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Chapter 1: I See a Familiar Face
I knew things were getting weird when I saw my best friend’s face in the campfire. I didn’t realize how weird until the campfire followed me home.
Yeah, I know how that sounds. I can hear your mom whispering right now, “Back away slowly from the crazy girl, and when I give the signal, run for dear life!”
Probably that’s what I should have done. Run for dear life. Or at least closed my blinds and hidden under the covers. But instead, when I saw that flicker of flame in the woods behind the barn, I sneaked downstairs, shoved on some shoes, put a poncho over my pyjamas, and went out into the rain to get a closer look.
My name is Samantha Anastasia MacReady: Sam for short. I’m thirteen years old and am in Grade 8 at Engelmann Middle School in the not-so-thriving metropolis of Limberpine, Alberta. And honest, I promise I’m not a crazy girl. Sure, I was a little freaked out the night my friend’s face showed up in the fire—but I was freaked out anyway.
See, school was supposed to start in a few days, and that meant I would be taking Dr. Ballard’s Grade 8 science class, and that felt seriously weird because I was one of only two survivors of Dr. Ballard’s Grade 7 science class.
The grown-ups called it “The Tragedy,” complete with capital letters, in a whisper, at least when I was around—they seemed to think if they didn’t talk about “The Tragedy” out loud, I might not remember that a bunch of my friends—including my best friend—had vanished into thin air.
It happened last May. While I was spending some quality time in the bathroom puking up everything I’d eaten since Grade 3, courtesy of a bad burrito, the other twenty members of my Grade 7 science class piled into a small school bus and headed up Mount Mollard for an overnight camping-trip-and-astronomy-adventure.
But they never reached the campground. The police found the bus lying on its side ten metres off the road. Dr. Ballard, still buckled into the driver’s seat, was out cold. So was Meg Leblanc, who had only started at the school after Christmas and I’d hardly ever said two words to. She turned up at the back of the bus, buried in sleeping bags.
Every other kid had disappeared without a trace. Literally. Not so much as a footprint—weird because the ground was muddy. Even weirder, all their stuff was still in the bus—even their cellphones, and since most of them took their cellphones everywhere, including into the bathroom, that seemed a sure sign of foul play.
A busload of kids vanishing under mysterious circumstances is like catnip to cable news. It had everything! Pathetic parents. Sobbing siblings. Valiant volunteers. Hovering helicopters. For days, Limberpine crawled with camera crews from CBC and Global and CTV and Fox and CNN and ABC and NBC and networks I’d never heard of. I think the Home Shopping Network turned up at one point.
Anchorpersons in heavy makeup prowled the streets like bears trawling a mountain path for unwary hikers. I don’t think anybody in town escaped being interviewed—not even me, but after I said a bunch of words thirteen-year-old girls aren’t supposed to say on television and tried to kick the anchor-thing, they left me alone. (Meg Leblanc didn’t kick anybody, as far as I know, but all they ever got out of her were grunts and monosyllables, so pretty soon they left her alone, too.)
After about ten days, the media frenzy fizzled out. Some celebrity announced she was either marrying or divorcing another celebrity—I forget which—and just like that, we were Old News.
The rest of the world moved on. We couldn’t. We were stuck with what had happened and had to try to deal with it. I mostly dealt with it by moping and throwing things and binge-watching anime. That’s probably why Dad decided he needed to get us both out of the house.
“We’ll go camping,” he said. “Up at Lake Stickleback. It’ll be fun.”
So we went camping. It wasn’t fun. It was cold. It started raining before we even had our tents up. And the campground didn’t even have an outhouse.
Did I mention it was cold? And raining? Nothing says “having a good time” like trying to pee behind a bush in the woods when your goosebumps have goosebumps, and there’s something rustling in the bushes.
I was tempted to steal Dad’s truck, figure out how to drive it (how hard could it be?), and head home the minute we got there, but apparently, the great province of Alberta thinks twelve-almost-thirteen is too young to drive. (How unfair is that?) So I was stuck until Dad agreed we should go home. Which he didn’t. He thought we would bond through shared misery. I don’t know if we bonded, but we definitely mildewed.
Thankfully, it was only for two nights. The second day, it stopped raining, at least, although since the sun didn’t come out and the fog lingered, it didn’t exactly warm up or dry out. Fortunately, even though the campground was an outhouse-free zone, it had dry firewood stored in a shed, so at least we were able to get a fire going. Sitting around it that second night roasting hot dogs and marshmallows, I almost convinced myself I was having fun . . . right up until I remembered that my friends had never gotten the chance to sit around their campfire last spring. Suddenly, the marshmallows didn’t taste as sweet.
That night, I had trouble sleeping, like I had all summer. When I finally dozed off, I woke up almost right away because I thought I heard someone call my name.
Sam?
It was barely a whisper.
“Dad?” I said—softly because I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t want to wake him up if I’d just been dreaming.
I didn’t hear my name again. Instead, I heard something else—the crackle of fire. And I could see it, too, an orange, flickering glow through the thin nylon of my tent.
I scrambled out of my sleeping bag and stuck my head out through the tent flap.
Our campfire was blazing, flames jumping four feet in the air, and that was wrong because I’d seen Dad put it out and stir the ashes before we’d gone to bed.
And then I heard my name again, only this time I knew where it was coming from—not from the direction of Dad’s tent, but from the campfire.
It’s a dream, I thought.
But I could smell smoke and feel the heat on my face and the ground pressing into my knees. I crawled out, and when I stood up, the knees of my pyjamas were wet, and my bare feet were cold in the dewy grass.
Heart pounding, I approached the fire, step by slow step. The flames died down as I got closer. I looked down into the fire pit . . .
. . . and that’s when I saw the face. It looked like a mask made of glass and filled with flames, but I recognized it instantly all the same.
It was the face of my best friend, Lorenzo.
There was no way I wouldn’t know his face. We used to live side by side on the same street. We’d known each other since we learned to walk. We played together in each other’s backyard. We started school together, did homework together, spent our summers together.
Then, when I was eight, Mom got sick, and she never got better. She died when I was nine, and Dad moved us out to a new house (new to us, it’s at least a hundred years old) right on the edge of town because he couldn’t bear to keep living in the old house anymore.
Neither could I.
Even after we moved, though, I saw Lorenzo all the time because Limberpine isn’t big. As in really not big. You can bicycle anywhere in ten minutes, and of course, we were still in the same school and the same grade. So we kept being best friends, right through elementary school, and into middle school, and . . .
. . . and he had been on the bus last May.
I stared at his fiery face. He stared back. His lips moved, and I thought I heard my name again, but I couldn’t make out anything else, just the crackle and whisper of flame.
Then his eyes got wide, and his mouth opened wide, and he screamed, a high-pitched hissing sound, like the sound of sap sizzling in a log in the fire, and I screamed, too. “Lorenzo!”
And then, suddenly, Dad was beside me, pouring a bucket of water on the fire, and Lorenzo’s face disappeared with the rest of the campfire in a cloud of steam . . . but I thought I heard him screaming a second or two longer in the hissing vapour.
Furious, I yelled at Dad, “Why’d you do that?”
He couldn’t figure out why I was upset. I stormed back into my tent, and I’m not ashamed to say I cried in my pillow, although, unfortunately, I didn’t cry myself to sleep. I stayed awake almost all the rest of the night, which didn’t help my mood in the morning. Especially since, by then, it had started raining again.
We drove home in surly silence and ate in grumpy gloom, and I went to bed early.
I was sure I’d fall asleep the minute I lay down. My bed’s way comfier than a sleeping bag on the ground, and the last two nights’ sleep had been lousy. But I couldn’t. In my head I kept seeing what I’d seen the night before, like I was watching a YouTube video over and over. Hearing my name. Leaving the tent. Lorenzo’s face in the fire. And then his terrible scream . . .
I dozed off at last, but every few minutes, I’d wake up and roll over. I’d hit my pillow with my fists to plump it up. Then I’d flip it over to get the cool side. Then I’d doze off, wake up, and do it again.
I was doing it for about the twelfth time when I suddenly realized that the wall of my room was flickering with orange light. Firelight. Just like the light that had flickered on my tent walls the night before.
I scrambled out of bed, caught my foot in the covers, fell with a thump, fought my way free, and finally reached the window. Flames danced in the woods, out past the old barn where Dad stores his beloved (but rusty) 1967 Mustang GT. A campfire, it looked like, but nobody camps in the thick woods at the base of Mount Mollard, and certainly not by our barn. Nothing should be burning out there unless the forest was on fire, and it clearly wasn’t.
For one thing, it was still drizzling rain.
Sam?
I yelped and spun toward the door, thinking Dad had heard me fall and come to check on me. But there was nobody there.
Sam?
The voice—Lorenzo’s voice—was only in my head.
Maybe last night’s voice had only been in my head, too.
I’m not crazy, I told myself fiercely.
Of course not, myself answered. Not crazy at all. Just seeing things and hearing things. And talking to yourself.
I told myself to shut up.
Maybe if I’d been smart enough to tell myself it was a dream, smart enough to jump back into bed, I would have fallen asleep. If I had, I probably never would have seen the fire again . . . or heard Lorenzo’s voice again.
Instead, two minutes later, I was heading out the back door, the rain pattering on my poncho, that impossible fire still flickering in the woods ahead of me . . . and still calling my name.
Sam . . . Sam!
Chapter 2: I Meet a Hot Boy
As I walked through the drizzle across the wet grass, the fire grew clearer—and weirder. The tips of the leaping flames were level with my eyes! Any ordinary fire shooting five feet into the air in the trees behind our barn would have set the woods on fire by now, rain or no rain, but this one just stood there, in one place, like a pillar . . .
. . . no, like a person!
I suddenly realized that’s what I was seeing—a person made of fire!—and my heart leaped, and I broke into a run because I recognized this burning boy, from the way he stood, from the way he was looking at me, from a million different things.
Lorenzo!
I wanted to throw my arms around him, but that seemed like a really, really bad idea since I could feel the heat radiating off him from ten feet away and hear the raindrops sizzling on his hot . . . um . . . skin? I skidded to a halt in the wet grass and stared at him. My pulse pounded in my ears. “Lorenzo?” I whispered.
His face still looked like a glass mask filled with fire. The rest of his body was less distinct, legs and arms and torso just kind of suggested by the swirl of flame and smoke, which was probably just as well since for obvious reasons, he wasn’t wearing clothes.
“Sam! At last!” It was Lorenzo’s voice, but distorted, hissing and crackling like Dad’s old vinyl records.
Dad! I shot a nervous glance over my shoulder. If Dad saw a fire out behind the barn, he’d come rushing out with another bucket of water. “Can you move?” I asked Lorenzo.
“Yes. Why?”
“We need to get out of sight of the house. This way.”
I hurried a few feet to my right, fire-Lorenzo gliding across the ground behind me, putting the black bulk of the barn between us and the house’s dark windows. The light of his burning body made my shadow dance behind me on the barn wall. I finally asked the all-important question. “What happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said after a moment.
I stared at his flaming face. “What do you mean, you don’t know? How can you not know how you turned into a walking campfire?”
“I mean, I don’t know how he did it,” Lorenzo said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
This was getting us nowhere. “Do you remember what happened to the bus?”
“Kind of. I was looking at my phone. I felt the bus start to tip over. Everyone was screaming. After that . . . it’s a blank.”
“Did you hit your head?”
“I don’t think so.”
“And when you woke up, you were all . . . um . . . flamey?”
“No. When I woke up, I was in a bed. And locked up in a room.”
“Like a cell?”
“More like a dorm room. There’s a desk and a chair and it has its own little bathroom with a sink and a toilet and a shower.”
“A dorm room?” I blinked. “It’s a school? Any idea where?”
“No. There aren’t even any windows.”
“Is that where you are right now?”
“Yes,” he said. His fiery face scrunched up. “My parents must think I’m dead.”
“They think you’re missing,” I said firmly. “Nobody knows what happened to any of you.” But yeah, they think you’re dead. I didn’t say that out loud. Lorenzo probably felt bad enough. Or maybe he didn’t feel anything at all. How did that work, exactly, without glands and a brain and all that other gooey inside-the-body stuff? “So what happened after you woke up?”
“I banged on the door. I shouted. I could hear other kids shouting and screaming, but faintly—we couldn’t talk to each other. I lay back down. I . . . I cried. Eventually, I fell asleep again. I woke up when the door opened. A man came in. He was wearing a lab coat and a mask, but not a surgical mask.”
“Then what kind was it?”
“More like a hockey goalie mask. It covered his whole face.”
“A goalie mask?” I’d streamed an old horror movie called Friday the Thirteenth when I was nine when Mom was in the hospital and Dad was with her. (Without telling Dad, natch. He never would have let me. He would have had a point: I had nightmares for a week about being chased by a killer in a goalie mask.)
Lorenzo nodded. “All I could see was the glint of his eyes.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing.” Fire-Lorenzo shuddered, flames dancing as though in a strong breeze, though not a breath of air stirred the leaves around us. A brief flash lit the clouds, and a few seconds later, thunder grumbled. The drizzle had almost stopped, but another storm would arrive soon.
“Nothing?” What kind of useless villain didn’t lay out his whole plan to his victim in excruciating detail?
“No. He just walked over to the bed. That’s when I found out it had straps on it. He strapped me down. I tried to struggle, but he was too strong.
“Then, he reached out and touched my head. And then . . .” His voice faded, and his flames, too, so for a moment, he looked no brighter than a dying coal in our fireplace. “It felt like he was pulling my insides out through my ears,” he said at last, his voice little more than the crackling whisper of a burning twig.
“It hurt?”
“Not exactly. It was just . . . weird. Wrong. Kind of . . . disgusting. Like I’d touched something slimy. Like that day at the pond.”
I remembered that. We’d gone swimming in a pool at the base of Mount Mollard, formed by a stream tumbling down the rocks from up above. Lorenzo had suddenly started shrieking and splashed out of the pool like he was being chased by a . . . well, by a killer in a goalie mask. He said he’d stepped on something awful.
Turned out it was a dead something-or-other. With fur. We couldn’t really recognize it.
We stuck to the town swimming pool after that.
“I don’t know how long it went on. When it finally stopped, the man unstrapped me and then walked out without saying a word. And I ran into the bathroom and threw up.” His voice dropped even lower, so low I had to strain to hear it. “But a few hours later, he came back and did it again. And again, a few hours after that. And again after that. And the . . . fourth time, maybe? Or fifth? . . . it was different. All that awful sick-making sliminess stopped, and suddenly, I was . . .” He gestured at his burning body. “Like this. Standing in the corner of the room. Only for a minute or two. Then I was back in my real body. The man got up, nodded, unstrapped me, and walked out again.” He sighed. “And I threw up again.”
“And in between, he just . . . left you there? What about food?”
“There’s also a woman,” Lorenzo said. “She wears a lab coat, too, and a mask, but just an ordinary surgical mask, you know, like people wore during the pandemic. She brings food. Mostly sandwiches, baloney or ham, mainly. Chips. An apple or banana. A piece of cheese. A couple of bottles of water.”
“Couldn’t you try to escape when she comes in?”
Lorenzo shook his head. “She doesn’t open the door unless I’m standing on the far side of the room. She puts the tray just inside the door, and I have to leave it there when I’m done.”
I couldn’t speak. Lorenzo carried on. “Anyway. The man kept coming back, doing . . . whatever he did. I’m almost got used to it. I quit throwing up. And every time he did it, I was like this for longer.”
“Couldn’t you have . . . done something to him? I mean, you’re the Human Torch!”
“He . . . controls me. Or at least keeps me from doing anything he doesn’t want me to. It’s hard to explain. It’s like a—a pressure. In my head.”
“But . . .” I stared at him. “Then how are you here?”
“As I began staying this way longer, I started noticing things I didn’t the first time. One was a . . . a line of fire. In my head. Stretching from me to . . . well, I didn’t know. I just knew I could follow it if I could get free. But that pressure he put on me . . . I couldn’t do anything while he was in the room. I could only move if he allowed me to move, and all he would allow me to do was walk around the room.
“But I got to thinking: if he could turn me into whatever I am, maybe I could do it myself. And since I had nothing else to do, I started trying.
“At first, I couldn’t make it happen. I couldn’t get the knack of it. But then, all of a sudden, after he hadn’t been in for a couple of days, I felt this kind of . . . click, I guess? . . . inside my head, and suddenly there I was, burning, standing in the corner of the room, looking at my unconscious body—and at that line of fire in my head. I kind of took hold of it, and when I did, I suddenly realized that you were at the other end. So I followed it. And the next thing I knew, I was in your campfire.”
Lightning flashed again; the thunder followed much sooner this time. The wind hissed in the trees and plucked at my hair. It began to drizzle, then to rain again in earnest. Lorenzo almost vanished behind clouds of steam. I pulled the poncho tighter around my pyjama-clad body and folded my arms over my chest to keep it in place. I was glad of Lorenzo’s heat: my front was warm, but my back was freezing. “And I’m the only one you have this . . . this ‘line of fire’ to?”
“Yes,” Lorenzo said.
“But why were you just a face in the fire? Why weren’t you a complete body, like now?”
“I think I was too far away from my real body up in the mountains. Only part of me was there. I tried to talk to you, but then someone poured a bucket of cold water all over me, and just like that, I was back in my real body.”
I winced. “Dad. Sorry about that.”
“Tonight, I finally got another chance. I followed the thread again, but I stopped myself out here. I didn’t want to set your house on fire.” His flames flickered, and his voice faded again to a crackling whisper. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay. My body eventually pulls me back. I can feel it pulling me now. And the rain is starting to put me out.”
Panic rose in me. “But I don’t know what to do! How do I help you?”
“Find me. The real me. My real body. Find me. Free me. The man . . . he’s started forcing me to stay outside of my body longer than I want to. I think . . .” His flames dimmed to a dull red glow. “ . . . I’m sure that someday, maybe soon, he’s going to be able to keep me out of my body permanently. If he does that . . . I think my real body will die, and I’ll be like this forever. And if I lose my real body . . . how long will I still be me? How long will I still be Lorenzo?”
“Let me get Dad,” I said. “He’ll know what to—”
“No!” Lorenzo’s flames brightened, and his voice strengthened, almost roared. “He’ll go to the police or tell someone, and if the man found out, he’d either make me this way permanently or kill me trying to do it. I’m sure of it.”
“What about the other kids? Is he doing this to them, too?”
“I don’t know,” Lorenzo said. “I still hear kids yelling, but I can’t make out any words. Maybe some of the others can talk to each other, but . . .” In the rain, his fire body hissed like an angry cat. The momentary brightness had already faded, and so had his voice. “I can’t stay much longer!” he whispered. “Sam, promise you’ll help me—all of us. Promise!”
“But how do I even start?” I cried.
“Did anyone make it back from the wreck?” Both his flames and his voice had almost vanished now. I had to strain to make out his hissing, crackling words.
“Mr. Ballard,” I said. “And Meg. Meg LeBlanc.”
“Ask them,” Lorenzo said. “Ask them what happened. Maybe they saw . . . aaaaaah!” His cry sounded no louder than a mosquito’s buzz. He reached out to me with his burning, steam-wreathed arms. I flinched back—I couldn’t help it—and then he collapsed in on himself, like a candle flame being snuffed, and just like that, he was gone.
But he wasn’t really gone. Maybe none of the kids were.
My heart pounded in my chest as I stared at the place he had stood. Then and there, I made up my mind: whatever it took, I would get Lorenzo back!
If I didn’t catch pneumonia. The rain suddenly became a downpour, and my poncho, it turned out, leaked. In seconds, I was soaked to the skin, my pyjamas clinging to me like wet toilet paper.
I dashed back to the house, bare feet splashing on the soaked lawn. Shivering in my bedroom, I stripped off the sodden pyjamas, pulled on a flannel nightgown I usually only wore in winter, and burrowed under my covers. Just in time: I heard Dad’s door open and the click of a light switch. A bright band of illumination sprang to life beneath my bedroom door. A second later I heard it ease open. But I had my eyes closed and did my best to impersonate a soundly sleeping kid until the door clicked closed once more.
A minute later, it wasn’t an impersonation.
