Cal was screaming her name from very far away. If he had been in Manitoba before, now he was down a mineshaft in Manitoba.

Her hand tightened on the key ring in her pocket. The teeth of some of those keys were digging into her palm. Biting.

“Blood is nice, tears are better,” Ross said. “For a thirsty old rock like that. And when I fuck you on the stone, it’ll have some of both. Has to be quick, though. Don’t want to do it in front of the kid.” His breath stank.

She pulled her hand out of her pocket, the end of her house key protruding between her pointer and middle fingers, and jabbed her fist into Ross Humbolt’s face. She just wanted to push his mouth away, didn’t want him breathing on her, didn’t want to smell the green stink of him anymore. Her arm felt weak, and the way she punched at him was lazy, almost friendly—but the key caught him under the left eye and raked down his cheek, sketching a jaggedy line in blood.

He flinched, snapping his head back. His hands loosened; for an instant his thumbs were no longer burrowing into the soft skin in the hollow of her throat. A moment later he tightened his grip again, but by then she’d drawn a single whooping breath. The sparks—the pinwheel stars—bursting and flaring at the periphery of her vision faded out. Her head went clear, as clear as if someone had dashed icy water into her face. The next time she punched him, she put her shoulder behind it and sank the key into his eye. Her knuckles jarred against bone. The key popped through his cornea and into the liquid center of the eyeball.

He did not scream. He made a kind of doglike bark, a woofing grunt (roop!), and wrenched her hard to one side, trying to yank her off her feet. His forearms were sunburned and peeling. Close up she could see that his nose was peeling, too, badly, the bridge of his nose sizzling with sunburn. He grimaced, showing teeth stained pink and green.

Her hand fell away, let go of the key ring. It continued to dangle from the welling socket of his left eye, the other keys dancing against one another and bouncing against his stubbly cheek. Blood slicked the entire left side of Humbolt’s face, and that eye was a glimmering red hole.

The grass seethed around them. The wind rose, and the tall blades thrashed and flailed at Becky’s back and legs.