A Place So Wicked Patrick Reuman (children's ebooks free online TXT) 📖

of a nuked town, except everything was still intact, rusty and aged, but intact, nonetheless. Behind the iron graveyard was an open field, its grass well-kept and short, and even further beyond that was a row of houses all facing away from them.

Paisley pointed into the distance as they stepped off the sidewalk onto the grass. “He lives in that house over there.”

He could only see the back of the building, but it looked normal enough. In the open, as they crossed the field, he felt exposed, like everybody was hiding behind their curtains, peering through the cracks at them, watching. They were the sacrifices. The words rang repeatedly through his mind like a deathly melody.

Paisley approached the door this time. She looked nearly as nervous as he had. She rapped her knuckles on the door. Unlike at Addy’s, they didn’t have to wait long. A woman came to the door just a minute later. She answered with a smile initially, but it seemed to fade when she spotted Paisley standing there at the door.

“Why are you knocking at this door?” she asked.

That’s when she noticed Toby standing off to the side. That didn’t seem to help. Her face filled with suspicion.

“I don’t know,” Paisley said. That had just been the door she had been at before when she was there. “I was wondering if Eli was around.”

“No. He’s about to eat.”

“What about after? I just want to talk to him really quick.”

“About what?”

She wished she hadn’t said that. Rather, said she wanted to hang out or something. Now there was curiosity in Eli’s mother’s eyes.

“Nothing. Nothing important.”

The woman looked like she was about to push the subject further, but right then, Eli came up from behind her.

“Who is it?” Eli asked a second before spotting Paisley standing in the grass outside the side door. “Oh, hi, Paisley!” He noticed his mom looking off to the side and peeked his head out, seeing a boy standing there who he had never seen before. “Uhm. What’s up?”

“I told them you’re about to eat and can’t come out to play,” his mom said before anybody could answer.

Eli looked from his mom to Paisley, disappointed. “I guess we could hang out tomorrow.”

A high-pitched alarm went off somewhere in the house. “Shoot,” she said. “Have to check the food.”

She turned and quickly disappeared into the house. “Well, I guess I’ll see you guys.”

“Wait!” Paisley said. “We need to talk to you about something.”

“What’s that?” Eli asked.

Eli’s mom shouted for him to get inside. He looked into the house and then back at them, exasperation in his eyes.

“It’s very important,” Paisley said.

Eli heard his mom coming. “I’ll come by your house later tonight, all right?”

“When?” Paisley asked.

But Eli never had the chance to answer. His mother came up behind him. She huffed, “Eli, I said to get inside. Dinner is ready.”

Eli said goodbye and closed the door, leaving Paisley and Toby standing there, no closer to answers than before.

“Well, now what?” Paisley asked.

Toby was looking around the field, waiting for some sort of epiphany. One didn’t seem to be in a hurry to show up. There was one thing, but even thinking of it made him feel sick to his stomach. They could go back to the source. They could go ask Robert.

Their third destination would be their last. After this, neither of them had any other ideas. If Robert’s house yielded no results, they would just have to wait until later when Eli came over.

Toby spotted Robert’s house based on the one and only thing he knew about it, the Steelers flag fluttering in the breeze out front. It was yellow and black, and even though he knew nearly nothing about football, he did know who the Steelers were because of the area they lived in.

As they approached, Toby heard voices, more like shouts, coming from inside the house. He hesitated, standing at the base of the porch steps, wondering to himself if it was too late to turn back. For his family’s sake, he could not. He walked up to the door and knocked.

When he knocked, he didn’t think the lack of response had anything to do with someone creeping silently behind the door, as it were with Addison’s house, but rather, a literal inability to hear his knock. From where he stood, all he could hear from the other side of the door was screaming and crying. Despite the argument being very loud, he couldn’t make out anything the participants were saying. The two opposing voices were going at each other so intensely and the crying was so frequent that the words themselves were drowned out.

He knocked again, this time more of a pound. The arguing came to a sudden halt. Toby’s breathing suddenly sounded like loud booms, his chest heaving up and down, his heart pounding. He heard what he thought was the sound of a floorboard bending under weight behind the door. Then he heard what he thought—no, what he knew—were indistinct whispers.

The door swung open. A woman stood before him. Short and pudgy, she stared into his eyes, her own bloodshot and glossed over. He knew then where the crying had been coming from. Her lips perched and her teeth peeked out from between them like an angry wild animal.

Instinctively, he took a step back from the scathing woman. She acted as though she was going to step forward after him but stopped at the fringe of the door as if something unseen was forbidding her from exiting. A tear formed at the base of her eye and started moving downward, ready to break free and fall onto her already socked cheeks.

“You!” she hissed.

“I—I—was wondering if I could talk to Robert really quick. I’m a friend, Toby.”

“You are no friend!”

Her