by W. J. May
We parked the car at the edge of the woods and got out.
“We’ll cover more ground if we split up,” Zoe said.
“I’m not letting you go on your own. Someone could be here.”
She looked at me with the odd way she had. “And you don’t think I’ll hear them long before they hear me?”
“True.”
“And you don’t think I can outrun or scream out to you?”
I sighed. She wasn’t going to budge on this one. “Does your cell have service?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling smugly. “It does. Yours?”
“Uh-huh.”
“If we find the car or get lost, then we call each other. If not, meet back here in an hour, no matter what?”
“Sounds good,” I said, sighing. I had hoped we could walk together so I could tell her about my parents. Hers were divorced. Maybe she could shed some light on the stupid subject. I turned and headed to the right of where the car was parked. Maybe not mentioning it would stop it from happening.
I kept my eyes trained to the ground to see if I could find anything like tire tracks, even though I knew I wouldn’t. It had been over a month since Rylee was killed and since then it had snowed, rained and snowed again. There would definitely be no clear tracks. However, a car was heavy and would crush tall grass, vegetation and even possibly scrape some trees when driven off the path. I was sure they’d have ditched it the night of the accident, probably even shut off the lights.
I glanced up at the mine off in the distance. You could make out the outline of it through the barren trees. Something caught my eye and I moved quickly to have a closer look.
A piece of bark had been scraped off the side of a tree, about headlight height of a car.
I kept going, hurrying forward and growing frustrated when I couldn’t find anything.
I threw my hands in the air, looking around the woods before checking the time on my watch. I had been looking for over half an hour and I still hadn’t found anything else besides the stupid bark mark.
My phone suddenly vibrated.
I flipped it on, turning to run back toward the car. “Zoe? Everything okay? You lost? Someone following you? Did you hurt yourself?”
“Not at all!” Zoe laughed. She sounded giddy. “I found the car!”
“Really? Where?” I sped my pace and veered toward the direction she had started searching in.
“I can hear you running. You’re not far from me. Keep coming straight in the direction you’re going, it’ll be on your left.”
Before long a dark blue blob came into view. Definitely a beat-up old car. As I ran closer, I could tell it was a Toyota Camry. It had a huge dent in its hood and a broken headlight. The license plates had been ripped off.
Excitement and revulsion filled me. I stuttered to a stop, gasping for air but not really winded. We could actually get somewhere in the investigation, but I couldn’t help but picture Rylee being crushed by this car. “I can’t believe it,” I finally said. “Kieran was right.”
Zoe stood a few yards to the left of me, her hands shoved deep into her pockets. “Come on.” She walked up and peered through the car’s window before checking the door.
“You think touching it is smart?” We’d be leaving fingerprints.
“I don’t care. We found it, we’re going to check for clues.” She stared at me. “You want to call the police first?”
I shook my head. I pulled my phone out to take pictures. The car’s hood, the car from a distance, and then the car’s interior. Aside from being slightly mildewed at being exposed to the elements for so long, there really wasn’t anything exciting or telling about the inside of the car. Whoever had done this had thought ahead. Not so much as a disposable coffee cup lay in the car. Even the glove box was empty. Not even the car’s instruction manual or the registration sat in the glove box. Nothing.
The thing was beat up and old on the outside, printless and perfectly clean on the inside. Well, not clean, but clueless.
“This is insane!” I groaned in frustration. “It’s definitely the car, but there’s nothing here. I bet the person has even wiped off the prints, not that we’d know what to do with those anyway.”
“The person would have had to dispose of the contents of the car somehow.” Zoe looked around. “Even if the car’s clean, there’s a registration.” She checked the driver’s door and front window before swearing under her breath. “Gone! Damn car id’s gone, the licence plates, everything!”
“Fire?” I suggested.
Zoe’s head shot up and then she slowly nodded. “You think?”
“That’s what I would have done.”
“The killer probably disposed of them as soon as possible,” she said.
“This whole area outside of the forest part is a campground.” I gestured around us. “It shouldn’t be hard to find a fire pit. Do you think the killer would’ve been sloppy enough to leave some of the evidence unburnt?”
Zoe shrugged and began walking to where the treeline thinned. “We might as well check it out.”
Neither one of us looked back as we left the car.
The last thing we wanted was to see its damaged hood again.
The closest fire pit was a short walk from the dumped car. I knelt down in front of the fire pit. It was full of damp ash and partially burned wood. I picked up a fistful of it with my hand and ran it through my fingers. When I did, a piece of metal cut my skin. “Shit!” I sucked my cut finger to stop the flow of blood.
Zoe carefully used a stick to clear the ash. Blackened thin metal showed in the pit. “It’s part of a license plate.”
We both began sifting through the ash, throwing any piece of metal we found to the side. After we had gone through it all, we stared at the half-formed licence plate. It was futile. The characters were illegible. I took pictures of it anyway.
“There’s nothing here.” Zoe shivered and looked up at the gray skies and sun just peeking through. “Let’s go. We can come back tomorrow.”
“Wait, hold on!” Something caught the weak sunlight, like a quick sparkle. I jumped into the pit and picked it up. It was the top part of the key. “The rest must have burned or broke away. Probably the ash piled up and kept this piece from melting.” Unlike the license plate, this piece of key looked nearly undamaged by the fire. As I turned it in my palm, I saw flecks of something on it. “It’s painted pink,” I said, peering with my eyes and trying to see if I could make sense of it with my super-vision. “That’s not part of the key, is it?”
“No.” Zoe leaned in to see it as well. “I’ve a feeling that the killer labels their keys by painting them different colors.” She smiled at her silly analogy. “It’s something, at least,” she said. “More than the police have.”
I took pictures of both sides of the key and then put it in my pocket. “You think it’s enough to catch the guy?”
“It’s a start,” Zoe said. “Let’s get out of here before—” She hesitated before I heard what she was listening for.
A twig snapped. We both turned to see someone disappearing through the trees. “Get to the car, Zoe. Now!” I yelled, running in the direction the person was going.
Zoe passed me as I ran, mumbling something about not letting me catch the dickhead alone.
We sprinted to where the person was disappearing through the woods. We gained ground on him fast. With our enhanced abilities and our training, there were very few people who could outrun us.
Except something was wrong. Whoever this person was, they were a lot more used to the woods than we were. While we were constantly tripping over roots and running into trees, the person in front of us had no trouble at all. We caught up just as they dove into a car and sped away, leaving us behind.
Panting, we stared at the small gray car as it sped down the road.
“We’re definitely being followed.” I looked at Zoe and reached for her hand.
Whoever it was, knew we were on to them.
C
hapter Sixteen
Zoe
The day after we found the key, Brent called everyone in for a training session. The first in a very long time. Since Rylee’s death, we’d been training on our own, but our hearts weren’t in it so we didn’t organize anything. We were tired of playing superhero and angry with each other. I didn’t think we could spend two hours in Brent’s gym without a fight breaking out. I continued working at honing my hearing so I could tune things out or focus on one thing better and I’m sure the others were doing the same thing at least a little so we could survive in the human world all right. Brent let me use the hyperbaric chamber and it helped. It just reminded me of Kieran so I had been avoiding it.
Brent sent everyone a text to meet out where we had parked the Beetle yesterday, just outside the forest by the mine.
“Why’d you call us here?” Heidi rubbed her arms. “It’s cold out and everything tastes like dirt.” She shivered slightly and looked around the forest.
“Here,” Seth said, taking off his jacket. “I’m getting overheated anyway.” He handed it to her. “Besides, I needed a reason to show off these babies.” He flexed his muscles under his tight, long-sleeved black shirt and kissed his biceps.
Heidi and Brent laughed, but I rolled my eyes. I knew he was making an effort to be civil today, at least to Heidi, but I was still angry at him for thinking I would betray them all. Not to mention his witch hunt for Kieran. We’d just have to prove him wrong.
“I thought it would be good for us to get back in sync with each other,” Brent said. “We need to keep training. A run in the woods would be a good way for us to figure some things out.”
I knew a run in the woods to bond over wasn’t all he wanted. I didn’t know why he had called us out here at all for a training session, but I could tell that for some reason he needed it, as if he just didn’t want to go home. We had the key, would he mention it? Would he purposely run them by the abandoned car? I bit back saying something, not wanting to draw any more attention to myself, or possibly Kieran.
Seth, through his fog of self-absorption, must have noticed it too. “I’m up for it,” Seth said. “It’s nice to be challenged now and then. Besides, everything here smells nice. Except for you, of course.” He pointed to Brent and snickered. Brent punched him in the arm.
I watched their interaction. Seth seemed his old self in a way. At least with Heidi and now Brent as well.
“Let’s get going.” Brent broke into a jog.
The rest of us quickly followed suit. The frigid air cut through the school warm-ups Brent had taken from storage near the gymnasium. Because all of the athletic teams got new warm-ups every year, four sets of five-year-old warm-up suits weren’t going to go missing. It was better than any workout clothes we had for jogging through winter weather.
We all struggled to keep pace with Brent. We tripped over different roots and dips in the ground, buried under the thin layer of snow. Cold moisture seeped through our sneakers, but aside from that the run was almost pleasant. Brent pushed the pace, stumbling but never stopping. I liked listening to the sound of the forest around us, as well as all four of our heartbeats and labored breathing. There was even something peaceful about it.
I continually checked around and behind to see if anyone was following us. No additional heart rate added to the four of ours, nor did I hear anything out of the ordinary. I stayed alert nonetheless.
Twenty minutes into the run, Seth and Heidi fell behind a ways. I moved up beside Brent and let the gap grow.
Brent noticed it too. “Do you think we should wait?”
I focused on Seth and Heidi and listened to them talking behind us.
“You’re quiet today,” Heidi was saying. “And you’re in a good mood. What’s up? Wake up on the right side of the bed today?”
I smiled and Brent gave me a look. “She’s teasing him,” I informed, blushing slightly to be caught eavesdropping.
Seth laughed. “I’m glad we’re training. I’d have chosen something other than a nice run in the woods. But it’s still invigorating.”
“It’s cold, wet. I’d rather be in the gym. What’s with Brent today?” Heidi asked Seth.
“Dunno,” Seth said. “But I missed all of this. I wish we had never stopped in the first place. I guess it just didn’t seem right, after… well, you know.”
I shook my head, focussing back on Brent’s heartbeat. “Let’s give them their space.” I didn’t want to listen to them. It wasn’t my business. Talking about Kieran was my business, this was not. “Seth’s opening up to Heidi.”
“Yeah.” Brent hopped over a large root. “Well, Heidi’s nice. She’s a good listener.”
A stab of jealousy shot through me. Was it possible he liked her? I mean, what wasn’t to like? He was right. She was nice, and a good listener. She was very quiet and laid-back, not to mention beautiful. There wasn’t any reason why he wouldn’t like her. I bit the inside of my cheek. I had no right to be jealous… and yet I was. The thought of it made my stomach turn. I still loved Kieran, but was it possible I had feelings for Brent as well? Life is so damn confusing. Rylee would have loved it. She craved drama like some people craved chocolate. It was ironic that the most drama happening to us happened after she died. She was probably watching us from the afterlife, laughing.
“What’re you thinking about?” Brent chuckled. “You’re smiling.”
“I am?” I tried to relax my face. “Nothing. Just… nothing. Hey, where’re we going?”
“I figured we could run up to the parking lot of the mine and circle back,” Brent said. “We would have been running for a few miles at that point, which is a pretty decent workout.”
“That’s true,” I said. “No car?”
“You mean the gray one?”
“No, the abandoned one.”
“Not today. I don’t think trying to explain how we know all the police reports and about the car is going to work without getting Seth riled up.”
“I agree.”
“You haven’t seen the gray car again, have you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve been keeping an eye out for it, but so far there’s been no sign of it anywhere.” I listened around us again. “Nothing here today either.”
Brent nodded. “Hopefully they were scared away by us nearly catching them. I still think you should let me drive you. They saw both of us, but it’s your car they followed.” He’d tried arguing with me last night on the phone, but I had refused.
“For all we know, they’re following your car, too,” I argued again. “Or they’re watching my house. It doesn’t matter, I doubt switching cars would fool whoever is following us. It might just make things worse.”
“We have these superpowers, who it is doesn’t have anything.”
“Maybe it’s a newspaper reporter trying to get a story.”
He shrugged, clearly not buying it. “If Kieran didn’t kill Rylee, someone did. I don’t believe for a minute it was an accident because of the weather. I agree with Kieran on this. Someone knows.”
“How could they?”
“Your dad knows.”
“That’s because he took my blood. I’m his daughter! He tested me. He’s a doctor!”
Brent raised his hands. “I don’t think it’s your dad!”
“I know that! I’m just…” I rolled my eyes. “I’m just defending him.”
“I know.” He smiled. “So, I’ll pick you up tomorrow then?”
“I can’t just be dependent on you for rides,” I said. “It’s nice of you, but I would feel bad.”
“It’s not about feeling good or bad.” He moved closer to me. “I want to make sure you’re safe.”
“I am.” I stumbled over a dip in the ground and Brent caught me from falling. “If I see the car around again, I’ll park the Beetle in the garage. Okay?”
“Promise?” Brent asked, raising an eyebrow.
I jerked suddenly when he pushed me. “Wha—!” A large tree split between us. Had
he not pushed me, I’d have run straight into it. I laughed suddenly when we joined back together. “We definitely need more training time in the woods. This has to be one of the toughest workouts I’ve ever done.”
“No kidding!” Brent nodded. “And dangerous. That tree almost took you out!”
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye and saw him laughing. “What’s with your idea behind training outside in the cold?” I heard Heidi moan again about her feet starting to freeze.
“I like training.” Brent refused to look at me. “I wanted to today. We can’t actually set up the gym again for a while, but just training feels like old times, you know? It feels normal. All I wanted was a sense of normalcy.”
I nodded, but I was concerned all the same. Brent hadn’t sounded this troubled in a long time. “What’s wrong?”
He clenched his jaw and shook his head. “I’ll tell you later. I-I don’t want to talk about it right now. Let’s just enjoy the run.”
Something was definitely wrong but I knew better than to push him. Instead, we kept running. We stopped in the mine parking lot and waited for Seth and Heidi to catch up.
Seth put his hands on his knees, breathing hard. “That was fantastic!” He straightened and beat his chest. “We’re superheroes again!” He tried to pump his fist in the air with a devilish grin, but the effect was ruined by the fact he was still out of breath.
Heidi panted beside him. “You sure picked a hell of a workout, Brent.”
Brent grinned. “We should do it again.”
“Not now!” Heidi looked mortified.
I was about to agree when I heard something that made me stand straight up. “Hey guys,” I whispered. “I hear something.”
“Not surprising,” Seth joked. “You’re always hearing something. A squirrel probably sneezed.”
