When the call finally came, the one she had been dreading all weekend, Clark had been dreaming (like she had all weekend) of Dylan Whitley.
She was asleep in her childhood bedroom—the room down the hall, in fact, the one which she now used to lodge exercise equipment—and while her dream-self knew that she had come to bed alone a few hours before, she had stirred, in the deep dark, and realized abruptly that there was a man standing just past the corner of her bed, dripping water onto her floor.
“Troy?”
A silence. In the far distance, beyond the man in the dark, she heard a thick insect drone, the faint rumble of a large engine.
“No,” the man said, and she recognized the voice as Dylan Whitley’s, though it lacked all of his Friday swagger. Instead he spoke almost in a whisper. “There’s not much time. You need to be ready, Officer. Both of you need to be ready.”
Odd, she thought—her eyes refused to adjust to the blackness that surrounded her.
“Ready for what?” she said.
“The big game.”
She heard her phone ringing, chirpy and distant, and a single strand of white Christmas lights stuttered to life above her bed. They revealed that she wasn’t in her childhood room after all. She had somehow been dropped into a black box with nails jutting from its walls, pale floorboards, a little kitchen. She recognized the droning. A mass of writhing flies glittered above her, gleaming like the garnet shawls her mother had always worn.
Clark went cold at a sight past the end of her bed. She and Dylan weren’t alone. There, in a dark corner, she could make out the leathery shape of another man. A man, but not a man: its fingers too long, its arms bent with too many joints. The man-shape, a blackness where its face should be, was coiled in a ball on the floor and rubbing itself, slowly.
Clark didn’t dare to move. She’d seen this shape’s work before but never the shape itself. It was death, she thought at first. Death, pleasuring itself with a little whimper.
No, her dream-self said. It was something much worse than death.
“Dylan,” she whispered, because now Dylan Whitley, standing at the end of her bed, had turned to study the thing with her. “Dylan, what is that?”
The droning mass of flies above them began to cheer, the engine outside sputtered and when the black man-shape in the corner rose to its feet, a stench of rot filled the room: a smell that was putrid and sour and old. A low whisper escaped the void of the thing’s face.
Dylan Whitley smiled at her. Where his right arm should have been there was nothing but a single piece of collarbone jutting from his jersey, the wound weeping blood onto her floor.
“That’s only the best years of my life right there, Officer,” he said with a laugh, and the man-shape forced its hand inside the boy’s open mouth.
She startled awake. The phone stopped ringing the moment she grabbed hold of it: 6:02 a.m. The smell of rot lingered in her dark room. After some of the things her crazy mother had told her as a girl, Clark couldn’t help but crawl to the end of her bed where Dylan had been standing in the dream and reach out to ensure that her floor was dry.
The phone began to ring again. Investigator Mayfield.
She was at the intersection of South Street and the highway when she heard a siren behind her. Deputy Jones pulled into the oncoming lane and rolled down his window.
“Stay close,” he shouted.
Clark nodded. She leaned on the gas, eased the clutch.
Go.
To the left they passed the school, the bar, the sheriff’s station. To their right, the empty eastern Flats flew by, the shaggy scrub and wild grass burning in the dawn. Soon they were passing the football field. Its rows of dead lights all cupped the crimson sun.
Only the best years of my life.
She debated calling Joel Whitley and decided against it. Let him sleep, if he was sleeping. If her suspicions were correct he wasn’t about to get much rest for a while.
The two deputies made it almost thirty miles north of town at top speed before Jones began to tap his brakes. Clark followed him around a tight turn, her shocks letting up a moan of protest.
Pebbles scattered as they bustled down what looked to be a private drive. Clark lowered her visor against the molten sun. Soon she caught the shape of a wooden fence, a wooden house in the distance, a scattering of outbuildings: a toolshed, a chicken coop, a horse stall.
A semitruck loomed over three SUVs and a Dodge Ram. Three men were smoking in the shade of the tall truck’s cab. Clark recognized Sheriff Lopez, Investigator Mayfield and Jack Spearson, the owner of the semi.
Jones and Clark clambered out and gave the men hollow little nods. Lopez gestured the two deputies closer.
“You don’t spook easy, do you, Clark?”
A bird whistled from among the leathery leaves of a nearby pecan. A woman’s face watched her from the house’s screen door.
“I don’t believe so, sir.”
Lopez glanced at Mayfield as if for his assent. The investigator nodded.
“The ATV don’t seat but four,” Spearson said. His eyes were glassy, like he was coming off stimulants. “One of y’alls could stand on the fender but—”
Jones said, “I’m fine right here.”
Spearson led them to a rusted red ATV. Clark sat in the back, next to Mayfield, and they went bounding around the house. There was nothing awaiting them on the other side but open country.
“It weren’t nothing but luck,” Spearson shouted over the whining motor. “All this here is Evers land these last few years. Mrs. Evers, she bought it out from me when the stocks went all to shit in oh-eight. But she kept me on as a groundskeeper, see.”
Clark bounced in her seat. She gripped the cool metal bar of the ATV’s frame to steady herself.
“I drives around once a week for her, the Evers lady, to look see has any vagrants set up camp, any of them tweakers cooking up that meth crank out here. I drives armed—I won’t make no secret of that.”
Spearson gunned the gas and soon the little house was only a fleck of black on the gold horizon behind them. Ahead of them, as far as Clark could see, was nothing.
“I got in from my haul late last night, maybe near past midnight, but I couldn’t sleep for shit—pardon, Officer, ma’am—on accounts I got the cedar allergies something bad, so rights around four thirty I say to hell with it, I’ll just make my rounds in the dark. This little guy’s got him the new lights on him, after all, and it were a clear morning.”
They bounced over a nest of small stones. In the very far distance Clark could make out a few spindly trees cutting a ragged lateral line across the country ahead of them.
“Now, normally, I start by heading out down to the south, at the property line, thens I cut across and head north up along Balton Creek till I hit the other line and come back around home. The creek is the eastern dividing line, see, between here and the far property.”
The ground sloped softly downward. Clark caught a faint tang of water in the air. Spearson banked to the left.
“But see, this morning, I thought I heard me a cayote up there northaways so when I set out I started off that direction first. I didn’t find no cayote but I still set off to the east till I ran up on the creek. And if I hadn’t gone that way I would have drove right past it.” A pause. “I would have drove right past it.”
The ATV began to slow. Clark’s feet had gone numb on the quaking metal floor. Spearson brought them to within twenty yards of a creek bed and stopped. Under the whiny click of the motor, Clark could hear the faint babble of slow water.
She saw a teeming cloud of flies.
Spearson nodded past the hood of the ATV. “It’s just there.”
Dry grass crunched under Clark’s boots. Cicadas droned. The iron smell of water grew stronger. The mass of flies pitched and reared. They didn’t disperse when the officers reached the edge of the creek.
The boy was stretched out on his belly, his feet bare, one arm flung out, the other folded beneath him. One side of his face was sunk in the shallow water. The other was turned up to greet them.
His cheeks were battered blue. His hands were a stark, cold white. He wore only a pair of dark jeans and a green Bison leather jacket. The jacket rode up around his hips. He wore no shirt underneath. On the side of his ridged stomach Clark saw the unmistakable dash of a knife wound. She noted, with a sudden irrational relief, that both of his arms were attached to his body. Instead, something horrible spread open on the boy’s throat.
And, of course, Clark saw the name branded across the back of the jacket, stitched just above the leaping Bison logo.
WHITLEY.
Only the best years of my life.
They stood in silence, watching the shallow water skitter over Dylan’s open eye. Finally Lopez stepped back, turned to Spearson and said, “Who have you told about this, Jack?”
“Just y’all. Not even my wife.”
Lopez nodded. In a low voice he said to Mayfield, “Get to that school. The boy’s friends, the ones he went to the coast with, did they make it back last night?”
Mayfield gave a careful shrug.
“Find out. Shake them a bit. I’ll wait here for the pathologist. Tell Jones to notify the family. Now. No sense waiting till we’ve got the body at the funeral parlor—we won’t be able to keep the lid on this long anyhow.”
Mayfield turned to Clark. “Did you bring the change of clothes I asked you to?”
“They’re in my truck, sir.”
“You can change at the school, then.”
“The school, sir?”
Mayfield headed back to the ATV. “You think I’d trust Browder to assist with this?”
Clark looked to Lopez. The sheriff nodded. “Talk to the kids. Get their confidence before they button up each other’s stories. Someone on that team knows something.”
She thought of Joel. “Everyone’s a suspect right now, aren’t they?”
“You know what kind of forensics you get off a wet corpse?”
She knew that well enough. Zero.
Stepping back to the ATV, Clark asked Mr. Spearson, “You said all this here is Evers property?”
“Everything on this side of the creek, ma’am.”
She turned to the sun climbing over the open Flats. “And what about out there?”
“Out there?” Spearson lowered his head like he was afraid to look at it. “There ain’t nothing out there to own.”