashlight beam to the bushes beside the sidewalk. I was beside her, watching the sliver of light do a bumpy dance from side to side.

  “Here.” Dylan’s quiet voice broke through our scuffling. He was up ahead.

  “Jeez, good spot, man,” Cam said. “We could’ve been hunting around here for hours.”

  “I come here a lot,” Dylan said. “This is the best way down, just after this huge spruce tree. Watch your heads.”

  We slid into single file on the narrow path behind Dylan. Cam, then Tess, then me.

  I wished I wasn’t last. Because the last one in line always gets picked off in the movies, right? Always. Especially if they’re smaller than the rest. The weakest, the littlest of the herd. I’d rather have been tucked in between the others, safe and protected.

  Let’s be honest. I wished Cam had been the last in line. If anyone had to be picked off, if I had to choose someone to be last in line, I’d pick him. He’s biggest, strongest. Probably fastest too. I glanced over my shoulder. We were leaving whatever light there was. I gritted my teeth and followed the others.

  We groped our way through the forest, down the ravine and toward the river. Technically, it wasn’t pitch black, even though we’d left the streetlights behind. The more we walked, the more my eyes adjusted to the dark. The trees, for example, looked black against the sky, which was more of a smudgy deep charcoal. I could see the tall shape of Tess in front of me, a white hoodie floating in the dark. I kept close enough to her that I could grab her if anything grabbed me. Then she could grab Cam, and Cam could grab Dylan. And the grabber—the wolf or cougar or whatever—would have to take down all four of us, which would be way harder than it taking down just little ol’ me. The thought cheered me up a little.

  It was very still. Just a faint rustle of wind in the trees. We, of course, were making noise—the boys stumbling over tree roots and swearing, Tess’s muffled laugh and Cam’s low voice saying something to her. My own raw breathing as I tried to keep up. The scuff of bushes and thin branches sliding over our legs and arms. The snap of twigs on the path. I hoped we were making enough noise to scare off any animals on the hunt. Surely by this time of night they’d all have eaten dinner, right? They’d just be wanting a good, long sleep.

  I groped at the back of Tess’s hoodie, and she half turned.

  “You okay?” she said.

  “Yeah, just stumbled. Sorry,” I said. But I didn’t let go of her hoodie, and she didn’t tell me to either.

  Finally we reached a spot overlooking the river, up on the steep bank. The river was dark and snakelike, gleaming and slithering down the length of the river valley. A long, powerful, moving presence in all this stillness.

  It was colder down here by the river. The wind whipped along the water, carrying the chill.

  “Careful. There’s a drop,” said Dylan.

  “Jeez, yeah, right there, Tess.” Cam turned to help her. I could see the smudge of his face in the moonlight. Tess turned to help me.

  Why, I wondered, are we navigating this ridiculous death-cliff in the dark?

  We were all using our hide-and-seek voices. Very low voices that were harder to hear than whispers. If you speak very low and quiet, you don’t have all those hissing “s” sounds that make whispers so easy to hear.

  We inched along the bank until Dylan stopped.

  “I usually sit here. Everyone have enough room?”

  I didn’t have enough room. Not at all. I was sort of half perched on an uncomfortable rock. I braced myself from tumbling down into the river by jamming one leg against another rock. But I didn’t want to say anything. Nobody likes a whiner. I snuggled into Tess, trying to get a few more inches of non-rock seat.

  We huddled together, laughing and joking, our voices still low to match the hush of the forest. Pretty soon we drifted into silence, all of us lulled by the forest sounds. The rise and fall of the wind, the flutter of leaves, the rush of the river. I was relaxing a little, even though my leg braced against the rock was cramping. I flexed it a bit.

  This wasn’t so bad, I thought. This wasn’t so scary. It was actually kind of peaceful.

  A baying, howling sound ripped into the night.

  It was so sudden and so loud that it made all of us jump. It came at us like a force, echoing along the valley. We all froze.

  “What the…?” Cam said, sounding nervous. I didn’t know what the others thought, but I was thinking, Wolves! The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I’d always thought when I read that description in books that the author was trying to be so dramatic. But it’s an honest-to-god fact. Your hair really does sort of stand up. Or at least it feels that way.

  I held my breath, trying to figure out what the sound might be, waiting for it to end. It was difficult to pinpoint where it was even coming from, but I thought it was across the river. A wolf across the river? Or wolves? The echo multiplied the original sound so that it bounced around us in waves.

  “Diablo! Shut the hell up!” A rough, deep voice skipped clearly across the river. “Shut him up, Kev! They’ll be here soon.” There was a muffled sound, then a sharp yelp, and the baying stopped abruptly.

  “Probably barking at some rabbit,” another voice said.

  “Dog,” Tess said in my ear with a nervous giggle. “Just a dog.”

  But I wasn’t relieved.

  It had all clicked into place. I knew that bark. I’d heard that deep voice screaming Diablo! before. At the pit bull in the backyard of the brick house at the end of our street.

  It was the Scumbags Down the Street.

  Only now, tonight, they were there, across the river.

  What were they doing there?

  And who were they meeting down by the river in the middle of the night?

  Chapter Four

  “Scumbags Down the Street,” I breathed into Tess’s ear, squeezing her arm. “Pass it on. Quietly. If we can hear them, they can hear us.”

  Tess squeezed back, telling me she understood. She turned to Cam. I felt a wave of relief for our silent group—every one of us knew how to keep quiet. There wasn’t one of us who’d panic and yell, Let’s get the hell out of here! Because for sure the men on the other side of the river would hear, and they’d let the dog loose to swim across the narrow river, and we’d be fighting our way out of the forest with a pit bull on our heels.

  We sat dead still and listened.

  “They’re late,” the rough voice said. His voice was astonishingly clear f
or being so far away. It just floated across the river. “Frickin’ cold.” In my mind, I called him the Boss. He was so clearly in charge.

  “Why can’t we just do the drop like we used to?” The second man, who must be Kev, had a higher, whiny voice. “Just drive up, plop, done. From a heated car.”

  “Keep your voice down. Did you forget what happened last time? That’s why. What’s that? No, no, listen.”

  We were all listening, straining our ears to catch everything. It was impossible to see much. A little movement, a blur of white here and there down on the beach.

  “Okay, showtime. This must be them.”

  The dog started barking again. This time, the Boss let him bark.

  I couldn’t tell how many people joined the two men. Two? Three? Diablo’s whining, growling and barking drowned out most of their conversation. But at the end, as clear as day, I heard the Boss say “—at the house. New shipment. Untraceable.” Someone responded. There was a gust of laughter. And after the others had stopped laughing, one laugh kept going. A thin whinny of a laugh.

  Kev, I thought. That’s gotta be Kev.

  We heard murmuring and rustling. A yelp from Diablo. We heard car doors slam, the faint sound of an engine. Then silence.

  Cam made a move to scramble to his feet, but Dylan grabbed his arm and pulled him back down. Tess and I sat frozen, our ears straining, our hearts pounding. It was awful not being able to see whether anyone was still there. Were they gone?

  “Figure they’re gone?” The voice floated across the river, echoing my thoughts. Thank god we hadn’t moved. It was the Boss, tense and businesslike.

  “Yeah, gone,” said Kev. “Let Diablo go. He’ll make sure.” He laughed, and we heard the dog’s powerful body charge through the bushes. A spark and a faint whiff of cigarette smoke wafted across the river. They were smoking while the dog prowled. I could see the glowing red tips of their cigarettes.

  None of us moved a muscle. Well, actually, one of us did. My leg that was braced against the rock was aching with strain. My foot was cramping up unbearably. I shifted it just slightly to take the weight off my heel. It was the smallest motion, but the ground around the rock crumbled. Dirt and rocks tumbled down the bank in a noisy, rattling, little slide.

  Tess grabbed my arm in a painful grip and hauled me practically up onto her lap.

  The men across the river reacted immediately.

  “The hell was that?”

  Silence.

  “Hey! Anybody over there?”

  Silence.

  “Some animal, probably,” said Kev. “Deer. Rabbit. Some animal.”

  “What if it wasn’t?” The Boss sounded tense. There was a metallic click, crisp and clear. Not a dog-leash click. Not a cigarette-lighter click.

  Tess’s grip on my arm tightened. We both knew that kind of click. We were a police officer’s kids.

  I swear Tess and I both thought the same thought at the same time. The Scumbags have a gun.

  Chapter Five

  A flashlight beam danced along the bank over to our left. Nearer, nearer. Then just below us.

  I heard someone mumble, “C’mon.” Rustling noises. I strained my ears. They really were going, the noises getting farther and farther away. Faintly we heard two car doors slam.

  We sat silent and still after we heard them leave. And then we sat some more.

  “Holy hell,” Cam finally said. He sounded excited rather than scared. “Was that a—”

  “Gun? Yep.” Tess shoved me off her lap. Her voice sounded hard and tight. “Let’s go.”

  “Ho-lee! They really are legit scumbags!” He laughed. “I thought they were just low-level—”

  Dylan cut Cam off. “We gotta get out of here. Now.”

  “Okay, okay. What’s the rush? I mean, they’re gone, right?”

  Cam is a very literal person. Very immediate. Like a child. Bad guy gone, so no more bad guy.

  “Look.” Dylan took a deep breath. “Buddy hears something on this side of the river. He’s suspicious. He takes the safety off or does whatever the hell makes that metal gun sound. He leaves. Any of that sound like they might be coming over here to see if there were witnesses to their little deal?”

  Dylan’s cold logic dropped into silence. He’d summed up everything I’d been trying not to think. My mouth was dry, and I couldn’t seem to stop shaking.

  “Let’s go. We have to go,” I whispered.

  We all scrambled to our feet.

  “Dyl, you’re the forest guy. Get us out of here,” Cam said, shoving him to the front of the line. We all took off at as full a run as we could manage in almost total darkness on a narrow, uneven, uphill path. Once again I ended up last in line, tripping and stumbling after the others. Tess hauled me along like a mom with a toddler, her hand tight around my wrist. Normally this would have annoyed me to the point of rage. But right now, raw fear blotted out every other emotion.

  “C’mon, c’mon,” Cam urged us on impatiently.

  “They have to get to the bridge, right?” Tess panted. “Other way.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Cam said. There was relief in his voice. “They have to get all the way up to the bridge and back down this way.”

  This made me feel a little better, but I still ran as fast as I could. I could hear my ragged breathing as I ran, felt my lungs burning. If we can just make it to the sidewalks, to the alleys, to somebody’s backyard, maybe even to our homes...

  Thrashing and blundering through the trees, tripping over roots and rocks, we climbed the path we’d gone down. My hands and face were scratched from the thin branches overhanging the path. Everyone’s probably were.

  I fell once, cracking my knee on a rock. It was blindingly painful, but anything short of a jagged gunshot wound seemed pretty tame right now.

  “You okay?” Tess dragged me to my feet. She didn’t sound very concerned. She sounded like she wanted to say, Get the hell up!

  “Yeah,” I said. I gritted my teeth.

  “Almost there,” Cam said over his shoulder. “I can see the streetlights up—”

  He stopped. We all stopped.

  Actually, we didn’t stop. We froze. Because we’d all seen the sweep of other lights.

  Car lights. Were those car lights? They couldn’t have got here this fast.

  We listened. Sure enough, above the pounding of my heart, I heard the sound of a car engine.

  It was coming down the street. Fast.

  It squealed to a stop.

  Chapter Six

  They were here! It should have taken them longer, but they were here, on our side of the river. They slammed out of their car and crashed into the ravine exactly where we needed to get out.

  “Quick, over here.” Dylan spun around, shoving past Cam and Tess. He grabbed my arm and bolted back down the path we had just climbed. I reached back for Tess, and she grabbed my other hand. We must have looked like a group of kindergartners out on a field trip, holding hands, all in a line.

  Only kindergartners aren’t usually fleeing from gun-wielding criminals, I thought. That would be one very sick preschool field trip. I stifled a panicky giggle. I do that sometimes when I’m really stressed. I giggle, of all embarrassing things. Tess has told me many times that it’s super annoying. I know it is, but I can’t help it. I bit my lip until I tasted blood. It stopped the giggle from turning into full-blown, hysterical, panic-laughter.

  Dylan groped around in front of me, searching for something in the gloom.

  “Rock. Big rock,” he panted. “Where is that big rock?”

  We heard the dog start to bark.

  “C’mon, man!” Cam said urgently. He pushed into Tess, who pushed into me.

  I remembered the rock. It was where I had cracked my knee.

  “Farther down,” I whispered to Dylan. “Around that bend.”

  I didn’t know why we were looking for that rock, but when Dylan found it, he whispered, “Here.” He took a sharp left off the path, straight into the trees.


  This was not a path. Clearly not. The ground was uneven. It was thick with spindly trees and prickly bushes that snagged at our pants. But it didn’t matter. We charged through, Dylan dragging me and me dragging the others. We crashed through the forest as quietly as four people can crash through a forest.

  It was exactly like a nightmare. There’s a specific kind of terror in being chased through a spooky forest at night. You can hear your own breathing, feel your heart pounding. You never seem to be running fast enough. You can’t see properly. You don’t know where you are or how you’ll get away. You have no time to plan. Like a nightmare, all we knew was that the people chasing us were Bad Guys.

  But there was no waking up from this particular nightmare.

  “Diablo!” The growling shout electrified us, and we scrambled on even faster. We needed that dog’s barking to cover the sounds we were making.

  The dog stopped barking and switched to frantic whining.

  Dylan pulled me down behind a massive fallen tree. I sank to the ground, with my back to the trunk. Thank you, Dylan. This was what you were looking for. So you had a plan after all. As long as we stayed still, the tree would shield us from the main path, from the glare of that flashlight.

  But not from the dog.

  All four of us crouched and froze, like prey.

  We could hear a few snatches of conversation.

  “…only path down…anybody here…let the dog…”

  We heard a click, and then a powerful body hurtled through the trees.

  We pressed back into the big tree, hardly daring to breathe.

  If it were just Kev and the Boss, I thought frantically, we might have a chance. But the dog. He was probably already picking up our scent.

  I wasn’t afraid the dog would actually attack us. Not really. I knew Diablo—or at least I thought I knew him. But would he know me here in the dark forest? This was different than my feeding him steak bits through a fence. Maybe it was only the steak that made the dog friendly. Maybe minus the steak I wouldn’t be such a friend after all.