Hide(23)

Close by, the snuffling. A wet, hungry breath. A sound like something pawing at the ground. Mack can’t be sure, but it seems like it’s coming from where she peed behind the clown shack yesterday. Her skin prickles with relief that she didn’t pee right by her own building.

The noise—a huff, then soft padding around and around—makes her want to scream with terror and tension. She’s being hunted.

She can tell herself otherwise, but she knows how it feels to be stalked as prey. He’s dead, he’s dead, he can never find her. Something else has taken up his task.

It brushes up against the side of her building, sending a tremor through the whole thing straight up to the roof. Straight through her bones. She opens her mouth to whimper, to cry, to release this terrible tension and let it find her, let it be over.

A hand closes around her own, tight, anchoring her there. The blanket is drawn back over her face, centimeter by centimeter, sealing her in the hot dark with Ava. Ava, who woke up without a sound. Ava, who is with her.

Come out, come out, wherever you are, he croons in her memory. She squeezes Ava’s hand hard, too hard, but Ava doesn’t move. A single rubber duck on the ground beneath them makes an agonized, slow death squeak.

And then a distant scream of rusted metal sounds through the air like a siren. Great bounding steps take off in the direction of the noise.

Mack lets out a shuddering breath of relief. Ava shifts, slowly, carefully, and Mack puts her head on the other woman’s shoulder. It’s stifling beneath the blanket, but she has no doubt Ava still feels the tears that leak from Mack’s eyes onto her shirt.

“It’s just a game,” Mack whispers. But she knows it wasn’t the idea of losing that filled her with existential terror. It was the idea of being found.

And then dying.



* * *



—

“You son of a bitch!” Sydney shouts as she watches Jaden run into the trees, away from the noise he’d made to draw the seekers to her. If she gets out, she’s taking that prick with her. She scrambles out of her airplane, almost breaks her neck climbing down. Racing after him, she shoves through the branches. Her sunscreen falls out of her pocket with a clang.

She screams as her hair catches on a branch, yanking her backward. The trees around her go silent. And then she hears a heavy footstep. And another. Something about the slow, deliberate pace drains all her anger and replaces it with fear. She sinks down into a crouch, closing her eyes, reduced to a child’s logic. If she can’t see them, they can’t see her.

She’s wrong, of course.



* * *



—

Mack and Ava stay on the roof for a few minutes after the spotlight announces an end to the day. Their hands tremble as they down water and shove granola bars in their mouths.

Ava nudges Mack with her shoulder. “Thanks. I’m sore and starving and afraid I’m gonna get a kidney infection, but I’m not tired anymore.”

Mack can’t say the truth—that without Ava’s hand anchoring her, she would have lost it. So she pretends it was a normal day, as normal as a day spent hiding in an abandoned theme park can be. “No biggie.”

They help each other down. Mack goes straight to the piano clown’s building. She wants—needs—to see footprints. Normal, boring shoe prints. Even animal prints. The ground seems disturbed, but she can’t really remember what state it was in the day before. And in the dim moonlight, she can only be sure there are no obvious shoe prints.

“We should hide somewhere new tomorrow,” Ava says. Just like that, she’s paired them. They’re a team. Mack should argue—should say no, but…

“Any ideas?”

Ava nods and they walk back toward camp. “I think climbing is our best bet again. There’s an old bumper car area. The trellis above it looks steady enough to hold us. It’s totally overgrown with ivy, so if we lie flat, we should be invisible from the ground.” She pauses. “And we could peek through if we heard something again.”

“See what it is,” Mack whispers.

“Who it is,” Ava corrects. But she doesn’t sound as confident as Mack wants her to. They stop on the edge of camp. “Hey, Linda!” Ava waves the woman down. She’s setting the last of her supply refills on the table.

“Yes, dear?” Linda looks exhausted. Even her lipstick has bled out into the fine wrinkles around her lips, making them look blurry and indistinct.

“Are there wild animals in here?”

Linda blinks several times. “There is some local fauna that might have made it past the fence. But nothing large or dangerous.”

“Maybe like wild pigs?”

Linda lets out a surprised laugh. “I’ve never seen a wild pig. But in a park this size, who can say?”

“How many seekers are looking for us?”

Linda shakes her head, that smile bleeding out of the lines just like her lipstick. “Does it matter? Caught is still caught.” She hurries away to pull supplies from the four-wheeler before they can ask more about the seekers, or who got out that day.

“It matters a lot,” Ava mutters, looking to Mack. Mack shrugs. It matters, and it doesn’t. One seeker or one hundred seekers—it won’t change how she plays the game.

Could have been a pig they heard. A big one. Or it could have been one of their mysterious seekers. Back at the camp, the terror that she was being hunted feels more like PTSD than something real. Still, Ava doesn’t leave her side. They sit together, eating, unwilling to shower yet. It feels important to watch as everyone comes back. To see who’s still in the game.