Trapped.‌

Shut in.

Only thirty-one feet to share between them, that extra foot important enough not to round down.

“Why would he want to trap us here?” Maddy asked, her pupils too wide, dark pools eating away the color of her eyes. “What does he want with us?”

“I don’t know,” Oliver answered, pushing up from the driver’s seat, one more punch to the wheel for luck. “He probably lives around here, and we are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I told you we should never have come down this road.”

“Like you predicted this was going to happen?” Simon said, a surprising note of anger in his voice, an unsteadiness to his tread. Red should get him some water. He needed to sober up, fast. His instincts were dulled, his reactions, and he would need those tonight.

“I said it was the wrong way and none of you listened!”

In the kitchen, Red opened the cupboard mounted high beside the microwave. She removed a glass and guided it to the shiny-clean sink, flicking on the faucet and filling it near full.

“We had no service. We were lost,” Arthur said, a forced calm in his voice that no one else had right now.

“Here.” Red handed the glass of water to Simon, telling him with her eyes to drink it. At least she didn’t have to hold the glass for him, like with her dad sometimes.

“It was Red,” Oliver said, not looking at her. “She insisted we come down this road. And you two.” He pointed at Arthur and Simon. “You three were navigating. This is your fault.”

Simon stepped forward, splashing some of the water on his shirt. The other patch had finally just dried. “By the same logic, I could say it was Reyna’s fault we got stuck here. Because she was driving and refused to turn around.”

“I couldn’t turn around!” Reyna said.

“Everyone, please!” Maddy slapped her hand on the dining table three times. “This is not helping. It’s no one’s fault we’re here. But we are, okay? And we have to work together to figure out what to do.”

“There’s nothing we can do,” Simon said, near hysterical now. “Unless someone also happened to pack a rifle for spring break and we can snipe him back.”

Red mimed for him to drink up.

“Is there still no service?” Maddy said, answering her own question as she looked down at the lock screen on her phone. “Shit. Nothing.”

“Can’t you call emergency services without a signal?” Simon said, still not drinking. “I swear I’ve seen it in a movie before.”

It didn’t work like that, Red knew. She’d asked that question before herself, years ago on a family vacation in Yellowstone.

“Yeah, ’cause sometimes it comes up saying No service—emergency calls only,” Reyna added.

“That’s only if your phone can piggyback onto another network,” Red said, her mom’s answer now becoming hers. “There’s clearly no service from any network here.”

“Try it,” Oliver said, ignoring her. “Try, Maddy.”

Maddy unlocked her phone, her tongue tucked between her teeth as she concentrated. She brought up the keypad and carefully typed in 9-1-1.

She waited for a nod from Oliver, then she pressed the green button and

raised the phone to her ear.

They waited. The seconds stretching into eternity as Maddy closed her eyes to concentrate harder. It was one of those things she did that made her Maddy. Like when they were ten and she thought you had to ring the doorbell every time you left or came home, even if no one else was in and you had the key. That shrill, insistent bell in one held note, standing outside the Lavoys’ house. Funny how Red could remember some things like that, yet she couldn’t remember to call AT&T. She wondered what were the things that Maddy thought made Red Red?

Maddy exhaled, her chest sinking. “Nothing,” she said quietly, letting the phone fall to her side.

Oliver swiped at her arm, grabbing the phone. “No network connection,” he read from the alert on the screen. “F**k.” He dropped the phone back into Maddy’s hands, worthless to him.

Well, Red did say.

“Someone might have called the cops, though,” Maddy said, not ready to give up yet. “I know it’s late.” She glanced at her phone. “It’s four minutes past midnight, and most people are probably in bed. But someone must have heard the gunshots and called the police, right? There were farms and houses not too far back.”

“The shots weren’t loud,” Red said. “Even we couldn’t tell what it was at first. Just the sound of the tires bursting.”

“It’s a rifle?” Maddy doubled down.

But Red had heard these guns before, a memory she tried to push away. The three-volley rifle salute at the funeral. A line of officers in uniform, aiming over the flag-draped casket. The road beyond the cemetery blocked with what felt like every squad car in the city, top lights spinning, painting the world red and blue. Ready to aim. Fire. Three times. A crack like thunder, riding through the sky, shaking the bones inside you. And those had even been blanks. So loud. Unmistakable. Piercing through the bagpipes as they

played “Amazing Grace,” which was funny in a way because her name had been Grace. The Lavoys should know; they were all there too. Catherine standing with one hand on Red’s shoulder, squeezing when the rifles went off. Red’s dad didn’t even cry, standing on her other side. No, he saved all his falling apart for after.

“Red?” Arthur said.

Oh no, they’d been talking without her.

“I think Red’s right,” Simon said, the glass in his hands only half full now. “It wasn’t even loud enough for us to know it was a gunshot. I think he must be using a suppressor.”

“A what?” asked Reyna.

“A silencer,” Simon explained. “And yes, all of my worldly knowledge does come from movies, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t valid.”

“So you think nobody heard?” Maddy deflated even more, if that was possible. “Nobody called the cops?”

Simon shrugged. “I think we can’t count on it.”

“No, we can’t count on it,” Oliver repeated, picking up the sentiment, chewing on some silent thought. “We make our own luck,” he said to Maddy alone, a Lavoy expression that often got wheeled out. Which must mean that Red was terrible at making hers.

Maddy looked back at her brother, a new glint in her eye. “Make our own luck,” she said. “Well, if no one heard the gunshots, then maybe they’ll hear this.”

Before anyone could say anything, Maddy charged to the front of the RV, leaned across the driver’s seat and pressed her thumb into the wheel.

The horn screamed, rupturing the quiet of just-past-midnight. One long note, then four short bursts.

“Maddy?” Red said. She didn’t like her standing so close to that bullet hole in the driver’s seat. On the other side, the shade over the smashed window swayed in the wind, like a silent threat from the outside world. No, not Maddy.

Maddy leaned the heel of her hand into the horn, as though she could make it louder that way.

“Maddy,” Arthur said, a tension in his jaw as he eyed the broken window. “Maybe we shouldn’t—”

Three loud beeps cut him off.

“Someone will hear!” Maddy shouted, determined. “Someone will—”

Red felt it more than she heard it. A rush of air to her right. The shade shuddering, dancing against its fixings, a new hole ripped through it.

Maddy screamed.

“No, Maddy!” Red screamed harder.