A branch snapped behind her.
Katie whirled around. Through a tiny hole in the foliage, almost impossibly distant, she could see the dim lights of the Lower Bend, but the portion of path she had just traversed was a long carpet of shadow. Her heart thundered in her ears, but even over its wild pounding, she could hear that sound again, the stealthy push of branches being moved out of the way. Something coming toward her. But on the right, or the left?
“Row!” she screamed into the woods, her throat raw with fright. “If this is you, I’ll fucking kill you!”
There was no answer, only that same sound of approaching progress, measured and deliberate. Katie dropped to the ground and began scrabbling, digging through the dirt until she found what she sought: a good-size rock, smooth and rounded but heavy, a rock she could wield. One side was jagged; a geode, perhaps, its crystals broken through the rock’s cracked surface. Katie straightened, clutching the rock in her hand, then froze as something moved on the path, perhaps thirty feet away, covering a patch of moonlight and blocking it out.
It was big, whatever it was, the height of a tall man. Katie could just make out a hint of silhouette, rounded shoulders and the protrusion of a head, but the shape, the posture, were wrong, slumped over, almost as though it was crouching. In desperation, her mind tried to convince her one last time that it was Row, having her on, but Katie knew better. Her gut knew better. She could smell the thing, dank and rotten, like vegetables gone bad in the cooler.
It stood still, regarding her silently, and in that silence Katie felt menace, not the charged, barely contained menace of a wolf or other wild animal, but something much worse: a thinking menace. Katie was suddenly certain that it knew who she was, that it had come looking specifically for her.
It knows my name, Katie thought, and her nerve broke. She turned and fled.
Whatever it was, it was quick. Branches whipped and cracked behind Katie with the speed of its passage. Katie heard her own gasping breath, tearing in and out of her throat, but beneath that, she heard the thing behind her, not breathing but snarling, a low buzzing noise like the wind made when it crossed the pinwheels in front of the school. Katie wasn’t used to running uphill. She sensed that it was gaining.
She ran through the lumber site, sprinting now, laying herself out, hearing a clatter of metal and wood as the thing behind her knocked aside one of the logging stations. She chanced a look back, hoping that it had gone down, but the thing was still behind her, even closer than before, a black shadow that loped along, bent low to the ground. The tree cover thinned and Katie bit back a scream as she glimpsed white flesh and staring eyes, hands that felt along the ground like those of an animal. It was a man, but not a man, not with its spine bent that way and that inhuman buzzing in its throat.
Bad, Katie thought. I know what bad looks like and there it is and will it eat me? Is that where this ends?
Then the trees closed again and Katie was back into the deep woods. Her breath rasped inside her throat like sandpaper. She leapt over the trunk of a fallen tree, its branches reaching up to scrape at her legs, but she barely felt it. She kept her eyes on the path, dimly visible ahead of her, knowing that if she blundered into the woods she was lost. The line of the path was becoming clearer in front of her, a long, light groove in the night, limned in blue. Yes, now she could see everything! If she hadn’t been so scared, she might have laughed, because Gavin wasn’t the only one who’d received night vision in the Crossing. But a moment later she realized that it wasn’t night vision. The light was coming from her right hand, which was still clenched around the rock she had picked up. Tiny blue lines of light gleamed between her fingers, bright enough to illuminate the path.
The thing behind her snarled and Katie screamed because it was right on her, its voice had been right there, behind her left ear. Something grabbed her hip and squeezed and she shrieked, a sound like the town firebell, and now she broke free through the treeline and there glimmering in the distance was the Town in all of its dull communal glory, but now Katie was dying to embrace that dullness; if she could have found the Town’s stolid, thudding heart she would have kissed it right now—
She chanced another glance behind her and came to a halt, such an abrupt halt that she fell sprawling in the dirt, scraping the skin from her left elbow.
Nothing was behind her.
The treeline was perhaps one hundred feet back from where she had fallen, right at the bottom of the High Road, where the houses began and streetlamps glimmered merrily in the dark. The trees at the edge of the woods were rustling, but it was only the natural sound that Katie had heard all of her life, leaves and branches rubbing together in the wind that came off the plains. There was no sign of anything moving.