The backpack goes over her head. The zipper closes to her neck, where it bites and pinches the skin.

She hears Chris nearby, crying.

The sound of a trunk popping.

And then she’s pitched into darkness. Chris, too, as he’s thrown against her.

Last things she hears are John Elvis panting, Skank cursing under her breath, and Mitchell Erickson saying, “Let’s go. The others will be waiting.”

It’s tough to breathe inside that bag. All she has is her nose. Nostrils flaring to bring in air. Mouth stuck shut with duct tape. She imagines the tape is a hand. A hand that smells like gasoline and cigarettes. Atlanta almost cries at that, but then she thinks: If I cry, my nose will fill with snot, and if my nose gets blocked, I’m dead. And so she stops, she tries to relax, tries to breathe slowly and surely and not feel like the entire world is collapsing, swallowing her in a crushing fist.

When she breathes, she once again smells the ephemeral scent of gun smoke.

But for the first time, it brings her solace.

A tangle of smells has a gang bang in her nose. She’s carried, blind and mute, and dropped onto a chair so hard her buttbone pulsates, but she can’t help but notice the new smells: dust, must, stale cigarette smoke, a hint of cologne like old men wear, a tang of beer and sweat, and beneath it all, that greasy-yet-clean smell of gun oil. The gun club, she thinks.

She knows where the gun club is. Hard not to; it has its own road. Gun Club Road.

It sits south of town, just up in the piney hills—not far from where Atlanta got thrown into the trunk of a Lexus. She’s been by the place once or twice. When she first moved here from North Carolina, she took to wandering to get the lay of the land. Eventually she became friends with Bee, and then Bee would drive her around instead of letting her walk, and they’d maybe sip beer or smoke a little weed as they drove around in Bee’s certified POS, a Suzuki Samurai.

The gun club itself isn’t much to look at. Blocky concrete building. Looks like a drain embankment you could live in for a while. American flag out front. A few boxwood shrubs. Bars on the windows.