“You were the boy on the side, weren’t you?” Joel said as the commotion raged around them.
Browder stepped back into the trailer and let the door close slowly behind him. He blinked and for a moment the deputy was himself again: furtive, bloodshot eyes, the teeth in his mouth a dull red in the light.
“Dylan was the real deal.” Browder swiveled the knife in the air. He took a step forward and a moment later Joel felt blood running down his cheek, a flare of pain. “Football hadn’t touched him.”
Joel started babbling. It was a primal reflex: delay, delay, don’t die.
“But it touched you? How did it touch you, Browder?”
“Jason had his foot. Ranger had his arm. Troy had his neck. I had my head. Bosheth likes us broken boys the best. He likes the way we taste inside.” Tears streamed down the deputy’s cheeks. He touched his forehead tenderly and said, “But not Dylan. The game never touched Dylan, no. It’s why he was leaving. College was going to take him away from me.”
Joel thought of the force that had tried to possess him last night at the park, the darkness that had overwhelmed his mind and nearly driven him to murder. He said, “You have to fight it, Browder. That thing inside you. You can’t let that thing take you—”
“This was all your fucking fault!”
Joel felt a pain in his shoulder so excruciating he thought a sparking wire must have fallen loose from the rickety ceiling and come to rest there. He looked down and discovered that it was, in fact, Browder’s knife, buried halfway to the hilt in the joint.
Joel fell backward. The knife slid back out again, grazing cold across the bone, and Joel landed hard on his ass. He stared at his ruined shoulder, gleaming black and bright in the red light, and fought the urge to vomit again.
“Do you hear me, Mr. Whitley? I said it was your fucking fault.”
Joel felt the knife press against his neck, just like Dylan must have felt. Joel closed his eyes. Was he even surprised to learn he was going to die this way? After all, he’d spent all week learning that he and his brother were far more alike than he’d ever thought.
A strange croaking noise came from the kitchen. Kimbra tried to rise to her feet, struck something, slid down again. She moaned.
“For fuck’s sake,” Browder shouted. His voice was no longer quite his own. He spun toward the kitchen and hustled in her direction. The wet knife left a string of black beads across the pale floor. A furious hiss seeped from the darkness in his mouth.
Joel heard, from a great distance, someone who sounded an awful lot like Clark shouting somewhere outside.
Kimbra moaned again.
Faintly, very faintly, Joel heard another truck approaching.