Page 130 of The Bright Lands

Coach Parter made it through the triple-wide’s door. Mr. Lott shouted something at him that Bethany couldn’t hear. She didn’t need to. A moment later Lott had the barrel of the rifle in his mouth.

Bethany saw Jamal leaning against the corner of the tall trailer’s porch, breathing hard, his clothes soaked. He met her eye. Bethany prayed that the little nod she gave him said everything she wanted to say:I’m sorryandGood luck.

She looked back up at the triple-wide’s window in time to watch Mr. Lott’s wig come off with the top of his skull.

And there was Jamal, revolver in his hand, climbing the steps of the tall trailer’s porch two at a time.

JOEL

“Fucking knockoffs,” Clark said under her breath, crouched in Joel’s drying vomit, struggling with the handcuffs on his ankles.

A second rifle crack. Clark didn’t pause.

“Hey,” Joel said, his voice sounding very soft to his own ears. “I’m sorry.”

“You can explain later,” Clark said, and the cuff around his left ankle finally popped free.

“No. I mean about Troy.”

Clark started work on the other ankle.

“You deserved to know everything,” Joel said.

Clark opened her mouth to speak, but instead she let out a grunt of pain when Browder’s boot struck the side of her head.

She fell. Browder took two staggering steps forward and kicked Clark hard in the stomach. She went limp. Browder bent over her body.

Joel’s brain struggled to think. His hand was heavy. He laid it over the cuff that remained latched around his right ankle and fumbled with the key Clark had left in the lock.

Browder rose to his feet, swung Clark’s pistol to within a foot of Joel’s face.

“Do you know how hard it is to get a text message out here, Mr. Whitley?”

Browder’s eyes were black. His teeth were black. It wasn’t a trick of the strange light. From somewhere deep inside Browder came the voice Joel had heard whispering to him the day he arrived. It was slick and it was deep and it wasold.

It wasn’t whispering now.

“And yet would you believe that’s just what happened when Dylan Whitley was sitting exactly where you’re sitting now, swearing to our poor young Browder that he had no plans to leave the man.”

I’m getting you out

“Deputy Browder, he was so convinced that Dylan was trying to get away from him. Your brother kept swearing and swearing that the whoring ad was fake, that he hadn’t asked you to come back to Bentley to help him, that he didn’t want money from you or anybody. He swore he was going to college in Waco so he could come home on the weekends. They’d be lovers for life, Dylan said. Forever and ever.” Browder’s face opened in a smile. “And then Dylan’s phone buzzed.”

Joel remembered every word of the message he had sent to Dylan on Friday night after the game, back when he’d been driving the rainy roads of town and was certain he could save his brother with a few swipes of his credit card.

“And it was beautiful old you.”

Don’t worry. I’m getting you out of this shit hole.

“Can you blame the poor deputy for coming off his head at that moment, Mr. Whitley? Can you blame me for whispering a little encouragement in his ear?” Browder brought his gun to Joel’s temple.

For a moment, Joel forgot his pain or his fear. He lost all of the resolve he’d gathered over the week. He was, instead, so crushed with shame at his own arrogance that he found it impossible to breathe. Pressing a hand to his ruined shoulder, marveling at the cost of his negligence—a dead brother, a dead cheerleader, the only person who would ever have come to his rescue about to be murdered—Joel felt all his hope seeping out between his bloody fingers. If only, if only. If only he’d gone home to the city last night. If only he had foregone one long white night to call his brother in the last ten years. If only he’d ever fucking cared.

“I’d waited so long, Mr. Whitley. I just needed a boy’s worth of blood.”

Browder opened his mouth. A hideous sucking noise came from inside his head—a sound like a straw slurping at the bottom of a cup—and Joel could feel the creature inside the deputy sucking something from the air of the trailer. Feeding.

“What are you?” Joel said.