As she listens to Linda’s ATV engine fade into the distance, Mack wonders if the seekers—that seems to be the title the other competitors have settled on for those looking for them—will have ATVs. If so, she’ll be able to track their movements by the noise.
She turns away from the exhaust lingering like perfume. Everyone is gone, except Ava, who’s on the opposite side of the camp. Ava nods, then walks into the trees. Mack does the same in the other direction.
Come out, come out, wherever you are.
She shudders against the prickle of cold dread on the back of her neck.
In the predawn haze, everything looks lazy and soft. But the intense, wild plant life, riddled with thorns, quickly dissuades her of the notion of simply pushing into the hedges and hiding there. She lets the vague remnants of a weed-choked path lead her away from the camp.
The clock is ticking. She can feel it with every beat of her heart. But she doesn’t rush. Shapes loom in the darkness. What she thought was a huge tree ahead of her is revealed to be a statue, swallowed by ivy. The topiary trees have shifted like nightmares, taking something known and distorting it until the familiar becomes monstrous.
She looks away from an agonized, swollen head screaming leafy terror at the sky. The branches are tight and small. Even if she could climb, she couldn’t hide. And something about these trees bothers her, haunts her. They seem sick in a way she can’t articulate. She wants nothing to do with them.
The path meanders in an almost aggressive manner. It doesn’t function like a path should. Instead of guiding to a destination, it seems determined to confuse. There are no straight lines. Everything curves, making it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead at a time. There are stone walls bordering most of the offshoot paths, which seems like an odd choice for a theme park—they block easy routes to destinations. She follows new directions at random. In the invisible distance—it’s hard to gauge how far away with no landmarks and such dense growth—someone swears.
Up ahead, there’s a break in the trees. She’s seen nothing promising, so she heads for the clearing. A series of small, sagging buildings along a more open central walkway greet her. In the nearest shack, a man is sitting at a rotted piano, his back to her.
He doesn’t move.
Neither does she.
After it starts to hurt, she releases her breath and creeps forward. Where a face should be, she finds blank, chipped emptiness. A statue. Maybe in its glory days a statue of a clown sitting at a piano filled people with delight, but seriously, what the fuck.
The thought that she could sit on the statue’s lap and be hidden unless someone looked closer briefly crosses her mind. But she’d have to stay in its faceless embrace all day. Its hands, once gloved, have rotted with mold and dark spots. They look like claws, or bones.
She turns away. This must have been the games section. Midway? Is that what those parts of a fair or amusement park are called? She’s not sure. Booths jostle for position, shouldering up to one another. A few are collapsed, the structures standing next to them looming like triumphant bullies. The ones that are still intact have counters, shelves, dim interiors. It would make sense to hide inside.
She looks up, instead.
From a nearby shack, a plague of once-cheerful rubber ducks hangs in nets from a half-caved-in ceiling. Maddie. A memory hits like a bullet, almost making Mack stagger backward with the force of it.
Maddie （at three? maybe four? Mack can’t remember and doesn’t dwell on the spike of pain and guilt that not being able to remember causes） had a bundle of yellow yarn that she tied into an impossible knot as big as her own fist, declared was a duck named Poopsie, and dragged everywhere—including the bath, where it disintegrated and clogged the drain. While Mack silently watched and Maddie wailed, their mom had quietly, furiously fished it out string by string, sweating the closer it got to when their father would get home.
Poopsie. Mack hasn’t thought of Poopsie since she had to give Maddie her own stuffed rabbit to keep her from crying herself to sleep over the loss of the imaginary duck. But here she is, playing hide-and-go-fucking-seek, and there is a shack filled with rubber ducks.
Mack doesn’t believe in signs, and even if she did, Maddie has no reason to send her a helpful one. The opposite, really. But she’s nearly out of time, so Mack climbs onto the counter, then grabs the edge of the roof. She scrambles up. Just as she suspected, the roof is concave, slowly pushed down by the elements. The wood is spongy. It creaks, but it’s only mildly alarming, not dangerous. If it caves in, she might be impaled, but she wouldn’t break any bones. Mack puts her pack down and then lies flat in the depression in the center of the sinking roof. From her vantage point she can see only the raised borders of the roof around her and the clear pale light of the dawn sky. Which means no one from the ground can see her.