An Excerpt from
Manhunt
Jennifer Huddock
The first weekend of spring always ignited our need to be outdoors. The year I turned thirteen it had been unseasonably hot, with Easter weekend falling near the end of March. The school labeled it “Spring Break,” and with no school on Monday, most of us had spent the entire day outdoors ignoring the occasional sniffle or chill.
It was just going on seven when Eve rallied us all together for an early season game of flashlight tag over at the Moore’s, which was a veritable junk heap of places thanks to their father’s inability to part with anything even long after it had broken down. Endless acres of country yard spanned the length of our four houses, but flashlight tag required us to cut down the amount of space we played in to keep the game from lacking in action. Even when all twelve of the neighborhood’s kids gathered, the area from the Moore’s yard all the way to the closest corner of my parents’ house was spacious enough for us to play in for hours without ever running out of places to hide.
During Eve’s big rally no one had bothered to ask the older kids to play. It had become begrudging work for them to even acknowledge us unless they were making fun of us. Asking them to entertain us was like begging to be humiliated. Besides, Matt’s friend Ed had come over to spend the night, and anytime we had even walked by his door that day he’d tossed ninja stars as warnings.
Settling into her place as our fearless leader, Eve declared that Steve, who was our age, but mildly retarded, be the first seeker in our dark game. Steven whined, but his younger brother Bob warned, “You won’t be able to play at all.”
Steve stopped sniveling, gritted his teeth and said, “I’ll catch you first, Bob!”
“I’m hiding with you.” Rachel, who was two years younger than me, clung to my arm as we raced off into the darkness to the sound of Steve’s rendition of counting.
“We always get caught when you hide with me,” I laughed.
In the distance Steve called out, “Seventy-seven, ninety-one, ninety-two, ninety-twenty. . .”
“We’ll find a really good place this time, I promise.”
Easy for her to say. All of our places were generally good places. In fact, anyplace was a good hiding place when Steve was it, but when bogged down with a partner making it back to base was a challenge. I didn’t mind though. I think Rachel was just afraid of the dark, and who could blame her after all the strange things we’d seen and heard about taking place out Glade Run Road in the hills of Muncy, Pennsylvania. Lenape Indian ghosts, ferocious bears, bobcats and the mysterious legend of heimer-schmidt trantulate—it was a wonder any of us liked to play outside in the dark at all.
“You have to be quiet,” I warned her as we rounded the house and came up on the tree I had been climbing since I was five years old. “We’re hiding in the tree.”
Under normal circumstances it would have been a stupid hiding place. Had anyone else been searching it would have been a matter of seconds before we were caught. Steve, on the other hand, always looked in the same places even though he knew nobody hid there. It was a brilliant spot. We’d be called in free before we knew it. All we had to do was wait.
Steve bellowed, “Ready or not, here I come.”
He roved around calling out to no one. “I see you Bob! You can’t hide, Bob! Come out! Is that you in there, Rachel? Rachel, I see you.”
From our vantage point above ground I could make out the line of his flashlight sweeping across the growing darkness toward our tree. Rachel stifled a giggle, and the intensity of the hunt initiated butterflies in my stomach. The light turned away from us, and Eve yelled out, “Base!”
“I can’t believe he didn’t find us,” Rachel whispered.
“Shh!”
A second voice called out the word, “Base,” and then a third.
“No fair,” Steve whined. “You’re all chicken-shit cheaters.”
A growl in the night caused Steve to squeal, and we listened to the growing sound of deeper, older voices. “Come on, Steve, you give up too easy. I know where Jenn and Rachel are.”
“That jerk!” Rachel huffed.
The voice belonged to Matt, Eve and Rachel’s older brother. Then Gary, who was Bob and Steve’s older brother, announced, “We’re starting over, and the next people we find are it.”
“At least we’ll be it together.” I sighed, watching the bouncing beam of the flashlight come racing toward us.
“This is so not fair!”
“Life’s not fair, Ruffle-Rann,” Matt snuck up on us from the opposite direction of the flashlight and started to climb the tree. “Steve, they’re over here. Over here in the tree.”
“You’re a jerk!” Rachel kicked her foot at him. [...]
From Issue 2, Number 1
To read the rest of Manhunt order Watershed, Issue 2, Number 1.
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