Ollie froze. It sounded like a huge dog breathing. Definitely not the sound of a scarecrow. The steps were getting closer. Ollie crept between two stalks of corn and hid.
A creature came snuffling down the long line of the maze.
Ollie didn’t realize she was biting her lip until she tasted blood. It was a dog—sort of. It had a coat the color of mushrooms, a snout like a hound, paws like a cat, and eyes of a perfect egg white. Its sides went in and out, and its breathing was louder than the cornstalks. It made Ollie think of the minotaur in the labyrinth.
The beast came closer, growling low in its chest. It paused. Sniffed the air. Sniffed again. Its ears swiveled towards Ollie, and then it peered between the cornstalks and saw her.
She stared into eyes white as two cooked eggs and she could barely breathe.
The beast didn’t move. But it growled again. “Come out, little girl. Come out.” Talking. Like a person. The ege of a fang just showed beheath its lip.
Ollie tried to think. Those eyes. That voice. Were they—were they familiar? She’d seen egg-white eyes before. Seen them pressed up against a bus window. Watching her. Just like they were doing now.
At night they’ll come for the rest of you.
She swallowed. And then she spoke, squeaking. “Are you—are you the bus driver?”
The beast didn’t answer directly. But it’s mouth dropped open, panting. She saw the red tongue, the red lips.
“Come out,” the beast whispered again, and this time reached out a stealthy, clawed foot.
Ollie jumped back, and then on a surge of fear and desperation, wrenched around and dug into her backpack. She scrabbled in her lunch box and on a burst of courage, thrust her way out of the corn, held out two of her dad’s peanut butter cookies and said, “Don’t you dare touch me. I gave you food once before. Do you want some more?”
She hoped she was right. She prayed she was right. Her hand holding the cookies shook.
The beast had stepped back. It shut its mouth and eyed her. Its tongue flicked out, as though tasting the air. He licked his chops. His tongue darted toward the cookies.
Ollie stepped back. “No,” she said. “You have to trade me for it. Remember?”
Silence. Then a hoarse, deep voice crept out between the beast’s teeth. “What trade, little girl?”
If her classmates were scarecrows, Ollie thought a little hysterically, then it wasn’t too strange that their bus driver was a giant wolf-creature.
Ollie said, “Where are my friends?”
“Lost,” said the wolf. “Lost until dark, and then—scarecrows.”
Ollie broke off a piece of cookie and fed it to him. He licked it up with surprising delicacy.
“Do you know where they are?”
“Yes.”
She fed him another piece, thinking. Her watch would get her to the center of the maze. But Brian and Coco...
Ollie closed her fist on the remains of her cookies. She said, “I’ll give you the rest—I’ll give you all the food I have—if you go find my two friends, Brian and Coco, and bring them to the center of the maze. Before dark. If,” Ollie added hastily, “you don’t hurt them on the way.”
“It won’t help,” breathed the creature. “Even if you all get to the center. What he has, he holds.”
“We’ll see,” said Ollie, and held out her cookies.
The creature snapped them up, then practically inhaled the rest of her food. Ollie, a little forlornly, put her empty lunch box back in her backpack, hoping she’d done the right thing. The beast licked his chops. “He doesn’t feed me good things,” he said. “Only souls, sometimes. The used-up ones, dry as dead corn.”
Without another word, the creature turned and stalked away.
—
It was almost dark when the corn finally ended. Ollie found herself at the edge of an open space.
