She glared at them all, then turned back to the woods. “Come on, then,” she said to Balowsky as she disappeared into the darkness.
Gwendolyn and Balowsky were gone for hours. Or maybe it was seconds. In the darkness Gus couldn’t keep track of time. He was about to propose that the rest of them go out and search for the missing lawyers when the nearest trees were lit by the orange glow from a torch.
Gwendolyn tossed the flaming brand into the fire.
“Where’s Reggie?” Shawn said. His hands closed around a rock as he waited for the answer.
“Maybe he tried to kill me and I had to knock him out in self-defense,” Gwendolyn said. “Or maybe I made him turn his head and then slit his throat with a sharpened twig.”
Around the campfire, everyone stared at her, waiting. Until they heard the sound of legs crashing through underbrush and Balowsky stumbled out of the woods behind her.
“Or maybe his legs are even slower than his mind,” Gwendolyn said, and took her place by the fire.
“I figured as long as I was out there I might as well take care of my own business,” Balowsky said. “So I turned my back on her for one second. And when I turned back, I saw the torch disappearing into the woods.”
“Your prostate problems are your own,” Gwendolyn said. “I was cold.”
“Enough!” Gus shouted.
They all turned to look at him. Shawn looked particularly concerned.
“We can’t keep bickering like this,” Gus said. “We’re just using up all our energy in meaningless backbiting. Meanwhile the killer is plotting how to take us out.”
“That’s not entirely true,” Shawn said. “I mean, unless you or I turn out to be behind it all, then the real killer is using up his energy in meaningless backbiting, too. So it’s not all bad.”
“It’s bad enough,” Gus said.
“It could be worse,” Shawn said.
Now the lawyers all turned to stare at him.
“How?” Gwendolyn asked in a tone that was less a question and more a dagger aimed directly at him.
“We’re all sitting around this fire not knowing which one among us is the person who has been systematically picking us off,” Shawn said. “Now imagine that while we’re sitting here, Reggie’s head falls off his body, grows spider legs, and runs away into the darkness.”
The silence following Shawn’s remark was the quietest Gus had ever heard. Even the fire stopped popping and sparking for a moment.
“Well,” Shawn said cheerily as he stood and stretched, “this is fun, but I’m going to bed. Who wants first watch?”
“I’ll take it,” Gus said. He didn’t think he was going to sleep anyway, not with the image of the monster from The Thing in his mind. And if he did manage to doze off, there was a bigger threat. The dream.
“I’ll stay up, too,” Savage said. “Two people on watch at all times, right?”
“Right,” Shawn said. “You and Gus go first; then in six hours wake Reggie and Gwendolyn.”
“What about you?” Balowsky demanded.
“Can I help it if we have an odd number of potential victims here?” Shawn said. “If the one of you who is trying to kill us had done a better job today, we could divvy up the watches a little more fairly.”
Shawn took the two steps from his seat to his sleeping bag, lay down, and started snoring within seconds. Savage and Gwendolyn followed him to their own beds.
The next few hours passed surprisingly quickly for Gus. If Savage was the killer, he was doing an excellent job of pretending to be terrified. And while Gus envied Shawn just a little bit for his ability to sleep so easily, he was also happy that he hadn’t felt tired since they discovered what had happened to Jade. He knew that the next day’s march was going to be long and hard, and much more so if he didn’t get any sleep tonight. But he liked being awake. He liked being able to see what was going on around the fire-or what wasn’t going on.
When Balowsky’s watch alarm went off and he woke up Gwendolyn and Savage so they could take their turn, Gus relinquished his job without much enthusiasm. He felt so much safer here by the fire. But he went to his sleeping bag and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again the sun was breaking over the mountains.
Except as the sun rose, it didn’t seem to give off any light. It shone hot and yellow in the sky, but the campsite stayed dark. Gus sat up in his sleeping bag to ask the others if they saw what he was seeing.
The others were gone.
Chapter Fifty
It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet and Heidi Sansome was already having a terrible day. She’d slept through her alarm and had been so freaked about being late she was nailed for a speeding ticket on the way to work. That got her to the reception desk ten minutes late. She’d be lucky if she wasn’t fired before lunch.
And to make everything worse, there was this ridiculous lifeguard in her waiting room. At least he was dressed like a lifeguard. He kept pointing at an insignia on his shirt and insisting he had something to do with feet, then demanding to speak to Mr. Rushton immediately. She’d explained a dozen times that Mr. Rushton saw no one without an appointment, which she would be happy to schedule for him. He just pointed at his chest and insisted he needed to see the boss now.
Heidi pressed the red button on her phone for the fifteenth time. Where the hell was security? They should have had this nut out of here ages ago.
Finally a side door banged open and Fritz the security guard came through. “What seems to be the trouble here?”
Well, duh, Heidi thought. It’s the crazy lifeguard with the foot fetish. She was about to point out the obvious when she noticed that Fritz’s hands were up in the air and his face had gone white.
Heidi turned to see that the lifeguard had pulled out a gun and was aiming it directly at Fritz.
“I want to see Mr. Rushton,” he said. “Now.”
Chapter Fifty-One
The others hadn’t been gone long. Gus reached over and touched Shawn’s sleeping bag. It was still warm. And the fire was blazing in the ring, a pot nestled among the embers heating water for instant coffee and freeze-dried eggs.
Gus looked back at the sun. It had climbed in the sky and it pounded him with its heat. But it still didn’t seem to give off any light. The only illumination in the campground came from the flickering fire. Shadows jumped, danced, laughed at the edges of the camp.
“Shawn?” Gus whispered. Beyond the reach of the firelight something rustled in the underbrush. Gus tried to peer into the darkness, but he couldn’t see anything. “Shawn?” he whispered again, but there was no answer.
Where had Shawn gone? Where had they all gone? And why had they left him here alone? He bent down to check one of the sleeping bags and his hand came back sticky and feathered. There was a gash in the bag, and as Gus stood up, the feathers flew out of the tear and swirled around his face. He shook his hand to get the feathers off, but they wouldn’t fall. He slapped at them, and his hand came back red with blood.
The gash in the sleeping bag was bleeding.
This wasn’t possible. Even as his rational mind was being consumed with terror, Gus knew that a nylon shell filled with duck feathers couldn’t bleed. And that meant this couldn’t be real. He had to be dreaming. He had to be dreaming that dream. All he had to do was wake up.
Gus squeezed his fist until his fingernails were digging into his palm. Then he looked down at the sleeping bag. It was still oozing blood. He looked up at the sun.
The sun was oozing blood, too.
There was another rustling in the bushes behind him. Gus turned to see who was coming after him. What was coming after him. A branch tore off a tree and fell to the ground and a hand reached through the opening in the tree trunk. Except it wasn’t a hand, it was more like a-
Gus woke up. His eyes flashed open. The sun was coming up over the mountains, and it was actually shining light down on the campsite.