Page 24

Twenty-Four

Now

My scream cuts off midfall. This time, I roll head over foot, and when I finally slam into the ground, I can’t make my lungs expand. Pain fissures through my spine, my bones, and the back of my head.

I lie flat on my back, staring up into the tree canopy, gasping like a fish on land. Just when I start to think I’m going to pass out from lack of oxygen, my lungs start working again. I take what might be the most painful breath of my life and cough it back out. It feels like my lungs are made of bruises.

How in the ever-loving hell did he get all the way up to the road before I did?

My head throbs, worse this time, and when I reach back, my fingers come away wet, and my knuckles scrape against a rock beneath my hand.

I try to sit up and the whole forest spins in a wild, wobbling circle.

A flutter of rocks rains down on me, followed by the sound of someone trampling down the hill. The panic returns full force. I manage to roll to my stomach and get my knees beneath me, but when I try to stand, I’m too dizzy and stumble to the ground again. My fingers dig into the earth, clawing my way further from the hill as fast as I can crawl.

A hand closes around my ankle and yanks me back. My arms fall out from under me, and my sweatshirt and turtleneck drag up my stomach, exposing my bare skin to be scraped raw against the forest floor. I cry out and he lets go, only to roll me onto my back again with the toe of his boot.

When I look up, Brandon towers over me with a foot on either side of my knees, breathing heavy. That fucking mask casts an ominous glow on the trees around us.

My scream echoes through the trees and I try to kick him in the knees, but he’s reaching for me, so I get him in the forearm instead. He lets out a robotic yelp and I scramble away from him.

In a flash, he crouches down and grabs fistfuls of Dylan’s sweatshirt and lifts me into the air. My feet dangle off the ground, and the sweatshirt fabric pulls painfully tight beneath my arms and around the back of my neck.

He tugs me close until we’re almost nose to nose. The pink light is so bright it hurts my eyes. His fists tighten in the fabric, and he shakes me until it feels like my teeth are going to rattle free from my skull.

“What is wrong with you?” he screams in my face, the mechanical twist on the voice making it clipped and emotionless. “Why won’t you admit what you did and let this be over? Her family deserves to know what really happened!”

He stops shaking me, and it feels like my brains are scrambled in my skull. My heart is beating so fast it’s almost like one solid pulse rather than individual thumps.

The mask looms in my face.

“Say it!” he screams. “Admit what you did!”

“I didn’t do anythi—”

He shakes me again and lets out a growl of frustration. “You always have to do everything the hard way!”

The forest spins in circles around me. I keep clawing at his hands, but the sweatshirt is cutting off circulation to my arms.

Something’s dripping down the back of my neck. The edges of my vision go dark, blocking out whole patches of fluorescent pink.

Fear like I’ve never felt before coils in my gut.

I’m going to die out here.

“Brandon—” I choke out. “ Please .”

The shaking stops and the robot voice laughs. “Sorry. Not Brandon.”

What?

His grip releases and he chucks me to the ground. Blood rushes back into my arms and I clutch them to my chest and roll into a ball on the ground, gasping through the pain.

He takes a step toward me, and I hear something move behind my head.

Suddenly the dude in the mask is screaming bloody murder. I watch in shock as he stumbles back and drops to his knees, grabbing at his face.

Jena drops down beside me, with one arm over her eyes and her pepper spray key chain in her other hand. My eyes immediately start to water. The air is thick with capsaicin.

Jena fucking maced him.

“God, I’m glad that…worked through that mask,” she says, coughing through her sentence.

She hauls me to my feet and pulls me toward the embankment. We wordlessly race to put as much space between us and the overspray as possible, but we’re blindly groping at the ground at best and the damage is already done. My eyes are on fire, and I can still hear Brandon—or whoever the fuck that is—screaming and thrashing around in the trees. It sounds like he fell further down the embankment.

My eyes are burning and watering so badly it’s hard to open them, but we know where the road is, so we just climb.

“There’s water in the car,” Jena gasps beside me. “We can flush our eyes.”

I nod, and realize too late that she can’t really see me. “Where did you even come from?”

“I got to the road, but you didn’t come up. I waited but when I heard you scream, I grabbed my keys and came to find you.”

God, I could kiss her. “I’m glad you did. I think he was about two seconds from wringing my neck.”

The screaming stops long enough to switch to angrily cursing my name, and we climb faster. Our attacker probably got a direct shot of the spray, but he could get up this hill if he wanted us badly enough.

My hand slaps the cool metal of the guardrail, and my muscles go weak with relief. We haul ourselves over the top of it and onto the breakdown lane. I hit the asphalt with a groan, seeming to land on all my embankment bruises at once.

“Don’t stop,” Jena says, tugging at me again. “We have to get out of here before he reaches the top or we’re fucked.”

I stumble to my feet, squinting to see through the burning.

We stagger along the road and when we come around the bend, the crash site is right there. One of the Bronco’s high beams is pointed straight at us. It illuminates the interior of the police cruiser and the Subaru like a lamp. I watch tendrils of smoke rise from beneath the hood of the Bronco with a burst of satisfaction. The fucker won’t be following us this time.

I wrench open the driver’s side door and reach inside the Subaru to grab the waters Jena bought at the gas station. I hand her one and crack it open.

“Don’t touch your face,” Jena warns. “Don’t rub it. Don’t touch anything but the water bottle until you can blink it away.”

The water stings until it doesn’t, and slowly but surely, I can open my eyes all the way. They still burn like a bitch but it’s bearable. Everything is hazy, like I’ve been swimming open-eyed in a pool for too long. Only much worse. I ditch the rest of the water and leave Jena to finish up with hers while I run to the police car.

Officer Lefebvre is hunched over her steering wheel. Blood is drying along the edges of her hairline and for one horrifying moment, I think she might be dead. But then her back rises and falls, and when I poke her shoulder, she groans.

“Oh, thank god.”

Her radio is going nuts. Calls come in, asking her to respond. Another voice says backup has been dispatched. Another voice asks how long she’s been out of contact. By now they probably have half the Dallas PD bearing down on this location. She’s probably going to be fine. The police response also means help is already coming our way, and if we keep driving, we’ll intercept them in no time.

I run back to the Subaru. “Get in!”

Jena throws the empty water bottles into the car and dives through my open door to get to her side of the car. Apparently neither of us wants to get close to those woods, not without knowing exactly where that fucker is.

I slide in and as I click my seatbelt into place, there’s movement in Jena’s sideview mirror. I look back and watch in horror as the masked asshole comes up over the guardrail next to the cop car. Black pants, black sweatshirt all covered in debris and clumps of pine needles. A darkened mask where their face should be.

This can’t be happening. How did he get back there already?

Who is this guy, Michael Myers? How many times does he have to go down before he stays there?

“Brooke, hurry,” Jena shouts, pushing the button to lock the door.

I hit the keyless start and the engine groans to life. The headlights blink on and someone’s standing fifty feet in front of the car. They throw up their arm to shield their eyes from the light.

Black pants. Black sweatshirt. Only their mask glows pink.

I whip back around. The other figure still stands at the railing.

Holy shit. “There are two of them.”

That’s how he’s appearing everywhere. That’s how he got to the top of the road before me. He didn’t . One chased me through the woods, and a second person pushed me down the hill. One got hit by the branch, and the other rattled my brains loose at the base of the hill.

Jena shrieks. “Brooke!”

I can’t respond. My brain is moving a mile a minute.

All night my only comfort has been knowing who was behind this: Brandon Heck, out for revenge—terrifying but simple. I knew my enemy and could at least guess what he was and wasn’t capable of. But as two dark figures stare me down, I am entirely unmoored. Who would help Brandon with this bonkers plan?

Sorry. Not Brandon.

And if it’s not him…who the fuck is chasing us? Who else would want me dead?

“ Brooke !” Jena says again, her voice thick with tears.

I look over at her, surprised. Tears stream down her face. Has she been crying the whole time?

I hit the gas and peel out, around the pink mask by the side of the road and onto the empty highway again. The speedometer climbs alarmingly fast, but I can’t take my foot off the gas. We whip around a few more turns and a long, long straightaway, but no headlights appear behind us.

I knew they were too smashed up to follow us.

It’s over.

“They’re not coming after us,” I say, trying to calm her down. “Take a breath, okay? He can’t get to us now that he smashed his own car to bits.”

She’s eerily silent, and stares straight ahead.

I point forward. The horizon is a few shades lighter than behind us. “Those are the lights for Dallas. We’re probably less than ten miles away. I’ll have service soon and we can call for help.”

She bursts into tears. Not the trickle that’s been falling down her face all night, but full-body sobs. Maybe it’s a rush of relief? She’s not the one who’s been peeling offensive stickers off her car and replacing slashed tires for months, so why is she the one crying?

She drops her head into her hands, and I reach out to rub her back while keeping my other hand on the wheel, but she pulls away from me and takes a ragged breath.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen!”

Her volume startles me in the confines of the car. I glance between her and the road. “I know. You keep saying that, but sometimes people do fucked-up things—”

I don’t even think she hears me. “It doesn’t make any sense! Why would he attack you?”

“What do you mean? Whoever’s in that car has been trying to run me off the road all night. Why are you so surprised by this?”

“He’s out of his damn mind.”

Okay. She’s not even engaging at this point. I need to get her home where she can calm the fuck down and we can process this whole shitty night. She looks one stressor from a full mental breakdown.

I focus on getting us home. My phone still says No Service, but I’ll be able to call for help any minute now. I glance at the dashboard.

12:10 a.m.

Shit, I probably have a dozen missed calls from my parents already, demanding to know why I missed curfew.

“None of this is right,” she says, getting quieter at least. My ears were starting to ring. “Why would he take it this far? That wasn’t part of the—”

My blood runs cold.

“ What did you just say?”

That she heard. Jena looks over at me, horrified.

“Jena. Who wasn’t supposed to take what so far?”

She stares at me, tears slipping down her face.

“Do you know who that is? Do you know who’s behind the masks?”

The guilt on her face tells me more than anything she could have said out loud. I feel like I’ve been punched straight in the chest, like I’ve had the wind knocked out of me a second time.

Everything she’s said to me tonight comes flooding back.

Do you think about what happened?

It has to be about that party, then, right?

Did anything else happen that night? Anything the stalker robot might know about?

Tell the cops whatever you have to say to get us out of this, and then take it back later.

She’s brought up the party every step of the way. Asked about Claire. Told me not to fight back. Told me to confess instead. The expression on her face when I brandished the cans and told her my plan to break their windshield is suddenly all I can see. The concern on her face…for the driver—driver s —in the car behind us.

What if you make him crash?

Jena’s the one who dragged me out of the house to go to this party in the first place. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, like my whole life would be ruined if I didn’t celebrate Yale with everyone.

What better time to reemerge onto the social scene than a party celebrating one of the most amazing achievements of your entire life?

Jena is the whole reason I’m here tonight.

She also had my phone in her hand when we lost service. She easily could have erased my call log and all those voicemails to cover her own ass.

I let my foot off the gas. I feel like I’m floating out of my own body.

“Jena,” I whisper. “What the fuck did you do?”