Preach was a man with prematurely white hair, long on top, so short on the sides his skull was visible. His eyes were the palest blue Whitman had ever seen. His long, crooked nose and thin lips gave him a cruel countenance, but he welcomed Whitman cordially enough. He was bare to the waist, sweat pouring off him in thick rivulets. Whitman couldn’t help but notice the deep crater in the right side of his back, lacquered with skin so shiny it almost glowed.

“I was shot with an arrow,” Preach said, clearly noting the direction of Whitman’s gaze. “When I was just about that boy’s age. Left for dead.”

“I’m sorry,” Whitman said.

“Why? You didn’t do it.” He turned to face Whitman, revealing another, smaller pucker in the flesh of his chest. “Plus which, I’ve survived worse—a gunshot, for one.”

After that, Whitman got down to business. He told Preach that he had been sent to the bayous to learn.

“Learn our crooked ways,” Preach said with a glint in his eyes. “And I don’t mean corrupt, fraudulent, or faithless.” He looked Whitman over. “I dunno. Can’t learn nuthin’ here lest you have the gift. D’you have the gift, Mr. Whitman?”

“I’m not sure.”

Preach grinned, his teeth as yellow and snaggled as a dragon’s. “Well, then, let’s you an’ me find out.”

Preach worked him all that afternoon and late into the night. An hour or two after midnight—time in Preach’s presence was as malleable as it was uncertain—he sat back from the fire he’d made and said, “Okay, then. Ask your questions.”

Whitman did just that.

“This is how we create zombies,” Preach said near the end of their time together. “And this is how we return them to a normal state.”

All the skills Preach had taught him Whitman now brought to bear on Flix, for he suspected that the poppy-based alkaloid drug administered to his friend was having much the same effect as Preach’s zombification ritual.

“You’ve got that look on your face,” Charlie said, squatting beside him. “That look you had when you came from the Well.”

Whitman, concentrating on what he needed to do, said nothing.

Charlie licked her lips nervously as she watched Flix. “Will this work?”

“Hold his hand, if he becomes agitated.”

“You mean restrain him.”

“No, I mean precisely what I said,” Whitman said as slowly as if he were speaking to a child. “Flix doesn’t need to be restrained; he needs to be grounded by a human touch.”

“Right. Got it.” Charlie nodded. “Okay.”

But her question, Will this work? still hovered in the air between them.

Of course, if he was wrong, Flix was doomed, but Whitman chose not to dwell on that possibility. It was Preach who had said, “In negative thoughts lie your destruction.”