The Truth Lies Here

by Lindsey Klingele

  I thought of Reese and Emily and all the others out there in the woods, just a few miles from the meteorite crash site. And even closer to the plant, where I’d lost an entire night of memory. My feet started to move backward off the porch before I even thought of a good way to wrap up the conversation.

  “Uh, okay. We’ll just go wait at the station, then. Thanks, Julie!”

  I tugged lightly at Dex’s sleeve until he followed me down the stairs.

  “Well . . . okay,” Julie called out after us, her concern now tinged with worry. “Stay safe, kids.”

  “We will!” I called, trying to keep myself from flat-out running to the car.

  When Dex got behind the wheel, he looked at me, his eyes asking what to do.

  “Millers’ barn,” I said.

  “You don’t think we should just wait for the sheriff at the station?”

  I shook my head. “Millers’ barn is close to the crash site. If he is infected, we have no idea what he might do.”

  “I don’t think he’s really going to do anything,” Dex said slowly. “I mean, Reese is out there.”

  He was probably right, but I hated the thought of going to the station and sitting in the waiting room until the sheriff came back. I felt the rush of momentum, pushing me forward. We couldn’t stop now; we couldn’t let this lead go cold. Dad was out there somewhere, and I couldn’t waste any more time.

  “Let’s just head that way,” I said. “It’s best if we talk to the sheriff outside the station, anyway. Two-on-one.”

  This time I wasn’t totally sure I’d convinced Dex. But he started the car up anyway.

  We drove back through town, quickly leaving the main businesses behind. Eventually, we reached the dark stretches of woods that were broken up here and there by houses, only distinguishable from the dense shadows by the squares of yellow light that showed still pieces of the lives inside—a lampshade here, a table edge there.

  I looked at Micah’s house as we passed, but there were no lights on inside. I wondered if Micah was at the party, though the last time I’d seen him he hadn’t exactly been in a partying mood.

  Less than half a mile from Millers’ barn, we saw a car pulled up on the side of the road. It was parked haphazardly, facing the wrong direction, two back wheels on the asphalt and two front wheels dipping low into the grass and weeds. The passenger-side door was wide-open.

  The side of the car read SHERIFF.

  Dex pulled over right away, stopping the car a few feet from the sheriff’s.

  “Why would he stop here?”

  I shook my head. Something about the car looked wrong. The way it straddled the edge of the road, one door flung open as if someone had spilled out of it. The inside of the car was completely empty.

  I climbed out of Dex’s car and walked toward the sheriff’s, goose bumps rising up my arm and trailing across my neck.

  “Penny,” Dex said once, his voice low and warning. But I didn’t stop, and after a few seconds he got out and followed me.

  The world around us was eerily quiet. No rustle of leaves in the still air, no car motors coming in our direction. The headlights of the sheriff’s car shone straight forward, casting the trunks of the nearest trees in a yellow glow.

  I walked slowly around to the driver’s side and looked in. Nothing inside the front of the car looked strange. The driver’s seat was ramrod straight, a seat belt dangling from one side. The car was in park, its engine off.

  A cracking noise sounded suddenly, from the woods. My head whipped around, but I couldn’t see anything beyond the circle of light from the sheriff’s headlights. Dex came around the car to stand near me, and we both looked silently into the dense shadows of the trees.

  “I don’t like this,” he said.

  I swallowed. “I don’t, either.”

  I heard the cracking noise again. I couldn’t tell if it was getting closer or farther away. I tried to keep my breathing shallow so I could hear better, but it was hard given how fast my heart was beating. As if I’d just sprinted a quarter mile instead of slowly stepping out of Dex’s car.

  After a few moments of silence, I took a step forward, then another.

  “Penny, wait.” Dex’s voice was urgent, and he reached out to grab my arm.

  I looked back at him in annoyance, but his eyes were on the ground, at the spot under where I was about to step. I looked down, then took a sharp breath.

  Right under my foot was something cherry red and bright, glistening oddly in a clump of dirt and grass.

  A Ring Pop.

  “Oh God,” I whispered. “Reese.”

  I moved quickly then, my feet taking me into the trees before my brain really registered what I was doing. Dex stayed right beside me, his heavy breaths constant and comforting. Together, we pushed aside branches, stumbled over shrubs.

  “Reese,” I called out, my voice carrying far in the silent air.

  The fear didn’t just prick at me, it stabbed. Every time I pushed past a tree trunk, I expected to see them again—the burned bodies, the twisted skin. Except this time it wouldn’t be Bryan and Cassidy. It wouldn’t be a deer in the woods. It would be Reese. Quick, stubborn, angry Reese, reduced to a pile of burned pieces. Of ash.

  No. No, no, no.

  “Reese!”

  Dex yelled, too, his voice deeper and louder than mine, traveling farther. We moved quickly, and I wasn’t even sure what direction we were heading in. The trees in this stretch were unfamiliar to me, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to find my way back to the road from here.

  “REESE!”

  “Jesus, what?”

  I heard her before I saw her, but then a blond head pushed past a small sapling just a few feet away. She flicked at a branch, staring at it as if it had conspired to get in her way and annoy her. She lifted her head and gave me the exact same look.

  But I didn’t care. Relief flooded through me, washing away the adrenaline that had been building through me all day, pushing aside all my momentum.

  “What is your problem?” Reese asked, crossing her arms. “What are you even doing here? I didn’t see you at the party.”

  “We thought that you were . . .” I trailed off, not sure how to answer that sentence.

  “We were looking for your dad,” Dex said, picking up my slack. “We saw his car on the road and thought something might have happened.”

  “Nothing happened,” Reese said, her voice still dripping with scorn. “Except for my dad being a total freak.”

  I shot Dex a quick look, and his eyebrows rose.

  “A freak how?”

  In the darkness of the woods, it was hard to make out Reese’s expression. But I could practically hear her roll her eyes as she sighed. “Well, first he breaks up a perfectly tame party at Millers’ barn. As if the hypocrite didn’t party there when he was my age. But he busts in, all weird and yelling at everyone to go home and making me get in the car. He was mental. And then we’re driving back and he just whips the car off the road. He said he saw something in the woods, some kind of light or something? He told me to stay inside, but he’s been gone for, like, fifteen minutes.”

  Reese told her story with agitation, but I could hear the worry pulsing at the edges of her words. It didn’t seem like normal behavior for the sheriff—pulling over the car so recklessly, leaving his own daughter behind, not coming back to check on her.

  But as we stood there, letting the story sink in, Reese sighed and shifted onto her other foot, her expression moving carefully back into bored disdain.

  “Whatever. Do either of you have a phone? Mine’s not working out here—”

  That’s when we heard the yell. A man’s voice, coming from somewhere behind Reese, somewhere in the woods. The shout was clear, and then it cut off abruptly.

  “Dad?” Reese whipped around, all pretense gone. She started running off in the direction of the sound.

  “Reese!” I called out.

  She didn’t turn back, didn’t acknowledge m
e at all. I touched Dex’s hand once, on impulse. For guidance, maybe? Or reassurance. Then I took off after Reese, deeper into the trees, and Dex followed.

  It was hard to see where we were going. The tops of the trees filtered out a lot of the moonlight, and I didn’t have time to reach for my phone and get out my flashlight app. It was easy to follow the sound of Reese, though, pushing her way through underbrush and snapping against small branches.

  I heard Reese stop before I saw her figure outlined underneath a large tree, so close that I almost crashed into her. Just beyond her shoulder I saw the large, hulking shadow of a building—the back side of Millers’ barn. But Reese wasn’t looking at the barn; she was looking just to her right, where two figures were huddled in the dirt.

  “Micah?” Reese asked, confusion and fear making her voice high.

  I came to stand by Reese and saw that the crouching figure was Micah. His eyes widened as we approached, and I saw fear in them. At his feet was the sheriff, sprawled out, not moving.

  “I just—found him here,” Micah stammered. I could see now that he was shaking the sheriff’s shoulders, trying to get him to move. Micah’s head snapped out in the direction of the woods. “Something’s out there.”

  “What?” Reese asked, moving forward and dropping down by her dad. “What the hell happened? Dad?”

  “He’s unconscious,” Micah said.

  Dex and I stepped into the small clearing, and Micah’s eyes fixed on me. “Penny? What are you doing here? I didn’t see you at the party. . . . I don’t think I did. . . .” He was rambling, his voice rising and falling. I knelt down next to him.

  “Micah, you said something was out there. What is it? What did you see?”

  Micah shook his head. “We have to get out of here.”

  “What happened to my dad?” Reese shrieked.

  “Shh! It’s out there; it’ll hear you.”

  My brain reeled. There was too much happening, all at once. The darkness around us felt like it was pressing in, and I got the sudden, undeniable sense that someone was out there, watching us.

  Or something?

  I shook my head. The sheriff. That’s who we’d come here for. That’s who we’d focus on. I reached one hand out toward the sheriff’s still form. His eyes were closed, his face slack, cheek pressed down into some muddied leaves. But he was breathing. I didn’t see blood or burn marks anywhere.

  “Let’s get him out of here,” I said, trying to sound as confident as possible.

  Dex knelt down next to me, looking for the best angle to help lift the sheriff up.

  “Don’t hurt him!” Reese yelled. I looked over and saw she was crying, her hair and face both drained of color in the thin light.

  “Shh!” Micah said again. He swiveled his head to examine the trees around us, left to right and back again.

  “Micah, help,” Dex whispered. He put his arms underneath one of the sheriff’s shoulders, and Micah leaned down to get the other.

  I leaned down to help, too, and that’s when I saw it. A flicker at first, just out of the corner of my eye. A light. Not the yellow of a headlight or a flashlight, but pure white. Like opening your eyes onto the brightest of mornings. A light so intense it hurt to look at.

  We all froze. Me, Micah, Dex, Reese. The boys had the sheriff half-lifted off the ground, their shoulders hunched awkwardly around him. But they stayed glued in place, staring at the light as it moved through the trees.

  It was coming straight for us.

  “Oh God,” Micah said. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  But of course no one knew. And it was getting closer, growing bigger. Like the purest of fires.

  Fire.

  “Dex,” I said, whipping around to him, even though Micah was closer to me. “The bodies . . . all burned up.” The thought was crystallizing in my mind as I spoke it out loud, the words tumbling out of me.

  Dex’s eyes widened, and I knew he understood. Whatever was coming at us now, that was what had killed Bryan and Cassidy. The hiker. The deer. And it was less than twenty feet away. No way we could run away fast enough, not with the sheriff in tow.

  My head scanned around wildly, looking for escape. “The barn.”

  “No,” Micah yelled. “We have to run.”

  “We can’t just leave him!” I motioned to the sheriff.

  Micah hesitated for a moment, just long enough for Reese to push him away roughly with her shoulder. She took up her dad’s arm and looked at me. “Let’s go.”

  Together, the three of us began to haul the sheriff as quickly as we could toward the shadowed outline of the barn. After just a moment, Micah picked up the sheriff’s legs and followed. The sheriff’s limp form was heavy, dragging us down as if it wanted to be back on the solid earth. But I gritted my teeth, adjusting my grasp on his midsection. The metal teeth of his belt caught on the skin just inside my elbow, and I felt it start to tear.

  But there was no time to slow down.

  I didn’t turn back around to see how close the strange light was to catching up with us. I kept my eyes firmly on the back of Dex’s brightly illuminated head, following in his steps, concentrating on not dropping the sheriff.

  We finally got around to the door of Millers’ barn, but it was locked. Dex pulled hard on the handle, but the door didn’t budge. He turned around to the tree line of the woods, and the white glare lit up his features, getting brighter and brighter.

  “I can feel heat.” His eyes were still fixated on the distance. “Even from here . . .”

  I felt it, too. A wave of heat, like I was standing less than a foot away from an open oven.

  Dex turned back to the door and threw his shoulder against it.

  “Wait!” Micah called out. “There’s a key around here somewhere.”

  Micah carefully extracted himself from the sheriff’s legs and started looking around at a clump of rocks near the edge of the door.

  “How do you know that?” Reese asked, her voice edged with hysteria as she watched Micah. “Oh my God, is this where you hooked up with Mandy Colbert?”

  “Reese,” I said, my voice low.

  She turned to me, eyes narrowed, but then her gaze caught on the thing beyond my shoulders, and her lips pressed tight together. Fear rolled in my stomach.

  I turned around.

  The white light had finally moved into the clearing. It was moving slowly, rhythmically, bobbing a bit up and down. I had to turn away, the light was so blinding, so unnaturally bright—

  “Got it!”

  I turned back around to see Micah straighten and jam a key into the barn’s door. He pushed the door open, and we all moved so fast that we tripped over each other and barely made it inside the darkened space before half laying, half dropping the sheriff on the floor.

  Micah slammed the barn door closed behind us.

  “How do we know it can’t get in?” Reese asked.

  I shook my head helplessly, and as I did, my eyes caught a hunched shadow in the corner of the barn. It was so dark in there that it was impossible to see. Struggling to catch my breath, I quickly took out my phone and turned on the flashlight.

  “Penelope?”

  The voice that crossed the barn to reach me was low and rumbly, familiar in a bone-deep way. My heart stopped.

  I swallowed hard, my hands shaking as I slowly moved the phone across the barn, the flashlight catching first on wooden boards, then on some lines of rope and some rusty tools hanging from the wall. And finally, lighting up the far corner of the room, where a man was hunched in a ball, his eyes round circles that stared at me as if they couldn’t believe what they were seeing.

  I knew the feeling.

  “Dad?”

  Thirty

  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.