Rusty must be standing too close to the campfire. He can feel the heat of it on his back, like his shirt is about to catch on fire.
“Get up!”
Something jabbed into his shoulder and he heard the words through the fog of burning on his back.
He had to get away from the fire.
Looking out through a forest of eyelashes, he could see only dirt and weeds and a shoe, someone’s shoe. He squeezed his eyes tight shut again.
The foot kicked him hard in the shoulder, and he opened his eyes all the way this time.
“I told you to get up!”
At that moment, the fire in his back morphed in a heartbeat from burning to blazing pain. Every inch of his back from his shoulders to below his waist was an agony so profound he couldn’t seem to breathe around it.
“Want me to shoot you again? I said get up.”
Shoot you again.
Shoot.
He’d been shot.
Mrs. McFarland … she shot him. Not with the pistol. What she had in her hands now was a double-barreled shotgun.
She’d shot him in the back with a shotgun.
And the buckshot had peeled his skin off from his shoulders to his hips.
He cried out, couldn’t help it, and she used the toe of her shoe to push him up off his belly.
“I’m gonna count to three. If you don’t get up by the time I get to three, I’m gonna shoot you in the leg.” She paused. “And at this range, the shot will likely rip it off at the knee.”
“No, please.” His voice sounded high and reedy, like a girl’s. “I’ll get up. I’ll get up. Just don’t …” Then he tried to move and cried out in agony.
“Awww, did it hurt its baby self?” She mocked him in baby talk. “Fall down and go boom? Skin his widdle knee?”
Then the baby-talk whine vanished.
“You ain’t hurt bad as you hurt my Dougie. No sir, not by a long shot. But you’re gonna give it back. Now get up or lose your leg.” She paused for a beat. “One …”
Rusty shoved himself up onto his elbows and the raging pain in his back made him nauseous.
“Two …”
He pushed up onto his hands, pulled his knees under him and swayed for a second on all fours. Then he tried to push himself upright, but his balance was off and he staggered and fell again. He heard her rack a shell into the shotgun and found the strength to try again. He pushed himself up, stood there swaying.
She used the barrel to gesture.
“This way.”
She backed out of his way and Rusty staggered off in the direction she’d pointed, back toward the car that was parked on the shoulder of the road. The passenger side door was open. Staggering closer, he saw that there was something lying in the middle of the road in front of the car.
His mind was too foggy to focus, was out of sync with the world so that what he saw remained a meaningless image for a heartbeat before his brain processed it and informed him what it was.
When he understood what was lying on the road … who was lying on the road, he stumbled again and let out a little cry that didn’t have anything to do with his back where buckshot had skinned him shoulder to waist.
Douglas.
His dead body was lying there. Unnatural. He looked like a horrible distorted mannequin lying discarded beside a store window. He was lying on his back and his arms and legs stuck out stiffly from his body. His right arm was a horror, black and purple, five times its normal size, his hand like a catcher’s mitt with fat hot dogs for fingers stuck to the side.
Rusty wouldn’t look at his face. Could not look at his face.
“This is what you done, but you’s about to undo it. You’s about to set it all right. You gonna give back to my boy the life you stole from him.”
Rusty had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
“Now, pick him up!”
Pick him up? If he’d been strong enough to pick Douglas up, he might have tried to carry him out of the woods after the rattlesnake had bitten him. Douglas was too heavy.
“Pick him up and carry him here.”
She gestured with the barrel of the rifle and it was only then that Rusty noticed it. The shimmer in the middle of the road. The mirror where he could see Douglas’s distorted body He could see himself, too, and Mrs. McFarland with a shotgun trained on him. Could see that his pants were soaked through with the blood that was pouring off his back, and dripping off his butt, making a puddle of red behind his bare feet.
“I’m almost ready,” Jolene said. She had never turned around, had not seen the mist overhead or the shadows among the buildings, but she could hear the cry that was getting louder and louder.
“Hurry!”
The shadows began to move.
Like shadows stretching out from under trees as the sun goes down, the shadows that should not have been there in the first place around the buildings began to puddle and grow thicker. They became pools of blackness, inky streams coming toward them.
The mist above got thicker and began to sink down on top of them.
The keening cry got louder.
Jolene stepped away from what she was doing, turned to look at them and saw what they could see and she leapt back and cried out, “It’s coming!”
She turned back to what she’d been working on, flipped a switch, and when she did there was a reverberation all around them. Like a gong sounding inside a bell jar, they could feel pressure rebounding off the mist above and the shadows that …
“We shouldn’t be able to hear … feel …” she said over her shoulder, obviously confused. She turned some kind of dial. And the instant pressure it caused slammed into them. Cotton and Stuart covered their ears with their hands, staggering.
The pressure … it was hard to breathe.
Jolene dropped to her knees and clapped her hands over her ears. Cotton stood rigid, his eyes almost bugging out of his head, then he clawed at his throat as if he suddenly didn’t have enough air.
“Sound waves … sealed in …” Jolene gasped.
Stuart felt wet on his upper lip, swiped his hand across it and saw the blood.
“Shadows!” It was a whisper on a gasp as Cotton sank to his knees, pointing toward the buildings behind Stuart. But Stuart didn’t turn because he didn’t have to. The shadows were oozing out in a black tide all around them. Then they separated out and became …
It was like what he used to do to entertain Merrie. He couldn’t make very many shadow creatures — a rabbit with two fingers and his index finger and thumb for the face. Hooking his thumbs together and forming his hands into wings for a bird.
These shadows weren’t tame rabbits or birds. They rose up off the ground like dogs that’d been crouched and were now rising up off their haunches to pounce. Misshapen horrors, distorted monster creatures with horns and claws and sharp teeth in open maws.
The shadows surrounded them. The mist hung just above their heads. Cotton looked up at it and his face twisted, like he wanted to scream but couldn’t. Stuart didn’t look up. He didn’t want to see what was up there that had stapled the look of abject terror on Cotton’s face.
And the wailing. The screeching had reached such a level that Stuart thought his ears might be bleeding. It felt like the sound would split his head open. The world around him began to dim. He was passing out. He was certain without knowing how it was so that if he ever closed his eyes, he would never open them again.