Contrary to what everyone sees in the movies, getting shot, even in the leg, is not something you can shrug off. True, she once saw a guy take a bullet to the torso and get up and run away, but he was on meth.

Carrie doesn’t have any meth. She does a lot of deep breathing instead.

The pain is like a red-hot brand pressed to her mind, filling her thoughts and crowding out everything else. The wound is in her calf, and the pain radiates outward every time she breathes, which means the bullet definitely hit bone.

The hole in her leg isn’t pumping blood, only leaking, so no major arteries had been pierced. Small favors. It’s not fatal, not if she gets treatment quickly.

But it doesn’t look like she’s going to the hospital any time soon.

Someone helps her to a sitting position. She looks up and realizes, with surprise, that it’s her mother.

“Keep breathing,” Mary says. She tears a strip from her sweater, the one she always wears around the house because she’s cold even in the middle of summer. She wraps it tightly —goddamn, it hurts — around Carrie’s leg.

She looks more alert and aware than Carrie has seen in months. Carrie recalls a scrap of an article she skimmed fourteen months ago about Alzheimer’s. In patients with specialized training, their skills are sometimes the last thing to go.

“Mom,” she says. “Are you all right?”

Her mother looks at her like she’s an idiot. “Yes, sweetie,” she says. “I’m not the one who got shot.”

“Right. Of course. Mom, you’ve got to get out of here.”

Her mother glares at her. “I’m not going anywhere. Not without you.”

Suddenly, the mob parts, like a river flowing around a stone.

Wade Wellman stands before her, looking like he did at his last parole hearing, where she testified against him. He looms over her and her mom, happier than she ever saw him in his life.

“Hey, Carrie,” he says, “I told you I would catch up with you. Sooner or later.”

She has a feeling of impossibility, of pure disbelief. She blurts it out.

“But you’re dead,” she insists. She got the call from the prison ninety-seven days ago, and even though it was paranoid, she insisted on seeing the autopsy report herself. He was dead, and she’d breathed a little easier, because at least that part of the past would be buried.

She really ought to know better by now.

“You’re dead.”

When Carrie says it out loud, it all comes back to Wade.

He slit his own throat in his cell. They made him do it. The Followers. It was easier to get his corpse out of prison than to engineer an escape, or grind their way through the legal process.

Then they brought him back.