CLARK

Clark saw the light too, recognized it though she’d never seen it before. “Those queer lights.” Maybe her father had been trying to tell her something after all.

She took a deep breath. If she wasn’t much mistaken her nose caught a smell of rot on the breeze. She pulled up beside Whiskey’s idling truck, shouted through the open window, “You boys stay here for now.”

It sounded to her ear like the right thing to say, the dutiful thing to say—and she had put enough weight on her conscience by bringing these terrified kids out here in the first place—but dear God did Clark not want to do this alone. With every strange new sight on this desolate plain, with every mile spent drifting farther from civilization, she had felt a cold dread growing in her mind. Whatever monster had been haunting this town’s dreams, whatever force had stalked Bentley’s beds all week, she knew it awaited her now. Right over there, on the other side of the fence her mother had always warned her about.

She checked the chamber of her father’s old revolver, though she wondered if it would do her much good against the thing awaiting her under those lights. She holstered the revolver on her left hip, pulled her 9 millimeter service pistol from the holster on her right, socked a round into the chamber.

She rolled up the hem of her jeans to leave Joel’s hunting knife exposed on her ankle where she could grab it easy. She popped free the safety strap of the knife’s sheath.

She took a long breath. Every inch of her skin was alight with prickling heat.

“If you hear trouble, you turn back and run,” Clark said to the boys, and she rolled up her window and drove.

LUKE

Luke stepped from the dim silver Airstream and blinked at the brilliant lights. Two boys were pissing into an empty Igloo cooler outside the red trailer across the circle. They nodded to him and looked away. Luke wiped some lube from his crotch, glanced back inside the silver Airstream and, when no one tried to stop him, he walked away.

Before a cop had caught him fucking a random trick from Rockdale (“Tyson,” the boy had called himself, though the student ID in his cupholder had carried a different name) in a Chili’s parking lot back in July, Luke had been convinced that he and Tyson were destined to be boyfriends. His heartbreak when the boy had evaporated afterward had hurt Luke far more than any of the predictable grief he’d caught from his father. Later, when Luke had realized there was a reason Wesley Mores seemed to understand him so well, Luke had felt a brief spark of hope, a silly spell of adoration, but when he’d finally succeeded in getting alone with Wesley last Friday night he had been disillusioned again.

Wesley had pushed Luke’s lips away from his mouth and down to his lap, had accepted head with the same grimace Luke saw on the faces of the boys here tonight in the Bright Lands. They all scowled and forced their eyes closed and pretended that they didn’t need this.