The Hike by Drew Magary Read Free Book Online Page B

muster up the energy to say. He was reduced to a random jumble of profanity and loud questions. There was nothing on this beach, nothing in these houses, no one to talk to. The stillness all around him made it obvious.
    Up ahead, he saw a slight deviation in the parallel lines, so he walked toward it. Again, everything looked much closer than it actually was. All this grand visibility was making his feet ache. The padding between his skin and bones had worn down to nothing. He was a pillow someone had ripped open and emptied of feathers.
    As he neared the veer in the path, he saw a faded billboard next to one of the ghost houses:
    COURTSHIRE ESTATES! NEW C ONDOS STARTING AT JU ST $350,000!
    This was Courtshire. Courtshire had nothing.
    Stupid old lady.
    His shoes were growing intolerable: wet and sweaty and stinking from all that running and fleeing and magic seed throwing. These sneakers weren’t accustomed to Ben being quite this active, and now they were falling apart like a lemon rolling off the used car lot. He kicked the shoes off and stripped away his socks, now flattened and brown (how did the
bottoms
of the socks get so dirty while containedwithin a pair of sneakers?). Then he mashed his feet into the sand and dug around. A piece of dead dune grass pricked his toe like a syringe.
Stupid grass. Stupid path. Stupid goddamn everything.
    After a mile-long drag, the path finally took a left, leading to yet another ghost beach house, this one a story taller than the rest.
Maybe this one has new shoes.
Ben dropped his shoes and socks in the sand, then made the turn and ran barefoot up the sandy front-porch steps. The parallel lines in the beach spread wide like an open mouth and faded away, giving him permission, at last, to safely explore an entire property. The house was unlocked. The people who had fled Courtshire—if any people had
ever
lived here—must have been in a hurry.
    Another empty living room and kitchen. The faucets: dead. The closets: barren. He searched around for supplies and clean socks and shoes, but it was no use. Near a picture window looking out onto the surf was a small end table with a big glass vase on it. The vase was empty. Ben grabbed it and hurled it through the window. If he couldn’t talk to anyone, he would express himself in other, more violent ways. He ripped the cabinet doors off and smashed them on the floor. There were pipes snaking up from the bathroom toilet and he tore those out of the wall. Anything that could be broken, he broke. Who was gonna see? Who was gonna care? He broke it all. Then Ben went upstairs and tore the bedposts off their frames, the wood splintering and the loud cracks soothing his terrified soul. When it was all over and the place was trashed, he sat down, ate some bread from his pack, and passed out on the hardwood floor.
    Twenty minutes later, he let his eyelids split a quarter open and noticed a staircase going up to the third floor. This was the only house in the row that had an extra level, and the path had led him here. Of course, this had all been a massive cosmic troll job. Ben fully expected to walk up those stairs and find a giant papier-mâché middle finger waiting for him.
    He took his time getting up, still sore to the bone. Buildings have been constructed with more haste. These were the only unfinished stairs in the house. The rest of the place had scrolls of dull tan carpet going up to the second floor and down to the basement, the carpet you see in any new suburban McMansion that’s been thrown up by a contractor in under three months. But this upper staircase was just a bunch of old planks. There was a flimsy door at the top and Ben could sense a presence behind it. There was a thing there. There was something the path was trying to get him to discover.
    I need a weapon.
    Bereft of the powers to summon a wolf (more of those seeds would have been nice), he rooted through the backpack and found Mrs. Blackwell’s cheese