The Road to Amazing by Brent Hartinger Read Free Book Online

and the trees weren't creaking
like they had been out on the deck at the house either. It felt
like the forest was holding its breath in anticipation of what was
going to happen next.
    I picked up my pace, eager to get to
the end of the road.
    It turned to the right,
around a bend, and then made another turn, to the left, down a hill
toward the water. Now I held my breath.
    I found myself facing another hill —
or, rather, a rocky promontory that looked out over the water. It
was rough and jagged, but still covered with trees and ferns. To
the right, a flat apron of land looped around a little rocky cove.
The trees and undergrowth were still thick — so thick I could
barely make out the beach.
    But as for the road itself, it just
ended. It wasn't even a cul-de-sac. It was a slightly wider area
where a car could park or turn around.
    I didn't see the ruins Christie had
mentioned, or any sign of the town of Amazing at all. There was
only the forest.
    Around me, the trees were creaking
again, and waves washed against the beach. Seagulls screeched,
fighting over something in the rocks.
    Well, that was
anticlimactic , I thought. As usual, I'd
let my imagination get away from me. As for Amazing, Christie the
Crackpot had probably made the whole thing up.
    Still, I'd come this far, so I figured
I should at least look around.
    I came to the end of the road, then
followed a narrow footpath down to the cove. At one point, someone
had made a bunch of stacks of flat grey rocks — cairns, I guess
they're called. Some of them poked up out of the sword ferns, and a
few of them stuck out into the trail itself, so the path veered
around them. There was something sort of otherworldly about them,
and I felt a little like I was walking through the skeletal remains
of a dinosaur. Somewhere to my right, a stream gurgled, but I
couldn't see it through the undergrowth.
    Suddenly there was someone right in
front of me. I'd almost run right into them.
    "Oh!" I said, pulling back.
    "Russel?" the person said.
    It was Min.
    "Oh, my God, you scared me!" I said.
She was wearing earth-tones (typical for her), so she'd blended
right into the undergrowth. Plus, I'd been distracted by the
stream.
    "What are you doing up so early?" she
asked me. She knew the hours I usually kept.
    "No curtains in the master bedroom.
What about you?"
    "Ruby snores."
    I felt bad for her, but was actually
glad I'd run into her out here. As excited as I was to gather all
my best friends together in one house, I'd been worried that I
wouldn't be able to spend any time with them one-on-one. Min and I
didn't live in the same city anymore, and I really missed
her.
    "Also..." she said.
    "What?" I said.
    "Well, there was this album back in
the inn — this book of articles. It talked all about this little
town of Amazing that the place is supposedly named
after."
    "I know! Isn't it cool? The manager
told me about it yesterday. But she said the residents were
abducted by aliens, so I figured she was making it up."
    Min smiled sardonically.
    "There were really articles, though,
huh?" I said. "And did they say if the residents really all
supposedly disappeared overnight?"
    She nodded.
    "So where is it?" I asked. "Christie
said there were ruins, but I don't see any—"
    And it was strange. All of a sudden I
saw how this little cove, and the apron of flat land that
surrounded it, was actually a pretty good place for at least a
small town.
    Min saw it too.
    "There," Min said, pointing to the
cairns I'd seen earlier.
    Except that's not what they were. They
were the remnants of stone foundations. The houses had long since
fallen away, and at some point whatever they'd used for mortar in
the foundations must have deteriorated too. So now even most of the
foundations had collapsed, but a few small sections remained
upright. If you connected the dots, you could see they formed
rectangles — the outlines of what had once been buildings. I could
make out at least three foundations, but there were