Page 122 of The Bright Lands

A strange croaking noise came from the kitchen. Kimbra tried to rise to her feet, struck something, slid down again. She moaned.

“For fuck’s sake,” Browder shouted. His voice was no longer quite his own. He spun toward the kitchen and hustled in her direction. The wet knife left a string of black beads across the pale floor. A furious hiss seeped from the darkness in his mouth.

Joel heard, from a great distance, someone who sounded an awful lot like Clark shouting somewhere outside.

Kimbra moaned again.

Faintly, very faintly, Joel heard another truck approaching.

LUKE

Luke joined Bryan, the Perlin tackle, as the boy rushed outside the orange trailer at the first sound of distress. Bethany Tanner—how in all holy fuck had she made it here?—was being dragged across the dirt by her feet, the spangles peeling from her green Bisonette’s uniform like a fish’s scales under a knife.

Tomas Hernandez dropped her precisely where Luke had stood just a short time before, dead center in the circle of trailers. Mr. Boone awaited her. In his leather jacket and motorcycle chaps, surrounded by a small army of naked boys, he resembled some sad parody of a warlord in a decimated future.

Mitchell Malacek descended the creaking stairs of the triple-wide bearing a handgun of his own. Parter followed him, a pump-action shotgun in one hand. To Luke’s horror he saw the big man slipping something that looked an awful lot like a red .38 buck shell into the pocket of his old Bison jacket.

The hulking frame of Garrett Mason, sheathed in his pads and helmet, emerged behind them, a long, black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle braced across his chest.

“The fuck are they doing?” Luke said to Bryan, appalled.

Bryan was shaking. “Shut up, fuck, shut up.”

Mr. Boone and Coach Parter and Garrett and Mitchell all came to stand above Bethany, regarding her. The generator rumbled. Bethany struggled to rise. Mitchell lowered his gun to within a few inches of her face. She went still.

Mr. Boone started to talk, turning to take in the two dozen boys standing on porches or framed in windows, their hands over their crotches and their mouths.

Boone couldn’t quite keep a nervous stammer from his voice. “I know none you boys want trouble here. None of you—”

“What’s that?” Garrett said.

The other boys stirred. Luke heard it too: the crunch of tires on dirt.

A sturdy-looking old Chevy rumbled to a stop between the green trailer (the trailer, Luke realized with a start, that held his phone and his keys) and the blue Water House. Four guns all swiveled around to face the truck’s driver.

The Chevy shifted into Park. Slowly, slowly, its door swung open.

CLARK

She saw the old sign as she pulled in. A dingy relic from another age, it was secured to two metal poles, looking sad and limp and desperately cheery.

WELCOME TO THE BRIGHT LANDS, it read. Pink flamingos and green bison smiled and charged around a landscape of mobile homes that reigned over tended lawns, around pies cooling on windowsills and men draping their arms over the shoulders of their teenage sons. A NEW KIND OF COMMUNITY.

Oh sweet Jesus. Oh sweet Jesus.

She rumbled to a stop between two trailers—a blue one to her right, a green one to her left, a tall triple-wide dead ahead across the circle—and took in the scene.

Why hadn’t she brought more guns?

Four armed men (boys, she thought, two of them were boys) stood before her, weapons drawn in her direction. A ghostly face framed by two plaits of brown hair slid up behind a window of the tall triple-wide and studied her with a loathing that didn’t seem human. Clark blinked, and the face was gone.

Hadn’t it looked a lot like Mr. Lott?

When no one lowered his gun, Clark saw no choice but to open her door. She took a careful step out of the truck, hands held high, and stood where her metal door still covered half her body. Where it concealed the pistol and revolver on her hips.

“Aren’t we flattered, boys?” Mr. Boone said. “More company.”

On the ground in the middle of the circle, Bethany Tanner looked about ready to rip these men’s balls off with her teeth.