Ava pats him on the shoulder. Cuffs him, more like. “My man, I’ve passed blood clots with more stamina than you.”
Mack laughs. Oh, she hopes Ava gets out quickly. She likes her way too much.
Jaden, red in the face, reflexively pushes his well-sculpted chest out. He’s doing it for the wrong audience. Mack turns back to the table, finishing her supply run. Ava takes a few water bottles, grudgingly, and follows Mack back to her cot. But Brandon already has the one next door. Mack is glad as Ava keeps going to find somewhere else to sleep. It’ll be easier when Ava’s gone. She finishes eating and curls up under her blanket.
“Who’s gonna stay up to make sure no one wanders off?” the intern asks.
“I’ll sit vigil tonight,” Linda says, stroking the intern’s hair in a motherly way. Maybe they bonded over a shared love of pantsuits. “This is the only night I’ll spend with you, but you can all sleep well knowing I’m keeping watch.”
Mack doesn’t care. She closes her eyes. She has to be ready, and physically is the only way she can prepare. Tomorrow she’ll be alone, hiding, with only her thoughts. And nothing she can do will prepare her for that.
DAY ONE
Mack double-checks her pack. She’s leaving half her clothes on her cot—which pains her—but she needs room for her supplies.
Jaden and another guy are stretching. Beautiful Ava joins them. Then half the camp is stretching like they’re at the starting line of a race.
It’s a decent theory. Whoever’s looking for them might start near the camp and range out from there. But it’s such an obvious strategy, Mack suspects near the camp is as likely to be safe as anywhere else. Now that she can see more of their surroundings, the whole thing feels absurd. How could they find anyone in this mess? Trees arch overhead; the paths around them crowd and teem with undergrowth turned to overgrowth. All the walkways are lined with either impassable shrubbery or walls high enough they block sight lines. It’s still dark, but even if it wasn’t, she couldn’t see ten feet past their camp clearing. From the drive in, she assumes the rest of the park is the same.
“You gonna run?” Brandon asks, face flushed with excitement.
Mack shakes her head.
“Cool. I think I’m going to. Good luck!” He holds out his hand, his smile guileless. Maybe Mack will miss him. She takes his hand and shakes.
“You, too.” She does wish him good luck. She just wishes herself better luck.
Linda is sitting on an ATV. It’s humorously incongruous with her jewel-toned pantsuit. There are tears in her eyes as she looks over the group. Then she frowns, as though considering something. “There’s a twist you should know about,” she says. Everyone freezes, waiting for this new information. “If you find a book—small, leather-bound—you get a bonus for bringing it to me.”
“What’s the bonus?” Ava asks, at the same time Jaden shouts, “Where is it?”
Linda’s eyes flash with something like annoyance, but her tone comes out singsong sweet. “If I told you where it is, finding it would hardly be a challenge.” She claps her hands, something she does whenever she’s shifting the conversation. “It’s time to start! Good luck! And…go!” She revs her ATV and peels out.
Linda didn’t answer the question about what the bonus was, and Mack’s sure it wasn’t in the packet anywhere. Seems like an odd addition at this point in the game. Without a good reason to look for it, Mack resolves to forget about it. Actively trying to find something while someone is trying to find her? Not worth the risk.
As she listens to Linda’s ATV engine fade into the distance, Mack wonders if the seekers—that seems to be the title the other competitors have settled on for those looking for them—will have ATVs. If so, she’ll be able to track their movements by the noise.
She turns away from the exhaust lingering like perfume. Everyone is gone, except Ava, who’s on the opposite side of the camp. Ava nods, then walks into the trees. Mack does the same in the other direction.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
She shudders against the prickle of cold dread on the back of her neck.
In the predawn haze, everything looks lazy and soft. But the intense, wild plant life, riddled with thorns, quickly dissuades her of the notion of simply pushing into the hedges and hiding there. She lets the vague remnants of a weed-choked path lead her away from the camp.
The clock is ticking. She can feel it with every beat of her heart. But she doesn’t rush. Shapes loom in the darkness. What she thought was a huge tree ahead of her is revealed to be a statue, swallowed by ivy. The topiary trees have shifted like nightmares, taking something known and distorting it until the familiar becomes monstrous.
She looks away from an agonized, swollen head screaming leafy terror at the sky. The branches are tight and small. Even if she could climb, she couldn’t hide. And something about these trees bothers her, haunts her. They seem sick in a way she can’t articulate. She wants nothing to do with them.
The path meanders in an almost aggressive manner. It doesn’t function like a path should. Instead of guiding to a destination, it seems determined to confuse. There are no straight lines. Everything curves, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead at a time. There are stone walls bordering most of the offshoot paths, which seems like an odd choice for a theme park—they block easy routes to destinations. She follows new directions at random. In the invisible distance—it’s hard to gauge how far away with no landmarks and such dense growth—someone swears.
Up ahead, there’s a break in the trees. She’s seen nothing promising, so she heads for the clearing. A series of small, sagging buildings along a more open central walkway greet her. In the nearest shack, a man is sitting at a rotted piano, his back to her.
He doesn’t move.
Neither does she.
After it starts to hurt, she releases her breath and creeps forward. Where a face should be, she finds blank, chipped emptiness. A statue. Maybe in its glory days a statue of a clown sitting at a piano filled people with delight, but seriously, what the fuck.
The thought that she could sit on the statue’s lap and be hidden unless someone looked closer briefly crosses her mind. But she’d have to stay in its faceless embrace all day. Its hands, once gloved, have rotted with mold and dark spots. They look like claws, or bones.
She turns away. This must have been the games section. Midway? Is that what those parts of a fair or amusement park are called? She’s not sure. Booths jostle for position, shouldering up to one another. A few are collapsed, the structures standing next to them looming like triumphant bullies. The ones that are still intact have counters, shelves, dim interiors. It would make sense to hide inside.
She looks up, instead.