She pulled her stiff fingers from where they’d cramped around the steering wheel. With trembling hands, she patted down her chest and thighs, making sure she was in one piece. Then she buried her face in them.

How could she be so stupid? She’d let her nerves get the better of her. She knew never to look away from the road while driving, especially at night. Her dad was going to lose it! And what if she’d totaled her truck? Wendy could’ve gotten herself killed—or worse, someone else.

Then she remembered the mass in the road.

Wendy’s breath caught in her throat. It could be a dead animal, but she knew in her gut it wasn’t. She twisted in her seat and tried to see out the back window, but the red glow of her taillights hardly lit up the outline of whatever she had almost run over.

Please don’t be a dead body.

Wendy struggled to untangle herself from the seat belt. She tumbled out of her truck and immediately looked to the woods. She took a few steps back, watching them cautiously. But they were silent and unmoving in the heavy summer air. The only sounds were the faint breeze through the leaves and her own labored breaths.

Tentatively, she peered at the front of her truck. It was pulled over onto the dirt shoulder of the road, the front bumper dangerously close to a thick tree, but still running. There was a dent in the hood from whatever had landed on it. The windshield was cracked—or, no, not cracked.

Were those scratches?

Wendy brushed her fingers over the lines. There were four of them parallel to one another in a long swipe. What could’ve done that? It hadn’t been a deer or a branch.

And what had she almost hit in the road? Her head snapped to look back over her shoulder to the mass in the middle of the road. It still hadn’t moved.

Wendy jogged toward the figure, trying to balance on the balls of her feet, so as to make as little sound as possible as she crept closer. She took each step slowly, willing her eyes to open wider, to adjust so she could see in the dark. She stood on her tiptoes and craned her neck to get a better look just as a cloud above shifted and a silvery glow was cast over the boy lying on his side.

A shudder racked Wendy’s body and she ran forward, falling to her knees beside him. Sharp gravel pressed through her jeans.

“Hello?” Her voice shook and her hands trembled, hovering over the boy, not knowing what to do. “Are you okay?”

Are you alive?

He let out a pained groan.