Page 25

He blinks, hoping his eyes will adjust, but all he sees are dark shapes against a dark backdrop. No wonder he tripped. Also, as for where that fallen tree came from, is he sure he’s heading back toward the road?

“Ellie?” He raises his voice.

No answer. His heart pounds hard, and he takes deep breaths. She’s fine. She must be. She just can’t hear him.

From forty feet away?

Or is it fifty now, if he’s gotten turned around?

No, when the light went out, he ran back toward the road. At most, he’s veered on an angle.

He starts walking again, shuffling his feet so he doesn’t trip over anything else. Soon his eyes have adjusted enough that he avoids walking into a tree, which is good.

A groan, off to his left, and he wheels. “Ellie?”

Another moan, almost too low for him to pick up. He breaks into a run, wielding the crowbar like a staff, swinging back and forth in front of him.

“Ellie!”

No answer. The forest has gone silent, but he knows what he heard. A groan of pain, nearly inaudible. Ellie is hurt. Hurt and unable to respond.

How? None of her injuries are going to have her flat on the ground, moaning.

He remembers the shadows in the forest.

Animals. Probably coyotes. If she saw one, she’d scream, not let it silently attack her and—

His foot catches in something, and he tries to counterbalance, but he goes flying, both knees slamming down with a crack, pain ripping through them. When he goes to scramble up, something has hold of his foot and panic surges and he starts to swing the crowbar before seeing what has him.

A vine.

A fucking vine.

He yanks it free and starts staggering upright, and when another vine snags his foot, he reaches to swipe it away … and touches something cold and clammy. With a yelp, he jerks back and falls flat on his ass. When he looks down, he sees a puffball by his foot, and he lets out a shaky laugh.

Cold and clammy? Like a fungus? Which grows in the forest, especially in the fall.

What the hell did you think it was?

Oh, he knows the answer, even as his cheeks burn with embarrassment. When Raine came back for Christmas her first year at college, she’d been so stressed that all she wanted to do was watch TV with her dad and sister, and what the girls decided they wanted to watch was The Walking Dead, which he’d forbidden when it first came out. He’d said he just didn’t think it was appropriate for preteens. The truth was that it wasn’t appropriate for one particular dad of preteens.

Henry hates zombies, has since his older brother made them watch all the Romero movies together when Henry was a kid. Something about zombies had lodged in his brain as the ultimate terror—the relentless march of inescapable death. If his preteen girls were going to watch it, then he’d have to watch it with them, as he did with all material of a questionable maturity rating. So he said no … until they were adults and Raine needed her dad to help her de-stress with zombies. Which de-stressed her. He had the sort of nightmares he hadn’t had since the Romero movies.

So when he reached down and felt something clammy “holding” his foot, that’s exactly what he’d imagined.

Henry finds his breath again and goes to rise, hands braced to push up and—

Fingers wrap around his wrist. He wrenches away so fast he falls backward, and scuttles away, and then crouches there, crablike, breathing hard.

Henry squeezes his eyes shut.

He hadn’t seen fingers grabbing his wrist. That’s just what it felt like. Cold and clammy. He must have put his hand down beside another fungus.

There are no zombies in the forest. Just fungus and—

Ellie. He pushes up fast, and he gets two running steps before the moan sounds, right beside him.

Henry stops short and slowly pivots. The sound comes again, from the forest floor. A low groan.