It was so goddamn dark out here he couldn’t see two feet in front of his face. The reek of garbage was coming from somewhere. People were always putting it in the alleys instead of taking it to the dump. How many times had he heard Jude tell people, Take your fucking garbage to the dump. What are we, pigs? A joke, sort of, since they weren’t pigs but what was the difference, really? Jude was always making jokes like that, to watch people squirm. For a while they’d kept pigs—Babcock liked pork almost as much as he liked the cattle—but some kind of sickness had wiped them out one winter. Or maybe they’d just seen what was coming and decided, What the hell, I’d rather just lie down and die in the mud.

No one would be coming to look for Leon, that was for sure; the problem of standing up was his to solve on his own. He could sort of see a way to do it, by drawing his knees to his chest. It made his shoulders hurt something terrible, twisted back like they were, and pushed his face, with its broken nose and teeth, into the dirt; he gave a yelp of pain through the gag, and by the time he was done with it, he was woozy and breathing hard, the sweat popping out all over. He lifted his face—more pain in his shoulders, what the fuck had that guy done, tying his hands so tight—and raised his upper body until he was sitting up, his knees folded under him, and that was when he realized his mistake. He had no way to stand. He’d sort of thought he could push off with his toes, jumping his way into a standing position. But this would just send him pitching forward onto his face again. He should have scooched over to the wall first, used it to shimmy his way up. But now he was stuck, his legs jammed up under him, frozen in place like a big dumbshit.

He tried to cry for help, nothing fancy, just the word “Hey,” but it came out as a strangled Aaaaa sound and made him want to cough. Already he could feel the circulation going out of his legs, a prickly numbness crawling up from his toes, like ants.

Something was moving out there.

He was facing the mouth of the alley. Beyond it lay the square, a zone of blackness since the fire barrel had gone out. He peered into the dark. Maybe it was Hap, come to look for him. Well, whoever it was, he couldn’t see a goddamn thing. Probably his mind was playing tricks on him. Alone outside on new moon, anybody could get a little jumpy.

No: something was moving. Leon felt it again. The feeling was coming from the ground, through his knees.