He said something choked and wet. His eyes strained to find her in the dim light. “Bloated. The others are bloated.”

Clark didn’t move until blood came puddling up from Boone’s mouth and the light left his eyes and then she grabbed the Glock in his hand and kept moving.

She was hoarding guns like the government was coming for them. The Glock was customized, very lightweight. An elegant tiger stripe ran along the grip, the letters HB monogrammed on the base like the vanity plates Mr. Harlan Boone always fastened to his new trucks. Clark thought of a similar gun she’d seen in Mitchell’s hand earlier and wondered if the two Glocks didn’t form a pair.

She dropped the new pistol into the empty holster on her hip and bolted the short distance to the silver Airstream. Nothing. No shouts, no gunshots. Clark pressed her back to the trailer’s cold aluminum wall and breathed.

When she looked to her right, her eyes settled on Whiskey’s truck parked a few feet away. She fought a wave of nausea at the sight inside. KT Staler’s face—or what was left of it—lay pressed against the glass of the truck’s passenger window like a specimen on a slide. Awful as that was, Clark didn’t feel herself slipping loose of her bearings until she saw T-Bay Baskin, sitting dead in the seat behind KT and wearing a great bib of blood on his shirt.

The crackle of splintering wood from up ahead cleared her mind. She kept moving.

JAMAL

For a very long time all Jamal could see were T-Bay’s bright eyes: they had locked on to his the moment the bullet had slid into his neck. Jamal had fumbled blindly with the handle of the truck’s door, unable to look away from his dying teammate, and then a bullet had shattered the cab’s back window and Jamal had thrown himself in the dirt and run.

“Let me talk to them,” KT had said.

“She said for us to wait,” T-Bay had said.

“They’ll never listen to her,” KT had said.

After a long silence, Whiskey had said, “Are you sure?”

Oh, these guys had listened alright. KT was dead, T-Bay was dead and now Jamal was crouched behind a black camper, Whiskey Brazos shaking and puking on his shoes beside him. Jamal stared at the black horizon and saw T-Bay’s wide white eyes staring back at him.

When Jamal returned to himself—how long had his mind left him? A second? A year?—he heard metal screeching inside the black camper against which he and Whiskey were sheltered. He realized that he and Whiskey were holding hands. The portly boy was mumbling something: “It feeds help it feeds help.”

Jamal smacked Whiskey and pressed his hand to the boy’s mouth. “There’s someone in there,” Jamal whispered, nodding his head at the black camper.

But Whiskey wasn’t listening to him. The pale boy had gone paler. A moment later and Jamal heard it too. To their left, footsteps were coming rapidly around the back of the bloody truck. Coming their way.