Vacations From Hell by Claudia Gray, Cassandra Clare, Maureen Johnson, Libba Bray, Sarah Mlynowski Page B

That it was a real hand, I was sure. That was the big thing here. Someone was dead. And Henri’s bare bathroom, stripped of anything that might…soak up blood. Towels and paper. If I was going to cut up a body, I’d do it in a tub. Then I’d wash the tub and bleach it. Then I’d get rid of everything else. Yes, that made sense. So Gerard had had a trauma and thought this was all based on some story. Grief and guilt had confused him. But there was still a danger here, and that danger was Henri. Henri knew where we lived. He knew our phones didn’t work. He knew we were alone. Which meant that I had to convince Marylou that we needed to get out right now .
    Everything looked blurry and odd. I started to run, paying no attention to the tiny frogs that might be under my feet, feeling like I was bouncing high with each step. The slowly darkening sky looked like one of the landscapes that Van Gogh used to paint here: swirly clouds against a bright palette of sunset colors. The view of the house throbbed in time with my pulse. Marylou was waiting for me at the open door, looking furious, still holding her trusty DSM-IV .
    “There you are!” she said. “I left for two minutes and you were gone! What the hell is going on?”
    I pushed her inside and bolted the door behind me.
    “What’s wrong?” she asked as I slumped on one of the kitchen benches. “Charlie, you look sick. You’re so pale.”
    She was not going to believe the hand. Not, not, not going to believe it. It would take something else, something more plausible. It would take a lie. A megaton of a lie.
    I had one in a second.
    “Gerard,” I said. “That guy. He’s nuts. He stole my phone, and he ran out. I chased him, and he tried to attack me. I just barely got away. He’s still out there. We have to get out of here.”
    “What?” she said, coming to sit by me and putting an arm around my shoulders. “Charlie…did he hurt you?”
    “I’m fine. I hit him. With this.” I held up the flashlight. “I don’t know what he was going to do with it, but I got it off of him and I hit him with it. I whacked him in the head, hard, and he kind of ran off. Now we have to get out, get to the village, and get help. This is not a lie . Look at me.”
    I could see Marylou testing out the plausibility of my story in her head. I have to say, I gave a magnificent performance. What I was saying wasn’t exactly true, but the sentiment behind it certainly was. My fear was real. And I had his flashlight. And she had probably seen him running. There was a lot to back up my story.
    Marylou got up and paced the kitchen while she weighed the facts. I saw acceptance flash over her face.
    “How old do you think he was?” she asked. “Eighteen? Nineteen? It’s common for people that age to experience a minor psychotic break.”
    “That’s reassuring,” I said, swallowing hard.
    “If he’s out there, we need to stay in here. We need to lock everything.”
    “No,” I countered quickly. “He said he’d come back. He said he’d get in. This is our only shot. If we go right now, we could get to town before he catches up with us.”
    Marylou stepped back from the bench and put her hands on her hips, looking worriedly around the room.
    “Okay,” she said. “Okay. Here.”
    She went to the hooks at the back of the kitchen and pulled down two of the heavy green rain slickers that were hanging there.
    “Put that on,” she said, dropping one of the slickers on the table. “It’s going to rain.”
    She rattled around in one of the kitchen drawers and produced a heavy carving knife, which she passed to me.
    “Put this in something,” she said.
    “What’s this for?”
    “Protection. I’m going to close the rest of the shutters upstairs. You do the ones down here.”
    Up the stairs she went. I went into the other tworooms and shut the shutters against nothing, then put on my slicker.
    “I found this too,” she said, running back down the stairs. It was a piece of