Page 125 of The Bright Lands

Luke wasn’t moving. Nothing she could do for him now. Instead, Clark thought of what he’d done earlier, before the shooting had started. Luke’s eyes had gone twice from her face to the black camper trailer and back again. It might have been nothing, or he might have been trying to tell her what she needed to know. It was all she had.

Go.

Hustling through the darkness behind the green trailer, Clark strained to track this place’s geography. From this trailer, moving up her side of the circle should bring her first to the silver Airstream, then to Whiskey Brazos’s truck, then to a long exposed space and then the black camper.

If Joel was still alive, and if he was there in that black camper—so many if’s—then maybe Kimbra was alive and with him as well. Maybe Clark could salvage some of this situation. Maybe she wouldn’t spend a lifetime choked by the shame she already felt for involving KT, Jamal, T-Bay and Whiskey in a firefight.

Go.

As Clark reached the end of the green trailer some strange monster composed of nothing but pale flesh and black leather threw itself across the ground in front of her. She raised her gun to fire, thinking it was the twitchy thing from her nightmares, but no: it was only Mr. Boone, heaving himself along on his elbows with what little life was left in him. Boone turned to look up at her, blood pumping from his nose, a black Glock held loosely in his hand.

He said something choked and wet. His eyes strained to find her in the dim light. “Bloated. The others are bloated.”

Clark didn’t move until blood came puddling up from Boone’s mouth and the light left his eyes and then she grabbed the Glock in his hand and kept moving.

She was hoarding guns like the government was coming for them. The Glock was customized, very lightweight. An elegant tiger stripe ran along the grip, the letters HB monogrammed on the base like the vanity plates Mr. Harlan Boone always fastened to his new trucks. Clark thought of a similar gun she’d seen in Mitchell’s hand earlier and wondered if the two Glocks didn’t form a pair.

She dropped the new pistol into the empty holster on her hip and bolted the short distance to the silver Airstream. Nothing. No shouts, no gunshots. Clark pressed her back to the trailer’s cold aluminum wall and breathed.

When she looked to her right, her eyes settled on Whiskey’s truck parked a few feet away. She fought a wave of nausea at the sight inside. KT Staler’s face—or what was left of it—lay pressed against the glass of the truck’s passenger window like a specimen on a slide. Awful as that was, Clark didn’t feel herself slipping loose of her bearings until she saw T-Bay Baskin, sitting dead in the seat behind KT and wearing a great bib of blood on his shirt.

The crackle of splintering wood from up ahead cleared her mind. She kept moving.

JAMAL

For a very long time all Jamal could see were T-Bay’s bright eyes: they had locked on to his the moment the bullet had slid into his neck. Jamal had fumbled blindly with the handle of the truck’s door, unable to look away from his dying teammate, and then a bullet had shattered the cab’s back window and Jamal had thrown himself in the dirt and run.

“Let me talk to them,”KT had said.

“She said for us to wait,”T-Bay had said.

“They’ll never listen to her,”KT had said.

After a long silence, Whiskey had said,“Are you sure?”

Oh, these guys had listened alright. KT was dead, T-Bay was dead and now Jamal was crouched behind a black camper, Whiskey Brazos shaking and puking on his shoes beside him. Jamal stared at the black horizon and saw T-Bay’s wide white eyes staring back at him.

When Jamal returned to himself—how long had his mind left him? A second? A year?—he heard metal screeching inside the black camper against which he and Whiskey were sheltered. He realized that he and Whiskey were holding hands. The portly boy was mumbling something: “It feeds help it feeds help.”

Jamal smacked Whiskey and pressed his hand to the boy’s mouth. “There’s someone in there,” Jamal whispered, nodding his head at the black camper.

But Whiskey wasn’t listening to him. The pale boy had gone paler. A moment later and Jamal heard it too. To their left, footsteps were coming rapidly around the back of the bloody truck. Coming their way.

KIMBRA

When the gunshots quieted, Kimbra raised her head. She heard footsteps somewhere nearby, heard silence.Move.

Kimbra blinked at the red light of the black camper, the things on the wall, the bare kitchen. Browder was slumped on the ground near a black metal refrigerator with a sharp corner on its door. He didn’t appear to be breathing.

From a few feet away Joel whispered, “Do you see a key to these cuffs on him?”

She turned back and saw Joel seated, his ankles cuffed to hooks in the floor, his hands pressed to his shoulder as something black and bright seeped through. “What did hedoto you?” she said.

“No keys?”

She ran her eye over Browder’s body and didn’t see anything useful on him. “I think he’s dead.”

Joel said weakly, “That pipe looks loose.”