Our two-traffic-light town was little more than a few square blocks of stores and restaurants. In the center a big church sat behind a grassy square filled with benches and squirrels. The high school at the edge of town was large for the town’s population, because Creek’s Cause was lousy with kids. Most ranch-and-farm communities need hands and backs, and folks here have kids early and often. It wasn’t unusual to see families of six or seven roll into church on a Sunday morning. What with all the cattle and crops, it was easy enough to fill mouths, and the sprawling countryside provided more space than anyone knew what to do with.

As we wove through the pines toward the familiar lights, we heard the movement of people in action, machinery whirring, doors opening and closing. Everybody was probably preparing to face the threat, like when an F2 tornado blew through last July and the town gathered in the church basement with food and supplies, battening down the hatches. I felt a flicker of relief that we’d lived through the worst and had finally arrived back in the world as we knew it.

We stepped out of the woods and scrambled down the gentle slope onto the tar-and-gravel roof of the general store. Creek’s Cause spread out below us.

For an instant, everything looked perfect. Folks in motion, working together, hauling wheelbarrows, moving back and forth across the square.

Then it all came into horrific focus. It was like some elaborate windup toy, everything running according to a precise but mysterious order, driven by invisible cogs and wheels.

The adults of our town toiled down below, too many to take in with a sweep of the eye. The men were walking their squared-off spirals or loading guns into wheelbarrows. They’d rolled back the rear door of the Bob n’ Bit Hardware store to reveal the stoked-up blacksmith forge where Bob Bitley hammered out his old-timey mailboxes and weather vanes. They were feeding handguns and hunting rifles into the roaring flame, melting the weapons into useless metal.

The women restrained screaming children, binding their arms and legs. Some of the men paused in their tasks to help. In the middle of the road, Don Braaten had pinned Janie Woodrow, the girl who sat next to me in Dr. Chatterjee’s biology class, to the asphalt. Still wearing his splattered overalls from the slaughterhouse, he was on top of her, mashing her cheek to the dotted yellow line. His knee pressed into her back as he wound duct tape around her wrists. Beside him the Durant brothers worked a pair of jackhammers into the road, sparks flying around their muscular forearms. Another Host had scaled a telephone pole outside the two-story hospital and was going after the junction box with an electric saw.