Kailynn nearly screams when the animal darts across the ground in front of her, rattling pine straw, but when it freezes, front paws in the air, she recognizes it. A groundhog. She does not think there’s such a thing as wild groundhogs around here. But there is a whole family of them in the petting zoo, and she guesses that the men have smashed and bashed that building like they did the others, so maybe there are sheep and goats and Shetland ponies running around, too. Now the groundhog is creeping toward her, and she stays still, letting it nudge at her leg. She has never seen the ones in the children’s area do anything but cower against the back wall of their pen, because all the animals in the petting zoo hate children.

Maybe this one is traumatized. Maybe it wants some comfort.

She reaches down very slowly. You’re supposed to hold out your hand to a dog and let it come to you, and she thinks sometimes little kids are the same way and this groundhog is the same way, too. She gets a good grip on it, careful, and the groundhog likes being picked up. It snuggles closer to her as she makes her way through the trees, its little claws catching the ends of her hair. Her little sister does this, too, pressing close and tight when she is scared. Kailynn takes a few steps forward – she has not been running for a while. There’s no point. She doesn’t know where she is, and she doesn’t know where she should be going.

That’s not true. She should be looking for Lincoln and his mother. She should have stopped running five minutes ago when she saw them fall, but she couldn’t make her legs slow down, and when she finally got herself under control, she was all alone. They are probably dead now – that Lincoln had such pretty hair, and he had smiled at her – and maybe they wouldn’t be if she had never brought them into the storeroom. She thought that it was a good thing. She told herself she was doing it to help people, but maybe that is not true. Maybe she only wanted to keep herself from being alone. Her little sister begged Kailynn not to move into her own room, because her little sister sometimes gets scared in the middle of the night and she likes to snuggle – like a groundhog – but Kailynn is not sure that the begging is why she stayed. How is she supposed to know if she did it for herself or for her sister? Because one makes her good and one makes her selfish, and if she is selfish, then she has probably killed that boy and his mother.

She strokes the groundhog’s head.

She sees a light ahead, and at first she thinks maybe she has found her way back to the main part of the zoo, but then she realizes the light is coming from a wide shape in the middle of the trees, and she slows down as she comes to an army-style tent big enough for ten people. Next to it is a broken-down jeep. The tent is lit from within, and she can see the silhouettes of three men inside sitting in a circle, and she is terrified for a moment before she realizes that they are mannequins. Another Halloween display.

She backs away, changing course slightly, getting away from the light.

She wishes she had more animal crackers. Maybe Oreos or Famous Amos. She is hating the feel of her own mouth. Her father would laugh at her for thinking of cookies – she knows he would – and she remembers the time she and her sister were at home by themselves and she was pouring a glass of tea when they heard a loud noise in the den and then a creepy laugh. She and her sister ran to the bathroom, but as soon as they had locked themselves inside, Kailynn realized she’d forgotten her phone, which she’d need if they were going to call the police, so she inched open the bathroom door a tiny bit. There was a man right in front of her – she screamed in that second before she recognized her father, who was laughing and laughing.

He loves to play tricks on them. She thinks it reminds him of when he was a kid, back before he wore suits and sat through teacher conferences and cleaned up cat throw-up. He was a preacher’s son, and he wrecked the car twice before he turned sixteen. He threw baseballs at windows on purpose. He once caught twenty-three cats in one afternoon and swung them by their tails onto a roof.

A hellion. That’s the word he calls his old self. The other kids were terrified of him. The grown-ups were terrified of him.

People say she is a nice girl. She makes mostly As and Bs. Hardly ever Cs. She saves her money in the bank. But now she wishes that she were the kind of girl who set things on fire instead of the kind of girl who proofreads her work. She wishes she knew how to scare people. She wishes she had worked yesterday instead of today, and she wishes she carried pepper spray like her mother has told her she should, and she wishes she had an Almond Joy, cold, and she wishes she were home in bed and her pillows were fluffed, and she wishes she had grabbed that little boy Lincoln and run with him and saved him, and she wishes she were a woman in a video game with pistols on her hips and a cleavage. She wishes her father could still pick her up and carry her, but she is too heavy.

The groundhog trembles in her arms, and every sound she hears seems like footsteps. She stops, listens, and decides she only hears leaves.

Her father was the sort of boy who should have turned into a psychopath – that’s what people say, isn’t it? That when you torture animals, it means you will be a serial killer? But he turned into her father instead, and there is no meanness in him. She has seen him cry at commercials.

She hears water up ahead, and she thinks again that there are footsteps. She creeps closer to see if she can spot anything moving through the trees.

She sees the creek, and she thinks she hears a voice, but when she stops to listen, she doesn’t hear anything. She steps behind a tree, and she waits and watches. She stands for what feels like a long time, and then she strokes the groundhog and walks carefully until she is right at the water’s edge, and she thinks about whether she should cross the water and then – her teachers have told her that she has a problem with focusing, that she sometimes drifts off – and then she is looking up and staring at Robby.

‘Hey,’ she says, like he has come up next to her at school as she’s stuffing books into her locker, like he is not standing there with his gun and what she thinks might be bullets looped over his shoulder. She is embarrassed about saying hello and thinks that it is idiotic, too, to be embarrassed, but she can’t take it back.

And then she feels someone behind her, and when she turns around, there is another man.

He is smaller than Robby, and if he is the same one who came into the restaurant earlier, he seemed bigger to her then. Now she looks at him and thinks that he doesn’t look any stronger than she is, the kind of boy she could beat at arm-wrestling, but he has a gun in each hand, a big one and a little one. He grins at her, a friendly smile that makes her mouth dry out more.

‘You been making friends?’ he asks, and he is clearly talking to Robby.

Robby doesn’t say anything. He hasn’t said a word.

Kailynn angles herself so that she can keep an eye on both of them. She takes two steps backward, turning so she won’t fall into the creek. She is holding the groundhog too tightly, and it squirms against her. She hopes they will not hurt the groundhog. She takes a third step and a fourth, and a branch breaks under her foot and makes her jump.

They just watch her. The trees make shadows move across their faces, and the shadows are so thick that she can’t tell anything about their expressions.

‘One for the road?’ says the one she doesn’t know. At first she is relieved, because he tosses both his guns to the ground. Then he comes at her so fast that she can’t even get her hands up before he is spinning her around, her back pressed against his chest, which is hard like metal.

‘What about your big escape?’ says Robby, and she keeps her eyes on him. She will not look away from him. She does not know why, but this seems important.

‘She’s even got hair like a damn squab!’ says the one who is holding her. ‘Didn’t you ever wonder if you could break someone’s neck with just your hands? My cousin said that’s only in the movies, that we have too much muscle in our necks, but I don’t think she’s got much muscle.’

Kailynn cannot see the one talking because of the way he is holding her. He twists his hands in her hair, grabbing her braids, and he yanks her head back, hard, and she feels some of her extensions pull free, her scalp stinging. He keeps on pulling until her face is pointed toward the trees and her throat is bent back. She still keeps her eyes on Robby, barely.

She wants to say something brave. She wants to spit at the man holding her or bite him or tell him that he is not strong enough to do anything to her with those toothpick arms, but she cannot talk, because he has his fingers on her throat now, pressing so that she thinks he will leave bruises.

She looks at Robby. He still has his gun in his hand. She cannot tell anything from his face.

‘Help,’ she tries to say.

‘I told you to go to the sea lions,’ Robby says, or she thinks he says it.

Kailynn kicks, and she thinks she hits the small man’s shin, but it doesn’t seem to matter.

The clouds are moving over the trees. She has both hands around the man’s wrists, nails clawing into his skin, and she has dropped the groundhog.

She thinks of her father. She thinks of him swinging cats onto roofs. He said he swung each one like a discus, and he felt so satisfied when he let loose and it sailed through the air.

She has skin under her fingernails. Blood on her fingers. The man grunts in her ear, and all she can feel now is this man wrapped around her. He is actually turning her head now, with both hands, and one of his fingers is digging into a soft part of her ear. She gulps for air. It hurts.

Robby says something.

‘Nearly there,’ breathes the voice next to her ear.

Someone is yelling. She cannot hear well, and she is not sure the voice is even real, but the hands around her throat loosen. She catches herself with her hands as she falls. Leaves stick to her bloody fingers.

When she takes a long breath, it does not sound human.

She looks for the groundhog in the leaves, and she can’t see it. Then she looks up at Robby and he is still just standing there, and she is angrier at him than at the man who has been trying to tear her head off her body.

Robby is looking past her, though. Kailynn turns, and her breathing is still terrible, and she sees a woman wading through the creek like some swamp monster.

‘Robby Montgomery!’ is what the woman yells, just once, or maybe she has said it plenty of other times and this is the first time Kailynn’s ears have worked right.

It is Lincoln’s mother, soaking wet. She does not have Lincoln with her, and this panics Kailynn.

The groundhog is by her foot. She scoops it up, warm. Everyone but her is moving.

Lincoln’s mother is climbing out of the water.

The man who was choking Kailynn is lunging toward where he dropped his guns.

Robby is lifting his own gun toward the woman.

‘Mrs Powell told me to tell you—’ starts Lincoln’s mother, close enough that Kailynn can hear water dripping on the leaves.

The choker has his hand around his pistol, but he grabbed it by the wrong end, and he is shifting it in his hands as he tries to turn himself toward the woman. Robby has jerked his gun up so that it points toward the sky, but he has not loosened his grip on it. Kailynn thinks something is smashed inside her throat.

‘Mrs Powell said that she wants to talk to you,’ says the mother. ‘Mrs Powell says that she wants to talk to you one more time.’

Lincoln’s mother is trying to get in front of her, it occurs to Kailynn. The woman is slowly edging closer. Now the creek water from her hair is splattering across Kailynn’s shoes and thighs.

Robby Montgomery is watching them both.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he says, and his gun lowers toward them, and Kailynn thinks, Well, it mattered a little bit, just about three seconds’ worth, and now the choker is lining up his pistol, and she thinks of her father and his cats.

She throws the groundhog.

Her aim is not good – she does not hit the choker or Robby. But the groundhog passes close to the choker’s face, and he jerks back so that he loses his balance and falls into the weeds. Robby Montgomery is looking down at his friend, and then Kailynn cannot see anything else because Lincoln’s mother is on top of her, heavy and wet. She is stronger than she looks. She is lifting Kailynn, dragging her, screaming in her ear, shoving her over the bank of the creek and into the water.

Kailynn falls in face-first, swallowing water, and by then the guns are shooting.