Night Runners

By Jessi Hammond

One year ago Hannah's older brother Tom died in a motorbike accident.

On the anniversary of his death, she returns to the bridge where it happened and finds two teenagers waiting for her; Cam, who doesn't talk, and Rylie, who seems to resent the fact that Hannah has seen them at all.

Dared into joining their Run, Hannah quickly realises her night has gone seriously weird.

How are they able to Run for so long – and so far – without feeling tired?

Who are the children that Rylie is Tracking – and how is she doing it?

How does Cam unlock doors with just a touch?

And why can't anyone see them?

But it isn't until Cam is forced to unveil his own strange, unsettling powers that Hannah finally starts to understand – and has to face her own past…

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kincaid Publishing
• Release date: Feb 2, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224378012

Book preview

About this book

One year ago Hannah’s older brother Tom died in a motorbike accident.

On the anniversary of his death, she returns to the bridge where it happened and finds two teenagers waiting for her; Cam, who doesn’t talk, and Rylie, who seems to resent the fact that Hannah has seen them at all.

Dared into joining their Run, Hannah quickly realises her night has gone seriously weird.

How are they able to Run for so long – and so far – without feeling tired?

Who are the children that Rylie is Tracking – and how is she doing it?

How does Cam unlock doors with just a touch?

And why can’t anyone see them?

But it isn’t until Cam is forced to unveil his own strange, unsettling powers that Hannah finally starts to understand – and has to face her own past…

Night Runners

One

Hannah leaned against the bridge’s guard rail, her arms folded across its cold steel, and stared down at the creek four metres below. It wasn’t much of a creek really, just a stretch of slow-moving water drifting sluggishly between steep banks and lit brownish-orange by the streetlights at either end of the two-lane bridge. Trees lined its top edge and long grass straggled across the bare dirt below, pale and washed-out in the sparse light.

There was nothing here now to show what had happened a year ago tonight when she and Tom had turned onto the bridge on their way home.

The wide swathe of scraped earth, of ripped-up grass leading to the creek, had grown over.

And this so-obviously new section of guard rail, right here where she was standing, had replaced the section that had given way when that stupid stupid fifteen-year-old driver in the stolen car had lost control –

She gripped the railing, the metal cold against her hands. Don’t think about him. Think about Tom. Think about the bike.

That’s why she was here. To remember the good things.

The bike was an old Honda 250cc, banged up, bent and with bits missing. Tom had bought it cheap at a garage sale. He and their step-father, Robert, had spent almost a year working on it, tearing it to pieces and building it up again. Robert was brilliant like that, so different to their own father. He and Tom were a lot alike; both of them could talk to anyone, make friends anywhere. Tom was planning on studying to be a paramedic when he finished Year Twelve.

He never got the chance.

And it was like he’d been the glue that held their blended family together, because after the funeral, things just started falling apart.

Hannah hadn’t noticed at first. Tom’s death had left her adrift, a ghost moving dazed through a world that no longer made sense. She knew Mum and Robert were just as devastated as she was, but they’d somehow managed to get past the grief. Maybe they had to, because baby Skye had been born six months ago and it was hard to feel sad around her.

Hannah had learned to fake it, pretending to be okay for their sake, but she still felt like she was bruised on the inside.

And Tom’s death had left her with no one to talk to about the colours.

Mum hadn’t believed her the few times she’d tried to tell her (she hadn’t said it, but parents were so fake sometimes), and Robert… Well, if Mum didn’t believe her, she kind of didn’t want him to think she was weird too.

Headlights brushed across the trees to her left, making their shadows shiver and dance across the water like spindly grey ghosts. Hannah darted to the end of the bridge and ducked around the guard rail, crouching out of sight just below road level where the bank sloped down to the creek.

She wasn’t stupid. She knew it was dangerous out here after dark, especially for a fourteen-year-old girl on her own, even out here in the suburbs.

But home was only three hundred metres down the road, and Hannah was a fast runner.

And she had to come out tonight, no matter what.

The lights flared bright and the car whizzed across the bridge toward her. She stayed still, grasping tufts of grass for balance, watching until its tail-lights had disappeared around the corner before she stood and climbed back up to the road.

The ambulance had stopped right here, where the road hit the bridge, its siren shrieking to an abrupt halt, its lights strobing across the bridge and the creek.

And here, barely five metres away… Hannah touched the new section of railing again, shivering. A year ago, the railing hadn’t been shiny and new. It had been ripped apart and twisted, its mangled ends hanging limply over the embankment, barely holding back the car…

The bike had been registered for three months, and Tom had had his licence for four weeks. Finally, finally, he’d agreed to let her come with him, but only late at night so there would be less traffic. And less chance of being caught, because it wasn’t exactly legal for him to have a passenger.

Those fifteen minutes had been absolutely legendary. Flying along the streets, her arms around Tom’s waist as they hugged the sixty-kilometre speed limit, the steady beat of the engine muffled by her helmet, the wind tugging at her arms and legs and madly fluttering her jacket. Then onto the bridge on the way home –

Hannah swallowed convulsively as her memory painted images onto the empty asphalt; the white car fishtailing toward them, lights swinging crazily as its driver fought to stop its skid, the scream rising in her own throat as Tom threw the bike onto the wrong side of the road in a desperate attempt to scrape past. She remembered the fleeting glimpse of white faces with black-circle screaming mouths barely a metre from her own as the car hit them side-on, slamming them through the guard rail ahead of it and sending the bike and its two passengers into a sickening, twisting, turning cartwheel down the embankment into the water. Hannah could still see the car hanging over the drop as she fell away from it, front wheels still spinning as it rocked back and forth.

How it stayed there, how it didn’t plunge after them into the creek, she didn’t know.

Somehow Hannah had been flung clear of the tangle of Tom and the bike, tumbling with agonising force down the embankment, grass slashing at her face. The world had shattered into roaring engine, the dull-and-sharp crumps of twisting and tearing metal as the bike bounced once, twice, then slid down the rest of the bank and hit the water with a massive splash.

After that was silence, broken by running footsteps as the cowards in the other car ran away.

Someone living nearby had heard the crash, called the cops and an ambulance. They found Hannah, the agony of a fractured leg masked by adrenalin, desperately searching the edge of the creek for Tom.

The police found his body the next day, submerged beneath the water two hundred metres away.

‘Miss you, Tom…’ whispered Hannah, and rubbed fiercely at her eyes before the tears could spill down her cheeks. She pulled in a shaking breath and held it, pushing the rage and sorrow back down.

They’d caught the car thieves, all under sixteen and drunk.

It didn’t help.

Tom was still gone and none of those kids had gone to jail.

They got off free, while her life was still a mess.

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t bloody fair!

Two

Rylie lay in her bunk bed in the room she shared with her two sisters and tried to sleep. Usually it was easy; she was used to her younger sister Felicia’s snuffles and twitches from the bunk below her, and she had learnt to sleep through the slight noises her older sister Sandy made as she came in later.

But tonight every little sound seemed to be