“Okay. So this was a machinery accident?”

“Yeah. Uh, yeah. The machinery. It was hydraulic, see.”

(“—male with multiple deep abdominal punctures!” That was Brent’s stretcher. Mollie shouted at the scrum of nurses and doctors sprinting past. “He got a dirty pitchfork in the gut! He could have tetanus!”)

“Pitchfork?” The cop squinted at Brent’s stretcher, already receding down the corridor, then frowned at her. “I thought you said something about machinery?”

“Oh, yeah, it was. Both, I mean. See, the hydraulic line, it, um, there was a really big pressure surge and when it blew it sent a pitchfork, um, across the barn.”

(“—multiple compound fractures to the arm, possible dislocated shoulder—” Mick screamed like the madmen of Talas every time his stretcher hit a bump. His shattered arm had more kinks in it than a carpenter’s rule.)

The cop blinked. “Jesus. What happened to him?”

“Oh. Uh, Mick was standing too close and when the compressor came apart it tossed him higher than the hay loft. He came down really hard. People think dirt floors are soft, but they’re not, you know, not when they’re hard-packed by people and cows and equipment coming and going all the time.”

“Sure.”

(“—White male, early fifties, multiple deep punctures to the abdomen, massive internal bleeding—”

“That’s my dad,” she shouted. “Check him for tetanus, too!”)

“Another pitchfork injury?” The cop cocked his head a little bit, squinting at her as though trying to read fine print tattooed under her eyes.

“Yes. I mean, no. I mean, yes, but it wasn’t another pitchfork. It was the, uh, the same one.”

“The same pitchfork got your brother and your dad in the gut?”

“Yeah. The tines went right through Brent and got Dad, too.” At least that was mostly true. The cop grunted and shifted his pose, clearly a little squicked out by the mental image of a dirty, rusty, manure-flecked pitchfork going straight through somebody’s stomach and poking out his back—

Mollie doubled over. Panted. Fought to swallow down the gorge before it splattered all over her shoes.

At least some of the sympathy had returned to the cop’s gaze when she levered herself upright again. But it winked out like a snuffed candle when, just before Dad’s medical scrum turned the corner, an ER nurse shouted plain as fucking day: “—multiple bite wounds and a severed ear!”

The puke surged up her throat so violently it actually jetted from her nostrils as well as her mouth. It splattered across a row of chairs in the clinic entryway and the backsplash stippled the cop, whose quick reflexes had saved him from the worst of it.

Kneeling on all fours on the hospital floor, Mollie couldn’t remember if she was the one to have bitten Dad’s ear off, and if so, if she had swallowed it. Watching the last streamers of puke and spittle trailing from her lips, she wondered if they’d find Dad’s ear in the contents of her stomach. The thought made her stomach convulse again; she tasted bile. How would they ever be able to look at Dad and his lopsided head without remembering how they’d temporarily become mindless eaters of their own kin?