The earth began to shake and this time it didn’t stop. It sounded so close now: the screeching stone, the thuds of a massive body moving—climbing—just a few yards beneath her.

When Clark turned again to Garrett she saw that there was no face behind the grill of his helmet. There was only darkness.

“Malacek,” Garrett said. “Grab a gun.”

But Mitchell, still on his knees, shook his head. “No.”

“The fuck did you say?”

“I said no.” Mitchell looked at that blackness, then turned away. “We never should have helped Browder with the body. We never should have taken the sock to the auto shop. We should have ended all this last week. Garrett, I’m—”

Mitchell was interrupted by the loss of his brainpan.

Garrett lowered the rifle from his shoulder. Screams rose from the Bright Lands boys as Mitchell’s body collapsed in the dirt. Clark saw Bethany twitch when his blood spattered her cheek. The girl never blinked.

“You mean to tell me there ain’t a single goddamn man here to finish this job with me?” Garrett shouted from the void behind his grill. The rumble in the ground shook Clark’s teeth.

“Maybe they were right about you queers after all,” Garrett continued. He took a few steps through the sea of boys, panning the gun over their heads. “Maybe I’ll have to do all this work myself.”

“I’m good.”

There was a gasp. From the bloody porch of the burning orange trailer Luke Evers rose to his feet and made his way across the circle. He was agleam in blood from the waist down, so much blood Clark wondered how he could possibly be alive.

But alive he was.

“Luke, don’t do this. Don’t help him!” Clark called to him.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Garrett shouted.

She felt the AR turn her way but she didn’t stop. “They shot you, Luke. I saw it—they tried to kill you.”

Clark should have saved her breath. Luke bent down slowly and rose up with one of the monogrammed Glocks. He tested its weight in his hand.

The ground quaked.

Garrett let up a twisted whoop. “Altoleth golesh shah.”

“It’s been feeding on you.” Joel’s voice cracked. “It’s been feeding on all of us. It sucks on our shame and our fear and our pain. It wants us to hurt. It wants us to bleed.”

In response, the ground opened with a crack beneath Mitchell’s body. One moment the boy lay there, the back of his head scattered over his feet, and the next he had slipped silently, smoothly, into a hole in the earth. From very far below, Clark heard water sloshing, the sound echoing and warping up the walls of the stone hole—the trench, of course, even the trench her mother had spoken of had been real—but she never heard a splash when Mitchell’s body landed.

She and several boys tried to push themselves away from the hole. They froze at the sound of gunfire.

“Nobody moves!” Garrett said. “He’s coming.”