The first sign that something was wrong — and not just normal, town-is-rotting-around-us wrong — was the chicken.

  More specifically: the chicken that exploded.

  Not in a boom kind of way. More in a why does this chicken have three eyeballs and a gurgling noise coming from its chest cavity kind of way.

  Alex found it first.

  She was taking a shortcut behind Hannah’s trailer, hopping over a fence with her Walkman blasting Blondie, when she spotted it.

  “Holy hell,” she muttered, pulling off her headphones.

  The chicken was twitching, one leg spasming, body bloated like it’d swallowed a beach ball and a car battery.

  Then it stopped moving.

  Then it blinked.

  Then it smiled.

  Alex screamed so hard a buzzard fell out of a tree.

  By lunchtime, the entire crew had gathered in the scrapyard, hovering around the corpse like it was a sacred artifact.

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  “I vote we burn it,” said Peppa, poking it with a screwdriver. “Maybe twice.”

  “That is not a chicken,” whispered Bug.

  “It was a chicken,” Mason muttered, kneeling beside it. “Now it’s… I dunno. A science project from hell.”

  “Maybe it’s a prank?” said Hannah, ever the optimist. “Like… one of those weird hippies just put a fake chicken out here?”

  Daisy shook her head slowly, shuffling a deck of tarot-sized VHS cards. “Nah. This town doesn’t do jokes. Just curses.”

  “Then what the hell is it?” asked Peppa.

  Bug didn’t answer. She was staring at something beyond the trees.

  Later that night, Peppa found her there again — behind the garage, flashlight flickering, staring at the old well.

  Nobody talked about the well. Not anymore.

  Not since the ground around it started cracking. Not since the last time a noise came out of it that sounded like a child laughing backwards.

  Peppa crept up beside her, dragging a half-broken radio antenna.

  “Whatcha looking at?” she asked.

  Bug didn’t blink. “It hums.”

  Peppa frowned. “The well?”

  Bug nodded. “It’s not water in there anymore.”

  Peppa felt the back of her neck go cold.

  “I’ve been hearing it in the wires,” Bug added. “It talks through things. Sometimes through radios. Sometimes through teeth.”

  Peppa opened her mouth. Closed it again.

  She wasn’t sure what freaked her out more — what Bug said, or the fact that she’d finally said anything.

  Inside the caravan, the others were arguing about Jaws versus Star Wars when the radio flickered.

  “Turn that crap off,” said Tanktop Tony, chewing on a toothpick.

  “No one touched it,” Mason said, backing away.

  The radio buzzed. Then hissed.

  Then in a voice that wasn’t a voice, it whispered:

  “They’re watching. The well remembers. Run.”

  The room fell silent.

  The fox under Daisy’s jacket hissed.

  Bug, from the garage, smiled for real this time — not kindly.

  Just knowingly.

  Like the game had started.

  And no one had read the rules.