66 Joey
Joey
Joey careens downhill without any semblance of control.
She hasn’t driven a dirt bike since high school, and she’s reminded why she hates them.
They’re too fast. Too loud. Too disruptive.
The bike is moving fast, away from the glass house, and the only thing she knows is that she needs to go down.
Once she’s close to the bottom, she’ll figure out where to go from there.
The rain, of course, is making sight impossible.
She bumps over something, a rock or a root, and nearly slides off the seat.
When she looks up again, there’s a tree trunk directly in her path.
She swerves inches from it, a maneuver that sends her skidding out.
The tires stop on the uphill side of a boulder, which is the impossible luck that saves her from tumbling to her death.
She catches her breath for a second, feeling the rain relentless against her helmet.
She hears something through the din of the storm.
A voice. Or voices. They seem to be coming from every direction.
Up, down, all around her. From the trees themselves.
“Not much further,” the voices say. “Just beyond the next ridge. Keep going.” Joey doesn’t need to search for the source of the voices.
She’s heard this before. Not these exact voices.
These are more generic, more ethereal. Not like the voice she heard in the woods days ago, before all this started, before Sophie and Elena showed up.
That time, it was Quinn’s voice, clear, spoken through the trees.
These voices, though. They don’t sound like a resurrected human voice but like the trees themselves, and Joey doesn’t have time to question her sanity.
She doesn’t have time for doubt or disbelief, not only because she knows, she knows, these trees can talk, but also because she knows the rules.
And the rules clearly state that when the trees talk, you must listen.
A faint growl echoes in the distance. Another bike.
The trees whisper once more. “He’s coming.”