“Alright,” Clark said. “Wait for my signal.”

A gunshot echoed from the direction of the triple-wide. They froze.

Jamal shouted, “Clear!”

A moment later, Whiskey shouted, “Clear!”

She heard the screech of stone shearing from stone beneath her. Louder now. Closer. The lights above the circle flickered again.

Clark met Joel’s eye through the window. A quick, silent conference—This is fucked/I agree—before Clark nodded to Kimbra. “Remember—wait for my signal,” she said, and headed around the side of the black camper.

BETHANY

Mitchell Malacek collapsed into the blue trailer, falling face-first into the basin of a long metal urinal that ran the length of the trailer’s wall. Whiskey Brazos panted in the open door, the butt of his handgun still raised where he had coldcocked Mitchell a moment before. Bethany was pressed into the trailer’s back corner, grasping a toilet seat over her head like a club, ready to swing. If Whiskey hadn’t knocked Malacek unconscious the moment Mitchell had stepped through the door Bethany supposed she probably would have killed the guy. She was unsurprised to realize this didn’t bother her.

Whiskey bent down to grab the handgun that Mitchell had dropped and stuck the pistol down the back of his pants.

Bethany lowered the toilet seat to the floor. She looked first at Whiskey and then at Ricky Turner, bent over one of the trailer’s many toilets, tears in his eyes, a rubber douche trembling in his hands.

Whiskey shouted “Clear!” through the open door.

Mitchell groaned in the urinal trough. Bethany crossed the narrow trailer briskly and slammed the toe of her shoe into his groin. Mitchell let out a yelp of pain and stared at her, aghast. She smoothed the hem of her Bisonette singlet.

“Now,” Bethany said. “Does anyone want to explain what the fuck is going on here?”

JAMAL

Jamal wasn’t entirely certain what a generator was supposed to sound like, but he didn’t care one bit for the wet sputtery noises the Bright Lands’ generator was coughing up. The trailer park appeared to be run entirely off a single massive black box that stood taller than Jamal by a good six inches. The name on its face—MITSUBISHI—was dancing violently a few inches to his right. He wondered if the thing had been hit in all the gunfire. Frankly, he didn’t want to find out.

“I hope you understand the arrest weren’t nothing personal, Reynolds,” Coach Parter said, hands over his head. “When Boone told Mason to hold on to Whitley’s socks I never thought we’d find a use for them. But once Staler started setting you up with the cops, saying you was mad at Dylan for some reason, well...”

Jamal said nothing. The big man stood a few feet away, just past the front of the triple-wide, the shotgun somewhere in the dirt. Parter had dropped the .38 easy enough when Jamal had come around the back of the trailer a moment before. The warning shot Jamal had fired had certainly helped the coach over any hesitation.