Screaming, his mouth pulled into a chimpanzee grimace.

'They used me as bait to find Uncle Cass. Do you remember Sam, honey? Daddy's friend?'

Coughing, convulsing.

'Sam was going to sacrifice me.' He swallowed hard. 'When it seemed I might die on the altar, she sacrificed you as well.'

Small, warding hands scraping the leather-backed seats.

'You are mine, you know. No matter what Uncle Cass might say.'

Eyes rolling in bovine horror. Screaming.

'Sacrifice,' Thomas wept. 'Sacrifice makes fathers.'

He called Neil when he was supposed to. He always did what he was supposed to. According to Nora, it was one of the reasons she had left him. He was too much a part of the machinery—the fucking machinery.

With the road an abstraction in his periphery, he scrawled down the directions to the new location on a Taco Bell napkin—some place in Connecticut. 'How can I trust you?' he asked the distorted voice.

'It all comes down to guesses, Goodbook,' Neil said. 'The trick is deciding which ones are worth dying for.'

Thomas hung up, glanced at his shrieking son. He looked back to the summer-shining road, stared at the passing promised land, the parallax of asphalt and brick. As always, the horizon held the distances motionless while what was near whipped into the funnel behind him.

Control was long gone. All he had was a weeping litany: 'Frankie-shh-shh-please-Frankie-shh-shh-please.'

Empty words. Pathetic words. Words that could only wheeze and grovel before his son's terrible scream, before the most ancient prayer of all. The first great transmission.

Everything. Everything was stuck on absolute transmit. The mountains. The oceans. Even the stars. Nothing listened. Nothing. The skulls of a million lambs cracked in the jaws of a million lions. A billion human screams, and each one unheard. Nothing more than a flicker in the abyss. Even less…

No consequences outside the inevitable. No point to yank short the knife's never-ending edge.

Only children died—Thomas understood that now. Small. Helpless. Uncomprehending.

Everyone was an infant in the end.

It seemed almost normal. An old, upstate friend, waving from the porch. A summer wind whisking through the trees. A child who had to be lifted from the back seat.

Whatever voice Frankie possessed, he had screamed away a long time ago. Now he simply rasped and twitched the way a dying addict might. Only rolling eyes and an old-man grimace spoke of the horror that cycled through his soul.

This could not be his son.

This could not be.

Thomas climbed the cement steps, looked up across the white, colonial facade, squinted at the sparking sun. He blinked at Neil, his thoughts beyond hope or hate.

Buff smile. Pained eyes.