Page 132 of The Bright Lands

He turned in time to see Coach Parter reaching for the rifle in Mr. Lott’s hands.

“Hey, Coach,” Jamal shouted.

Parter glanced over his shoulder, hesitated.

Jamal didn’t. He lobbed the cocked revolver across the couch. The gun spun gently through the air, end over end, and landed at Parter’s feet.

It worked better than Jamal could have hoped. When the revolver struck the floor its hammer sprang into the chambered round and the spark of the bullet’s detonation ignited the gasoline that had soaked the gun’s other chambers. Five bullets fired at once, and because only one bullet had anywhere to travel the other four could only explode with a furious burst of shrapnel. The gun had become a hand grenade.

Jamal had only been hoping to distract Parter. Instead the small explosion tore most of the skin from the coach’s legs. Parter collapsed against the wall, knocking a scented candle from a shelf of trophies and into the lap of Toby Lott’s Bisonette singlet. The singlet ignited in awhooshof crackling polyester, the fire leaped from the uniform to the Polaroids that papered the wall and in a second four decades’ worth of boys were alight.

Parter tried to escape. Jamal was too fast for him. He pushed the couch against Parter and pinned him to the burning wall. He felt Parter struggle, heard the big man scream for him to stop, stop pleasestop, but Jamal closed his eyes. He had no doubt that the man would kill him if their places were reversed.

The room filled with smoke and whispers and the shit stench of decay. Jamal held his breath.

A cluster of dull pops that sounded like firecrackers came from Parter’s jacket a few feet away and Jamal felt the couch first convulse and then go as still as a line when a fish slips free. Jamal rose, panting, and saw that the fire had reached Parter’s open, unblinking eyes.

“You still say I got no strength in my legs?” Jamal said, mostly to himself.

He looked toward the hallway and saw, somehow without surprise, that the hole was gone, the floor restored.Jesus.

He didn’t linger. The fire was real enough, and he smelled gasoline in his hair.

Outside, hurrying down the triple-wide’s steps, Jamal heard a strange chugging noise. He saw that the wall of the trailer was alight, burning just a few feet away from the generator.

That generator. Hadn’t it been leaking—

“Get down!” Bethany screamed from the door of the Water House, but it was too late. The shock wave of the explosion caught Jamal as he reached the ground and sent him flying through the night.

JOEL

The lights died, and the explosion knocked the triple-wide into the black camper. Like a capsizing ship, the camper tipped into the dirt, the shutters swinging closed and sending Clark—who had just lodged an arm over the Browder thing’s windpipe—rolling off of him and tumbling into the sudden inky dark.

Joel heard Clark strike something hard in the kitchen. She righted herself as Browder ran toward her. Joel grabbed for the deputy but caught nothing but air.

Between the damage to his skull, the blood lost from his ruined shoulder and now this canted floor, Joel felt hopelessly disorientated, jet-lagged, as if his mind had left his body in a safer, colder time zone. He wasn’t sure how he was still conscious. When Browder and Clark collided with the far wall, some cracked piece of Joel’s brain wondered what the queens with whom he’d gone to Tulum would say when they heard that Joel Whitley—the brooding boy with the chest and the black card and a drug dealer in every city—had run out his brief clock in a mildewed mobile home in the middle of nowhere.

“I’d say you deserve better.”

A sudden warm draft lifted the hairs on the back of Joel’s neck.

“I’d say you deserve more of that fifty-k.”

A dull amber light came from somewhere just over his shoulder. Years later, Joel would imagine a thousand explanations for the voice he heard in his head at that moment.

But Joel knew something he would never tell a soul: his brother’s voice came not from inside his head but frombehindhim. He heard it a few inches from his ear. And his brother’s hand had pivoted his head, ever so slightly, to show him exactly what he needed to see.

Browder was pinned between Clark and the kitchen wall, his hands around her throat, hoisting her into the air. She grabbed for his black eyes—her feet convulsing, her strength failing.

But what was that on her ankle?

“He needs vessels,”said Dylan’s small voice.“But you can break them.”

Joel felt the little key in his hand turn smoothly and the cuff around his ankle pop free.

“Go.”

He stumbled down the canted trailer floor in a crouch—careful to avoid the pipe Kimbra had pulled loose earlier—and when he reached Clark, he somehow moved his bad arm enough to touch her leg. To still her.