“And it was beautiful old you.”

Don’t worry. I’m getting you out of this shit hole.

“Can you blame the poor deputy for coming off his head at that moment, Mr. Whitley? Can you blame me for whispering a little encouragement in his ear?” Browder brought his gun to Joel’s temple.

For a moment, Joel forgot his pain or his fear. He lost all of the resolve he’d gathered over the week. He was, instead, so crushed with shame at his own arrogance that he found it impossible to breathe. Pressing a hand to his ruined shoulder, marveling at the cost of his negligence—a dead brother, a dead cheerleader, the only person who would ever have come to his rescue about to be murdered—Joel felt all his hope seeping out between his bloody fingers. If only, if only. If only he’d gone home to the city last night. If only he had foregone one long white night to call his brother in the last ten years. If only he’d ever fucking cared.

“I’d waited so long, Mr. Whitley. I just needed a boy’s worth of blood.”

Browder opened his mouth. A hideous sucking noise came from inside his head—a sound like a straw slurping at the bottom of a cup—and Joel could feel the creature inside the deputy sucking something from the air of the trailer. Feeding.

“What are you?” Joel said.

Browder smiled wider. “Hungry.”

With a roar, Clark threw herself against the deputy, grabbed for the pistol. A gunshot rang in Joel’s ear, singed his hair.

Browder and Clark landed against the wall together. The gun tumbled to the floor.

JAMAL

The inside of the tall triple-wide smelled of lemons and cordite and rot. It was some strange approximation of a man cave: big-screen TV occupied by a pair of chicks with dicks, a half-deflated sex doll with a mouth open in permanent surprise, a long berber couch. Shelves full of football trophies lined the walls, scented candles burning amid the cheap metal like shrines assembled at a strip mall.

The walls, just like the wall Jamal had passed outside on the porch, were papered with Polaroids of boys: boys laughing under the white Christmas lights outside, naked boys drinking, boys wrestling in the dirt.

Mr. Lott’s body lay near the open window through which he’d fired at Kimbra, just past the couch, the barrel of the rifle now jutting through what remained of his head. Jamal stared. It took real commitment to shoot yourself with a rifle that big.

Coach Parter, standing across the couch from Jamal, raised one hand again when Jamal brought up the revolver. He pressed the other hand against a wound in his arm.

“The fuck is wrong with you people?” Jamal said.

“That’s a very good question, son,” Parter replied. He took a little step to one side and revealed a long hallway that stretched into the back of the trailer behind him. “You’ve made mistakes yourself, though, haven’t you?”

Jamal hardly heard him—something had grabbed hold of his mind. His feet seemed to move on their own. He stumbled forward until he stood at the threshold of the hall, staring at an open bedroom a few yards away, a room whose walls were paneled with mirrors. In the center of the room there was a hole in the floor.