“Oh, that’s lame,” I said, for a weird—and rather nice—moment feeling like an average teen having an average conversation with her best friend. “So they’re posting the tryout results early. So what?”
“Well, they said they were going to post them on the door of that church that’s back in the woods across the street from the football field.”
“The haunted one on the Carlisle farm? Did someone miss the memo that the old dude is nuts and shoots people?” I asked, shivering as I recalled my bike ride last night. Even being near the edge of that farm had given me the heebs, big-time.
“Yeah, well, I guess they don’t care. They’re going to make all the sophomores hike through the woods Saturday morning to see if they made the team. The juniors will already be hiding out inside the church and will pretend to be ghosts to scare everyone. Then they’re going to jump the four who made it and steal their clothes so they have to run back to their cars naked.”
“What? They are so twisted.”
“Totally. But that could be good news for us. Monica should be heading out there pretty soon. I’ll just get there first and find a way to get her talking.”
“To the haunted church? But Jess, that’s—”
“It’s not
really
haunted. Ghosts aren’t real.” She paused. “Are they?”
“Not that I know of, but it’s still creepy, and Monica could be dangerous, and—”
“I’ll be careful. I’ll take that little tape recorder I use for history class and—”
“No, it’s too dangerous,” I said, determined to talk her out of this whacked plan.
“London will be there too.”
“So what? If Monica’s guilty, she’s crazy. She could still try to kill you.”
“How? With a zombie? I thought Monica needed to use your clothes as totems to make the zombie attack you. She wouldn’t have any of my clothes.”
“Still, Reanimated Corpses are drawn to the smell of blood. She could scratch you or something and then—”
“I’ll be careful. Don’t worry, Megan—I’ll get all the evidence you need to put Monica away for good. Then our lives can get back to normal.”
“No, Jess, I—”
“And maybe you’ll even get another chance to try out once Monica is gone!”
“No way, it’s too—” Then she hung up on me. Hung. Up! “Jess? Jess?”
I called her again and again and text-messaged her telling her she should
not
go ahead with this crazy plan, but she still didn’t answer. Frantic and completely freaked, I decided it was time to call Ethan. It didn’t matter that he’d been avoiding me—he was the only one who might be able to help. I called him three times, but I went straight to voice mail. Finally I resorted to texting him the lowdown and sat praying for him to text me back before it was too late.
Fifteen minutes later, I knew I had no choice. I was going to have to go after her. Despite the fact that sneaking out last night had nearly killed me and sneaking out again would break my mom and dad’s hearts, I had to go.
I couldn’t just call SA and tell them about Monica now, not when I’d broken the biggest Settler rule there was. My family would be relocated within twenty-four hours if anyone knew I’d told Jess what I was . . . or even what Monica was.
“Crap!” I was completely backed into a corner, with only one way out.
I turned off the shower and quickly brushed my teeth and washed my face. I changed into my pajamas so I would look the part of a girl getting ready for bed as I slipped out of my room and into my parents’ room to say good night. Smythe was still outside my door, but Barker seemed to have headed for bed. Good. One less babysitter to worry about.
Back in my room, I slipped into tight black spandex pants and a long-sleeved black top and pulled my hair back into a long braid to keep it from getting in the way. As I turned off my light and made my extra blankets into a Megan-shaped lump beneath the flowery comforter, I tried not to feel guilty for the stress my second disappearance would cause my parents. I had no other choice.
The window to my room opened without a sound, but I hadn’t bargained on the screen. Before I had time to doubt myself, I pushed on the screen. It made a slight popping sound as it broke free, but I managed to lean over and catch it before it fell to the ground. Carefully I pulled it into my room, concealing it behind the drapes. When I was done, I peeked out the window, amazed to see the compound fairly deserted. Earlier in the day, there had been a good number of Elders milling around, attending to whatever business old zombie Settlers attended to in their spare time, but now the gated complex was oddly peaceful.
The
gated
complex. I’d forgotten about the gates! The
electrified
gates that completely surrounded the compound. There was no way over those suckers and only one way out—through the main entrance, where a security camera monitored anyone coming or going. The guards in the control room would surely notice a kid leaving on foot. I’d be snatched up and thrown back into my room before I could say, “There’s no place like jail.”
I was trapped, unless . . .
My parents were already going to kill me once they realized I was gone—how much angrier could they get once they realized their car had disappeared too?
As I climbed out onto the roof and tiptoed over to the edge of the condo closest the ground, I plotted my dash across the parking lot. Only twenty feet to Mom’s Corolla, which was always left unlocked and had that extra key in the glove compartment because she kept misplacing her real keys. Then I would be on my way to
really
getting myself grounded for the rest of my natural life.
Assuming I didn’t get myself or Jess killed or my family relocated, I figured it would just about be worth it.
CHAPTER 16
Twenty minutes later, I was pulling down a narrow gravel road at the edge of the Carlisle farm, shaken up but thankfully still alive. The whole driving thing was
way
harder than it looked, at least once I left the deserted roads near the SA compound and entered real traffic. People in Carol drove like maniac Indy 500 qualifiers on crack!
If I made it to tomorrow morning, I was so going to write a letter to the paper urging people to slow the hell down.
Right now, however, the living-through-the-night thing wasn’t feeling like a given. It was even creepier out here knowing there weren’t seniors enjoying a bonfire nearby. And of course, I would actually be
on
Carlisle’s land as soon as I stepped into the woods, not skirting the edge of it. The old man would have every right to shoot me as soon as I trespassed, and I knew he’d have no problem pulling the trigger. Dude was completely, should-be-in-a-room-with-no-doorknobs insane.
All because he’d once dared to spend the night in the haunted church back in the woods behind his property.
He’d been a young man then, so the urban legend went, and there hadn’t been much to do in Carol. (Not that there was much to do
now
if you weren’t into the burgers at Sonic, or bowling, or if the pool was closed for the winter.) So he and some buddies had decided to camp out in the old church, one of the only remaining buildings from when Carol was settled in the late 1800s.
Nathaniel Carlisle had been the only one of the five boys to make it out alive and had been a wacko ever since. He’d babbled about ghosts, about living skeletons who had eaten every last one of his—
“Stop it!” I hissed to myself. The last thing I needed to be doing was mulling over old ghost stories. There was probably a perfectly rational explanation for what had happened in that church.
Like . . . Nate Carlisle had killed all the other boys and hacked them up and buried them somewhere on his property, and the whole living-skeleton, “I’m so crazy” story was just to throw people off his track.
Great job with the self-comfort, Megan.
But there was no turning back now. Just ahead, off to the side of the road, sat Jess’s little silver VW Bug convertible, the one she wasn’t supposed to be driving alone for two months. Her dad was going to be excessively pissed if he found out, but Jess had risked her father’s fury. I had to get my butt in gear and help her before it was too late.
I pulled Mom’s Corolla in just behind the Bug and shut it off but left the key in the ignition. I’d seen enough horror movies to know I didn’t want to mess with trying to fumble the key into the slot while an ax murderer was close on my heels.
No more horror movie thoughts!
It was so much easier to freak out about pretend scary stuff than to think about the very real and very whacked Settler gone bad who could be, even now, lurking somewhere in the dark woods.
I’d been too worried about avoiding a wreck to get seriously freaked out before I got here. But now I couldn’t deny the
really
bad feelings skittering across my skin as I shut the car door and started down a faint trail I was hoping led to the church. My gut was telling me to turn around and run for my life, but I couldn’t. So I forced my feet to move along the path instead of cutting through the woods and across the street, where the homecoming dance would just be starting.
Ahh . . . crepe paper and balloons and the cheesy fog machine they always cranked up before the announcement of the homecoming king and queen. If only that were in my future tonight.
Instead, I was up for more dark woods and potentially near death experiences. What fun.
At least the eclipse hadn’t started yet. It was only a little after nine, and there was still enough moonlight that I could find my way without tripping over rocks and tree roots, but it was too dark to feel completely safe. Anything or anyone could be hiding in the shadows, and I wouldn’t know they were there until it was too late.
Still, I forced myself to move a little faster. I certainly wouldn’t want to be on this path at ten o’clock, when the lunar eclipse would eliminate all the natural light in Carol—not to mention turn
up
the dark power available for Monica’s ritual, whatever that might be.
It still made my chest ache to think about Ethan being so into a chick who was so evil. How could it have felt so right to touch him, how could that kiss have rocked my world so completely if he was on the verge of declaring his undying love to Monica? It just didn’t seem right.
Didn’t seem
right
. Hmm . . .
What if Monica had done more than raise zombies with magic? What if she’d found a way to put some sort of love spell on Ethan? That would certainly explain—
I shook my head. I couldn’t dwell on Ethan right now. I had to get to the church, ASAP.
My best friend could already be dead, ripped apart by RCs, her poor little body mutilated on the floor of the old church. By now, the rats that called the place their home could be descending on her corpse, ready to—
I started to run, concentrating on dodging obstacles in the path instead of on visions of Jess’s dead body, pushing myself to move as fast as I could without making too much noise.
If Monica was waiting for me somewhere in the dark, I didn’t want to give her advance notice that I was on my way to kick her ass. And kick her ass I would, even though my fighting skills were probably on par with those of the grandmas who took Tae Bo down at the senior center.
But if Monica had dared to hurt Jess, she was going to pay for it. Big-time.
“Megan? Is that you?” It was barely more than a whisper, but I recognized the voice immediately.
“Jess? Where are you?” Seconds later Jess emerged from the shadows a few feet behind me. I turned to see her standing in the middle of the path, her hair a mess and mud on her T-shirt but otherwise in one piece. “Are you okay? What happened? I made it here as fast as I—”
“I’m so glad you came!” She flung herself into my arms and hugged me like she would never let go. “Monica tried to kill me! Like, for real kill me! She had a knife, and I had to fight her. London ran away. I screamed for her to come back, but I guess she didn’t hear me or maybe she’s in on it too. I don’t know; I—”
“Okay, just take a deep breath,” I said, holding her by the shoulders. “Where is Monica? You fought her and then what happened?”