The Summer It Came for Us Read online

  “Looks like some dream you had last night, Jace,” Malcolm muttered.

  But Jace had shown us this car, parked in his parents’ garage.

  His parents had two SUVs?

  We all turned to Jace, who was looking pale.

  He merely swallowed.

  “So do we all agree we were in a crash last night?” Zoe said.

  Jace inhaled sharply and released his breath in a hiss. “I thought . . . that because the car was home . . . that maybe . . . maybe it had all been reset . . . like a second chance or something. The hell was I supposed to think?”

  “It’s okay.” I patted his arm. “I would have thought it was a dream, too.”

  Poor Jace. He was the most shaken up of all of us, since he’d been the driver. He’d wanted to believe it was a dream.

  “The real question,” said Malcolm, “is who bought the second car and put it in Jace’s garage?”

  “And how’d we get home?” Zoe said. “We still don’t know that, right?”

  “Or how we lost our memory,” I added.

  “Or what that flash was,” she said.

  “Guys, just restating the obvious isn’t going to solve anything,” Malcolm said.

  “I asked for this.” Jace continued to stare at the wreckage with a spooked expression. “When we went over the edge, I prayed for a miracle . . . and I thought, when the car was home . . . that maybe God or something . . .”

  “No,” Malcolm said, “God would have cleaned up after himself.”

  I took a shaky breath, fighting a shiver. The air carried a faint odor of electricity, leaving a pungent sting in my nose.

  “So . . . now is about the time we call the police, right?” said Zoe.

  “No one’s calling the police,” Jace warned.

  Malcolm faced upriver, cupped his hands to his mouth, and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Vincent!”

  His voice echoed around the ravine.

  I joined in, yelling in the other direction. “Vincent!”

  We fell silent, listened.

  A gentle breeze stirred the forest. Insects clicked and chirped.

  But no reply.

  “VINCENT!” Malcolm roared.

  I was about to yell again, when Malcolm squeezed my shoulder.

  “Don’t waste your breath. He’s not out there. Let’s check inside the car.”

  I nodded, that lump back in my throat, and turned back to the SUV.

  Would we find his body inside? His skull cracked open, spilling blood and brains across the seats?

  “No, ew, get away!” Zoe flailed suddenly, waving at something invisible, then shrieked and slapped at her face. “Oh my God, it just kamikazied in my eye!”

  I crept closer to the car, and my shoe sank in an inch of muck.

  With a wet slurp, I pried it loose and treaded more carefully, circling to the front of the vehicle.

  But I didn’t want to look inside, I didn’t want to see.

  “Remi, don’t move. I’ll look.” Malcolm stepped over a puddle, as deft as a cat, and wrenched open the driver’s door. I watched him, gnawing on my fingernails, for once grateful for his pushy version of chivalry, strange though it was. He stooped to peer inside, gripping the frame.

  I quit breathing.

  Please no Vincent, please no Vincent . . .

  He caught my eye and shook his head—no Vincent—and I let out a huge sigh of relief.

  Vincent must have gotten out, too. Which meant there was a good chance he was still alive.

  Like Malcolm said, the frame had crumpled in on the driver’s side, the windshield had shattered. Leaves and saplings had caked under the windshield wipers and spilled like a load of compost over the dashboard and into the empty front seats. A strap ran diagonally across the passenger seat.

  “Look at the seatbelt,” I said. “It’s still buckled.”

  “That’s where I was sitting,” said Malcolm.

  “You buckle your seatbelt after you get out?” Jace snorted. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I didn’t get out,” said Malcolm. “Someone—or something—pulled us out.” He crouched over a label inside the frame, took out his phone, and started tapping in numbers.

  “What are you doing?” said Jace.

  “Taking the VIN.”

  “Dude, obviously it’s a different car. Just take the license.”

  “Can’t trust plates.” Malcolm pocketed his cell phone and was about to close the door when his eyes fixed on something inside the glass. He leaned back in, his shoulder muscles flexing. “Whoa . . .”

  I tried to peer over him. “What?”

  He picked at a black flake on the window. “Blood.”

  My stomach seemed to drop. “Blood?”

  Malcolm rubbed it between his fingers, crumbling it into dust. “This yours, Jace? This is where you were sitting.”

  Jace looked down at his torso, checked under his arms, and shrugged. “Don’t think so.”

  “Is it Vincent’s?” I asked.

  Ignoring me, Malcolm reached for the seatbelt, hanging limp across Jace’s headrest, and held it up on two fingers, staring at it for a long time. Finally, he looked back at Jace with narrowed eyes. “Were you wearing your seatbelt?”

  Jace shrugged again, and shuffled his feet. “I don’t know. I don’t remember.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No, Malcolm, I don’t remember,” he snapped. “I was a little distracted.”

  “You think?”

  “Guys, forget the seatbelt,” I said. “We’re here for Vincent.”

  But Malcolm and Jace were engaged in some kind of staring contest over my head, which they did whenever they challenged each other on something.

  I could only watch.

  With a withering shake of his head, Malcolm went back to rummaging in the car.

  Zoe and I shared raised eyebrows, both of us thinking, What was that about?

  Without warning, Malcolm slammed his palm against the frame and straightened up, inhaling through flared nostrils. The metallic echo reverberated around the ravine. “You all just going to stand there like idiots? Am I the only one who has eyes? Look for clues, guys, come on!”

  Startled, Zoe and I leapt into action.

  I cupped my face to the intact passenger window and waited for my eyes to adjust. “Are those . . . I think those are my heels on the floor! I took them off while we were driving.”

  Zoe scooted in next to me. “And hey, two of the seatbelts back here are still buckled, too.”

  Malcolm said, “What about Vincent’s seatbelt? Where was he sitting?”

  “Uh . . . next to me,” I said. “Behind you.”

  Jace shook his head, muttering, “This is stupid,” and wandered to the other side of the car.

  Zoe looked again. “Vincent’s seatbelt is unbuckled. The other door’s open a crack, too.”

  Malcolm and I exchanged a hopeful look.

  So Vincent had definitely made it out of the car—

  Suddenly, the back of my neck bristled.

  Malcolm sensed it too. His eyes flicked to the side, focusing on something behind me, and for a split-second, there was something in his expression I had never seen before . . . fear.

  Breathless, I spun around. “What? What are you looking at?”

  But all I saw was a gently gurgling river, a shady inlet on the opposite bank, the oak trees rising into dense, dark forest.

  “I thought I saw something,” he said. “It was nothing.”

  “You . . . you sure?” I scanned the opposite bank.

  “It was nothing, Remi. Just a shadow.” He peered up at the tree canopy, then slowly swiveled around three hundred and sixty degrees, and muttered, “Place gives me the creeps.”

  Just a shadow?

  A shadow of what?

  I shuddered, badly wanting to leave all of a sudden. To be far away from this place, whatever this place was.

  “Guys, you hear that?” Zoe whispered.

&
nbsp; “What?”

  “Listen!”

  I listened, but all I heard was my own buzzing adrenaline.

  “I don’t hear anything,” I said, growing more fearful by the second.

  “Exactly,” she said, “there’s no bugs, no birds . . .” her frightened gaze darted around, “. . . it all stopped all of a sudden.”

  I noticed then, too. The unnatural silence hanging over the forest.

  As if here, time itself had been paused.

  “Yo, I found Vincent,” Jace hollered, and I nearly jumped out of my skin.

  Vincent!

  Heart in my throat, I rushed around to the other side of the car, and found Jace kneeling over a patch of mud.

  “Look.” He pointed to a deep shoe print in the mud, right outside the passenger door—Vincent’s footprints. “He got out of the car.”

  The next shoe print, I had stepped on.

  I backed away from it, then quickly spotted the next one. “He started walking up the hill.”

  Malcolm was already ahead of us. He pointed down at a deep handprint. “Looks like he stumbled, landed on his hand . . . crawled through here”—Malcolm whacked through a bush, which had clearly been trampled on—“and kept going on the other side.”

  “He was heading back to the road!” Following the footprints, I bounded after Malcolm, excitement buzzing in my nerves.

  All we had to do was follow the footprints, and we’d find Vincent!

  “He got up again,” Malcolm narrated, pointing to the last handprint, “staggered into this clearing . . .”

  “Then lost his shoe.” Zoe pointed out the New Balance sneaker wedged in the mud.

  I pried it up to give back to him.

  “Look, his stride changes here,” said Malcolm. “He started running.”

  “Fast, it looks like,” I said, judging by the long, widely spaced smears in the mud, every other one clearly made by a sock.

  “He kept going,” said Malcolm, “kept running, and then . . .”

  Malcolm abruptly fell silent, frowning down at the mud.

  I came up behind him, saw what he was looking at, and felt an icy tingle draw down my spine.

  In the middle of the clearing—with no sign of a body and no sign of a struggle—Vincent’s footsteps simply ended.

  Chapter 5

  Twenty-four miles away, high-energy physicist Clara Hopkins had just finished splashing her face and arms from her water bottle to cool down when she got the call from the DOW radar operator.

  “You’re going to want to kiss me when you hear this,” he said.

  “Make it quick,” she said irritably, sweating again within seconds.

  Cooped up inside the stuffy Mobile Operations and Repair Center—basically, a glorified RV containing workstations and radios—she was in no mood for his charm. They were parked in the sun, and there was so much heat radiating from the van’s walls and pouring off the equipment, the air-conditioner just couldn’t keep up.

  “Those atmospheric conditions we were getting last night,” he said. “Well, I’m seeing them again right now. Bizarre as heck.”

  She forgot all about the sauna she was in.

  She gripped the phone harder, her pulse taking off in a gallop. “You found it again? The exact same pattern?”

  “See for yourself. I’m sending it to you.”

  The computer screen in front of her changed to a grid map of the Shasta-Trinity River Valley, overlaid with ebbing neon colors—the real-time data gathered from the radar trucks they’d deployed throughout the valley.

  A rainbow-colored knot had formed at the edge of the valley, now pulsing angrily.

  “My God,” she whispered, wiping away the sweat that had dripped in her eyes. “Would you look at that.”

  She studied the map closer, frowning. “Hold on, is that near a population center?”

  “Nah, it’s way out on Ridgeview Drive,” he said. “Shouldn’t be anybody for miles.”

  “Good,” she said. “I’d hate to think of someone stumbling on this.”

  She pulled on her radio headset to broadcast a crew-wide message. “Guys, we got an active anomaly,” she said. “Let’s head out.”

  “He didn’t just evaporate,” said Jace, pacing in his basement once we’d gotten back to his house after leaving the crash site. “He didn’t just vanish into thin air.”

  “No shit, Sherlock,” said Malcolm.

  “Maybe he climbed into a tree,” Zoe offered weakly.

  “Weren’t any trees within reach.” Malcolm dragged his hand down the back of his neck, staring vaguely into space with a scowl. “No branches, no vines, nothing he could have grabbed onto.”

  I listened to their theories with a strange detachment, like I was behind glass.

  This couldn’t be real.

  The footsteps had just . . . ended. Right in the middle of a clearing.

  We had stayed at the crash site for another thirty minutes, combing every inch of that mountainside.

  There was no trace of Vincent.

  “What he could’ve done,” said Jace, “is he could’ve run into the clearing, stopped, then carefully backed up in his own tracks. Make it look like he vanished. He’s clever like that, right?”

  I nodded along, grateful that he was trying to explain it rationally.

  That we all were.

  Because as long as there was a rational, logical explanation, it wasn’t nearly as scary.

  “Why would he do that?” Malcolm shook his head. “No, weren’t any other tracks leading away from the car. At some point, he’s got to leave tracks.”

  “Maybe he was still there, hiding under the car,” said Zoe.

  “He wasn’t,” said Malcolm. “I looked. Wasn’t us he was running from.”

  A shiver slipped under my skin.

  I pictured Vincent stumbling out of the wrecked SUV, looking behind him, and scrambling up the hill in desperation, running for his life.

  Running from what?

  Had something swooped out of the air and grabbed him? Or had he, like Jace said, simply evaporated?

  “Maybe a mountain lion was chasing him,” I suggested, much preferring that to the alternative.

  “Or a bear,” said Zoe.

  “Or a wolf.”

  “Guys, did anyone see paw prints?” Malcolm said. “No, whatever took him didn’t leave tracks.”

  “And what about us?” I looked up at him. “What about our tracks? We must have left the crash site, too, at some point.”

  “Not on foot.”

  “Maybe a helicopter picked us all up,” said Zoe.

  Jace snapped his fingers. “I got it. There was a rope hanging from a tree branch, like a rope swing or something—you know, to swing into the river—and Vincent climbed it and pulled the rope up behind him.”

  We looked around at each other, nodding.

  This seemed like the best theory so far.

  “And maybe he only thought there was something chasing him, but there wasn’t,” I said hopefully. “Maybe he was just scared of the dark.”

  Malcolm chuckled. “That seems like Vincent.”

  “Don’t be mean,” I said.

  “So . . . that’s it, then, right? That’s what happened?” Zoe’s frightened eyes glanced between us, looking for reassurance. “He was scared, so he ran away, and he came to a rope swing and climbed into a tree?”

  “Are you idiots hearing yourselves?” Malcolm growled. “Vincent didn’t climb into a goddamn tree. Someone took him. They wiped away their tracks, they planted an identical car in Jace’s garage to conceal the accident, and they drugged us to erase our memories—this whole thing’s a goddamn cover-up.”

  My throat worked through a nervous swallow. Was Malcolm right?

  Had someone staged our car crash last night, kidnapped Vincent, and then tried to erase all the evidence?

  It was sure starting to seem like it.

  “We need to call the police,” I said.

  Jace raised his
palms. “Hold on, hold on . . . let’s just think, alright? Let’s not do anything rash.”

  “Jace, our best friend is missing,” I said. “Don’t they say the first forty-eight hours are the most important in a missing person case?”

  “Look, all I’m saying is maybe we did something really stupid last night, maybe we did something illegal—I don’t know, because I don’t remember—but right now, my parents’ car is parked in the garage, we’re not in any trouble, and no one’s asking questions, and that’s really, really lucky . . . so let’s just think before we involve the police.”

  I glared at him. “You are so selfish. Vincent is missing—”

  Malcolm raised a hand to silence me. “If we call the cops now, they’re going to think it was us.”

  “Why on earth would they think it was us—?”

  “Because we waited too long to call them, and now our footprints are all over that ravine, that’s why.”

  Jace nodded grimly. “They’re going to think we buried his body.”

  “Ugh, this is so stupid.” I folded my arms and pouted, wishing I’d called the police the moment I woke up.

  Next to me on the couch, Zoe fidgeted and knotted her hands in her lap. “Guys, we don’t think this has anything to do with Vincent’s accident, do we?”

  I looked sharply at her. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “He never talks about it.”

  “That was ten years ago,” said Jace. “Completely unrelated.”

  “It might be related,” she said.

  “You mean . . . you mean to why he vanished?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But it is a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  One by one, we all glanced toward Malcolm, who had remained silent. His eyebrows pulled together a smidge.

  Just then, a mechanical groan rattled the walls and shook dust off the ceiling.

  I flinched, before realizing what it was.

  Just the garage opening.

  We all barely had time to share nervous looks before the door from the basement to the garage opened and in stepped Jace’s mom, carrying two bags of groceries.

  Before it shut behind her, I glimpsed her white Honda parked next to the Subaru Forrester, and felt an eerie chill.

  It’s still there . . .

  “Hi, guys,” she said cheerfully.

  “Hi, Mrs. Johnson,” Zoe and I said, too quickly.