Inside the black trailer, the flames were consuming the kitchen and Browder’s body—or whatever Browder had been there at the end—along with it. The camper had a tin roof, thank God, but the fire was chewing up the walls. It would reach her and Joel in a few minutes. Even with both windows shattered open the smoke had already gotten deep inside her. Every breath was a little fire of its own.
Clark felt the camper’s door shake as Jamal struggled to fit a crowbar in the frame. “Ready!” he shouted.
“On three!”
She counted. She pulled on the knob. He pushed the bar. Nothing. The camper was locked like a bank vault.
A quick pair of rifle shots cracked somewhere in the distance. “Don’t worry,” Jamal said. “That’s just Bethany.”
Clark could worry about this later, just as she could spend the rest of her life wondering about these sad men and this dark little trailer and the hungry force that had possessed Browder. She could spend her life wishing she’d paid more attention to her mother’s warnings about the things that hid across the fence.
Now, right now, Clark felt in her bruised bones that she was missing something obvious and vital and that if she didn’t find it now none of that shit would matter much longer.
“Fuck!” Jamal shouted.
Clark leaped away from the door the moment the fire raced up the wall.
Joel gave a nasty cough from where she’d left him on the floor. “Stay low,” she told him, though she’d started to wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to just start sucking down smoke—it must be better to black out for good than feel your skin charring off your body—because the flames had caught on every wall. She saw a long chain whip hanging from a nail that was burning blue in the heat.
Joel propped himself on one elbow to give her a thumbs-up. He stopped.
Clark saw it too.
The floorboards. Did her eyes deceive her or did those bright new boards wobble when Joel leaned his elbow on them?
“Crowbar!” she shouted through the window, her voice cracking, her bruised throat tightening and tightening. A moment later Jamal slid the tool through the bars of the window and pulled back from the flames with a curse. Clark fished it away from the burning wall with her foot, ignored the heat of the metal in her palm and dug the crowbar’s wedged end through a gap between two boards.
They were loose.
The first board was the hardest. It bumped and squealed against the crowbar but refused to budge. Finally Clark stood tall, closed her eyes against the smoke—don’t breathe it in yet, Star—and pushed down against the bar with all her strength.
The board snapped loose. Clark kicked it free and hooked the curved end of the bar on to the next. Joel dragged himself through a thin skein of dried vomit to get out of the way. He tugged at the loosened board with what little strength remained in his good hand.
When they got the third board up he said faintly, “There must have been so much blood.”
Clark bent down to examine the space they’d created. No wonder the floor had come up so easily: the crossbeams that undergirded the trailer were blackened with rot. Whoever had laid these cheap new synthetic boards—and the fact they were cheap and fire-retardant, Clark thought, was no doubt the only reason she and Joel weren’t dead already—had nailed them into gummy wood that should have been ripped out years ago.
Clark drove the sharp end of the crowbar down into the beam that crossed the hole they’d made. Again.
The beam broke at the same moment the roof finally collapsed into the kitchen. Clark shielded her eyes from the scalding dust that billowed up with it. She kicked out the crossbeam. She shouted for Jamal to be ready. She prayed he heard her.
“It’s just a few feet to the wall,” Clark said, gripping Joel by the armpits and lowering him into the hole. “Just drag with your legs—”
She couldn’t say more. Her throat had finally closed. She watched Joel disappear down into the hole and she turned her head to give the roof above her a dubious look. It would fall at any moment.
Clark looked back down. Joel was already gone.
No time like the present.
She braced her arms on either side of the hole and lowered herself into the dirt. She slipped at the last moment and landed hard on her ass. She stretched herself backward and crabwalked toward the front wall on her elbows and heard the roof collapse onto the hole she’d made. A dizzying wave of heat struck her face.
A pair of strong hands grabbed her ankles. A moment later Clark was sliding forward, forward until she saw the stars.
Jamal helped her to stand. The ring of trailers was ablaze. The crackle of it was almost comforting, like the logs she had always hoped would burn at her house at Christmas. Blank-eyed boys had poured into the night, hunching their naked shoulders. They looked sullen and humiliated—caught out—and terrified to within an inch of their sanity. They all looked so young. Something was raining down from the sky that Clark at first mistook for leaves until one landed at her feet and she saw that it was a singed Polaroid, the naked boy in its frame staring back at her with much the same expression as these shivering young men.
With Joel’s good arm over her shoulder, Clark and Jamal made their way into the circle away from the flames. The little sea of boys parted and she saw Mitchell Malacek, his hands on his head, stepping toward her in the orange firelight. When he reached the dead center of the circle he stopped, a few yards from Clark, and sank to his knees and studied her feet.
Bethany Tanner, naked but for a bra and panties, strode behind Mitchell with a rifle braced against her hip. Clark recalled the two rifle cracks she had heard earlier—“Don’t worry, that’s just Bethany”—and fought the urge to smile at this girl’s dedication.
Whiskey Brazos joined Bethany from the blue trailer and rubbed at a swollen lip. Clark saw with some relief he still held Mr. Boone’s custom Glock.
Clark forced her bruised throat to swallow. She allowed herself to breathe.
Four fast pops tore through the crackling fire. Semiautomatic fast.
“Everyone on the fucking ground!”
Clark turned in time to see Garrett Mason, his pads and his Bison helmet covered in soot, step from the burning green trailer, the AR-15 braced against his shoulder.
“That means you, Officer.”
Clark tried to ease Joel gently to the ground—oh Christ, think, Star, think—but gave up when Garrett sent a bullet whistling over her head. She dropped Joel in a heap and threw herself down beside him. Jamal, stretched out on her other side, whispered, “Piece of shit,” into the dirt.
The Bright Lands boys fell on their faces without a second’s hesitation.
Bethany Tanner hadn’t moved fast enough: her rifle was still frozen, aimed at the back of Mitchell’s head. Clark prayed the girl wouldn’t try to be a hero.
Bethany clearly considered it, but when Garrett turned the AR-15 in her direction she settled for giving the boy a long, baleful scowl. She tossed the rifle into the dirt. When the gun landed, Clark felt the strangest ripple pass through the earth and reverberate in her fingers, like the rifle had landed on the tight skin of a hollow drum.
“You too, Brazos,” Garrett said, and Whiskey threw the custom Glock down by Bethany’s rifle. Garrett growled. His voice was growing deeper. Older. “I see what you got tucked in your belt.”
Whiskey sighed. He withdrew a matching Glock from the back of his jeans and tossed it into the dirt with its mate.
The earth began to shake and this time it didn’t stop. It sounded so close now: the screeching stone, the thuds of a massive body moving—climbing—just a few yards beneath her.
When Clark turned again to Garrett she saw that there was no face behind the grill of his helmet. There was only darkness.
“Malacek,” Garrett said. “Grab a gun.”
But Mitchell, still on his knees, shook his head. “No.”
“The fuck did you say?”
“I said no.” Mitchell looked at that blackness, then turned away. “We never should have helped Browder with the body. We never should have taken the sock to the auto shop. We should have ended all this last week. Garrett, I’m—”
Mitchell was interrupted by the loss of his brainpan.
Garrett lowered the rifle from his shoulder. Screams rose from the Bright Lands boys as Mitchell’s body collapsed in the dirt. Clark saw Bethany twitch when his blood spattered her cheek. The girl never blinked.
“You mean to tell me there ain’t a single goddamn man here to finish this job with me?” Garrett shouted from the void behind his grill. The rumble in the ground shook Clark’s teeth.
“Maybe they were right about you queers after all,” Garrett continued. He took a few steps through the sea of boys, panning the gun over their heads. “Maybe I’ll have to do all this work myself.”
“I’m good.”
There was a gasp. From the bloody porch of the burning orange trailer Luke Evers rose to his feet and made his way across the circle. He was agleam in blood from the waist down, so much blood Clark wondered how he could possibly be alive.
But alive he was.
“Luke, don’t do this. Don’t help him!” Clark called to him.
“Shut your fucking mouth,” Garrett shouted.
She felt the AR turn her way but she didn’t stop. “They shot you, Luke. I saw it—they tried to kill you.”
Clark should have saved her breath. Luke bent down slowly and rose up with one of the monogrammed Glocks. He tested its weight in his hand.
The ground quaked.
Garrett let up a twisted whoop. “Altoleth golesh shah.”
“It’s been feeding on you.” Joel’s voice cracked. “It’s been feeding on all of us. It sucks on our shame and our fear and our pain. It wants us to hurt. It wants us to bleed.”
In response, the ground opened with a crack beneath Mitchell’s body. One moment the boy lay there, the back of his head scattered over his feet, and the next he had slipped silently, smoothly, into a hole in the earth. From very far below, Clark heard water sloshing, the sound echoing and warping up the walls of the stone hole—the trench, of course, even the trench her mother had spoken of had been real—but she never heard a splash when Mitchell’s body landed.
She and several boys tried to push themselves away from the hole. They froze at the sound of gunfire.
“Nobody moves!” Garrett said. “He’s coming.”
Luke gave the hole little more than a glance and stepped around it.
“Garrett—Luke—the fuck are you doing this for?” Whiskey shouted. “We’re your fucking brothers!”
Garrett answered with a bullet in the back of Whiskey’s knee. The boy keened into the dust.
A singed Polaroid drifted gently into the hole. Dirt whispered as it slipped over the spreading edge, just like Clark had heard in her dreams and a moment later, with a humid rush of air, the smell of rot billowed up from the open earth and overwhelmed her. The whispering voice rode on the stench, forced itself up Clark’s nose and down her ears and into her mouth and noosed itself around her mind and choked off every thought.
hatedhim, Bosheth whispered. youhatedhim
Clark couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. She was blinded by a vision of her brother, standing at the kitchen sink, telling her how afraid he was of this town, this county, this filthy trailer park where God knew what had been done to him. And how had she answered Troy?
By cursing him, running him out of her house, spitting on his truck. Troy had been trying to ask her for help—it was so obvious now—and Clark had been too petty and jealous to imagine that the man against whom she was always compared might need her help just as bad as she needed his. Cruel. Had anyone ever been so cruel as Starsha Marilynn Clark?
couldhavesavedhim
The voice was right. She could have saved him—could have loved him—but she had despised him instead. And now she couldn’t save anyone—not her brother, not her town, not a single soul here at this awful place. She had failed them all. She had always, would always
failthem
All around her, Clark heard a hungry sucking nose as the creature drew air into the pit, feeding on every doomed soul in the circle, because
—because now now now was the time, now was the time he had been waiting all these many years for, the reason he had hidden here, sleeping and licking old wounds and leaking with dreams. Now—at last—now he had burned enough blood to break open the trench and take shape in the dirt world, had found a vessel that could keep him tethered there, this boy who would help him stare at the stars again, yes.
Now was the time again for the stonethings and the bloodthings, the sandthings and the bonethings, all the things the carpenter had banished to the far place, all the things that now would beg to follow Bosheth across the trench, the things that would cry and the things that would weep and the things that would shout please, Bosheth, please forgive us, please: please give us a taste of your men.
And he would smile and he would tell them, When I’m through.
“Some of you we’ll keep in chains,” Garrett shouted. “And some of you will bring more people here. And some of you—”
Jamal was sobbing. Joel was struggling to rise. Clark couldn’t even imagine moving. The moment that voice had finally entered her head she’d felt her lungs fill with lead.
Only Luke seemed unbothered. As the rumble in the hole rose to a roar of delight, as the ground crumbled beneath Clark’s fingers, Evers calmly made his way over a few whimpering boys and stopped a foot from Garrett.
“Celebrate, boys!” Garrett shouted. “These are the best years of your life!”
Luke raised the Glock and fired two shots into Garrett’s chest.
NO! The whispering voice in Clark’s head started screaming. The screeching of nails on the stone below grew louder, Bosheth climbed faster. NO!
Garrett fell back with a cough of surprise. The rifle fell from his grasp. Clark raised her head in time to watch him try to crawl away from Luke but there was something wrong with his legs. After struggling to escape, Garrett gave up, clutched his hands to his Bison helmet and pressed it hard to his head as if it might shield him from the fruits of a life of shame and hate and all the hush-now pillow games his brother had taught him. He let out a child’s whimper. Luke took a step toward him.
A blink, and Clark saw behind Luke—though she wished for the rest of her life she hadn’t—a great white hook of a claw, pale as the moon and long as a school bus, throw itself over the edge of the hole. Saw a clutch of whiskers, tall as cornstalks, bleached white after centuries in the water, rise, dripping, from down below.
Saw a single eye, black and infinite and cold, emerge to stare at her.
“Luke!” she shouted.
But Evers seemed to notice none of this. He only regarded Garrett, regarded Garrett’s helmet.
“It’s just fiberglass, you idiot,” Luke said, and emptied the Glock into Garrett’s head.
Clark buried her face in the dirt as a wail of rage rose from the mouth of the hole, the sound so high and sharp she was certain it would burst her ears. She felt blood run from her nose. She screamed.
She grabbed hold of Joel and Jamal.
From somewhere in Garrett’s direction she heard the pin of the Glock clicking when it struck an empty chamber. Heard a shaking in the dust as Garrett’s body gave up the last of its life.
There was a great splash from deep below a moment later and the wailing stopped.
It took all sound with it. The whispers. The roars. The crackle of the flames. For one long moment, all Clark could hear was her heart, galloping in her chest.
Before her strength returned to her, Clark looked up and saw not Bosheth or the empty hole of the Bright Lands but Troy, standing at her kitchen window, opening his mouth to speak.