Three Truths and a Lie by Brent Hartinger

Author:Brent Hartinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

12

We didn’t make pancakes the next morning. We hardly ate anything at all. Being stranded without transportation or a phone at a remote cabin with an unknown assailant lurking in the woods has a way of killing your appetite.

That’s the right word, right? Assailant?

And of course it was still raining. We could hear it coming down outside, thumping squirrel-like on the roof of the cabin.

“There’s no way they spent the night out here,” Liam said. “Not in that rain. Not even in a car.”

“They might have,” Galen said, and Liam bristled a little. “All we know for sure is that they’re crazy. We don’t know how crazy. They’re definitely crazy enough to follow us all the way out here and spend a whole day jerking us around, but are they also crazy enough to spend a whole weekend? In the rain?”

“Let’s just go,” Mia said. The plan was to start the long walk to the highway at first light, and it was now way past that.

I looked at the four of us, with no real rain gear whatsoever. Not a single one of us had even packed boots.

We set out on the dirt road. We’d packed a few supplies in backpacks—water, some food, some dry clothing—but left most of our stuff in the cabin. Someone would have to come back for the car anyway. As we passed the car, I could still smell the spilled gasoline—it hadn’t been washed away, even in all the rain. No one said anything, but it felt strange to leave the vehicle behind. Don’t they always say that if you’re ever in an accident to never leave your car? But that advice obviously didn’t make any sense here.

The road was muddy. Really muddy. So muddy that I was thirty-five percent sure we’d have gotten stuck somewhere along this road even if the car was running, especially on that first steep hill.

By the time we reached the top of the hill, my feet were already soaked. The mud had also somehow gotten into my socks, and the wet dirt felt like sandpaper, scraping my ankles and heels with every step.

Most of the mud was in the tire ruts, so we all quickly gravitated to the rocky bulge in the middle of the road. That meant walking single file. And the bulge was narrow, so it was a little like walking on a balance beam. How fast does a person normally walk? Two miles an hour? Between the mud and the rain and walking on that rocky balance beam, we were probably going half that. And how far was it to the highway? Mia had said it could be fifteen miles.

That meant it was going to be a long walk. That we might not even be there by nightfall.

“We don’t necessarily need to walk all the way to the main road,” Mia said. “We only need to walk far enough that there’s a signal.” She meant for our cell phones, and that reminded her to check hers right then, shielding it from the rain with her hand.

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