“I will, Mom. Love you.”

That night the burning face came back to me in my dreams. I was tied down to a table, with restraints on my arms and legs and a metal collar around my neck. As I struggled to get loose, I saw a pair of hands peel open my abdomen as if it were a box and then start pulling my organs out and placing them onto a metal table.

I didn’t see the face until I turned my head to the left and was confronted by a huge, unnaturally wide smile with rows of razor-sharp teeth that gleamed like metal in the faint light. Then his head started to burn, and I couldn’t look away as he laughed, the flesh blackening, cracking, blistering, and popping.

Even at this moment of horror, I tried to make a wisecrack—something about how this was what happened when Rice Krispies went to hell (no one said jokes have to make sense in dreams)—but couldn’t get any words out. Then I saw my dad standing a foot from me in his white lab coat, and from deep inside me erupted a howl for help. I howled and howled, and he did nothing.

Just stood there as the flaming man’s hands tore me apart.

CHAPTER 11

Maggie

I JOLTED UP in bed and looked at the clock. 4:14 a.m. What had awakened me? Nerf?

No, not Nerf. Ugh.

Mom’s voice was coming from downstairs. What was she doing up so early? Some animal emergency, no doubt.

I got out of bed and stretched one arm, then the other, over my head, my oversize Pure Prairie League T-shirt (I was a killer thrift-store shopper) flapping against my waist. The air felt humid and stuffy, which was usually the case when we had no animals inside; Mom liked to save on air-conditioning bills when she could. In her view, having a cat in the kennel was good reason to cool the place, but having a daughter upstairs was not.

I descended the stairs softly to find Mom in the front doorway leaning against the jamb, her arms folded. She was wearing shorts and a wrinkled button-up, as if she’d gone to sleep in her clothes.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said, sounding tired and resigned.

“I swear on a stack of Bibles,” responded a raspy female voice from outside.

“Hey,” I said.

Mom looked up at me with red eyes, something I hadn’t seen for a long time.

“You know Rachel,” she said, and looked out the door. I peered out and saw Rachel Anderson smoking a cigarette in the dark. She lived a few blocks down, in a house where they kept goats.

With the nearest streetlight a block away on Main, most of the light outside came from our yellow “24-Hour Emergency” neon sign. I stepped outside, if for no other reason than to get into the cooler air.

“Rachel’s sheepdog, I think you’ve seen him,” Mom said. “He had to get stitches last year. Anyway, I just put him in the back. Same condition Nerf had.”