The Long Way

The Northwood High marching band should be celebrating.

After a late-night competition, all Sarah wants is to get home. But when their band director takes a shortcut down Blackwood Road, an approaching winter storm turns the trip into a nightmare.

The bus crashes miles from help.

Twenty-six people are stranded in the freezing wilderness with injuries, dwindling supplies, no cell service, and no way of knowing when-or if-rescue will come.

Then they find the tracks.

Something is moving through the woods beyond the wreck. Something large. Something patient. And as the first students disappear, Sarah realizes the storm isn't the only thing they need to survive.

They're being hunted.

With panic fracturing the group and the adults they trusted no longer able to protect them, Sarah and her classmates are forced to make impossible choices. Stay with the wreck and freeze, or venture into the wilderness and risk becoming the creature's next prey.

But the thing following them isn't just hunting.

It's learning.

Every trap teaches it something. Every escape makes it more dangerous. And every mile through the frozen forest leaves fewer of them alive.

Twenty-six people took the shortcut onto Blackwood Road.

Not all of them are coming home.

The Long Way is a bleak, atmospheric survival horror novel about the cost of shortcuts, the collapse of authority, and the moment childhood ends-not with a scream, but with the understanding that no one is coming to save you.