These Deadly Games(80)

Dammit.

But if everything they did served a purpose, the name Lance Burdly must’ve meant something. There were no false leads in An0nym0us1’s playbook. No useless moves.

Desperate, I googled the name again, but it was still a dead end—not even a single result to dig through. Usually there were at least some incorrect results; other people who shared the name, or misspellings.

I glowered at the message underneath: Including results for lance bradley.

Maybe I had the spelling wrong. I’d only seen the script for a moment before reading it aloud—

Wait a minute. I leaned forward, gawking at Google’s suggestion “bradley.” So close to Brady. I drew a sharp breath. No way. It couldn’t be that simple.

Well, was it simple if it took me a whole day to figure out?

I frantically flipped to the page in my notebook where I’d scrawled his name.

LANCE BURDLY



I rearranged the letters, crossing out each one as I spelled a new name underneath.

BRADY CULLEN



That was no coincidence. That was a fucking anagram.

My chair seemed to disappear beneath me, and it felt like I was falling into an infinite abyss. I gripped the cushion to steady myself, to confirm it was still even there. Zoey was right. This was about Brady. Was I meant to unscramble this clue? Or had An0nym0us1’s game glitched, and I finally spotted it?

Either way, now I knew. This wasn’t about MortalDusk at all.

It was about revenge.





5 Years Ago


It seemed half the town had joined the search party in the woods by the late afternoon. Our little game had become a real-life, terrifying manhunt.

I begged Dad to let me search with him, to help find my friend. Warm, guilty tears slid down my cheeks, and he couldn’t help but agree. He kept a firm grip on my hand the whole time, as though some unseen presence might whisk me away, just like it had Brady.

The police had already searched Zoey’s and Brady’s properties with a fine-tooth comb, but there was no indication of a kidnapping—no tire tracks, weird footprints, dropped belongings, or signs of a struggle. A couple of the houses on the other side of the woods had security cameras, but only facing the front doors to dissuade thieves from stealing packages, like Zoey’s parents had. We hadn’t gone close enough to the front doors to appear on the recordings.

Zoey’s footage showed Brady leaving, me following soon after, then both of us returning together. But nobody passed through the front door again until Brady’s mom came over in the morning.

The police assumed Brady went out the side door, and then …

Well, that was the mystery.

He’d simply vanished.

By now, we’d sunk so deep into our lie there was no clawing back out. Besides, as Randall reminded us, we were sweeping the woods anyway. There was no point fessing up now.

Rumors and theories rumbled through the search party—of kidnapping, of bears, of Brady running away. But I kept dragging Dad to all the possible hiding places we hadn’t checked last night, and even some we had: shrubberies with enough space underneath, sheds, under gardening tables, underneath people’s back decks. I even dragged him to the Nelsons’ backyard—it had been out of bounds, but maybe Brady had been determined to outplay us.

I was the one who spotted it—the bright red fabric peeking out from a slim, metal storage unit leaning against the Nelsons’ detached garage. Much of it was rusted orange, and the parts that weren’t matched the forest-green trim of the Nelsons’ house looming nearby under an awning of pine trees.

“It’s his sweatshirt!” I cried. Matty’s sweatshirt. The one Brady had borrowed. Relief washed over me. No wonder we hadn’t been able to find him all the way over here.

Dad tried the rusted handle, but it was stuck. “Are you sure?”

“Yes!” I pounded on the metal door. “Brady? Brady, can you hear me?” I pressed an ear to it, but jerked back—the door was frigid. “Brady!”

Dad jiggled the handle so hard I thought the locker might pitch forward, but it stood firm against the garage. Then he tugged at the fabric. “This is making the door stick. Hey,” he called to a nearby crowd at the edge of the woods. “Hey, over here!”

Chief Sanchez was in the crowd, and he dashed over. “What is it?”

Dad motioned to the fabric. “My daughter thinks that’s his.”

Sanchez gave the handle a fruitless jiggle. “Locked?”

“Or stuck, from the fabric,” said Dad.

Sanchez radioed in, “Sanchez here, I need a crowbar at 65 Chester Street.”

“Ten-four, Chief,” a voice called back. “I got one, heading your way.”

The elderly Nelson couple had noticed the kerfuffle and trudged the wide length of their backyard to reach us, clutching peacoats closed over matching plaid bathrobes. As Dad explained what was happening, I brainstormed how to convince Brady to go along with our lie—that we hadn’t snuck out last night to play Manhunt. He could say he’d been sleepwalking! Yes, that was it. He sleepwalked out here to the Nelsons’ yard, and somehow ended up in their storage locker.

Another police officer arrived a few minutes later, gripping a crowbar with Brady’s family in tow. His mother’s eyes were wild with worry, and his father and brother looked drawn and ashen. But they should be relieved! We’d found him! “He’s not responsive?” asked the cop.