Gerry, the ­flesh-­and-­guts boy, was lumped on his beanbag, the only light in his room the glow from the TV atop the dresser. His PlayStation wheezed on the floor at his slippered feet. The game was Blood Dusk 2. You played as Cole Skuse, an ­ex-­Yankee soldier and mercenary. Right now, Gerry was about to attempt the rescue of Skuse’s love interest, a beautiful blonde prostitute named Dora Levigne. She was being held hostage by the Cullen gang inside the saloon. Mission objective was get in there, ventilate as many of the Cullen boys as possible, and get her out. The Cullen faction was part of a larger horde of roving rapists, murderers, thieves and scalp hunters led by a scarred brute known only as the Padre. The Padre was your true and final adversary, the man who, in the game’s prologue, had ordered the murder of your family.

Gerry liked Blood Dusk 2, but was becoming less and less enamoured of the repetitious, ­shootout-­intensive missions you were obliged to complete in order to advance the plot. The game weighed things too much in your favour. You had unlimited lives, too many automatic save points, too nuanced and forgiving a targeting system for taking out your opponents. What was worth it, what kept Gerry coming back, was the game map. The map was gorgeous, two hundred square miles of simulated, fully interactable ­nineteenth-­century North American frontier. While the missions tended to cluster in the towns and settlements that occupied only a small percentage of the game’s physical environment, Gerry had spent countless hours ranging through the enormous remainder of the map. He had discovered the remnants of Indian graves, chased down buffalo on an open plain, drunk moonshine with a benignly deranged prospector by the shore of a moonlit creek. The landscape teemed with wildlife and, to a lesser extent, other people, and you could, of course, shoot every living thing in the game, though Gerry refrained whenever possible. At sunset, he would goad his nag up the trail of a hill to watch the sinking rays cut across the cliff walls of a distant canyon, the ponderous flecks of vultures lagging in the thermals, circling something dying unseen on the canyon floor . . .

‘Shhtburk.’

‘Hah?’ Gerry said.

‘Shit. Brick,’ Pell repeated from the doorway, looking down at Gerry. She was in Uggs and sweatpants, holding a glass with a clear liquid in it. Pell liked vodka, liked to lingeringly nurse thimblefuls of the stuff in the evening. Off school, and drinking when she liked: Pell had Nick under her thumb. The funny thing was that Nick, back before the folks croaked, had been mad for drinking, going out, and the general pursuit of ­hell-­raising. Now he’d turned brutally sensible: worked every hour he could, stayed diligently sober, did not even bother with women any more.

‘Yeah?’ Gerry said.