I dusted my palms and sat down on the dirty ground with a sigh.

We had been digging around the poison ivy plant that had the number three as a letter for a couple of hours now. Doing that with a shovel wasn't easy work so you could imagine how it was as we dug our fingers into the soil like dogs looking for their buried bones.

We had probably dug up to like two feet and I was feeling a little hopeless about the whole thing until Peter shrieked.

“Found it!” He pulled a slightly muddy piece of note out of the soil and dusted the sand off of it.

“This is crazy!” he decided, unfolding it immediately. I sat there and the girls knelt down, waiting patiently for him to read the note.

“I carried the treasure on the waters
It was a misfortune, we left it to sink
With a last glance at the yellow red leaves
I marched off with so much to think”

“What do you think?” he asked to no one in particular.

“Something about the river or the lake probably, about something under it?” I said, picking grains of sand from my fingernails.

“Yeah but I think it's in another lake,” Michelle pointed out.

“Another lake?”

“According to the note, maybe, yeah,” she said with a shrug.

“What do you mean?”

“Well from what you read it's not the lake we usually go to. I know that because of the ‘yellow-red’ leaves part. There are no orange leaves at the lake you guys know.”

“There's another lake?" Peter asked.

“Uh huh. A few days before you guys got here, I went there. There are lots of orange bushes lining the edge of the water."

“How come we've never seen it before and you've never told us about it?”

“I don't know, it wasn't necessary I guess.”

Peter nodded slowly. After a moment of silence, he groaned and got up, sticking the note into his back pocket.

“Alright, but I need something to eat now.”

He turned and started to walk back, his gait slow like a slug’s. I followed him and walked beside him while the girls followed us behind.

They stopped before we got to the shed and when we asked, Michelle mummured something about wildflowers.

“Hmm,” Peter mumbled as we walked back to the shed.

“What?”

He leaned on the door.

“She's been cheerier today.”

I didn't reply.

“What happened between you two yesterday?”

“What happened…?”

He raised a brow at me. I stared back at him. We had a short staring contest.

“Fine. I…wanted to be alone last night so I walked off and she…cau–saw me. " I glanced briefly at my arm. The cut wasn't very noticeable, thankfully, and was already healing.

"I don't know why she was stalking me. She tried to talk to me but I wasn't listening. And then we heard the buzzing sound and–”

“Again?”

“Yeah…so we came back to the shed. Nothing really much happened,” I finished with a shrug.

He plucked something out of his eyelashes. “I just don't get you guys' story.”

“What's there to know? She liked me, I liked her, I told her I couldn't be with her, she got mad, said shit about me and my dead family, I don't want to have anything to do with her again. The end. Well, except for this clue hunt.”

“And it's just going to be like that?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Okie dokie,” he said with a sigh and pushed himself off the door.

“Where are you going?”

“Food.”

“Right behind you."

"Grab your backpack."

***

We all met up on the way. Michelle was holding a bunch of wildflowers. Tanya had one in her hair that if I wasn't mad at her, I would have admitted made her look pretty.

“They look pretty,” Peter commented with a mouthful of fruit.

“Thanks,” Tanya said a did a little twirl. Michelle laughed at the action.

“That doesn't fit you. Never do that again.”

She stuck her tongue out at him and we moved on our way.

We were all silent for the rest of the walk home. I occasionally popped berries into my mouth, staring at the different types of trees and bushes. There were so many different types and that was an incredibly beautiful thing about nature. I liked it. I also liked the fact that there were trees with different sizes of leaves, ranging from the ones with leaves as big as a dinner plate to the ones as small as a pinkie finger nail. I loved the trees with tiny leaves the most, although there weren't many in this forest.

I reached out involuntarily for the leaf of a bush but I caught myself before I could get to it. Then I let out a chuckle.

“You okay Lars?”

I laughed harder and ran my hands through my hair. It was okay. I told myself. Then I plucked the leaf.

“I was a kleptomaniac, remember?” I started. “But after the…accident, I had to force myself to stop stealing. I still get urges though, but it's rare.”

I looked over at him. He nodded. “And you were about to steal the leaves?” He let out a short laugh.

“Yeah,” I said, joining him. Then everyone joined in.

I shook my head with a smile. I had no idea why I was even smiling and laughing about it.

***

“What the fuck?”

We all scrambled over to our temporary resting place. The shed was almost completely destroyed. Broken planks of wood lay at our feet all around us. I picked up a plank.

“What the fuck?” I repeated and let the plank in my hands clatter to the ground.“Someone was here! It has to be!”

“Why would someone do this?” Michelle asked, her voice strained as she crouched to pick up some pieces of the pieces of her former home.

“Are we sure there's someone? I mean it might've been the wind–”

“What sort of fucking wind would destroy this shed no neatly hmm, Peter?" I asked. "There's fucking people here. They're the ones shooting arrows at us, doing things like this, setting clue hunts for us, trying to get to us?”

“It's all so strange,” Peter mused.

“What's next?!” I blurted out into the air.

Suddenly the buzzing sound came back.

“What is that?” Michelle asked, her head whipping to the right with the rest of us.

“They're back,” I murmured.

“What's back?”

“I don't know. But they're here now.”

The buzzing sound was getting louder and louder like a huge swarm of gigantic bees were heading towards our direction.

I don't know why we didn't run. Instead we all kept staring towards the sound, waiting. I guess it's because we knew that it couldn't possibly be real. It just couldn't.

And we were right. It wasn't. Instead a huge gust of wind came towards our direction with such a huge force that we were pushed back a little, the remaining parts of our tent scattered and flew all around, and some branches broke off and flew towards us.

It didn't stop, it kept coming, and only from that direction. We had to run. Twigs and dust flew up into the air.

We hadn't gotten that far but the wind had somehow stopped.

“What the fuck, Larry why would you ask them that?” Tanya shrieked as she picked twigs out of her hair.

Peter and Michelle laughed.

“I didn't…” I started, running my hands through my hair with a chuckle. “What the fuck just happened?”

“Apparently, you angered them,” Peter said.

“Angered them? They destroyed the fucking shed!”

“If there's a them how the hell did they make that…wind,” Michelle said, gesturing wildly. “Maybe Peter's right. It was the wind."

“It's very possible there could be a them, I mean, it's a person that would have to write those clues but the thing is, we haven't seen them before and all the weird things that have happened in this forest that we want to associate with them, they're all not normal. Like supernatural kinda shit. It's not normal," Peter pointed out.

I hung my head so I was staring at the ground. I sighed, exhausted in every sense.

“So what do we do now?"

"There was a tent in the shed," Tanya remembered.

"That's true!"

We rushed back to the planks of wood that was once a shed and dug out all the things we'd need: the remaining cans of food, some clothes, a bar or soap, our sleeping bags, and the tent.

We all worked together to set up the tent and in a few minutes it was up. Fortunately, it was large in size and could accommodate all of us with some extra space. We put the other items at a corner and arranged our sleeping bags inside.

"I just want to go home," Tanya sobbed as she crawled into the tent before the rest of us.

+_+_+
A/N

How are you?