Not saying a word to anyone, shaking his head at an offer for free coffee and sandwiches at one of the tents, not feeling the hands that pressed briefly on his shoulders (“We tried, folks, we did our best…”), Ronnie, now on auto-pilot, walked the length of the festival grounds, soon found himself back on North Cedar Street, and continued on toward downtown.

Adjusting his backpack, he tried to find some sense of Sarah around him, but the silver thread was…still and slack.

…you’ll be no different from the monsters who Hurt all the others…

For a few hours, he just walked, oblivious to the night, his surroundings, even to the voices of Suzanne and the others calling to him, trying to get his attention.

Eventually, realizing that he was once again walking toward the same road he’d used before, he smiled to himself as something occurred to him. But first, he had to make sure.

He found a dark stretch of road and retreated into the bushes, kneeling down and opening his backpack, rummaging around until he found the thing he hoped he still had.

He did.

Putting everything back in its place, Ronnie zipped up his backpack, slung it over his shoulder, and walked back out into the night, following the road back in to Heath just as he’d followed it coming in to Cedar Hill…at least for a while.

He reached the place where Union Street connected to 21st Street via a small side-street whose name he didn’t know, had never known, would never know, turned right, and followed it along the log fence-lined border of this end of Moundbuilders Park.

He knew exactly where he was going.

It took him less than five minutes to reach the 21st Street entrance of the park using this side-street, and once there, he saw what he’d come for.

The sculpture, carved from a series of stones, had been commissioned by the Cedar Hill city council to memorialize the victims of a mass shooting many years ago. A kid named Andy-Something-or-Other had gone nuts one July Fourth and mowed down over thirty people, many of them right here in Moundbuilders Park. The artist had chosen to memorialize the victims by carving rows upon rows of faces into the gigantic circular stones, then setting the rows atop one another, creating a crowded stack of faces that went around and around and around, getting a little thinner as it rose toward the top, like a stone volcano made out of stone faces.

Ronnie took a moment to study the faces.

At least none of them seemed to be in pain. That was nice.

He walked around the sculpture to see if the gaps were as he remembered them being, and they were. A careful person could climb all the way to the top—which is exactly what he began to do.

The piece rose nearly twelve feet from the ground, and by the time Ronnie reached the top, the cumulative effect of the past twenty-or-so hours hit him hard, and it was all he could do to pull himself over the rim and look down to where the small, rotting (and in some cases, desiccated corpses) of rabbits, squirrels, and something that once might have been a dog lay in the mud.