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“No. I’m just telling you what happens,” Miranda says. “No one goes back. Sara won’t go back without her sister. Mel and Anthony won’t go back without her. Trina won’t go back unless Kyle does, and Kyle doesn’t want to keep going, but he doesn’t want to go back, either. And Jeremy can’t go back alone.”
“You left out yourself. And Vanessa,” Jeremy points out. “Vanessa and I can go back together.”
“But you won’t,” Miranda says. “And we’re wasting time. Seven gates, and we’ve only gone through two. We haven’t even seen what’s past this one yet.”
“She’s right,” I say. “We’re wasting time. I’m going. Anyone who wants to turn back can, but I don’t recommend it. Everything we know tells me it’s not that easy to get back home; you can’t just turn back. Look what happened to Isaac. We have to keep going. Then we’ll find a way off.”
Miranda nods. Vanessa looks like she’s going to argue, and so does Jeremy, but I don’t wait for them to try to convince me. I just start walking. Mel’s quick behind me, Anthony slower but only because he’s talking to Jeremy; I know he’ll follow.
Eventually, they all do. Jeremy with his jaw set, Vanessa lagging at the rear, but all of them trudging along.
“That was badass,” Mel says, nudging me with her shoulder. She flashes me a smile that makes my belly twinge and my cheeks flame. I’m glad the darkness hides it.
I’m still listening to the steps behind me when we come across the first gravestone.
It sticks out of the ground like a broken tooth in a rotted gum, the soil lumpy around it. It might have been a classic tombstone shape once, but the top is cracked off and weathered. Even with our flashlights fixed on it, it’s impossible to make out what might be carved on the surface—is that an eight or a nine? ATor anR?
It’s a few feet off the road. I edge up close to the edge but don’t stick so much as a fingertip over.
“If we get attacked by zombies, I’m out,” Jeremy mutters. Trina hushes him.
“There’s another one up there,” Anthony says, pointing his flashlight. We traipse along. Sure enough, another tombstone juts out of the soil, leaning slantwise. Still unreadable. As we walk, more appear. Some farther out, some so close you could almost stretch out and touch them from the road, though no one tries. A stone angel hovers over a cluster of three headstones, her hands and face worn away, her wings broken.
“Spooky,” Anthony says as we pass a double headstone. Husband and wife, maybe.
“I don’t know. It seems almost normal,” I say.
A tumbled-down stone wall intersects the road up ahead. A sign, wooden and rotten, sticks half out of the dirt just beyond, no more legible than the tombstones.
“This must be the town,” Trina says. “Lots of towns used to have a cemetery just outside, right?”
It sure seems like she’s right. As we keep walking, our flashlights sweep over the remnants of foundations—stones still stacked into the corner of a house, hip high, or a lintel and stairs still persisting amid root, vine, and mud. The road widens, and then the stones peter out. For a moment that panics me, but the road is still obvious. It’s just dirt instead of stone. We walk through what might have once been the town square, skirting the open maw of a ruined well, padding silently past a huge, toppled building that might have been a town hall or something.
“Hey, look,” Trina says. “Burn marks. They’re on all the buildings.”
We pause, our beams branching out as we confirm the finding. Sure enough, every building has some black scar—scorched beams lodged in the earth, mortar turned black and crumbling between the stones, metal soot-stained and pocked.
“Oh, crap,” Kyle says, sounding excited. “You know what this is? Briar Glen. BG. It’s right in the notebook. This is the old Briar Glen, the one that burned down.”
“Could be,” Anthony says. “No way to know for sure.”
“We’re in the Briar Glen Woods, aren’t we?” Kyle says, and from the look on his face, he immediately regrets the question.
“I have no idea,” Anthony says. “None of us do.”
“But it could be,” Kyle says. “Right, Vanessa? You’re the history expert. Does this look like Briar Glen?”
Vanessa bites her lip, eyes widening as we all look at her. “I d-d-d—” She cuts off and looks apologetic as the word fails to come. I frown slightly, not sure why that bothers me. “S-sorry. Id-don’t know,” she continues. “It could be. I would need to look at a map.”
“I don’t think you’re going to find a map of this place, V,” Jeremy says. “Are we done sightseeing? Can we go?”
“We can go,” I say, trying to decide just how much of a problem he’s going to be.
We come to the edge of town quickly, and then the stone road picks up again, rolling along like it was never interrupted.
“Was that it?” Jeremy asks. “That was the town? I thought it would be a bigger deal. Like the darkness.”
The Liar’s Gate, I remember from Becca’s notebook. It fits with that thing in the dark. Pretending to be Anthony. I shudder. And the notebook called this the Sinner’s Gate. So what’s waiting for us?
