Take hold. It was his thought but in his father’s steadying voice. Making that voice helped. He stared at the dog’s caved-in stomach and saw lively movement there. A boiling stew of maggots. Like the ones he’d seen squirming on the half-eaten hamburgers lying on the passenger seat of that damned Prius. Burgers that had been there for days. Someone had left them, walked away from the car and left them, and never come back, and never—

Take hold, Calvin. If not for yourself, for your sister.

“I will,” he promised his father. “I will.”

He stripped the snarls of tough greenery from his ankles and shins, barely feeling the little cuts the grass had inflicted. He stood.

“Becky, where are you?”

Nothing for a long time—long enough for his heart to abandon his chest and rise into his throat. Then, incredibly distant, “Here! Cal, what should we do? We’re lost!”

He closed his eyes again, briefly. That’s the kid’s line. Then he thought, Le kid, c’est moi. It was almost funny.

“We keep calling,” he said, moving toward where her voice had come from. “We keep calling until we’re together again.”

“But I’m so thirsty!” She sounded closer now, but Cal didn’t trust that. No, no, no.

“Me too,” he said. “But we’re going to get out of this, Beck. We just have to keep our heads.” That he had already lost his—a little, only a little—was one thing he’d never tell her. She had never told him the name of the boy who knocked her up, after all, and that made them sort of even. A secret for her, now one for him.

“What about the kid?”

Ah, Christ, now she was fading again. He was so scared that the truth popped out with absolutely no trouble at all, and at top volume.

“Fuck the kid, Becky! This is about us now!”

↓

Directions melted in the tall grass, and time melted as well: a Dalí world with Dolby sound. They chased each other’s voice like weary children too stubborn to give up their game of tag and come in for dinner. Sometimes Becky sounded close, sometimes she sounded far; he never once saw her. Occasionally the kid yelled for someone to help him, once so close that Cal sprang into the grass with his hands outstretched to snare him before he could get away, but there was no kid. Only a crow with its head and one wing torn off.

There is no morning or night here, Cal thought, only eternal afternoon. But even as this idea occurred to him, he saw that the blue of the sky was deepening and the squelchy ground beneath his sodden feet was growing dim.

If we had shadows, they’ d be getting long and we might use them to move in the same direction at least, he thought, but they had no shadows. Not in the tall grass. He looked at his watch and wasn’t surprised to see it had stopped even though it was a self-winder. The grass had stopped it. He felt sure of it. Some malignant vibe in the grass, some paranormal Fringe shit.