Burning Midnight by Will McIntosh Read Free Book Online

I’m always on the lookout.”
    As soon as Sully put the car in park, Hunter jumped out. Sully followed as she turned away from the lodge and zoo, and headed toward the mountain.
    “We’re going hunting in the woods?” If there was one thing everyone knew about finding spheres, it was that not many were hidden in nature. Once in a while someone found one wedged in a tree or stuffed in an old gopher hole on the prairie, but most were hidden in and around man-made structures.
    Hunter’s eyes were bright with excitement. She was walking so fast that Sully strained to keep up with her. “Yes and no. We’re going to Doodletown.”
    “Doodletown?” He’d never heard of Doodletown. It sounded like a joke. A made-up place.
    Hunter pulled a folded page from her back pocket and handed it to Sully. “Once upon a time there was a little town called Doodletown, about three miles from here. Seventy houses, a school, a church. Two stores. The last residents left in 1965, and it became a ghost town. Ten years after that, the buildings were bulldozed. All that’s left are a dozen foundations, a few walls, and two graveyards.”
    Sully scanned the Wikipedia entry Hunter had printed out, his smile growing bigger as he read.
    “When you’re picking sites, you have to keep in mind, you don’t know what’s already been searched. You could break into an abandoned factory in the city, and it looks like the best place in the world to find marbles, but ten people have already gone through it with a fine-tooth comb. This late in the game, the key is coming up with places other pros wouldn’t think to look.”
    “You really thought this out.”
    Hunter looked at him. “It’s all I think about.” They reached the sidewalk that ran along the base of Bear Mountain, and paused. “One day I’m going to make a big score. Maybe not a Cherry Red like you, but big. Chocolate. Mustard. Olive…”
    Sully nodded. Those were million-dollar marbles. He watched Hunter’s face as she gazed toward the summit, her dark eyes blazing. She saw him looking. He looked away, at the mountain.
    Through the trees he scanned the snow-covered boulders that filled the lower half of the climb. He used to get a kick out of climbing around on those rocks as a kid.
    “Six miles, round-trip. I hope you’re in shape.” Hunter hopped onto a rock, sprang across a little gap to the next. Sully followed. He’d keep up if it killed him.
    —
    The narrow trail they’d been hiking opened onto a wider road heading uphill. Trying not to let on how out of breath he was, Sully fell into step beside Hunter.
    “You in any particular camp about what they are?” he asked.
    Hunter shook her head. “I like it that no one knows. Whatever you want to believe—that they’re proof God exists, that they’re from another dimension, that aliens left them—no one can tell you you’re wrong. You can’t laugh at someone else’s ideas if yours are just as crazy. And they’re all crazy. How can they not be?”
    Sully couldn’t argue with that.
    The weirdest part to him was that they were hidden. If they’d all just appeared at random one day, that would be one thing, but they’d appeared in hiding places. That was one of the arguments the God camp used. The spheres were hidden, and that meant an intelligence was behind it, and that meant God. Or Satan.
    A steel sign on a tree announced that they were entering Doodletown. To their right, a concrete walk ran up a hill, leading nowhere. A few hundred yards farther along they came to a three-sided stone wall surrounding nothing but snow and weeds. It looked to be a building foundation.
    Hunter consulted the map she’d printed out and pushed past the foundation, toward the trees beyond. “Let’s start at the farthest point and work our way back.”
    At first Sully just watched Hunter work, and she didn’t question this. He wanted to pull his weight, and before he could do that he needed to see how she approached the