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“There is another car out there,” I say. “With a—a leg in it.”

“Of course there is. You need to set that up, in case we insist on seeing it. There’s a car and a fake leg in it.”

“You wanna come out and have a look?” Henry asks. “See how fake it is?”

“No, I want you to admit it was a prank for a video. It failed, and your best bet is to stop acting and hope we accept an apology.”

“Tell me about this old man,” the bartender says to us.

Caleb spins on him. “There was no old man. Are you listening to me?”

“No, because I know this isn’t a video prank. Therefore, I’m asking.” He turns to Henry. “The old guy was pinned. You two went to get the crowbar…”

“He was screaming,” Henry says. “Then he stopped, and we thought he passed out.”

“Screaming?” Caleb says. “The crash is less than a half mile away. Wouldn’t we have heard him screaming? Or heard the crash?”

The bartender shrugs. “When I redid the interior, I had them put in top-notch soundproofing. We didn’t hear your crash either.” He looks at Henry. “Then what?”

“We didn’t rush back to his car. Like I said, we didn’t realize anything was wrong. The poor guy had been screaming since before we left him—panicked and in shock. But when we got there, the door was open, and he was gone.”

“Except for his leg,” Caleb intones in a sonorous voice-over. “His severed leg.”

“Kid?” the bartender says. “I’m going to ask you to shut the fuck up now.”

Caleb turns. “‘Kid’? How old are you?”

“Old enough not to act like a freaked-out little boy listening to campfire stories.”

“I am the opposite of freaked out. I am explaining what’s really—”

“No, you’re that little boy who stands up at the campfire and starts shooting off his mouth so no one realizes he’s scared shitless.”

Caleb takes a step toward the bar, but Henry gets in his path, palms raised to defuse the situation. Noemi tugs the back of Caleb’s shirt and whispers to him.

“I am telling you what we experienced,” Henry says slowly. “You don’t have to believe it. You don’t have to do anything. In fact, I’m going to strongly suggest you do nothing. Sit here with the rest of us and wait for daybreak or cell service.”

“You can’t tell me what—”

“Holy shit,” the bartender says. “Really, kid? You just tried to say this is all staged for a prank video. If it is, then how boring would it be if you followed Henry’s advice? A video of you and your girlfriend just sitting here, waiting.” He turns to Henry. “So when you got back to this old guy’s car, it was empty.”

“Right. We could see drag marks on the shoulder. And blood. We followed it in, and we shouted, but the trail ended.”

“And you just came back to the bar?” Caleb says.

“The trail ended,” Henry says firmly. “Also…” He glances my way. “There’s something in the forest. Earlier, before the guy hit, we were trying to block the road. We couldn’t get into Ellie’s trunk to get the hazard signs, so we thought about putting fallen branches on the road to slow someone down.”

“That’s a good idea,” Noemi murmurs.

He gives her a quarter smile. “It was Ellie’s. The problem was a lack of fallen branches. It was a thunderstorm, not a windstorm. We had to go into the forest looking for branches. We saw … things.”

“What kind of things?”

Henry’s gaze slides to me, and I know he’s not going to answer that. Caleb already thinks we’re pranking him, and our story won’t help.

“There was a dog’s paw print in the old man’s blood,” I say. “A huge one. And we saw things moving in the forest. We didn’t dare go far.”

“Oh shit.” The bartender’s eyes round. “The dog pack.”