The Summer It Came for Us Page 6

  Malcolm slowed the car. “GPS.”

  “No, I know,” Jace grumbled. “But we’re not the FBI—”

  Malcolm screeched to a stop in the center of the road, wrenching me painfully into my seatbelt. “We don’t need to be the FBI.” He whipped out his phone and wagged it in Jace’s face. “Vincent installed an app on his phone so he could locate it using GPS if he ever lost it.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “His phone, of course . . .”

  Malcolm could be brilliant sometimes.

  Actually, more like all the time. Which was one of the reasons he and Vincent got along so well.

  “Wait, how does that help us,” Zoe said, “if the app is on his phone?”

  Malcolm tapped the screen. “He installed it on my phone too, so my phone can look for his phone.”

  “You know his password?” said Jace. “Those things usually need a password.”

  “It’s Trevor4ever,” I said. “That’s his password for everything now.”

  Even after almost a year, my brother’s name still caught in my throat.

  “Yep, I’m in.” Malcolm smirked. “Says it’s searching.”

  I unbuckled my seatbelt to scoot closer.

  Sure enough, a tiny Google map of the Shasta-Trinity River Valley—our current location—was overlaid with the word Searching . . .

  Then it disappeared, and the map updated.

  “Holy shit,” said Jace with a disbelieving laugh. “It actually found him?”

  Malcolm’s smirk only grew. “It found him.”

  “It found him?” Zoe asked.

  My heart gave a sudden jolt, and I scrambled forward to get a better look. “Where? Where is he?”

  “Yeah, where does it say he is?” Zoe leaned in next to me.

  Clutching Malcolm’s shoulder, I stared at the map on his phone and the green bull’s-eye pulsing at its center, unable to make sense of it at first. “Where . . . where is that?”

  Still smirking, Malcolm raised his arm and pointed directly over my shoulder. “Right behind you.”

  By right behind me, of course, Malcolm meant two and a half miles behind me, not literally standing right behind me.

  But I still shrieked and whipped around, expecting him to be standing there.

  That would be just like Vincent and Malcolm to team up and scare me like that.

  But he wasn’t there.

  The highway and the creaking, chittering woods across the street were empty.

  “He’s that direction. Come on, let’s track this fucker down.” Malcolm handed off the phone to Jace, put the car in gear, and flipped a U-turn, burning rubber in the opposite direction while I scrambled to buckle my belt.

  “Where is he?” I craned my neck to get a look at the phone again, but with the car’s bouncing I couldn’t make out the map.

  “Take a left here,” said Jace. “Then a right on Pine Ranch Road.”

  Consulting the phone, he directed us along one winding road after another, the low, red sun flickering between the trees like an ember about to burn out.

  We ended up back on Ridgeview Drive.

  “What’s he still doing out here?” Jace said. “Hitchhiking?”

  “Oh my God, how funny would it be if we offered to give him a lift?” said Zoe.

  “Wait, is he near the crash site?” I asked, wondering why we hadn’t run into him this morning when we’d driven up and down Ridgeview Drive.

  “He might be heading out there, actually,” Jace said. “Can’t think why else he’d take this road.”

  “Or he might be walking back,” said Zoe.

  An image flashed of Vincent hobbling back into town, dragging a broken leg.

  “Is he moving?”

  Jace studied the phone up close. “Can’t tell. He’s only a few hundred more feet.”

  That we might only be a few hundred feet away from Vincent gave me a rush of excitement.

  Malcolm downshifted around a blind corner, then shot out on a straightaway like a bullet, making me uneasy.

  “Malcolm, please slow down,” I said, “in case he’s, like, standing in the middle of the road or something.”

  He braked to half his speed. “You can be useful sometimes, Remi.”

  As I played his words over in my head, analyzing them and picking them apart, I realized what he’d said wasn’t even remotely a compliment, and my mood soured.

  Getting under my skin was Malcolm’s expertise.

  “Coming up, coming up,” Jace said. “He’s just around this bend.”

  Without realizing it, I’d grabbed my seatbelt strap in a death grip, my knuckles white . . . bracing myself.

  Malcolm rounded the bend, and as the next stretch of road came into view, my pulse ratcheted up until I felt it throbbing in my fingertips.

  But there was no one.

  Crisscrossed with long, spindly shadows, the highway went straight for another hundred feet before curving off into dark wilderness.

  Ugh, where was he?

  “He should be right around here,” said Jace.

  “Probably off in the trees.” Malcolm pulled onto the shoulder, and we all hopped out, spinning around in circles.

  Here, the road crossed a gulley, the land dropping away on either side. Peering over the guardrails, I made out a creek trickling down below, all in shade.

  My eyes wandered into the thick, overgrown pine forest at its banks, the shadows deepening in the early dusk. He could be huddling under a bush down there and we wouldn’t even know it.

  A tall humanoid figure materialized in my periphery.

  I gasped and jerked toward it, needles dancing across my skin.

  But it was only a dead tree, which had been split open and charred by lightning, leaving a hideously shaped husk. In this light, everything looked like a creepy figure.

  “What’d you see?” said Malcolm, his voice low.

  “Just that stupid tree.”

  Still, that antsy feeling never quite went away, like someone was watching us.

  I shuddered and turned back to the others.

  Using the phone like a compass, Jace zigzagged out into the road, roughly following the double yellow line as he muttered, “Getting warmer . . . warmer . . .”

  I ran to catch up.

  How cool was this?

  We were using GPS to track down our lost friend.

  Of course, it was possible we would just find his cell phone lying in a ditch somewhere.

  Jace came to an abrupt halt in the middle of the street, and frowned at the screen.

  “Did you lose the signal?” I said.

  “No, this . . . this can’t be right,” he said, glancing around. “It says he’s right here.”

  “What?” I looked down at his feet, then scanned the asphalt around him, but there was no sign of Vincent or his cell phone. “So he must be in the forest somewhere?”

  “No, it says he’s literally right here. Right where I’m standing. My dot and his dot are overlapping.”

  “Give me that.” Malcolm wrenched the phone out of Jace’s grip. Then he, too, screwed up his eyes at the screen. “The fuck . . . ?”

  “He’s supposed to be right here, right?” Jace said.

  “But he’s not,” said Zoe.

  “How accurate are these things?” I asked. “I mean, they’re probably not that accurate, right?”

  “Should be within a few feet,” said Malcolm. “No, it says he’s here, right where we’re standing. That means he’s here.”

  We all fell silent.

  Slowly, we glanced around at each other, then at the empty road around us.

  No Vincent.

  By now, the shadows had crept up the trees, and only their very tippy tops still had a bronze tint from sunset.

  A breath of cold air brushed the back of my neck, drawing out goosebumps . . . the night’s first chill. Hugging my bare arms, I fought the urge to shiver.

  After the sun went down, the temperature dropped fast.

  Mal
colm faced the woods and bellowed, “Vincent!”

  At his voice, the chittering bugs fell silent.

  The rest of us joined in, calling in all directions.

  “Vincent!”

  “VINCENT!”

  We gave up quickly and paused to catch our breaths, at a collective loss for words.

  Malcolm squatted, glaring at the ground. “There’s supposed to be a goddamn phone here. I’m not seeing a phone.”

  “I mean, how does GPS work?” I said. “Maybe it gave us the wrong location.”

  Malcolm shook his head. “The phones triangulate their positions from satellite signals. If they’re off, they’re both going to be off by the same amount. My phone and Vincent’s phone should be in the same spot.”

  “Well, they’re not,” I said. “Obviously.”

  Zoe cleared her throat. “Guys, has it occurred to you that maybe Vincent doesn’t want to be found? Like, maybe he’s hiding from us?”

  “He might be hiding,” I said, “but not from us.”

  “Latitude and longitude,” Jace said. “That’s what GPS gives you, right?”

  “Mm-hmm,” said Malcolm. “Coordinates.”

  “And there’s only ever one point on earth with the same latitude and longitude, right?”

  “That’s basic geometry,” Malcolm muttered.

  “Wait,” I chimed in, suddenly remembering a random lesson from geometry. “I thought you needed three coordinates to identify a point in space?”

  “Earth’s surface is two-dimensional. It’s flat. You don’t need a third coordinate, which would be altitude. Unless you’re trying to tell me he’s in a cave or up in a tree . . .” Malcolm’s words died in his throat, and he looked up.

  I followed his gaze to a spindly oak branch directly above us.

  Of course! If Vincent’s phone was above us, or below us, it would show up on the map as being in the same spot.

  “Actually,” said Zoe, “the earth is round. It’s not flat.”

  Malcolm stood up abruptly.

  I opened my mouth to ask him what he was thinking when a pair of bright lights flickered between the trees, sending shadows streaking across the road.

  The flash . . .

  I stared in awe as the lights swung into view, blazing right at me and forcing me to shield my eyes—

  A car horn yanked me out of my trance, and the next thing I knew Malcolm was dragging me off the road as an olive green Humvee roared past, the wind flapping my hair and blowing up leaves and dust.

  “Remi,” said his low voice in my ear, his arm still slung presumptuously around my middle, “it’s deer that are supposed to get caught in headlights.”

  “I thought it was that flash again. Let . . . GO—” I wiggled out of his grip, shooting him a glare.

  But he’d already moved on to peer over the guardrail into the gully.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said. “It was below us.”

  I ran to his side to see where he was looking.

  Sure enough, jutting out of the hillside was a corrugated drainage pipe, trickling water into the creek.

  It passed below the highway, directly under where we’d been standing.

  And it was just large enough for a person.

  Chapter 6

  “Vincent?” I called into the pipe’s pitch black opening, which buzzed with my reverberating echo.

  I paused to listen, wiping the mud off my butt from sliding down the gully.

  A damp, swamp-smelling draft wafted out of the darkness, carrying the echoes of strange noises—water trickling, droplets pinging on metal, critters scuttling through leaves, the sounds eerily distorted by the pipe’s acoustics.

  And breathing . . . I heard breathing.

  I could just make out a faint circle of light—the opening on the other side of the highway—but nothing else.

  Dusk was fading fast.

  “Vincent?” My wavering voice betrayed my fear.

  “Don’t bother.” Malcolm turned on his phone’s flashlight. “He’s either dead or unconscious.”

  He panned the light into the mouth of the pipe, illuminating several feet of matted leaves and muddy rivulets . . . then blackness.

  “Why would he crawl in there?” Zoe whispered, peeking over my shoulder. “I would never go in there.”

  “Maybe it’s just his cell phone,” I said. “Maybe it got washed down there.”

  “I’ll call it.” She dialed his number again.

  We all scooted closer to hear, but this time it merely clicked and went silent—no ring tone, no voicemail, no beeps—as if the cell phone network had no idea what to do with the call.

  Malcolm checked his phone’s GPS map. “Well, according to this, he’s still down there.”

  “Why would he go down there?” Zoe said.

  I took a deep breath to calm my nerves and, sounding much braver than I felt, declared, “We have to go in there and check.”

  “Are you insane?” she gasped.

  “What if he’s hurt?”

  A stick cracked in the woods behind us, and our heads swiveled as one.

  Nothing there.

  Slowly, the adrenaline jolt subsided.

  Though the horizon still showed traces of green and blue from the sunset, the thick overhanging pines made it much darker.

  “Guys, maybe we should come back in the morning,” Zoe suggested.

  “Yeah, screw that,” said Jace. “I’m not going down there.”

  “Fine, I’ll go . . . Malcolm?” I looked to him for support, kind of hoping he would back out as well, because then I could, too; no way in hell was I going in there alone.

  He nodded grimly. “Let’s crawl down this godforsaken pipe.”

  Without another word, he gripped the edge of the pipe and clambered up inside, his boots clanging on the metal. His cell phone light shrank in the darkness.

  Crap.

  Now I was committed.

  I swallowed down my fear and climbed in behind him, my fingers sinking in the muck. On hands and knees, I crawled after his silhouette, trying not to think of what diseases I would catch from the slimy puddles.

  “Does GPS work underground?” I asked, more to distract myself than anything. Inside the pipe, my voice had a spooky echo.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “No?” Surprised, I jerked my head up, bumping it on the pipe’s low ceiling. “Then why are we even . . . what’s the point of . . . ?”

  “Phones have accelerometers,” he said. “If they lose the satellite, they figure out where they are that way.”

  “What? How?”

  “Math.”

  “How do you even know this—?”

  “Shh!” He halted and threw a hand back to stop me, shining the light ahead into the darkness.

  A tremor of fear ran down my spine. I leaned around him, afraid to look . . . afraid not to.

  But except for a clump of leaves, the pipe was empty.

  “What?” I hissed.

  “I thought I heard something . . . like a voice calling my name.”

  “It was probably just an echo.” My words ended in a full-body shiver, my teeth chattering.

  Malcolm lowered his phone and opened the map again, his face blue in the glare, then panned it up and down the pipe.

  “I don’t get it . . . his phone should be right here.”

  “Right here?” I patted the corrugated metal around my knees, then dug through the clump of leaves, coming up empty handed. “But it’s not.”

  He continued to study the screen, shaking his head with knitted eyebrows. “There’s something else going on here.”

  I sat against the curved walls and hugged my knees to my chest, fending off another wave of shivers. “C-c-can we go now?”

  “Whoa!” He hunched forward over his cell phone. “It moved, it just moved! Vincent’s dot just moved!”

  I scrambled over to him, breathless. “Where?”

  “He’s over there now, at the other entrance.” Malcolm poi
nted to the opposite end of the tunnel, where—thanks to the blinding light of his cell phone—I could no longer make out the opening, just inky blackness.

  “Turn off the light,” I said suddenly. “Turn it off!”

  He covered the screen with his palm, plunging us into darkness.

  When my eyes adjusted, I made out the dark blue circle of the pipe’s exit, only barely lighter than the surrounding black.

  And a figure standing in the opening.

  My heart gave a startled thump, sending a surge of prickles over my skin.

  I blinked, and the figure vanished.

  Only a blurry silhouette lingered in my vision, making me wonder whether I’d seen anything at all.

  Malcolm peeked under his palm.

  “It’s coming toward us. It’s inside the pipe.”

  “What is? I don’t see anything.”

  “He is.”

  Adrenaline pounded in my temples. Straining my eyes, I stared into the inky blackness beyond our tiny bubble of light, waiting for something to emerge.

  What if it wasn’t Vincent?

  My eyes flicked to Malcolm’s screen, where the dot marked Vincent’s Phone was moving straight toward our dot.

  In the silence, I heard Malcolm swallow, heard my own ragged, terrified breath.

  The dot moved closer.

  “He’s still coming . . . fifteen feet," Malcolm whispered. “Ten feet . . . five feet . . .”

  I looked down the pipe again.

  But nothing came out of the darkness. Nothing materialized. Nothing was there.

  “He’s right on top of us,” Malcolm said.

  On the screen, the Vincent dot reached our dot . . . and stopped.

  Malcolm and I shared a spooked look.

  Suddenly, a disembodied whisper brushed my ear, like a breath of wind. I froze, too terrified to move, as the air around me went ice cold, as goosebumps drew down my arms. My shaky breath misted in front of me, and then—as if disturbed by something unseen—the mist swirled into a vortex, briefly resembling a face before breaking apart.

  I screamed and scrambled back to safety, slipping and stumbling all the way back into Zoe’s and Jace’s arms.

  “There was something else in that pipe with us,” Malcolm said, once we were back in Jace’s basement with all the lights on and the local news blaring on his huge TV—which still had no coverage of our accident. “I swear to God . . .”