A long, blank time later, still hot, when at last a flesh-colored moon in partial decay had risen overhead, he had scooted back down the gutter to the cistern. Listening from there, he had heard through the dirt walls of the house a terrifying commotion, Faith shrieking and Papa bellowing, the dog woofing excitedly, things falling and breaking.

With a memory of this morning, he had eased off the cistern’s rim to the ground. The rough road he had arrived on had exited the forest between two huge stumps. From there, to his first glimpse, the cluster of low, grassy-topped structures had looked like a hobbit shire in Middle-earth, a paradise. Now he was groping through moon shadows along the forest’s edge, looking to escape through those stumps again. A door squealed open.

“Tippy! Get!”

The beam of a flashlight had struck him in the back, casting a black ghost of himself forward as he fled.

Finally, slick with sweat and dry with thirst, no more breath to run, he lies heaving and bruised where he fell among the scoured rocks and tumbled timbers of a deep dry wash.

You can’t escape.

After his first fifteen seconds of flight, he has never outrun the dog. The dog has been with him this whole time. But it has always waited, panting, growling, and snapping, for the woman to catch up. So Sammy Lamb of God has limped and rested, limped and rested, night heat somehow heavier than day heat, an hour, two hours, a redundant terrain addled by moon shadows, uphill scrambles and downhill plunges, holes that look like shadows, shadows like holes, always fetid water on low ground, tilting hummocks, sucking mud, swarming mosquitoes, then another brushy climb with thorns tearing at him, going in circles, he fears, with the dog trotting menacingly behind him, now and then baying to guide Faith as she lumbers and crashes along. The dog can go forever, so it is her against him, who can last longer, and it seems that she will never quit.

Finally she is near. He can hear her staggering strides, her laboring lungs. Then he sees her zombie shape lurching downhill toward him. The dog shows her. She aims. Then something rolls beneath her and she falls, firing the rifle into the treetops. He starts to crawl down the gulch. She fires again, hits rock. He finds the breath to scramble out and rise to a crouch behind a tree trunk. He turns his back to her, sees a lane to the bottom, and lets gravity pitch him headlong downward. The dog gallops easily at his heels. But the bottom is a bog. He staggers ten strides into muck and sinks to his hips. He is stuck.

I am everyone and everywhere.