Jamal was sobbing. Joel was struggling to rise. Clark couldn’t even imagine moving. The moment that voice had finally entered her head she’d felt her lungs fill with lead.

Only Luke seemed unbothered. As the rumble in the hole rose to a roar of delight, as the ground crumbled beneath Clark’s fingers, Evers calmly made his way over a few whimpering boys and stopped a foot from Garrett.

“Celebrate, boys!” Garrett shouted. “These are the best years of your life!”

Luke raised the Glock and fired two shots into Garrett’s chest.

NO! The whispering voice in Clark’s head started screaming. The screeching of nails on the stone below grew louder, Bosheth climbed faster. NO!

Garrett fell back with a cough of surprise. The rifle fell from his grasp. Clark raised her head in time to watch him try to crawl away from Luke but there was something wrong with his legs. After struggling to escape, Garrett gave up, clutched his hands to his Bison helmet and pressed it hard to his head as if it might shield him from the fruits of a life of shame and hate and all the hush-now pillow games his brother had taught him. He let out a child’s whimper. Luke took a step toward him.

A blink, and Clark saw behind Luke—though she wished for the rest of her life she hadn’t—a great white hook of a claw, pale as the moon and long as a school bus, throw itself over the edge of the hole. Saw a clutch of whiskers, tall as cornstalks, bleached white after centuries in the water, rise, dripping, from down below.

Saw a single eye, black and infinite and cold, emerge to stare at her.

“Luke!” she shouted.

But Evers seemed to notice none of this. He only regarded Garrett, regarded Garrett’s helmet.

“It’s just fiberglass, you idiot,” Luke said, and emptied the Glock into Garrett’s head.

Clark buried her face in the dirt as a wail of rage rose from the mouth of the hole, the sound so high and sharp she was certain it would burst her ears. She felt blood run from her nose. She screamed.

She grabbed hold of Joel and Jamal.

From somewhere in Garrett’s direction she heard the pin of the Glock clicking when it struck an empty chamber. Heard a shaking in the dust as Garrett’s body gave up the last of its life.

There was a great splash from deep below a moment later and the wailing stopped.

It took all sound with it. The whispers. The roars. The crackle of the flames. For one long moment, all Clark could hear was her heart, galloping in her chest.

Before her strength returned to her, Clark looked up and saw not Bosheth or the empty hole of the Bright Lands but Troy, standing at her kitchen window, opening his mouth to speak.

AFTER

DYLAN

Now there was a party that had gotten out of hand. Pills and speed, the age-old story: to think these substances had become so pernicious in this country they could ensnare not just the Bison and the new Sheriff’s Deputy but such pillars of the community as Mr. Lott, Mr. Boone and stalwart Coach Parter. The men at the bar agreed that it was a bad business, but it could have been worse. After all, just think what would have happened if Officer Clark hadn’t arrived armed?