Free Creed by Trisha Leaver

my father. And as for your car, well, that’s not going anywhere.”
    “Your father?” I asked. My hands were shaking, my voice a strangled whisper.
    Luke instantly reacted, wrapping his hand around my shoulder and pulling me into his side. I don’t know what he whispered into my ear; I wasn’t paying attention, but I knew from his tone that it was meant to be reassuring. It wasn’t.
    I closed my eyes tight, the hammering of my heart suddenly drowning out everything around me. We were at his mercy, this Joseph kid who’d come out of nowhere. This boy whose blank look haunted me like each bruise my father had left behind. He may have been my age, and we both may have suffered a broken arm or two courtesy of our fathers, but this kid was nothing, nothing , like me.
    “What are you not telling us?” I mumbled.
    “It’s not easy to explain,” Joseph said, and I squeezed Luke’s hand, a billion horrible thoughts racing through my mind. Inbred townspeople. Radioactive mutations. Axe-wielding nut jobs. The possibilities were endless and insanely idiotic.
    “Try,” Mike said. “Because I want to know exactly what you meant when you said our car’s ‘not going anywhere.’”
    “The car is the least of your problems,” Joseph replied. “But if you can trust me for five minutes, I’ll show you.”

ELEVEN
    We followed Joseph, not because we were stupid or we’d suddenly decided to trust him. We did it because we needed answers, and following him seemed like the only way to get them.
    We cut through the backyard of his house and skirted the edge of the dying fields before Joseph led us into the stalks. I think he intended to hide our movements in the fields, which meant I had to trust that whatever lay on the other side of the decaying stalks was friendly.
    On the surface, it made sense, but I was having no part of it. I needed a clear view not only of him, but of the town I feared would come roaring back to life. Luke’s fascination with D-list movies had taught me well. I’d take my chances with the silent town rather than risk dancing with some machete-wielding nutcase.
    I stopped dead in my tracks, Luke coming to a halt beside me. “I can’t see the road if we’re walking through the fields. I want to see the road.”
    “I agree,” Luke said.
    “There’s a slight chance he doesn’t know you’re here yet,” Joseph reasoned. “If that’s true, you’d do best to keep it that way. I get that she’s scared, and I have no intention of hurting her, of hurting any of you. I can help you, but you need to trust me on this. We need to stay clear of the road.”
    “Unless you got a can of gas or a speed pass out of this place, then there isn’t a damn thing you can do to help us,” Mike fired back.
    “Gas is not what you need,” Joseph mumbled, and I wondered what he meant by that. I planned on asking, but he started talking again before I got the chance. “Fine, we’ll move closer to the road. We can cut a path three or four rows in. That should be close enough for you to see the street, but it’ll give us enough cover that … ”
    “That what?” I wanted to know what was out there, what he was so afraid of.
    “Nothing,” Joseph said as the blank mask he was so fond of wearing settled back into place. “We should be fine.”
    We headed back toward the edge of the field. There were only three miserable rows of dying, waist-high stalks to conceal us. When the backside of the buildings started taking shape and I could make out the closed sign in a store’s window, I relented and took a step farther into the fields. There was something about those darkened windows that had me wanting more than three feet of dead crops between me and them.
    “You taking us back into town?” Luke asked. It wasn’t a question; more of a subtle warning.
    “No,” Joseph replied.
    “Then where?” Mike asked, obviously annoyed. “Cuz there’s nothing but fields for miles. You can’t tell me there’s a phone