“Come ye the resurrection where the hunted are born again.”
I sniffled. My body froze. “What are you saying?”
He was so close now that I could make out a long scar that ran from his ear to his chin. “I am saying that I know.”
Static buzzed in my ears. I remembered the tire tracks, the shattered phone. And now my stomach threatened to betray me. I’d ignored all of it, and I was here.
“How?” I rasped. I squeezed my eyes closed and reopened them free of tears. “Where … are … we?” I asked cautiously. But as soon as I asked, I knew the answer. I knew it because it was the only possible answer. I peered out the window, and sure enough a short distance away was the highway. He had seen me. Then he had seen Adam. That night came rushing back. The farmhouse with its lights on. The barking dogs. A scream lodged in my throat. This felt like a nightmare. One that lived and breathed and bled into the day to torment me.
“Bring him back,” McCardle said.
My spine went rigid. Already pressed to the coffin, I tilted my head and stared down at the amalgamation. “I can’t. He’s … he’s a monster. He’s gone. I can’t do it.”
I cringed away from the body, but McCardle caught me by the wrist. He ran his bandaged hand over my forehead and down the bridge of my nose. “I suppose then that my boy could use a new nose. Maybe ears.” He crossed my face to the lobes. “Patches of skin. What do you think?” he hissed. His breath was sour like curdled milk.
“No.” I breathed. My mind began reeling. I needed time to figure this out. I needed to buy time.
He yanked me into him.
I bit my lip by accident. A small shriek escaped. The room was spinning. “What—what I mean is, I can’t do it here. I have to have … my equipment.”
“If you think I’m taking you back to your house, where you can call the cops…”
“No,” I added quickly. “Nothing like that. The lightning generators. They are … my father’s invention.” The spit was so thick in my mouth I could hardly speak. “Without those, the resurrection, as you called it, it won’t work. We have to go to them.” A part of me begged to collapse on the moth-eaten bed, but I remained standing. Time. That was what I needed. As much of it as I could get. “I can show you.”
Some of the gauze around his hand loosened, and I could see the spots of blood that had seeped throughout the layers. “I already know where they are,” he said. And a cold fever swept through me.
THIRTY-EIGHT
Coordinates: 33.6627589 degrees north, 95.7891265 degrees west
Take left at the lone oak
Forty paces to due west
Look for the clearing in the woods
*
How long had McCardle been following me? I wondered. My teeth rattled against one another as we forked off onto the country road that bordered the beginning of the Hollows. The rope still knotted around my wrists rubbed deep grooves there, and I winced every time we went over another bump.
McCardle knew where the generators were. The thought sent icy tentacles around my throat. We hadn’t been alone that night. We’d been right. The Hunter had been watching us, tracking us. Who knew what he might have done, especially if I’d gone alone.
I rode silently on the front bench of the blue truck that left no divider between us. A white rabbit’s foot dangled from the rearview mirror. Something told me he didn’t buy it at a gas station for a souvenir.
The sky was breaking. Drops of rain spattered the grimy windshield. The darkest clouds now hung directly above us, grumbling like monsters. The occasional ripple of lightning flashed through the clouds’ bellies, but I had yet to see one break free.
I stared silently out the window. Through the side mirror I could see the blue tarp that covered the glass coffin loaded into the truck bed. During the drive, I’d been waiting for a plan to come to me, but I was no closer to one than I had been when I’d first woken up, drugged and groggy, in McCardle’s creepy farmhouse. My only thought was to get to the generators and wait for an opportunity.
“We’re almost there.” He ran his hand over the steering wheel. Thumped the bottom with the base of his hand. He was anxious. Anxious could be good, I figured. I might catch him off guard. But anxious could also be unpredictable, in which case all bets were off.
I cleared my throat. “You know, it wasn’t your fault what happened to your son. It was an accident. Everybody knows that.”
He watched the storm swirl above. “It’s really starting to come down out there.”
I shifted in my seat. “Yeah,” I muttered. “I guess it is.”
We rounded a bend in the road where there was a small inlet large enough for two or three cars to park. I didn’t think I could ever go near that spot without thinking of my dad leaving me behind in his truck to go chase the lightning.
I inhaled sharply. Another car was already parked there.