That’s when Dawson first smelled the heat. Almost like someone had left on a hot iron for too long. Then suddenly the smell was stronger, reminding him of scorched hot dogs on an open campfire—black, crispy, burnt meat. Then he remembered they hadn’t brought any food.
The sensation started as a tingle. Static electricity traveled the airwaves. The others felt it, too. They weren’t “oohing” and “aahing” anymore. Instead, they stumbled, heads tilted upward, searching the treetops.
Dawson looked back at the brush for the fiery red eyes. Gone.
His head swiveled. His eyes scanned the area, only now his eyes moved jerk by jerk. He could hear a mechanical click in his head like his eyes had become a machine. Each blink scraped like a camera shutter, open and closed. Every movement ticked and echoed in his head. His nostrils flared, sucking in air that singed his lungs. A metallic taste stuck in his throat.
The next flash of light sizzled, leaving a tail of live sparks.
This time Dawson heard shouts of surprise. Then cries of pain.
Suddenly the fiery red eyes came running out of the brush. They came racing straight at Dawson from across the campsite. A hooded wolf, blazing white with teeth bared and sparks of light shooting from its outstretched arms.
Dawson raised his own arm, aimed the Taser and pulled the trigger.
The creature reeled back, fell and sprawled in the leaves, kicking up glowing stars that shot out of a bed of pine needles. Dawson didn’t wait for the creature to spring to its haunches. He turned and started running, or at least, his feet did. The rest of him felt carried, pushed, shoved into the forest by a force stronger than his own two feet.
It was all he could do to raise his arms and protect his face from the branches that snapped and tore at his clothes and slashed his skin. He couldn’t see. The pounding at the base of his skull drowned out all other sound. The flashes were hot and bright behind him. Total dark, in front of him.
He hit the wire hard and the jolt of electricity knocked him off his feet. He stumbled and felt his skin pierced and caught like a fish on a hook, only a thousand hooks. The pain wrapped arrows around his entire body and stabbed him from every direction.
By the time Dawson Hayes hit the ground, his shirt was slick with blood.
CHAPTER 1
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 7TH
NEBRASKA NATIONAL FOREST
HALSEY, NEBRASKA
Dawson Hayes looked around the campfire and immediately recognized the losers. It was almost too easy to spot them.
He could pretend he had some super radar in reading people, but the truth was he knew the losers because … what was that old saying? It takes one to know one. It wasn’t that long ago that he would have been huddled over there with them, wondering why he had been invited, sweating and waiting to see what the price of the invitation was.
He didn’t feel sorry for them. They didn’t have to show up. Nobody threw them in the trunk of a car and brought them here. So anything that happened was sort of their own fault. Their price for wanting to be somebody they weren’t. Admission to the cool club didn’t come without some sacrifice. If they thought otherwise, then they really were hopeless losers.
At least Dawson accepted who he was. Actually he didn’t mind. He liked being different from his classmates and sometimes he played up the part, purposely wearing all black on football Fridays when everyone else wore school colors. Being the geek got him noticed, even garnered an eye roll from Coach Hickman, who before Dawson started wearing black on Fridays hadn’t bothered to remember Dawson’s name.
At the beginning of the school year during roll call for history class Coach would yell out “Dawson Hayes” and look around the entire room, over Dawson’s head and sometimes straight at him. Then Coach Hickman’s eyebrows would dart up with Dawson’s hand like the man would never in a million years have put a cool name like Dawson Hayes together with the pimpled face and the hesitant, skinny arm claiming it. Dawson didn’t mind. He was finally starting to get noticed and it didn’t matter how it came about.