Nobody took them seriously. They either thought Makani and Darby were actors or that they were acting like obnoxious, insensitive teenagers.
It was snowing harder. Flakes swirled down and around them. Makani hunched as she ran so that she could still see the footprints through the white. Just as she feared they were chasing the wrong tracks, they busted through another wall. And there they were. Wrestling, like the days of middle school gone by.
David was on top, but Ollie had somehow managed to pin David’s dominant wrist. The knife shook in David’s hand, but he wasn’t letting go.
Makani screamed again and rushed them. David made eye contact with her just as she kicked him in the forehead. His muscles loosened. The bodies shifted. David rolled over, and Ollie scrambled away through the straw. They were both coated in mud.
Makani planted herself between them. Darby shouted, another voice called out, and Makani was knocked to the ground. The wind sucked out from her lungs.
David was above her. His knife was above her.
She closed her eyes as it came down for her heart.
A wave of blood crashed against David’s head and showered down onto her face. They gasped, and the pressure of his body released from her. Someone pulled her to her feet and held her securely, their arms wrapped around her waist and chest.
“I didn’t know what to do!” a panicked voice said.
Makani wiped the blood from her eyes. A tall girl in rectangular glasses and Victorian dress was holding a bucket. Brooke. Haley’s best friend. The blood trickled between Makani’s lips, and she tasted something sweet. Corn syrup.
A heart was beating against her back. Ollie.
She squeezed his arms. He hugged her tighter.
Darby positioned himself between them and David. Brooke was backing against the far cornstalks as David wiped the fake blood from his face. He flicked it to the ground in disgust, sneering at Darby. “It was almost you.”
“W-what?” Darby said.
“Before she moved here”—David pointed his knife at Makani—“I’d considered you.”
Darby was already in tears. “I don’t understand.”
David had more emotion in his voice than usual. He sounded angry. “You want out, but your roots are too strong. She’s the one who will leave.”
“You don’t want us to leave?” Darby said it like a plea. “We won’t. We’ll stay. We can help you. How can we help—”
David lashed forward, and Darby went down.
Makani screamed. Darby was on the ground, clutching the wound in his chest, which was gushing blood. Ollie pivoted to shield Makani—to place his body in front of hers—before releasing her to rush David. But David rushed Ollie first.
Ollie cried out near her ear. The blade sucked out. Squelched back in. Ollie’s breath was hot on her neck. Back out. She was still screaming as Ollie crumpled limply to the earth.
Another chest wound. Gaping. Their hearts, or maybe their lungs.
Her screams turned into hyperventilating gasps. A group of tweens appeared from around the bend and shrieked. David spun to attack, but Brooke was right there, and she shoved them, hustling them back through the maze.
Makani trembled between the bodies of her last remaining friends. David stared at her, predator to prey. His face was long and homely, but his entire head was dripping red as the coagulating theater blood mixed with the real blood. He swished his knife and more blood flew off and through the air. Blood was everywhere.
The terror was finally spreading outward. If the corn were an ocean, the cries were its waves. Manic, frenzied people tore through the dry vegetation.
But Ollie and Darby had stopped twitching.
Ollie and Darby were dead.
“What . . . what the fuck?” Makani said it quietly, exhausted. She was crying. Her question was rhetorical and not one she expected David to answer. But he did.
“The fuck is,” he said, “you were supposed to die two days ago, and I was supposed to have another week. But I pushed through. I made it work. And now we’re here, and soon the cops will be here, and it’s fitting that you’ll be my last.”
He stalked toward her. Backed her against an arrangement of hay bales and pumpkins and a life-size skeleton wearing a frilly Victorian corset.
“You’ll be here forever,” he said. “And I get to leave.”
“To prison,” she said.
“I was looking forward to turning myself in. But this gets me there, too.”
He actually wanted to be caught. “So, it’s about fame?” she asked. “You wanted a high body count so that you could be another Gacy? Another Dahmer?”
“Those assholes killed for sexual pleasure.”
“And you’re killing for the fun of it?”
“This isn’t fun,” David said as he lifted the knife above his head. “This is just something I have to do.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Makani ducked as the knife thunked into the pumpkin behind her head.
She ran for her life.
She fled down the path blazed by the terrified people before her—a straight line through the cornstalks. Her sneakers slapped against the churned mud as David crashed through thick stalks that hadn’t yet toppled.
She burst out from the maze into a huge thoroughfare. It looked and smelled like an abandoned traveling carnival. Plastic soda bottles, hot dogs, funnel cakes, roasted corn on the cob—everything discarded and trampled in the rush to escape. Fried food blended into a manure stench as she raced past the live enclosures. Pygmy goats. A hunched zebra. Scraggly coyotes. The animals paced and howled.
Behind her, the footfalls grew louder. She glanced back just as David was close enough to swipe. She dodged and swerved, and then careened toward the vast corn pit. The parking lot was visible on the other side of it.
A split-second decision, and she hurdled herself over the edge. Corn sprayed over the rim like a pool. She hit the kernels hard. Stitches snapped in her injured arm, and her swimming muscles were weak from disuse, but her adrenaline was pumping. Makani stood, and the kernels were nearly pelvis deep. She slog-ran toward help.
Cars and trucks jammed the parking lot with everyone trying to exit at once. She yelled at them, waving her good arm, but their shouting and honking drowned her out.
She looked over her shoulder to find David hovering at the pit’s edge. He was waiting to see what she would do, determining how he should respond. He climbed onto the rim and prepared to jump.
But he didn’t see what Makani saw behind him.
David keeled forward, knocked into the pit by a blow to the head from an iron folk-art skeleton. He face-planted into the corn. His body didn’t move.
Relief shocked Makani. “You aren’t dead!”
“No,” Darby said. “I’m not.”
Mud and snow and blood spattered his tweed sport coat. He clutched the decorative skeleton by its spinal cord. He used it to gesture at David. “But is he?”
They bent toward the body. Afraid to get closer.
“I don’t know,” Makani said from the center of the pit. “I don’t think so.”
Darby hesitantly stepped forward and then rapidly backed away. “Screw this,” he said, dropping the skeleton. “Meet you on the other side!” And he took off, sprinting around the perimeter.