Page 134 of The Bright Lands

He got it open with the third key on the key ring.

Jackpot: hammers, a long crowbar. He loaded his arms with as much as he could carry and started back.

BETHANY

She didn’t give herself time to be disgusted. Mr. Boone’s body came up from the ground with a wet squelching noise and she dug her hands in the pockets of his leather chaps. Nothing.

A key could be anywhere around here.

“Son of a bitch!” Whiskey shouted from across the circle.

He was leaning against the door of the Water House. He looked dazed, blood dripping from a cracked lip, pointing his Glock past the far rim of trailers.

Bethany heard a truck’s engine turn over.

“Malacek’s getting away,” Whiskey shouted.

Sure enough, through a gap in the distant trailers, Bethany saw a pair of red taillights go bouncing away over the dark country.

She shook her head, wiped her sticky hands in the dirt. Mitchell and the others here had killed her man and ruined her life and nobody—nobody—was escaping from this place on her watch.

Bethany Tanner was the Sharpest Shot in the West. And she knew just where to get a rifle.

CLARK

Inside the black trailer, the flames were consuming the kitchen and Browder’s body—or whatever Browder had been there at the end—along with it. The camper had a tin roof, thank God, but the fire was chewing up the walls. It would reach her and Joel in a few minutes. Even with both windows shattered open the smoke had already gotten deep inside her. Every breath was a little fire of its own.

Clark felt the camper’s door shake as Jamal struggled to fit a crowbar in the frame. “Ready!” he shouted.

“On three!”

She counted. She pulled on the knob. He pushed the bar. Nothing. The camper was locked like a bank vault.

A quick pair of rifle shots cracked somewhere in the distance. “Don’t worry,” Jamal said. “That’s just Bethany.”

Clark could worry about this later, just as she could spend the rest of her life wondering about these sad men and this dark little trailer and the hungry force that had possessed Browder. She could spend her life wishing she’d paid more attention to her mother’s warnings about the things that hid across the fence.

Now, right now, Clark felt in her bruised bones that she was missing something obvious and vital and that if she didn’t find itnownone of that shit would matter much longer.

“Fuck!” Jamal shouted.

Clark leaped away from the door the moment the fire raced up the wall.

Joel gave a nasty cough from where she’d left him on the floor. “Stay low,” she told him, though she’d started to wonder if it wouldn’t be wiser to just start sucking down smoke—it must be better to black out for good than feel your skin charring off your body—because the flames had caught on every wall. She saw a long chain whip hanging from a nail that was burning blue in the heat.

Joel propped himself on one elbow to give her a thumbs-up. He stopped.

Clark saw it too.

The floorboards. Did her eyes deceive her or did those bright new boards wobble when Joel leaned his elbow on them?

“Crowbar!” she shouted through the window, her voice cracking, her bruised throat tightening and tightening. A moment later Jamal slid the tool through the bars of the window and pulled back from the flames with a curse. Clark fished it away from the burning wall with her foot, ignored the heat of the metal in her palm and dug the crowbar’s wedged end through a gap between two boards.

They were loose.

The first board was the hardest. It bumped and squealed against the crowbar but refused to budge. Finally Clark stood tall, closed her eyes against the smoke—don’t breathe it in yet, Star—and pushed down against the bar with all her strength.

The board snapped loose. Clark kicked it free and hooked the curved end of the bar on to the next. Joel dragged himself through a thin skein of dried vomit to get out of the way. He tugged at the loosened board with what little strength remained in his good hand.