Page 95 of Forever Dark
“Turn up ahead.Fairgrounds are on the right.”
“I know where they are,” Selena said.“We slept here last night.”
“Oh, you’ve been here before?”he replied sarcastically.
She almost smiled, then the gate came into view, and the smile vanished.
The revival grounds looked dead.
Connor’s SUV rolled through the open entrance first.Selena followed and braked hard enough to feel the nose of the car dip.Yesterday the place had hummed with movement.Folding chairs.Families.Lights.Music.Hands lifted in prayer.Now the tent had been collapsed into itself, canvas sagging low over the frame like a body under a sheet.Trucks were gone.Volunteer tables gone.Generator gone.
Most importantly, Croft’s bus was nowhere in sight.
Selena stepped out fast.
Wind moved across the empty grounds and slapped loose plastic against a post.Tire marks cut through the mud in layered arcs.Off to one side a trash barrel had tipped over, scattering paper cups and hymn sheets into the weeds.Nothing remained to suggest this had been a living camp only hours earlier except the churned-up earth.
Connor came around from his SUV and scanned the grounds once.
“I wonder if he ran the second we left.”
“He moved,” Selena said.“Could be just heading to their next location, as was their plan.”
“I suppose.”
They crossed the mud toward what had been the center of the camp.A folding sign lay face down in the dirt.Selena flipped it with the toe of her boot and saw the painted words half-smeared with mud.
ONE MORE NIGHT OF MERCY
“Cute,” Connor muttered.
No one answered when he called out.No volunteer stepped from behind the collapsed tent.No caretaker appeared from the fair office.The silence had that abandoned fairground quality to it, every loose flap and bent pole looking faintly obscene now that the crowd was gone.
“Why would they leave the tent?”Connor asked.
“That’s the question,” Selena answered.“It’s the type of thing you do when you’re running.”
From the road beyond the gate came the rattle of an old pickup.Selena turned.
A local man in a seed cap slowed when he saw the SUVs and leaned out his window.Gray whiskers.Sunburned face.Tobacco in one cheek.
Connor approached him first.“Hey there.Did you see the revival folks leave?”
The man nodded toward the west with two fingers on the steering wheel.“A few minutes ago, maybe.Bus and a few cars.Headed out that way in a hurry.”
“What kind of cars?”Selena asked.
“Vans, black SUVs.That sort of thing.”He squinted past them toward the empty grounds.“Something happen?”
Connor said, “Where exactly did you see them?”
“Route Nine headed west.They took the fork by Candler’s Feed instead of the highway.”
Selena and Connor exchanged a look.
Connor asked, “You sure?”
“Sheriff, my eyes still work.”
