“Don’t,” I warned her, but she just kept talking, ignoring the gun I was holding.
“We almost lost you again after you tore outta that campground. If you hadn’t stopped at that diner, things might’ve ended differently. Worked out in the end though . . . at least for us.” She took another step. “Tyler won’t be as hard. He’s a sweet kid. Trusting.” Her voice changed then, and I heard her, the old Natty. The meek girl who’d been my friend. “He’ll believe me when I say I just want to help him find you.” She squeezed her brows together, a tortured sort of look. “We’re in this together, Tyler. Kyra’s my friend too.” Her voice broke, and if I didn’t know the real Natty, I would have believed she was going to break down and cry.
My shoulders fell because she was right. She was so totally-completely-utterly convincing. Tyler would buy this act of hers hook, line, and sinker. If Natty got to him, there was no way he would ever suspect her of what she really had planned for him.
I couldn’t let her get away with it. I used both hands to raise my gun to point at her head.
When she laughed, it was an insulting sound. “Let’s just get this over with.” She wasn’t afraid of me. She didn’t believe I could do it.
And maybe she was right. Already my hands were shaking again, and the beating in my chest had resumed.
Beat-BEAT . . .
. . . Beat-BEAT . . .
Don’t let her get to you. It was a silent prayer.
Natty . . . Natty who I’d once believed was my friend. My eyes traveled down to her gun at the same time I concentrated on the one in my own hands. I saw her nod toward me . . . at me.
I recognized the nod. I’d seen that nod on the field a million times. Athletes gave it whenever they were feeling overly cocky. Too confident for their own good. It was a Fuck you nod. She didn’t have to say it out loud.
I focused, telling myself Natty was wrong. She was full of crap. She was the reason I was here in the first place. She was the reason Blondie was dead and I’d been forced to kill Eddie Ray and the others. She was the reason Blackwater had fallen. But she wouldn’t take Tyler.
I slowed my breathing . . . and my heartbeat. I counted to three.
One, two, three.
Beat-BEAT!
Then, like lining up a pitch, I fired.
SIMON
I HALF EXPECTED FREDDY KRUEGER TO JUMP OUT AT us with his knife-fingers at any second. Vines snaked in and over every surface of the crumbling building, choking it out. The lawn needed a serious dose of weed killer, and the driveway, which had one of those massive iron gates at its mouth, was now a disintegrating mess of broken asphalt, and was lined with creepy, spindly limbed trees.
I wondered what it must have been like, back in the day. Jett had mentioned that people used to drop off their relatives at places like these . . . dump them when no one could, or wanted to, care for them.
What was that like, to live behind these massive brick walls, cut off from the rest of the world?
Nothing like now, I guessed. Now this was a place time forgot. Just like us, I couldn’t help thinking. Now it was an empty shithole crumbling to the ground. I wondered who we were about to come up against in there. And for the millionth time, I hoped to God Tyler was right, that Kyra was inside. That he hadn’t just led us on a wild-goose chase.
“Cut the lights,” Griffin whispered, but I was one step ahead of her, already switching them off. Then, she added, “We should go the rest the way on foot.”
No one said much, not even Jett, who usually rattled off numbers whenever things got tense. This time, he kept his mouth shut. No data about our odds or the probability we could be walking into a trap.
We’d figured that one out all on our own.
Kyra’s dad took his cue from us, and the lights from that piece of shit pickup behind us shut off too. The world—the run-down grounds around us—went black. When we parked, he cut his overloud engine too. If anything had given us away so far, it was that goddamn truck of his.
Getting out of the SUV, my adrenaline kicked into overdrive, pumping so hard I could taste it. I signaled for Griffin to bring her AK-47, and Jett, and to stick with Tyler and me. We’d be going directly through the front entrance. Ben Agnew’s party would take the rear, searching for an alternate way in.
I lifted three fingers—our channel on the two-way—the only way we’d be communicating from here on out. But until there was something to report, everyone knew to stay off the comm. No point giving those sons of bitches any other clues we were on to them.
I joined my fingertip to the tip of my thumb: okay?