Nobody apologized to her, of course. Nobody liked to be reminded of their mistakes. Nobody wanted to admit that Carrie had been right all along. She ate lunch alone, as usual.

Wade Wellman looked at her like he wanted to kill her. That’s not what he said, of course. He yelled at her from across the cafeteria.

“We wanted say thank you again, Carrie,” he shouted. “Thank you for saving us. For rescuing us from that awful, awful man. You don’t know the plans he had for us. I sure hope we can find a way to repay you. I want to be sure you get what’s coming to you.”

But Wade was all talk. Everyone knew that.

Then Carrie found her dog, Bailey, in her backyard. Eyes open, tongue lolling out of his mouth, body already going stiff. The vet said Bailey died of a crushed windpipe.

Carrie had never heard her mother scream at her father like that, ever. She insisted he go “arrest that little bastard.”

But Carrie knew her dad couldn’t. They couldn’t prove anything.

Which is why Wade did it. He knew it would hurt so much more this way.

Carrie thought about evil. She had watched Wade evolve from a nuisance — a schoolyard bully and a mean little shit — into something much worse. She thought about how so many people in her school, people she had known her whole life, had been ready to do horrible things because someone else gave them permission to be cruel.

She thought of Adam Goodson, whoever he really was, and how someone was willing to smear him all over the walls to keep him from talking.

She thought of what was scary enough to terrify a whole bunch of high school kids into silence.

She hated the idea of intuition, of hunches, of gut feelings. She believed in a rational world. She put together clues to make concrete deductions. Carrie didn’t go looking for crimes; there were plenty that found her already.

But she could not get past the feeling that something else was moving pieces on the board, that there was an intent behind all of this.

There was a pattern that she couldn’t yet see, a kind of shadow that hung over the data. Someone — or something — wanted all of this to happen. She knew it with a cold certainty.

There was a bigger bad guy out there. A network. People willing to use kids as currency, to steal them and ship them and do God knows what else.

Something had crawled into Middleton, or had always been there, hiding beneath the surface.

This wasn’t over. It was just beginning.

16

That’s How Her Story Ought to Go