I glanced back at the campfire. Men laughed and drank. The quarters on the ground glinted by the fire. Nobody moved to pick them up, or to cover the women. The meat was cooked, and some of the women sliced it off the spits with Bowie knives.

If only they would take those knives and escape. Jake was drunk, all the men were drunk or getting there. The women could overpower them. They could get away. Starla was sleeping in the shed with Kaylee—that woman would be a burden, to carry or convince, to deal with her sickness as we drove far, far away from here. Were there other children in the compound, hidden in trailers and shacks? Would we have enough cars to carry them?

The shape in the woods made a sound, and I looked for it again, willing my eyes to adjust to the shadows. The figure wobbled, tripped. As it came closer through the trees, it no longer appeared graceful. I heard the snap of branches and leaves. I heard a moan.

The men tore into their meat. The women would eat last, if at all; I knew this without even asking. Dance and Grayson would eat with the women. I looked at their empty hands, their eyes as they watched the other men chew. Most of the women had their eyes cast down, or were making themselves busy picking up the beer bottles and bones, trying to stay on the edge of the circle and avoid attention.

But Jamey looked straight at me across the fire. She said loudly, “Where the hell are those potatoes, girl? The men want potatoes with their meat!” She began to stride across the ground to me, purposefully. She touched my shoulder and turned me away from the fire, away from Jake. She lowered her voice. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s somebody in the trees,” I said. “Are you missing anybody? Did anyone run away?”

“No.”

“Look. Just stand here and look. Someone’s in the trees.”

She stood with me, so quiet I thought she was holding her breath, so close I could almost believe we were friends. Together we saw the pale shape stumble forward, almost colliding with a tree. If not for Jamey beside me, seeing it, too, I would have thought I was seeing a ghost.

Jamey said: “That’s not a person.”

I looked back at the shape as it sank to its knees.

“It’s a damn deer.” She sounded disappointed.

But then I knew something. “Jamey, we can’t eat the meat. The deer meat. If that’s a deer...” It was beating its head against a trunk. Dazed, as if dosed. So thin its rib cage stood out like a prow. “If the deer meat came from the woods around here, we can’t eat it. Nobody should eat it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve seen this thing before. At one of our neighbor’s.”