She ran fast, and she ran hard. She ran after the red, her feet keeping time against the packed earth beneath her.
Star had been seeing the flashes of red since they left the house. At first, she thought she was imagining it. It was easy to imagine things, in the back of the pickup truck, with the sunset creating pockets of shadows around them.
Inside of her, rising flush to the surface like a fish to the dusky film separating the world of water from air, Star felt an unexpected calmness emerge. Maybe it was such with all things in the midst of transformations cut short. She, a girl with her first chance at love, also a girl stuck in the thick mud of grief for the parents she had lost. If she could move from one world to the other, everything that had come before might still keep its weight but at least hang heavy upon her with a purpose, a valuable necklace not to be removed but worn always, a tether to the past.
Dumb thoughts. Useless. There would be no transformation from confused, grieving girl to wise woman for her. Once, when she was a kid, she’d found a butterfly’s cocoon attached to the side of her friend’s yellow house. She’d plucked it and then, using her child’s dexterous fingers, peeled back the layers of the wrapping, expecting to reveal a beautiful butterfly. Instead, what she found inside was a mash of blood and pus, unformed bits of body floating amidst it all. She hadn’t speeded the unveiling, only killed the insect. The transformation, like her own, was never to be.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t pass the chance on to Javier. It all came down to the red.
It did no good trying to ignore it, as she’d tried to ignore John and Erma, the two of them acting like it was no big thing that they had each other left back there in the truck, acting like everything was going to be okay.
Star knew better.
A dip in the earth caught her foot, and her ankle rolled painfully to the left. Star flung her arms wildly to the side, stopping herself from falling, but her ankle gave a scream of pain in protest. It didn’t matter. Couldn’t matter. She had to go on. There. Just ahead of her, she saw another flash of red, and then the ground dipped, undulating in a wave of one of its many hills, and the red was gone. Star chased after it, the pain in her ankle blooming into a sharp, insistent throb.
The answer was in the book, and anyone who looked at it knew that things were going to be a long way from okay.
Back at Bunny’s house, Pill had sat his wife’s journal down on the chair after reading it to the group and left it there.
“You want this?” Star asked, picking it up and offering it to him.
Pill shook his head. “It’s done what it needed to do. That thing’s no friend of mine.”
So Star kept it. The journal was old, and the soft leather of its cover, a faded brown calfskin, was comforting to touch. All the way here, in the truck, she’d stroked its cover as she flipped through the pages. And that was how she understood the red, understood her one chance at saving Javier.
Pill had read the story in the journal to them all. He had not, however, shown the others the pictures. They were graphic and the scenes within them perfectly executed. There was no doubt that Jessi had been a good artist—too good, maybe. With each turn of the page, a new horror sprang to life.
One picture showed the town burning, people with claws reaching out of the flames. One showed an old woman with red eyes and black nails, the old woman from the circus, Star guessed. Others showed monsters in various stages of change, their faces human, but on each of their chests rested a black mark, like an X drawn there by Jessi.
But it was the last picture in the file that Star kept going back to. It was a picture of a young girl with red hair holding the hand of an older boy. The girl, Star guessed, was Jessi. She didn’t have any reason for this assumption except for what Pill had told her about his wife and…and because she knew that the boy was Jimmy. It was the way that Jessi looked at him in the picture. Around them, flames burst everywhere, and arms and limbs reached from them, the flesh hanging from them, blackened. The boy and girl, however, remained untouched. The fire was closing in around them, and yet…
The danger seemed to be coming from inside the circle. It came not from the fire but from the boy. Because the girl looked at him not only with love but with terror, and Star could not tell whether the girl was holding his hand or trying to get away.
And on the fourth night I shot him.
Almost, she could hear the girl in the picture speaking it. On the fourth night I shot him. And why had Jimmy alone been left out of the caves? Why had he remained when all the other Feeders went below?
Star thought she knew. He’d been left above for insurance. The Feeder liked to play with humans, but he didn’t just enjoy manipulating their emotions for amusement, he needed that vulnerability. If you loved someone, it made it harder to kill them, didn’t it?
He’d left Jimmy just in case. He’d left Jimmy because he’d somehow had a bad feeling about Jessi. Bad maybe because she’d been marked by Trees when he spoke his prophecy. Bad because he feared something in her. And so, just in case, he’d left Jimmy outside of everything because he knew Jessi loved him. But Jessi’d surprised him. Surprised herself, too, maybe; the weight of her finger on that trigger, the weight of a future not to be lived. But she’d pulled it. By God, she had.
There was the red again, rising from a new valley just ahead.
Star didn’t think that Javier loved her. Not yet, anyway, but there was a connection between them, she knew that. He’d said she reminded him of someone, and Star felt certain that whoever it was, he’d loved her. Star had to put enough distance between herself and Javier that he couldn’t catch her easily.
If he came after her.
If.
She ran faster than she’d ever run before. She ran toward the red.
“You fucker!”
Javier watched in fury as Pill’s truck bounced across the rough landscape, toward the factory. Then he turned in the opposite direction, behind him, to watch the disappearing figure of Star. What the hell had the girl been thinking?
Javier shook his head to clear it. Maybe it wasn’t so bad. All he had wanted was to go into the factory and kill what could be killed before he himself died. He could still do that. He gathered himself to run after the truck.
But that left Star. Star.
She’d taken off without any thought to what could be out there. Maybe the Feeders were all in the factory, but maybe they weren’t. He’d counted on having Erma and John at least be with her when he left, but now that was ruined. Damn her! Why hadn’t she said something to him? And damn, Pill! If the cabrón had waited, he could have gotten all this settled, gotten Star taken care of, explained what he was doing to Erma and John, told them to look after Star, and then joined the old man. But now…
Javier looked to John and Erma, holding each other, watching the truck as it trundled off into the distance and toward the factory, its rounded green outline like a determined beetle climbing an anthill. Neither of them were even paying attention to the rapidly diminishing figure of Star.
Javier looked once more at the disappearing taillights and then behind him toward the darkness and the large shape of the rock beyond which the girl had disappeared.
Just like your sister.
“Goddamn you!” he screamed, shaking his fist in Pill’s direction before turning and running after Star.
Please let him follow. Please let him follow.
The words beat time to her footsteps as she ran toward the next hill, where the flash of red had disappeared. This hill was larger, not just a dip in the ground but an actual piling of earth. Star knew what she would find when she reached it. Jimmy had been The Feeder’s insurance the last time, and this time it was Mabel. She’d come to the conclusion logically—there was no one else The Feeder could leave behind who would mean anything to the group. Javier’s family was dead, as was Pill’s, and Erma and John had just each other. She, Star, was the only person who had someone left she might care about.
Mabel was alive, and she’d been following them.
Star had to find her. But if Javier didn’t follow her, then…she couldn’t finish the thought. She needed him after. For her own insurance, Star needed him.
If there was an after.
Star heard an insect buzz close to her ear and pass, while below her, grasses whipped at her legs. The sky was a pale purple, the sun setting with a brilliance that belied the ugliness beneath it. In the distance the outline of Cavus stood like a forgotten toy left out in the yard, while behind Star, the factory glowed a bright, white light from its windows, all the electricity in the building turned to high. The scene was as it should be—an apocalyptic setting of man’s hand-built sin pressed against the yielding but unfathomably beautiful breast of the earth.
Star hardly saw any of it. She thought only of Mabel. If Javier followed, they could kill Mabel together and make it out of this thing alive. If he followed, then it would be only Pill who had to go into the Feeders’ nest and die. Not Javier. Javier could live.
If he only followed her.
She did not dare look back.
There, just ahead, was the hill. She was almost upon it. Star steeled herself. If Mabel had become one of those things, Star would kill her. With her bare hands if she had to. She wouldn’t let Mabel live like that, even if Javier didn’t follow.
Star rounded the hill and there, just as she’d expected, was the outline of a person, its face turned in Star’s direction.
But it was not the person she’d expected.
On the other side of the hill, waiting for her, stood her father.