We killed the lantern immediately.
Headlights swept across the cracks in the cabin walls.
Cody reached for the hatchet.
I motioned him down.
A truck idled outside. Doors opened. Men’s voices drifted through the dark.
“Place looks empty.”
“Check around back.”
My pulse slammed.
Boots crunched on wet leaves.
Someone rattled the porch steps. Another moved past the window toward the smokehouse ruins.
Toward the cellar.
Cody’s eyes found mine in the dark.
And in that instant, both of us understood the same thing:
Vernon Pike wasn’t waiting for us to think.
He had already decided to take what he wanted.
Chapter Four: The Men in the Dark
There are sounds your body remembers faster than your mind.
A doorknob turning when it shouldn’t.
Boots where no boots belong.
Men whispering outside your walls in the middle of the night.
Even before I fully woke, my body knew danger had arrived.
The cabin was black except for a thin red line inside the stove where the fire had burned down to coals. Cody crouched beside the lower bunk with Grandpa’s knife in one hand and the hatchet in the other. He looked younger in the dark and harder at the same time.
Outside, a flashlight beam cut across the porch.
“Back door,” a man said quietly.
The cabin didn’t have a real back door, just a warped plank door near the stove that stuck in humid weather. I had jammed a chair under the knob before bed more out of habit than foresight. Now that flimsy chair suddenly felt like the only thing between us and a very bad night.
Another voice answered from somewhere behind the smokehouse. “There’s something back here.”
My stomach turned over.
The cellar hatch.
I crawled to the front window and lifted the feed-sack patch just enough to see.
Two men. One on the porch, one in the yard. Both broad, both carrying flashlights. A third figure moved near the truck. I couldn’t make out faces, but I didn’t need to. Nobody comes onto mountain land after midnight to be neighborly.
Cody leaned close enough for me to hear his whisper.
“What do we do?”
I thought fast.
We couldn’t fight three grown men. We couldn’t outrun them easily in the dark if they caught us breaking from the cabin. But we had one advantage—they didn’t know what we knew. They didn’t know about the second cellar. They might not even know whether we were inside.
The man on the porch tried the knob.
The chair scraped.
“Occupied,” he muttered.
Then the man behind the cabin said louder, “Boss is gonna want to see this.”
Boss.
That told me enough.
I touched Cody’s arm and nodded toward the trapdoor built into the floor under the table. We had moved it earlier that evening to get a crate of canned goods from the cellar. Usually we kept a rug over it. Tonight, by luck or exhaustion, we had left the latch unhooked.
His eyes widened, then he understood.
We moved soundlessly.
I eased the floor hatch up an inch at a time while Cody backed toward it. Outside, the porch man knocked once—not polite, more like a warning.
When no one answered, he hit the door harder.
We slipped down the steps into the cellar and pulled the hatch closed above us.
Darkness swallowed us whole.
For a few seconds there was only the sound of our breathing and the distant thud of fists on wood.
Then the cabin door splintered.
Cody flinched.
Voices above us, muffled by floorboards.
“Search it.”
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