“I was going to fix everything,” Micah said for the third time, like a mantra he couldn’t stop repeating. “When I saw those agents were back, I knew they’d have more of the X10-88, or at least know where some was. I just had to get some more of it, enough to make Ike forget everything. And then I was going to take my dad out of town, somewhere far away, where he couldn’t hurt anyone else.”
“That’s why you finally told me about the agents?” I asked. “You set me up to track them down, all so you could get your hands on more X10-88?”
“I didn’t want to get you involved, but since you were clearly hell-bent on figuring everything out—even after losing your memory at the plant—I figured I might as well use that to help set everything right. Once you found out where the agents were keeping the drug, I could go get more. Then everything would be fine.”
“It wouldn’t be fine,” Reese said, the rage still seething from her. “Nothing would be fine. Look at my dad! Did that . . . thing out there do that to him?”
“No,” Micah said. “I did.”
“What?”
“I had to keep people away from here! When I heard about the party, I called it in to the cops to get them to bust it up before anyone could sneak in here and find Ike. But the sheriff just couldn’t leave it alone. He went out looking in the woods, and I had to make sure he wouldn’t find my dad again. For both their sakes. I had to knock him out. And then I tried to get all of us to leave, to run, but no, you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“And that makes it all better?” Reese’s voice rose higher. “You knocked out my dad! Bryan and Cassidy are dead. And the monster who killed them? He’s out there right now.”
“HE’S NOT A MONSTER!” Micah’s face was so twisted up, he looked like a stranger.
I exchanged a look with Dex, who was only a few feet away from Micah now, closer to him than the rest of us. Another wave of fear jolted through me—I could guess what Dex was going to try to do as soon as he got close enough, and I didn’t want him to take the risk and get hurt. But I couldn’t communicate that without tipping off Micah.
As for Micah, he seemed a little shocked by his own outburst, and certainly unnerved by how scared we all were. He ran one shaking hand through his hair and took a deep breath through his nose. “My dad is not a monster,” he said, slowly and more calmly. “He’s my family.” He looked up at me then, and I saw again that look in his eye—that desperate wish to have me understand him. I kept my eyes trained on Micah as Dex slowly began inching toward him again.
“No dad is perfect,” Micah said. He waved a hand—the hand with the gun—toward my dad. “I mean, what about everything you told me about him? About how much he let you down? But you still went looking for him. Because he’s family.”
I kept stock-still, not wanting to turn around and see my dad’s expression. But my eyes darted to him unwillingly. I expected him to look angry, but he just looked confused. Like he was truly surprised by what Micah was saying.
And it occurred to me that for all the years I’d been angry at him, I’d never really gotten up the nerve to tell him why, or to demand a reason for his behavior. And why hadn’t I ever told my dad how I felt? Why hadn’t I told him how angry I was, about finding him with Julie Harper, and losing Reese, and the divorce, and the stupid black bear in the woods? The split between us had seemed so wide, and we’d fallen so far apart, that it hadn’t occurred to me to just talk to him. To hear his side, to tell him mine.
And if we didn’t figure a way out of here, I’d never get that chance.
Micah stared at me, waiting for a response.
“You’re right,” I managed to say. “We do a lot for family, no matter what. But, Micah, you said yourself your dad hurts people without meaning to. He burns them, somehow. And right now, he’s out there, and he could come in any second—”
“No,” Micah said, with a surety that surprised me. “I was the last one in, and he saw me before I came inside. He saw me, and he went back into the woods. My dad would never hurt me.”
“And the rest of us? Would he hurt us if he saw us leave here?”
“You can’t leave here. Not until I get this figured out!” Micah put his free hand up to his eyes and rubbed them, hard. He was coming apart. He wasn’t going to figure anything out—and even if he did, I definitely didn’t want to be part of his solution.
But I didn’t get a chance to think up a solution of my own. While Micah was rubbing his eyes, Dex made his move.
It happened so fast, I barely had time to register it, let alone try to stop it. Dex had maneuvered himself so he was only a couple of feet away from Micah. As soon as he was in reach, Dex lunged out, his long legs closing the gap between them, his arms wrapping around Micah’s upper shoulders to trap him in place. For just a moment, Micah stood frozen, stunned by Dex’s sudden move. His gun arm was pinned to his body, the barrel pointed at the ground. But then his jaw hardened in anger. His shoulder muscles bulged up easily. And Dex realized his mistake the same moment the rest of us did—though he had the element of surprise, and even an inch of height on Micah, he was nowhere near as strong as Bone Lake’s superstar quarterback.
It took less than three seconds for Micah to break Dex’s hold. The momentum sent Dex flying backward. He caught himself before falling, but then Micah spun around on him, the gun aimed squarely at Dex.
A scream tore out of me. I thought Reese might have been screaming, too, but I could barely hear it over the sound of blood rushing through my ears. Everything else in the barn was forgotten—Reese, my dad, the potential killer roaming just outside the flimsy barn walls. My whole world was narrowed to that small, dark gun barrel and the few inches of space between it and Dex’s chest.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Micah said.
“Don’t shoot him, Micah,” I begged. “Please, please don’t.”
“I don’t want to shoot anybody!” Micah said. With his back to me, I couldn’t see his face, but his voice sounded pained. “I never wanted to hurt anyone!”
“Micah,” my dad’s voice called out. “Think about what you’re doing. Things have gone too far, son. There’s no fixing this. The only thing left to do is let us go.”
“I can’t!” Micah yelled. “I can’t lose him. Don’t you understand? I can’t.” The panic was rising in his voice, and his hand tightened on the handle of the gun.
My dad started to talk again, but I interrupted him, making my own voice louder.
“I know, Micah,” I said. “I hear you. Just . . . tell us what we can do. Tell us what you need. Please.”
Micah stayed still. One second passed, then two. Finally, his shoulders relaxed a moment.
“I need the drug. The X10-88. Did you find the agents, Penny?”
“Yes,” I said. “I did. And I can tell you where they’re storing stuff.” I didn’t remember seeing anything in the storage unit that resembled any sort of drug, but at the moment, Micah didn’t need to know that.
“I’ll tell you,” I continued, “but first you have to put the gun down. Let Dex go.”
The barrel of the gun dropped two inches, and Micah quickly jerked his head, indicating Dex could move. Dex’s eyes closed in relief, and then he quickly melted away to the side of the building, made his way back to where I was standing. I wanted to reach out and grab him up, to push him behind me and keep him safe, but I didn’t want to make any more sudden movements.
Micah slowly turned to face me.
“Thank you,” I breathed. “There’s a storage facility outside of town, off of M-66. The agents were there.”
“Okay,” Micah said, nodding his head quickly, thinking. “Okay. Everyone get out your cell phones. Toss them over to me.”
“What?” Reese sounded strangely offended, as though that were the strangest thing for Micah to ask of us that night.
“Do it!” Micah said, vaguely raising his gun.
Dex, Reese, and I reached for our phones and tossed them to the ground at Mi
cah’s feet, where they landed with three distinct clatters.
Micah picked up the phones and put them all in his pocket. Then he backed slowly toward the barn door and opened it, keeping his gun trained on us the whole time.
“You can’t seriously just leave us here!” Reese called out.
“I just need to get more of the drug. Then I’ll come back, give it to you all, and everything will be fine again. It’ll all be fine.”
“But what about the monst—sorry, your murdery dad—right outside?”
“I told you, he saw me come in here. He wouldn’t hurt me,” Micah said, keeping one hand steady on the open door. I could see a patch of darkness outside, but nothing beyond that. It was impossible to know if lurking out there, somewhere, was a meteorite-infected man consumed by blinding fire.
“But you’re leaving,” I said. “What if he comes back for the rest of us?”
Micah paused for a second, his mouth moving quietly. “He won’t,” he finally said, but his voice lacked any conviction. “Besides, I’ll be fast. Just stay here.”
“Micah!” I called out, but the door had already shut behind him. I heard a key turning in a lock and realized, stupidly, that he hadn’t “found” the key as we were trying to get inside—he’d probably had it on him the whole time.
“Just stay there!” his voice called out from the other side of the wall.
I heard his footsteps moving away through the leaves, and then nothing. I quickly scanned the barn, but there was no window, no other way out.
We were trapped, alone in the woods, with a killer right outside. A killer who’d been infected by meteorite alloy that had been experimented on by the government.
As soon as the thought passed through my mind, I could feel something bubbling up in my throat, and at first I thought it might be a scream. But what came out was a single burst of laughter. The noise was startling in the small, enclosed space of the barn, even to me.
“Penelope?” Dad asked. “What is it?”
“I just . . .” I gasped, my voice rising as I struggled to speak, “I was just thinking . . . it was a zebra the whole time.”
“A zebra?” Reese asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“When you hear hoofbeats, think horse, not . . .” I said, then broke into a round of panicked giggles that got stuck in my throat.
A split second passed, and then Dex’s face broke into a smile, too. “Zebra.”
“It was a zebra!” I felt my voice rising in a fit of panicked laughter, but I couldn’t stop it. I just threw my hands up in the air. “And who knows? Maybe aliens are real. Bigfoots, too!”
“Are you losing your minds?” Reese asked.
“Maybe!” I said, then turned to see Dad was watching me with concerned, wondering eyes. But he was also smiling.
“How is this funny?” Reese’s voice rose higher, its panicked pitch nearly matching my own hysterical one.
But her outburst only made me laugh harder. For just a second, the horror of the evening let up, my chest loosening a fraction.
But before that second could stretch into two, I heard the noise. We all did.
It was low but distinct, like feet dragging slowly through the underbrush. It was coming from outside the barn walls.
And it was getting closer.
Thirty-One
EVERYONE INSIDE THE barn went still. We looked at the wall with the barn door as if we could will ourselves to see through it, as if we could somehow hear better if we just stared hard enough.
There was the noise again, soft but distinct. And deliberate. Something was cutting a path toward us through the woods.
“Maybe it’s Micah? Maybe he changed his mind?” Reese whispered.
Another noise, like a footstep. I peered through the thin cracks in the wall’s boards, looking out for any kind of glowing light.
“Penny,” Dex said, his voice low and in my ear. With a start, I realized he’d moved to stand right beside me. “Micah said they had to move him from the basement because he kept accidentally setting things on fire. We’re surrounded by wood right now.”
He was right—the entire barn was made of wood slabs. Even the floor of the building was made out of old, coarse boards. If any single part of the building caught fire, with us trapped inside—
“You have to get out of here,” Dad said from the corner. “Get past whatever’s left of Hal Jameson and run.”
“How?” I asked.
“Over there,” Dad said, motioning to a dark, shadowed corner of the barn. “There’s something over there, something metal with a handle. I haven’t been able to move from this spot since the kid chained me in here, but in the daylight I saw it—a shovel or something.”
Dex ran over to the corner and began searching. Something fell to the ground with a clatter, the noise ringing through the barn. For a moment I felt my heart stop. We all froze, held our breaths, waiting to hear if we’d drawn the attention of the thing outside.
“Sorry,” Dex whispered. He leaned down and picked the object up off the floor. It was an old pickax, its handle the size of Dex’s forearm, the head covered in rust.
“How can we use this to get out?” Dex asked in a rushed whisper. “The lock’s on the other side of the door. . . .”
“Look for a weak spot in the wood,” Dad answered. “This barn is ancient. There has to be a loose or rotting board somewhere. Knock lightly on the wood. If it’s soft, use the axe to knock it down.”
“But, you know, quietly,” I added.
Dex gulped and then started in on the nearest barn wall. Reese and I took others, making our way around the room while being careful not to step on Dad or the sheriff’s still form. I pushed my hand against the wood, wondering the whole time whether Micah’s dad was just on the other side, capable of burning me alive with a touch. After running my fingers over one splintered board after another, I finally pushed against wood that seemed to give—just a little—under the weight of my hand.
“Here!” I called out in the softest voice I could manage.
Dex came over with the pickax, kneeling down next to me on the floor. The soft spot was close to the ground, just a few feet away from the door. Dex shoved the edge of the pickax into the small slit between two boards and started to push the handle sideways, wedging the boards apart. One of the boards groaned as it grudgingly moved a few centimeters over. Dex took a deep breath and tried again.
“It’s working!” I turned to Dad. “Wait,” I said. “How are we going to unchain you?”
Dad’s smile vanished. “Kiddo, I’ve been trying to get out of these things for days. You all go on and get help, then come back for me.”
“You want me to just leave you behind? Alone?”
“Not alone,” Dad said, motioning to the unconscious sheriff. “I’ll have some company.”
“But . . .” I shook my head. “Mr. Jameson is out there. If he gets close, this whole building could go up like a matchstick. You’d be trapped.”
“Then you guys had better hurry.” Dad’s voice was stern, but as his eyes met mine, I could see something else in them. Fear. I thought again of our ill-fated Bigfoot hunting trip, and how afraid Dad had been when the bear came after us. I remembered how panicked I’d felt, seeing Dad like that, knowing that he was just as afraid as I was. He hadn’t known the absolute best thing to do to keep us safe; he was just reacting to the situation the best he knew how. He was guessing.
And he was guessing now.
But instead of letting panic overtake me and just taking his lead, I shook my head. Because if both of us were just blindly making our way through every situation with the best knowledge we had on hand, then maybe my guess was just as good as his.
“No,” I said. “I’m not leaving you here alone.”
Dad’s whole face tensed up. “Penelope, this is not up for discussion. You are getting out of here—”
I heard something creak behind me and turned around to see that Dex had opened up a
small hole in the wall. He tried pulling up another board, his arms straining with the effort, but it wouldn’t budge.
“I think this is as good as it’s going to get,” he said.
“You have to go through it,” Dad said. “Now.”
“No!” I said back, forgetting to keep my voice low. “I’m not leaving you here alone, and chained. If Mr. Jameson—or whatever he is now—somehow gets inside without burning the whole place down, who’s to stop him from attacking you or the sheriff?”
“Pen—”
“I will.” Dex stepped forward, looking almost like an action hero with his shoulders squared and the pickax in one hand. Then his eye twitched and I saw Dex again—the boy next door who used to cry when we got too rough playing neighborhood games.
I shook my head, but before I could say anything, Dex made his case. “I won’t fit through that hole anyway.”
I looked down at the opening his pickax had made and realized it would be tight, even for me. Dex’s shoulders probably wouldn’t make it through.
“Look at the facts, Penny,” Dex said. “Isn’t that what you always say?”
Yes. And the facts here I couldn’t avoid were that Reese and I were the only ones who would fit through that hole, and there was no way I was sending her through alone. But looking between Dex and my dad, my stomach flipped over on itself. I swallowed against the dry lump in my throat as my gaze landed on Dex.
“I can’t lose you,” I whispered. I’d meant to say I can’t lose you both or I can’t lose you, too, but my voice had faded out at the end, swallowing up the last word.
Dex’s eyes widened briefly, filled with an emotion I couldn’t place. “Then hurry,” he said. “I left my keys behind in the car when we went looking for the sheriff.”
I nodded then looked over at Dad. “The faster you go, the better chance we have,” he said.
Reese was biting her lip, her eyes on the hole. “What if it’s waiting right outside?” she asked.
“Would you rather stay?”
The Truth Lies Here Page 26
