by Daka Hermon
“We should tell them what we know,” he says. “Tell them so we can go.”
I nod. “Let’s go to the amphitheater. We can—”
“Justin,” Not-Mom’s voice whispers. “I’m coming for you. We’ll be a family again.”
I spin around, my eyes searching the area. She stands in the shadow of a large tree.
“Justin,” she whispers again. My skin crawls.
Mary sucks in a loud breath. I touched her. She can see Not-Mom.
“What is it?” asks Nia.
“No one,” I say. “I mean, it’s nothing.”
Nia frowns, but before she can ask me anything else, I quickly walk over to the amphitheater.
I jump onto the small stage as the kids settle on the concrete stairs arranged in a half circle. Nia, Lyric, Mary, and Duke join me. I count the kids. Forty-five. That’s a small number considering there are almost four hundred in Nowhere.
Soft murmurs and faint crying drift past me as kids stare fearfully in our direction. I slide my backpack off my shoulders as if that will lighten the heavy responsibility I feel.
“Well, talk already.” Carla sits in the front row.
I glance at Duke. He gestures for me to speak. I thought for sure he’d want to explain everything since he’s been here longer than me.
I clear my throat. “My name is Justin.”
The silence is thick as I gaze at the scared faces before me. I slide my hand into my pocket and grasp the puzzle piece. Where to start?
I hold up my arm, deciding to focus on what’s most important at the moment. “The number on your wrist, we all have them. We figured out that the Seeker is keeping track of the number of kids in Nowhere.”
I watch as kids glance down at the wrists, touching the marks. “I’m number 399.”
“We don’t want it to reach four hundred,” Lyric says.
“Why?” Carla asks with a frown.
I swallow hard. “We believe if the monster reaches that number, it’ll be able to leave this place and enter our world for good. All the fears and scary stuff—”
“No kid will be safe,” Nia says.
The boy wearing the pajamas whimpers. “So, the monster could take my brother and sister, too?”
“Not if we stop it,” Mary says.
“I want to go home,” a kid cries.
“Why did it bring me to this place? I want my mom,” says AnnaBelle.
“How do we leave?”
It’s rapid-fire questions and comments. The level of the frantic voices rises until it’s almost painful.
Finally, Duke whistles so loudly I flinch. “Too much noise. They’ll hear you. They’ll come and it will be bad. Very bad.”
Instantly, there’s quiet. Kids stare wide-eyed at Duke.
“Listen, I know this is hard to hear. It was scary for us, too, but we found out that the monster takes kids who break the rules of Hide and Seek,” I explain.
“What?” cries Shae. “A man with a scar came to camp and passed out ice cream.”
Mary gasps.
“He saw us playing games and started going on and on about Hide and Seek,” Shae explains. “Me and my friends decided to play it, but then I got hot and didn’t want to sweat so I quit.”
“Dude!” cries Lyric. “He set her up, too.”
“I don’t understand,” says Carla. “You’re saying we’re here because of a stupid game?”
“The Seeker’s game.” Duke sways back and forth. “You played, you pay.”
“Long story short … we found out the monster was going to snatch us and bring us here,” I say.
Nia steps forward. “Since we had that information, we tried to come up with a plan to help us escape once we arrived.”
Lyric shrugs off his backpack and holds it up. “We saw Quincy get taken while wearing one of these, so we decided to sneak in supplies to fight the Seeker. It worked.”
Quincy perks up and puffs out his chest.
“Estas enojando el monstruo,” a boy yells out. “Es peor para nosotros ahora.”
I frown. “What did he say? I don’t know Spanish.”
Shae jumps up. “I do, I do, I do. I have a tutor.”
Carla rolls her eyes.
“He said, ‘You’re making the monster mad’ and ‘It’s worse for us now.’ ”
A fierce wind whips past us. It howls and bolts of lightning slash through the darkening sky.
“The monster is stronger because it’s almost achieved its goal to capture four hundred kids,” Duke says, raising his voice to compete with the wind. “We have to stop it.”
“How did you figure this all out?” Carla says, her forehead creased.
“Zee. Remember those weird chants?” Lyric asks. “He was trying to warn us.”
Carla face-palms. “Are you kiddin’ me? We’re listening to him?”
Nia leans close and whispers, “You need to tell them everything.”
Grimacing, I nod. They should know what will happen once we get home.
“There’s more.” I wish all the kids were here. It’s not fair they have no idea what is going on. This will affect them, too.
“Well?” Carla says, throwing her hands up in frustration. “What is it?”
“You age,” I blurt out. “Time stops here, but when you leave all those years catch up to you.”
“You age? So? I don’t get it,” Carla says.
Lyric groans. “Think about it.”
“I understand,” Shae says, twirling a long piece of her hair. “Some of these kids are gonna be super old when they leave.”
Carla’s eyes widen. Her gaze jumps around, taking in the faces of the kids. “Oh. I—”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Duke shakes his head. “We age? I’ve been gone eighty years and I was thirteen when the Seeker took me. You’re saying if we return, I’ll be ninety-three? I won’t be thirteen anymore?”
“Yeah,” Lyric says.
Duke stumbles back and doubles over. His hands rest on his knees. “I’ll be … I could …”
My wide eyes bounce between Mary and Duke. “You didn’t know?”
“No.” His voice cracks as he slowly lifts his head. He turns to Mary. “Did you?”
She winces and lowers her eyes.
Duke’s devastated expression morphs into anger. “You knew?” he asks sharply.
“Yeah.” She twists the bottom of her dingy shirt. “I’m … I’m sorry. We talked about going home, but I didn’t think we’d ever get out so it didn’t matter.”
Duke gawks at her. “It didn’t matter?”
Nia twists her braids into knots. “I don’t get it. We have a plan. You agreed to help us.”
“Mary, what else didn’t matter?” I ask with growing dread. “What else didn’t you tell Duke?”
She flinches. “I …”
“Oh man. I sense some major betrayal.” Lyric runs a hand down his face. “You know about her brother, Hyde, right?” he asks Duke. “He was here, too, but he decided to work with the Seeker. It let him out to trick kids into playing the game. He sold us out.”
Duke clutches his head. “Why … All this time …”
Suddenly, something the Seeker said pops into my mind. The games began, you were the first. Not much longer until I’ll unleash my worst.
I slowly approach Duke. “What number are you?”
He tugs back a long sleeve and extends his arm so I can see his mark.
One.
I tremble. Nia and Lyric suck in a loud breath. In the woods I saw the number one, but thought it was for one hundred and something. But he was the first kid the Seeker stole.
“The Seeker really has taken everything from me,” Duke whispers, staggering a few feet away.
He’ll be ninety-three. What if he goes through all this, fights the Seeker, and dies the moment we reach home? My hands curl into fists. I want to howl my anger. It’s not fair!
“I’ll be twenty-two,” a girl cries.
“Thirty-seven.”
“Forty-nine.”
“Sixty-two.”
Kids call out ages as they calculate the math.
“At least you’ll be home. Anything is better than Nowhere, right?” Shae asks.
“Easy for y’all to say,” says a thin boy with long shaggy hair. He’s wearing dirty overalls. “I’ll be almost fifty.”
I was so focused on escaping as fast as possible, I never considered how it would affect all the other Nowhere kids. Zee was gone a little over a year so not much changed. But for Duke and some others—it’s a lifetime.
“What did y’all expect to happen?” Carla asks. “That you’d go back and still be a kid? That the world would rewind or something?” She seems honestly confused.
“What if we don’t leave?” a boy with long, dark hair says. He’s wearing knee-length shorts, sandals, and a worn T-shirt with a picture of ocean waves and a surf board across the front. “I’ll be seventy-eight. My family … what if they’re not around anymore?”
“We could help each other,” Nia says shakily.
“How? You’ll still be a kid. I’ll be old.”
Nia flinches.
“You’d rather stay lost and scared?” Lyric asks, shaking his head as if the thought is unimaginable.
The surfer kid turns away. His chin trembles.
Duke pins Mary with a hard glare. “You should have told me everything.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, wiping tears from her eyes.
He turns to me. “We destroy the Seeker. Whatever happens after that—” His jaw clenches. “I’m in no matter what.”
Kids yell out their agreement or voice their despair. Some slip away.
“Man, this is messed up.” Lyric runs his fingers through his tangled hair. “Think about all those other kids in Nowhere. They have no idea what will happen to them when they return home.”
“There’s nothing we can do,” I say. “It’s not like we can find them all and fill them in.”
“Are we done with all this talkin’?” asks Carla. “How do we get home?”
I run a hand down my face. “That’s what we need to—”
There’s a loud rumble and the ground shakes. The concrete bleachers split; kids tumble to the ground.
“Whoa.” The stage tilts at a steep angle. Flailing around, we slide to the ground. I roll away from the debris of cracked stones.
Screaming, kids scramble out of the crumbling amphitheater and attempt to flee in different directions. Desperate to escape, they bump into each other and their cries of horror echo around us.
“What the—” I watch as an invisible force lifts the surfer kid up toward the sky as he runs away. He bobs up and down, and sputters as if he’s underwater.
“What is it? What’s happening?” Quincy cries.
“Ooomph.” Duke staggers back, clutching his stomach. “They’re here.” His head jerks back as if someone has delivered an uppercut to his chin. He hits the ground with a thud.
Nia tugs on my backpack. “What are we gonna do?”
“Justin! Nia!” Lyric glances around frantically. “Where are you?”
“Here,” Nia says, moving to stand right in front of him.
“They’re beside you,” Mary tells Lyric.
Panting, he swings in our direction. His gaze is a little off to the right. “Don’t leave me,” he pleads.
My mind is spinning quickly, but it’s like the action in front of me is happening in slow motion. The volume of the noise rises and falls.
“Get them off!” AnnaBelle rolls around, screaming in pain. “Get them off!”
Quincy rushes toward her, but Duke crawls to his feet and jumps into his path, blocking him. “Don’t touch her.”
“But, but … we have to help,” Quincy says. The ground under our feet shifts and rolls like ocean waves. A giant hole appears. AnnaBelle, a few inches off the ground, speeds toward the large opening as if she’s being carried. She disappears within the pit.
All around me kids are being attacked by their fears. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see what they see; I feel connected to them. Like the terror is traveling, searching for the next person to torture.
“What are we doing?” Carla asks. “Somebody make a decision.”
“We can’t stay here,” Shae cries.
Breathe. Must breathe. It’s chaos all around us.
“Justin! Nia!” Lyric calls out.
I reach for him, but my hand drops to my side. Can’t touch him.
“Follow me,” Mary tells Lyric. “I won’t let you lose them.”
We run. And run. And run. We race out of the park and down the street with no specific destination in mind. We’re followed by screams and cries for help.
Adrenaline has me moving much faster than I ever imagined running in my life. Finally, out of breath, I collapse in the middle of the baseball field near our school. Bodies fall around me. Nia, Lyric, Carla, Quincy, Shae, Duke, Mary.
All those kids back there …
My heart is racing. Black dots swim across my eyes. One. Two. Three. Four. Breathe. Sweat trickles down the side of my face. Breathe. Inhale. Exhale.
“We had to leave them,” Duke mumbles to himself as if he’s reading my mind. “There was nothing we could do.”
“Justin?” Nia says.
I squeeze my eyes shut. One. Two. Three. Four. Breathe.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
The truth is no. A very big no, but I can’t make myself say it out loud. I reach for my pocket. It’s enough just to rest my hand there, feeling the outline of the puzzle piece. Breathe. Count. Breathe. The spike of adrenaline I felt during our escape from the park plummets, leaving me weak and shaky. I’m tired. So tired.
The silence around me is painful, prickling my skin. Everyone is slumped over, gasping for air. Their clothes and hair are disheveled. The expressions are the same—terror and confusion.
My eyes lock on Lyric.
His face is flushed. There’s a scar across his cheek. I’m not sure when it happened. Maybe during the madness in the park.
He smiles weakly.
“You can see me now?” I ask.
He swallows hard. “Yeah, but I can’t always.”
Nia scoots close to him. “When I first found you here, I was calling your name, but you didn’t know I was there, did you?”
Lyric looks away, unable to meet her eyes. “No.”
“That’s why you ran. You didn’t hear me. Then we found Justin and …” She frowns. “And …” She frowns.
When she doesn’t continue, I ask, “What?”
“I forgot what I was going to say.”
I watch her closely. She fidgets with the buttons on her shirt. “It was nothing.”
“It’s always something,” Duke says with a heavy sigh. “Always.”
Shae hugs herself. “I’m scared.”
“What are we gonna do now?” Carla uses her inhaler, then shoves it back in her pocket.
“We stick to the plan,” says Duke. “We stop the Seeker.”
“Do we really have to fight a monster?” Shae asks. “There’s no other way to get home?”
“I’ll protect you,” Quincy says.
Shae rolls her eyes.
There’s a loud grumble. I jump and my gaze whips around.
“That’s my stomach. I’m hungry.” Carla tugs on Lyric’s backpack with him still attached. “You got some food in there?”
“Hey, watch it.” He leans away. “Your brother has a backpack, too.”
“Carla, I brought all your favorite snacks.” Quincy unzips a pocket. He hands her a pouch of cinnamon applesauce, a fruit cup, and a string cheese.
She blushes, but takes the food.
“Uh, I’m not sure that cheese is safe. Two days without refrigeration sounds dangerous to me,” says Lyric.
Carla squeezes the
applesauce packet in her mouth and mumbles something I can’t make out.
I guess we’re taking a snack break. Regrouping. That’s fine with me.
“I have some stuff, too.” I pass out some packaged cookies. Lyric packed some peanuts and chocolate. He passes those treats around.
Mary gazes longingly at the cookies.
“Wait, do you eat?” I don’t know much about the basic day-to-day stuff.
“When I first arrived, I was hungry.” Duke runs his hand over the scar on his head.
“After a while, you lose your appetite,” Mary says.
“That sucks.” Carla peels opens the fruit cup and drinks the syrup.
I wait for Nia to burst out a fun fact about food or digestion, but she remains silent. She tugs on some long blades of grass, her expression blank.
Quincy shoves several cookies in his mouth. His cheeks bulge as he chews. Crumbs coat his smacking lips.
Duke stares at a candy bar for a long moment. He unwraps it, then hesitantly takes a bite. His eyes immediately light up. “I forgot how much I like chocolate,” he says quietly.
He takes another big bite.
“Careful,” says Lyric. “You’ll probably get a serious sugar rush.”
“I’m already feeling it,” Duke says with a smile.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen a happy expression on his face. He looks different. Lighter.
“It’s like a burst of energy,” he says. “I haven’t felt this since …” His smile slips away and the haunted expression returns.
Mary nibbles on a cookie. Some color seeps into her pale face. Maybe she’s getting the boost like Duke. Maybe it’ll give them extra strength to deal with the Seeker.
I dust salt and dirt off my hands with a wipe from my backpack. I shift left and right, stretching my sore, bruised limbs. For a moment, I let myself pretend I’m eating lunch with my friends at school, and there’s not something ready to jump out and scare us at any moment. The crackling of the wrappers and sounds of chewing are comforting. I have to enjoy this because I know it won’t last long.
Carla finishes her fruit cup. “We can’t sit here forever. What’s next? How do we get back home?”
See. Didn’t even get five minutes of peace.
“We have to go through the Seeker,” Duke says. “It knows we’re coming and it’s getting ready for us.”
