Page 133 of The Bright Lands

With his good hand he slipped his brother’s hunting knife free from the sheath on her ankle. He stood up straight. He met Browder’s black, empty eyes over her shoulder.

The knife was so sharp it slid into Browder’s side as easy as sex after a long night. When the hilt of the blade reached the skin Joel turned it once, turned it farther, then turned it back around, just as he had seen Browder spinning his own knife earlier. Joel studied the pain in the deputy’s blackened face and wondered when he would find the exact combination of turns to take the life from his twisted body.

Browder shuddered. His mouth opened wider and wider, the jawbones cracking free of their sockets, and a horrible smell of blood and clay and rot seeped out.

A blink, and Browder’s eyes were his own again. The young deputy focused on Joel with an expression of absolute, desperate tenderness.

From his ruined mouth, Browder said, “You look just like him in this light.”

Joel pulled the knife free. Blood splashed onto the old linoleum. Browder’s fingers fell from Clark’s neck. His eyes died.

Clark was saying something that Joel couldn’t hear. She was pulling him away from the wall. He stumbled back up the canted floor and felt the bloody knife fall from his fingers.

Joel raised his head to see the place where his brother’s voice had spoken to him. He saw nothing there. No shadows, no light, no bends in the air. No ghostly presence to give him one final nod of encouragement.

Instead he could just make out the trailer door rattling. “Fire!” screamed a voice outside. “You’re on fire!”

BETHANY

It was a piece of paneling off the side of the tall triple-wide that did it. She saw a wooden board come loose from the triple-wide’s wall, hit the grass and a second later there was a flash bright enough to blind her.

The generator’s explosion blew out the windows of the Water House. Mitchell Malacek stirred. Whiskey brought his Glock to within an inch of the boy’s head. “Don’t even,” he said.

Someone was screaming outside. Jamal. Bethany saw that he was rolling in the grass, his fake leather jacket burning on his back. His hands were slapping at the flames, his arms were tangled in their sleeves. He was panicking, she saw. Panicking and trapped.

Bethany and Whiskey traded nods.

She rushed across the circle. She saw boys watching her from the shattered windows of the trailers, some she knew and some she didn’t, all looking terrified and appalled and nobody making a move to help Jamal. They hadn’t done a thing to help anyone, friend or foe, from the moment the shit had hit the fan. She wasn’t surprised at this—men were noted pussies, after all—and she supposed she really should be grateful that they weren’t all wielding guns or bricks or toilet seats, but she couldn’t help but think less of them for it. You’d think that after years of lies and secrets they’d have some fight in them.

What had happened to these boys?

Did she care? Not really. When Bethany reached Jamal she pulled her Bisonette singlet off over her head and thumped at the flames with it, just like she’d seen in safety videos at school. Those videos didn’t warn you putting out a fire burned like a bitch.

She was able to damp the flames enough for Jamal to get hold of a sleeve and pull his arms free. A moment later her singlet ignited. Bethany dragged Jamal away and the two of them stared, dazed and fascinated, as their clothes burned together a few inches from Kimbra Lott’s outstretched hand. Bethany pressed her singed palms together between her thighs.

The fire from the burning triple-wide leaped to the black camper. It spread up the camper’s walls.

“Fuck,” Jamal said. “Joel and the cop are in there.”

But Bethany was already running.

The black camper’s door was locked so firmly it hardly moved when she pounded on it. “Fire!” she shouted. “You’re on fire!”

Clark’s face appeared behind the bars of the trailer’s broken window. “Find something to force the door—” She turned her head to listen to something behind her. “—Joel says Boone mentioned something about a key. I left him back by the Airstream.”

Jamal said, “Whiskey has a toolbox in his truck.”

“A crowbar, a hammer, anything,” Clark shouted. She started to cough. Smoke poured from the barred window.

Bethany said, “I’ll check the body.”

JAMAL

Jamal hustled to the truck. He glanced back, saw that the generator’s explosion had set fire to the roof of the orange RV across the circle. Luke Evers wasn’t moving. With a lump in his throat, Jamal realized that Kimbra had died for nothing.

When he reached Whiskey’s bloody truck he kept his eyes on the ground. He arrived at the tailgate, doubled back, held his breath. He reached a hand into the cab—brains on seats, shards of glass in open mouths—and pulled Whiskey’s keys from the ignition.

He tripped around a pair of gym bags in the truck bed, over some empty beer cans and found the rusted metal toolbox he’d seen earlier when he’d clambered into the cab at KT’s house.