She shook off her own fear and focused. Fear did Christopher no good. Action did. Answers did. No one had died since they dug up David Olson’s skeleton. Maybe there was an answer in the diary. Maybe there was an answer in the woods where they found him. And nobody knew those woods better than Christopher or…
The sheriff.
She didn’t know if the words led her eyes to his room or the other way around. But Kate Reese found herself looking at the sheriff in his room in the ICU.
“The sheriff,” Ambrose said, as if his own mind were on a three-second delay from hers.
Kate Reese looked down at Ambrose. He might have been blind, but he was sharp as a tack. She pushed him into the sheriff’s room. The sheriff was terribly pale. His lips shivering. Even in his sleep. She moved to his bedside and took his hands. The same hands that sweated on their first date. His hands were now freezing. Not from cold. From blood loss.
“How is he?” Ambrose asked.
She looked at the wounds in his chest, stitched with a practiced, if hurried, hand. He had been shot point-blank in the chest. One of the bullet wounds was right above his heart. But it was still beating.
“Alive,” she said.
She looked at the IV bringing morphine into the sheriff’s arm. The same arm that had been scrubbed within an inch of its life by the surgical team. But she could still see little impressions of words left behind by permanent ink.
“There’s a message on his arm,” she said.
“What is it?” Ambrose asked.
She moved her hands over the words like Braille as she spoke them aloud to Ambrose.
David Olson—boy. Don’t—sleep. Call Carl—NOW. Tools—children. Stone—wood. Whole city—the flu. The last flu—ended—David disappeared. Did David—stop the flu? Did he save us?
Suddenly they heard screaming down the hall. A man was hungry, and he didn’t understand why the meals were only for patients. They could hear shouts of “Calm down, sir,” from the nurses and shouts of “Help my wife!” from the man. Eventually, there was the sound of metal crashing on the floor, and the man being pulled out by security, kicking and screaming.
“That will be us soon,” Ambrose cautioned. “Keep reading.”
Kate Reese found the other arm, deciphering each faded word.
Call Ambrose! Stop listening—the voice—is lying to you—making you forget. You know what the tools were for! Run to Kate. What happened to David—happening to Christopher. Run now! Too late, Sheriff. I just hit them with a car.
“You have to get out of here,” a voice whispered.
Kate Reese almost screamed. But the voice belonged to the sheriff. He was forcing himself awake. Barely audible.
“It’s not safe here. There are no police left.”
The sheriff tried to sit up, but he was too weak. Kate put a loving hand on his forehead and brought him back down with a soft shhh.
“Christopher is right next door. We’re not leaving you,” Kate assured him.
The sheriff let go and allowed himself to melt back into bed. The morphine falling like raindrops on a glassy pond. Drip. Drip. Drip.
“Bobby,” she whispered. “What were the tools for?”
“Huh?” he said, his voice as high as a kite from morphine.
“The tools,” Kate repeated desperately. “What were they for?”
He took a hard, dry swallow and pushed through the pain.
“The construction crew found tools and petrified wood. My friend Carl ran the tests. There are dozens of tree houses out there. Kids have been making them for hundreds of years.”
“What does that mean?” Ambrose asked.
“It means David and Christopher are not alone in there,” Kate Reese said.
Kate settled back in thought. There were other children. She didn’t know if that was a good thing or a bad thing. Ambrose’s voice broke the silence.
“Were the tree houses all in the same place?” Ambrose asked.
“No,” the sheriff said. “They were spread all over the woods. Why?”
The old soldier wrinkled his brow under his bandages. “Maybe they’re all linked,” Ambrose said. “Maybe she’s using them to build something bigger.”
106.3 degrees
beEp.
Chapter 89
Christopher tiptoed down the path, bending his body to avoid every twig. Every branch. He was not invisible at night. He couldn’t make a sound. The hissing lady was in these woods. Somewhere. Christopher saw David a hundred yards up ahead on the trail. The little children surrounded him like a maypole. Skipping and clapping. Christopher saw the footprints David left behind. Muddy and bloody. Christopher remembered following footprints into the