Prologue

The search began with over forty cops. Forty men and women from the Sunnycrest Police Department and departments in the surrounding counties working in round-the-clock shifts, carefully combing the thick, rocky forest of the McGuff's Pass area.

Most of the bodies from the SWAT assault on the cabin were recovered in the first couple of days. The official head count provided to the search patrol by Police Chief McBride included eight soldiers, along with four violent killers who used the cabin as a home and hideout: a father, a mother, an uncle, and a son. All were accounted for very quickly.

The final head counted was classified as belonging to a civilian: a young girl, a high schooler. The initial hope was to find her alive, but as days wore on, that hope was downsized to finding her at all. Days turned to weeks, more and more cops were diverted from the search to other tasks, and quiet hope was replaced with formality, a sense of duty, rather than the actual expectation of finding something.

So it was that on a chilly fall morning, a little under a month after the assault and a little over a week after McBride's death, one half of the McGuff's Pass search effort ducked under a branch. “Find anything?” he asked.

A few weeks ago, the inquiry might have been mistaken for serious. The other half of the search effort rolled her eyes at him. “Har har.”

It wasn't much of a joke, so Officer Taylor didn't give it much of a laugh. Two people scouring an area of sixty square miles of dense, overgrown woods for one missing girl and actually finding her? She wasn't much for absurdist comedy.

Their boots crunched on pine needles and rusted leaves as they continued their slow hike through the woods. Officer Ball's little joke brought the missing girl to the forefront of Taylor's mind for the first time in days. She pursed her lips and said, “Poor kid shouldn't even have been there.”

Ball was surprised. He'd thought all conversation on the subject of the missing girl had been exhausted long ago. He saw his partner looked troubled. “She wanted to be there, though. She demanded to go back and show the team the way to the cabin. She wanted revenge.”

Taylor frowned. “Doesn't matter. They should have turned her away. They had no business bringing her back to that place.” She put a foot on the trunk of a fallen tree and stepped over it. “Can you imagine escaping that nightmare once...to go through all that pain and suffering and make it out the other side with your life...only to go right back? To go right back and lose what you fought so hard for?”

“She might not be dead,” Ball replied.

Her eyes flashed at him. “Spare me. We both know this stopped being a search for survivors after about seventy-two hours.” Then, those eyes picked out some black and white splotches through the foliage. “There's the car. Come on, let's get the hell out of here.”

Officer Taylor picked up the pace, stomping towards their car. Ball strove to keep up with her, a bit perplexed by her sudden sour shift in mood but not quite perceptive enough to realize she might be upset with herself for his having a laugh at the victim's expense.

Her thoughts were so consumed that she wasn't watching where she was stepping. As soon as Ball followed her through a wall of low bushes, he glanced down at the ground, and his eyes widened with surprise. With a loud “Whoa!,” he whipped an arm in front of her to keep her from taking another step.

She halted with a start. “What?” she demanded. When she attempted to throw him a glare, she noticed he wasn't even looking at her.

Slowly, Officer Taylor followed his line of sight to the forest floor. Yawning barely an inch in front of her toes was the mouth of a huge pit.

“Holy crap,” she said. “What the hell made this?”

The pit was deep enough, and the position of the sun was such that its depth and contents were indeterminable. The hollow space bore the stillness of an open grave, but the humid linger of a full one. The cool autumn breeze developed a chilly, wintry bite. “Beats me,” Ball replied, zipping up his jacket. “You see anything?”

Still rattled from her near plunge, Taylor shakily grabbed a flashlight off her belt. “Hang on.” She clicked it on, then aimed the beam down into the abyss.

What they saw nearly made them jump out of their skin.

A bed of long, grotesque harpoons. Sharp, hand-carved, stained with many things that definitely weren't wood varnish.

Lying on them, or more accurately, sheathing them, punctured through in a dozen different places, was a girl.

Ball staggered backwards in shock. Taylor's hand trembled as her grip on the flashlight turned brittle. Neither of the officers had ever seen anything like this in their small-town career.

They were so shocked that it took them a moment to put two and two together. “Wait, is...is that her?” asked Taylor.

“Who?” asked Ball.

“The girl. The one we're looking for.”

She focused the flashlight's beam on the girl's head. Long, dark brown hair. Caucasian. And the face...

Officer Taylor pulled out her phone again and checked the photo. Her stomach churned. “It's her.”

“Jesus,” Officer Ball added. He looked up at the car, then pack at the pit. “Those hillbilly shits. She was almost to the road.”

Taylor needed to be doing something. She needed to distract herself. Remembering her radio, she reached for it to call in their discovery.

As she unclipped the radio from her belt, however, her flashlight unwittingly caught something that made her drop both.

The girl's eyes snapped open.

It was Taylor's turn to jump backwards, tripping over herself in her fright. “Holy—” cried Ball, too shocked to fumble for his own light. His exclamation was interrupted by a rattling, hacking cough from the floor of the pit, chased by a pulpy gurgle.

“Help...” the hole croaked. “Help me...”

Chapter One

“Hmm. A bit higher,” judged Lindsey.

Alicia raised her end of the banner and Caitlin raised hers, each of them standing precariously on the top rung of a stepladder. The words HARVEST DANCE NEXT FRIDAY! joyously filled the space between them. Some of the students passing through the Sunnycrest High foyer looked at the banner, and others used the banner as an excuse to look at the cheerleaders holding it. Sunlight beamed in through the school's glass front doors, and every time they opened, an unassuming waft of crisp, autumnal mountain air took the chance to dart in with it.

“How's that?” asked Alicia.

Lindsey, standing safely on the floor, closed the eye that wasn't obscured by her blonde bangs and held out her thumb, arm fully extended in front of her. “Hmm...Hmmm...”

“What the heck are you doing?” Caitlin asked her curiously.

“She's giving us the thumbs up. It looks good,” said Alicia.

“No, no, I'm doing that thing. You know— trying to tell if it's straight or not.”

“How is closing one eye, sticking out your thumb and going 'hmm hmm' going to tell you whether it's straight or not?” asked black-haired Caitlin, ever the skeptic.

Lindsey sighed. “Come on, you've seen people do this, right? Like on TV and stuff? It's a real thing.”

Caitlin gave Alicia, their redheaded captain, a look of uncertainty. “Well, yeah, but...wouldn't closing one eye actually impede your vision, making it more difficult to tell?”

“Yeah, doesn't that, like, remove your depth perception?” Alicia agreed.

The blonde shrugged. “A small price to pay for the marked increase in banner perception.”

“That isn't a real thing,” replied Caitlin.

Alicia looked up with a smile. A girl was approaching: pretty, with a small spill of discreet freckles, hair in a wavy blonde bob, and brilliant green eyes. “Chase! You're back!”

“Yep, back!” the newest member of the squad confirmed, stopping below them. She held up some nails in one hand, and a hammer in the others. “Get all stuff!”

Caitlin reached down and cupped her hands into a bowl. Chase dumped the nails into them. When Caitlin straightened and inspected them, she gasped and pulled one of her hands away. It was covered in a shining red liquid. The bridge of her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Guh! What the heck, Chase? Why is there blood on them?”

They already pretty much knew why, or at least they could hazard a guess, but Chase thought that with the right fib she still had a chance of escaping culpability. “Not blood,” she claimed.

“Not blood,” repeated Caitlin. “You're telling me that this isn't blood and that you didn't just kill somebody with these nails and eat them?”

“No, not blood. Rust.”

“Rust isn't wet.”

“Wet make rust,” Chase reminded her. “This rust just fresh. Great fresh.”

Alicia and Lindsey queasily assured Caitlin that the nails were probably still perfectly good, even if they were somewhat dirty. Caitlin realized this wasn't an argument she was going to win, and begrudgingly decided to save her strength for hammering.

Chase stood back and surveyed the scene. Watching her friends work together to put in the nails made her smile contentedly. Less than a month had passed since these girls had saved her from the SWAT raid that killed her entire family and destroyed her home, but she already felt a deep sense of belonging, not just with them, but with the world they had given her: a normal, idyllic high school life of dances, friendships, and of course, cheerleading. Cheerleading, her life calling, her greatest pleasure. The days of kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, were behind her now.

She really hoped things would stay that way. Doubt, however, had its means of creeping in. Chase could not be certain the danger had passed. She could not be certain the snake had been killed just because she chopped off its head, Chief McBride. Her being here, sharing in this humdrum life, came with a built-in risk: She very likely could put her friends in danger once again when someone else who wanted her dead came calling.

Displeased by these thoughts, she quickly shook her head, although she knew by now they wouldn't be dislodged so easily. They had been recurring more and more frequently ever since her showdown at the football game, and it was taking more and more effort to distract herself from them.

She was probably just paranoid. Who would ever try to kill her? Who knew about her? No one, that she was aware of. But the feeling of an impending danger still loomed, impossible to shake.

“What Harv?” she determinedly cut in.

Caitlin looked down at her. “Huh? You don't know about the Harvest Dance yet, Chase?”

“You're going to LOVE it,” gushed Alicia. “It's Sunnycrest's biggest dance of the year! Everybody's gonna be there!”

For most schools, the biggest dance of the year is prom, or maybe homecoming. Winter formal is usually up there, but always just shy of serious contention. But to a school as decidedly rural and small-town as Sunnycrest, the harvest dance was the one that generated the most excitement. The end of growing season was sort of the crux of the local economy and, therefore, held great importance not just for Sunnycrest's considerable agricultural population, but also to Sunnycrest's teens. To a teen in the autumn of his or her youth, harvest time was an event analogous to their own passage to adulthood, what with all the growth and ripening and everything. Or at least, that was a sentiment the principal liked to eloquently express at the beginning of each dance, usually just prior to reminding everyone that any student caught with alcohol would be removed from the gym and punished harshly.

“We've never gone before, but now that we're upperclassmen, we can,” added Caitlin with a grin. Both her voice and her hammering showed a subtly increased excitement.

Chase was very curious about this. “What do at Harv Dance?”

“Well, uh, dance. For one thing,” said Lindsey, scratching her head.

“Dance,” repeated Chase. She looked very confused. “More words, please.”

Lindsey and Alicia exchanged a glance. “You know, uh...dancing?” ventured Alicia, watching Chase's face for some kind of recognition. “Music plays, and you move your body to the rhythm.” She did a quick shopping cart as an example, which almost sent her falling off the ladder.

Chase had never heard of this dancing before. It was a strange and foreign concept to her. Once she reshaped Alicia's explanation into something she could make sense of, her eyes widened. “Like cheer!”