After another mile, I notice the road getting a little more packed down and well traveled. I can see light up ahead. Soon, the nonstop buzzing of the local insect life gives way to something equally annoying.

Country music.

I wouldn’t exactly call this place a town. I’m sure it doesn’t show up on even the most detailed map. It looks more like a campground that people forgot to leave. Or maybe this is just a place where the local hunters come to bro around and escape their wives, I think, noticing an overpopulation of pickup trucks in the nearby gravel parking lot.

There are a couple dozen crude huts scattered throughout this cleared stretch of swamp coast, all of them pretty much indistinguishable from an old-school outhouse. The huts basically consist of some pieces of plywood hastily nailed together, and they look like a strong breeze could knock them over. I guess when you’re building at the edge of a Florida swamp, there’s no point in putting too much effort in. Hung between the huts, lighting this grim little vista, are strings of blinking Christmas lights and a few gas-powered lanterns. Beyond the huts, where the solid ground sinks back into the swamp, there’s a rickety dock with a few tied-up pontoon boats.

The source of the music—the center of this “town”—and the only solid structure built here is Trapper’s, a skeevy-looking bar housed in a log cabin, the name proudly displayed along the roof in sizzling green neon. A row of stuffed alligators line the bar’s wooden porch, their jaws open and searching. From inside, above the music, I can hear men shouting and pool balls cracking.

“All right,” Nine says, clapping his hands. “My kind of place.”

The place does sort of remind me of the off-the-grid spots I used to hit up when I was alone and on the run, places where the tight-knit and gritty locals made it easy to spot out-of-place Mogadorians. Even so, as I notice a scrawny middle-aged guy with a mullet and a tank top staring at us, chain-smoking in the shadows of the porch, I wonder if we should find a safer place for us to poke our heads in.

But Nine is already halfway up the creaky wooden steps, Marina right behind him, and so I go along. Hopefully this place has a phone so we can at least get in touch with the others back in Chicago. Check to see how John and Ella are doing—hopefully better, somehow, especially now that we know the cure-all Five claimed to have in his Chest was a bunch of crap. We have to warn the others about him. Who knows what information he might’ve been feeding to the Mogadorians.

When we push through the swinging saloon doors of Trapper’s, the music doesn’t screech to a stop like in the movies, but everyone in the bar does turn their heads to stare at us, almost in unison. The place is cramped, not much to it besides the bar, a pool table and some beat-up lawn furniture. It stinks of sweat, kerosene and alcohol.