The Rules (18 page)

“The clue has got to be something to do with that sign,” Kyle said.

Perched on the cliff on the other side of the compound was a billboard barely visible in the moonlight. But Robin, Thea, and Kyle could make out the luminescent outline of a child’s sand pail in the lower right corner. Kyle confirmed that it hadn’t been there when he’d first arrived. The killer had used glow-in-the-dark paint to draw both it and an upside-down arrow pointing at the building beneath it. Robin was amazed at the lengths he—or she—had gone to in organizing this alternative hunt. This do-or-die game where he called the shots.

Just like August and his spreadsheets and his zombies and rowboats.

Dozens of windows stared angrily at them. Part of the first floor had collapsed inward, leaving the impression of an opened mouth waiting to swallow up the unwary.

Nothing in Robin wanted to go inside.

“That is so unfair,” Thea said nervously. “What if no one saw the little bucket he painted? Would he kill us all?”

“Maybe it’s like a magic trick,” Kyle said. “You know how magicians ask you to pick a card? And then they tell you to look under a chair, or pick up the envelope on a table, stuff like that, and there’s the same card? It works because they put different props in lots of places ahead of time. The deck is marked, so when you give them back the card, they know which one you drew. Then they tell you where to look. Magic.”

“I knew that,” Thea said quickly.

“So what you’re saying is that maybe there’s more than one place to look for a bucket,” Robin said.

“Or for a well,” Kyle replied. “Or whatever he wants us to find.”

They continued walking toward the building and Robin wondered if they should turn off their flashlights and the lantern. That way they would be less of a target. Maybe the killer was waiting inside, watching them come closer, closer. Beside her, Kyle was shivering in the borrowed hoodie and sweats. She could even hear his teeth chattering. His flashlight beam skittered like a mosquito.

“Do you want my jacket?” she asked him.

He shook his head, and they kept walking, their feet making a tremendous racket as they crunched on the seemingly endless tract of crushed shell.

Then something made a screeching noise and swooped past Robin’s ear. Bat? Owl? It came back, batting the air close to her ears again. It dive-bombed at them a third time and Robin simply ducked, but Thea let out a yell and began running toward the building.

“Thea, wait!” Robin called.

Thea kept going, utterly panicked, and Robin and Kyle hustled after her. Robin heard the screech again, as sharp as a slap against her eardrums.

“Ow!” Kyle said, letting go of her hand. He fell to one knee and she stumbled over her own feet as she slowed.

“Kyle!” she cried.

“Pothole,” he said. “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

Robin broke into a trot, raising her lantern high. “Thea!” she called. Then her foot caught on something and she lurched forward. Her lantern burst out of her grasp and crashed to the ground, winking out.

“Kyle?” she said. “Thea?”

No answer.

Tiny pricks of fear stabbed every inch of her body. She turned in a slow circle, and something inside her—some instinct for self-preservation—told her not to make another sound.

The retreating shriek of the night creature made a reedy, thin noise against the bass thundering of her heart. She didn’t hear anyone else. It was as if the fog had spirited everyone away, and she was the only one left on the cannery grounds.

She and the killer.

Then she heard another sound. And it was so unexpected, and so desperately dreamed of, that for a few seconds, she didn’t recognize what it was.

But when she did, she began to whoop with joy.

It was a car horn.

“Thea! Kyle!” she shouted, breaking into a run. “A car! There’s a car! Thea!”

The sound of the horn seemed to bounce from building to building, and then the echo died. She couldn’t tell which direction it had come from—if the driver had entered through the double scrollwork gates or was still blazing down along the road high above the cannery on the upper cliff. She hoped it had navigated the razor-sharp turn and now was in the lot. It could be a coincidence, just someone out for a night drive along the coastline. In this fog, she doubted he would even see the cannery from the road. And unless he—or she—already knew about the party, they’d have no reason to come down here anyway.

So Drew might have had the right idea all along—go up to the road, wait.

“Thea?” she called. “Kyle?”

Neither answered.

She stopped running. Stopped dead in her tracks.

It was too silent.

Robin caught her breath. She was just about to call out to Thea again when a little voice in her head told her to wait.

Footfalls that were not hers crunched along the pulverized shells. But they weren’t coming from behind her, which was where Kyle should be, nor from anywhere in front of her, where the billboard and the building stood. They were approaching from her right.

Slow, cautious. Deliberate.

She stilled her panting, almost strangling herself as she held her breath and steadily let it out. The footfalls kept coming,
crunch, crunch, crunch
. Her breath shuddered against her lips as she fought to stay as quiet as she could. Her nerves were jangling; all her senses went on high alert.

Then they stopped.

This person could be just as frightened as she was, wondering if they were gliding through the ghostly fog beside the killer. Who would make the first move?

The mistake?

Robin didn’t know what to do. She stood stock-still, struggling not to pant. Not to panic. But it was so hard not to. Cage’s ruined face, Heather’s eyes bulging as she swung above their heads. It could be her turn. People all around her were dying. No one who had been murdered had awakened this morning wondering if this day would be their last. Old people worried about dying. Not teenagers.

Robin made herself think, strategize. She wished she still had the lantern. She could bend down and throw shells in their eyes. If she could see their eyes.

Her best defense was running. But the sound would give her away.

Don’t move,
said the little voice inside her head.
If you move, you will die.

THEA’S RULE #4:
Do what you have to in order to survive.

Thea barreled into the disintegrating building, sprinting down a maze of corridors, turning left, right, and then so many times she lost track in her full-out terror. Her shoes landed on hard things, soft things, brittle shards of glass. The place smelled of pee and her brain registered that there might be squatters living in here, homeless people.

Her flashlight bounced along cracked walls and graffiti. As she turned a corner, she saw a floating figure staring at her and she screamed, throwing the flashlight at the very same moment that she realized she was staring at a reflection of herself in a mirror. The flashlight smashed the glass in a cascade of splinters and she ducked, slamming against a wall.

The wall cracked, snapping beneath her weight, and she fell right through it into a pitch-dark room. All the air was squeezed out of her lungs as she dropped hard onto a cement floor. Fragments needled up into her outstretched palm and at the same time that she cried out, she heard another sound.

A car horn.

For a moment, she was transfixed. She couldn’t believe it. Her mind tried to deny it. It was a
foghorn.
It was one of the electric guitars. But she knew what it was.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “Thank you, God.”

She scrabbled to her feet in the ebony nothing and tried to go back into the hall. Then she fell to a squat and groped along the floor for her flashlight. She thought she heard Robin calling her name, but she sounded very far away.

“I’m here,” she tried to shout, but the words came out as a papery whisper. That was probably a good thing, since she was in the building that the killer had led them to.

Was it a trick? Some sound effect he had rigged up to make them
think
a car had arrived? So they would run to the parking lot and then—

Thea straightened. Her side and slivered hand both tingled. She put her other hand against her ribs and her hand came back wet. She was bleeding.

In the darkness, something squeaked.

Then it ran over her shoe.

A rat.

Thea stuffed her hand over her mouth in a struggle for silence. Another rat joined the first, tiny feet skittering over her instep. This time a voiceless moan escaped and she wheeled around, running—

—straight into a wall. She hit it so hard that she was stunned for a few seconds. Her forehead ached dully and she staggered backward, trying to fix in her head the many ways she had turned. Her shoe came down on a slab of glass, breaking it into more pieces.

Something sharp stabbed the back of her heel. It was a rat, biting her. She wanted to let out the loudest shriek on the planet but she panted in fear instead. She had gotten into this mess because she had panicked.

She thought about rabies and infections.

The car would take her and Praveen to the hospital.

Icy sweat beaded on her forehead. She scanned the darkness, seeing blossoms of velvety blackness, tricks her eyes played on her as they tried to compensate for the lack of light.

Something bright blossomed a few feet away to her right, glowing as if from underneath a piece of furniture. She shuffled toward it, colliding with something, and dropped to her haunches. Her entire body thrummed with pain.

Next she let herself fall forward onto her knees, then very cautiously lay on the floor. The beam of the flashlight almost blinded her but she shifted her line of sight and closed her eyes to let them adjust.

She heard rats chittering and swept around herself with her hand, making contact with something that scooted away. Then she stretched a little farther and grabbed the flashlight.

The flashlight revealed a sea of rats between her and the wall. She swayed, and then she began kicking. They cheeped almost like birds as one of them went flying, and then another.

She found the open door that led into the corridor and tried to remember if she’d gone left or right. Nothing looked familiar; everything looked the same. This was the exact nightmare of her entire life: a haunted house.

And then, to her left at the end of the hall, her light shone on a rusted metal
bucket
with a metal half-circle handle.

Her ragged breaths sounded like machine-gun fire as she studied the bucket. It could be a coincidence that it was there. Or a trap. The killer could be watching, waiting to pounce on her if she took the bait. A montage of images flashed through her mind of each person in the group finding a different bucket or even a well, and then the killer taking them out in horrible, sadistic ways.

She didn’t have time to waste. And maybe the old Thea would have scooted past, pretending not to see it, or gone back to it later with Robin at her side. But she wasn’t a coward anymore. Not if she wanted to stay alive. So she gathered up all her courage and looked inside.

Her face prickled. There was a white envelope just like the others at the bottom. And writing on it:
#2.

Clue number two.

She grasped the bucket by the handle. The curved metal piece detached at one end and the bucket canted at an angle, nearly clattering to the floor, but she caught it against her stomach and snaked it up against her chest. A rat scampered across the next passageway. She came across a swarm of rodents gathered around something on the floor, tugging violently at it, chewing. She averted her gaze and kept going.

Dead end.

“Please don’t leave without me,” she whispered. And then she heard a creak on the floorboards behind her.

She shot forward, bucket clutched against her chest, going left, right, right again. Locked door. Wrong way. And then into a room she didn’t recognize. She painted it with her flashlight. Lying on a corroded white metal counter with deep drains on either side was the perfect skeleton of a two-foot-long fish. A cockroach crawled out of its eye socket. Coiled around it were two hoses, like maybe to squirt water into the gutters to clear away fish guts on the floor.