Walk Me Home by Catherine Ryan Hyde Read Free Book Online Page B

until now was nothing. A mild intro.
    “I’m worried about you,” Jen says.
    “I just need some sleep.”
    But she thinks she won’t get much. She’s cold, she’s too upset, and she has a spring poking into her side.
    She’s wrong. She sleeps.

ARIZONA
    May 13
    Sun pours through the dusty windshield onto Carly’s face. A door has opened on the car, waking her.
    It must be late. The sun is nearly overhead. Still her teeth chatter.
    Shooting pangs of emptiness radiate from her stomach. Her mouth is cotton dry. She winces as she opens her eyes.
    On the passenger side floor of the old Pontiac, on a surprisingly well-preserved rubber mat protecting the faded carpet, is a coiled rattlesnake, apparently fast asleep.
    Carly pulls back in slow motion and eases over the seat and into the back, expecting to land on Jen. But the backseat is empty, the back door wide open. She can feel the cool air of the desert morning. It feels colder inside the car than out.
    She bolts out of the car, vaguely aware of the clanging of bells. Tinny bells. She slams the door fast.
    She looks back through the window at the rattlesnake. It hasn’t stirred.
    “Hey, Carly!” she hears. “Come and look at this.”
    Jen is standing in the dirt road, completely surrounded by sheep. White sheep with big woolly bodies and skinny legs and elongated, droopy ears. Well over a hundred of them, moving along the road like a sheep river, parting to flow around Jen Island. About every fifth sheep is wearing a bell around its neck.
    Now and then part of the procession leaps or bolts or turns suddenly, and then Carly sees they’re being herded from behind by a dog. A yellow dog with bizarre yellow eyes. She looks around for the person who goes with the sheep, but there’s no person. Only the dog.
    When the dog pulls level with them, he stops cold, puts his head down, and barks at them. But not as viciously as the last dog. More bitter complaint and less flat-out assault.
    “Why are Navajo dogs so mean?” she asks Jen.
    “They’re not. They’re just doing their job.”
    The dog looks to his sheep and sees they’re too far ahead. He abandons his complaint with the girls and runs to catch up.
    “You’re not gonna believe this,” Jen says. “There were mice in that backseat with me. Three of them. Either that or I saw the same mouse three times.”
    “I believe it.”
    “Bet you didn’t have a mouse up front with you.”
    “That’s true,” Carly says. “I didn’t have a mouse.”
    They set off walking down the road together. Carly’s heels hurt, and she feels like she might be about to black out. But she doesn’t say so. She doesn’t even limp.
    Jen says, “Remember when we were at that gas station yesterday?”
    Carly feels a lurching in her stomach, like something trying to come up. As if there were something in there to lose.
    “Yeah…”
    “Remember that sign on the door?”
    Carly has no idea where this is going.
    The sheep are still clanking along in front of them down the road, and now and then the yellow dog stops, turns, and shoots them a disapproving look.
    “What about it?”
    “It said it was May twelfth. But didn’t it also say a day of the week?”
    Carly suspects she knows where this is headed now. And she doesn’t want to go there. More precisely, she doesn’t want Jen to go there.
    “I don’t remember,” she says, which is a lie.
    “Was it Thursday?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “Because if it was Thursday the twelfth, then this is—”
    “Right. I know. Friday the thirteenth. But I don’t think it said Thursday. And even if it did, there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.”
    “Maybe we should go back to that car.”
    “No!” Carly shouts, too harshly, remembering the snake.
    “We’d be safer there.”
    “Jen. It’s just a dumb superstition.”
    “But it can’t hurt to be safe.”
    “Can’t hurt? To spend the whole day without food or water?”
    “Oh,” Jen says. “Right.”
    Carly notices