Excerpt

"We're safer in here than out there," Pammy Mae argued. "Nate, tell your brother to keep his butt in that seat until we make a plan."

"Nate, tell your pushy girlfriend that I don't want to get eaten by giant space bugs," Cooper retorted.

"Will you both knock it off?" Nate barked. "Cooper, sit still and shut up. Babe, do you have your phone?"

Pammy Mae whipped her cell out of her back pocket and powered the screen on. "No service out here," she said. There were no bars, but she stared at the screen all the same. Only two hours had passed since she and Nate arrived at the party. Now, she wasn't sure how many of their friends were still alive. How could so much have happened in so little time? It didn't seem right.

"Okay, then." Nate crossed his arms and frowned down at the floor of the car with that intense expression he always got when he was thinking about a game. "We're on the road now. Someone could come by. If they do, we'll flag them down. Until then, we're safer inside the car than out there."

"You're making a mistake, man," Cooper told him. "A car's not going to stop one of those things."

"I know that you don't have any tools with you, and you're going to be easy as hell to pick off if you go out there," Nate argued. "I don't want you to end up like Kat."

"Don't talk about her," Cooper growled. "Don't. I can't think about that right now."

"Exactly. I can't think about you getting killed in some dumb daredevil rescue stunt. Pammy is right. We stay in the car."

"Whatever."

Nate closed his eyes, shook his head once, and turned to Pammy Mae. "Okay, okay. Let's just stop and think for a minute. Can you try the engine again?"

Like that's going to do any good, she almost retorted, but that was the fear speaking. Nate was right: they had to think smart if they wanted to get out of this in one piece. She turned the car off, waited a few seconds, and tried again. The engine rumbled to life, but the Jeep didn't move when she tried to back up. Instead, the whole vehicle rumbled, the way it did when she was stuck in mud or deep snow but the tires couldn't find purchase.

"It's no good," she said, taking her foot off the gas. The rattling sound continued.

"Stop giving her juice," Cooper said.

"I'm not."

"I can hear it," he said.

He was right, but the rumbling no longer came from beneath her feet. Now it came from the night around them, a clattering, clanking echo. It seemed to circle behind them, coming around to the driver's side. The Jeep rocked, and all three of them looked up in tandem to see half a dozen dimples appear in the canvas moonroof.

Cooper swore under his breath, and Pammy Mae bit the inside of her cheek.

When she had been a little girl, she'd been afraid that a giant tarantula lived under her bed, and that if she got out of bed in the night it would grab at her ankles with its hairy limbs, snap her up in its mouth, and jerk her beneath the wooden frame so that it could wrap her up in its web and suck her dry. For months, she would lie awake at night, caught between her need to use her bathroom and her fear of the unseen beast that she was certain waited below. If she wrapped herself in her blanket and stayed very still, she convinced herself that it couldn't hurt her.

As the many-legged creature prowled above them, rattling as it went, that old instinct returned. If I am very good and very quiet and perfectly still, nothing bad will happen.

That logic had worked in childhood.

It did not work now.

The rattling increased, and a long, narrow object pierced the canvas above them. Cooper screamed long and loud.

If it has to be one of us, I'm glad it's him. Pammy Mae didn't mean to think it, but the words came to her mind unbidden, and they were cruelly honest. Of the three of them in the car, he was the only one she viewed as disposable.

"Nate!" he was screaming. "Nate! Nate!"

Pammy Mae twisted in her seat, expecting to find Cooper grabbing at his brother, begging for help before the thing—whatever it was—killed him. Instead, she found Cooper grappling with the narrow object, clutching it in both hands and trying to snap it in two. Nate sat in his seat, an expression of dull surprise on his handsome features.

Her eyes traced the long, narrow object down to the hole in his shirt, where bright blood welled around the wound. He was pinned to the seat, with the object piercing the center of his chest around his solar plexus.

Nate lifted his eyes to hers and frowned. "Pammy?" he asked. "Babe?" His mouth was too red, and a trail of foamy spittle dripped from the corner of his mouth as he spoke.

Pammy Mae reached for him at the same moment that he was jerked upwards with a terrible force. His chest hit the metal struts of the moon roof, spanning them so that his head hit the back of the structure and his feet dangled over the passenger seat at the front, weakly kicking against the dash and leaving a smear of dirt where they hit. She grabbed onto his leg while Cooper tried to anchor him by an arm. He lowered slightly, and she thought that they must be pulling him back down until he hit the roof again with a jolt that shook the whole vehicle. Somehow, the creature out there had grabbed him and was trying to pull him up and out, yanking him the way a toddler might, unwilling to acknowledge that he wouldn't fit through the hole.

"Give him back!" Pammy Mae screamed, bracing her feet against the underside of the dashboard as she tried to pull Nate down into her arms. "Give him back!"

Nate groaned as he was slammed against the roof a third time, followed by a fourth. On the last attempt, a prolonged crack echoed through the car, until his spine bent backward too far, accordioning in on itself as the canvas tore to allow him through. Pammy Mae's grip was no match for the force of that colossal tug, and she made one last grab at him as his fingers slipped through hers.

The rattling noise retreated, leaving Pammy Mae and Cooper alone in the car with the starry sky visible above them, a hole in the leather of the seat Nate had occupied the only proof that he had ever been there at all.