Page 136 of The Bright Lands

“I said no.” Mitchell looked at that blackness, then turned away. “We never should have helped Browder with the body. We never should have taken the sock to the auto shop. We should have ended all this last week. Garrett, I’m—”

Mitchell was interrupted by the loss of his brainpan.

Garrett lowered the rifle from his shoulder. Screams rose from the Bright Lands boys as Mitchell’s body collapsed in the dirt. Clark saw Bethany twitch when his blood spattered her cheek. The girl never blinked.

“You mean to tell me there ain’t a single goddamn man here to finish this job with me?” Garrett shouted from the void behind his grill. The rumble in the ground shook Clark’s teeth.

“Maybe they were right about you queers after all,” Garrett continued. He took a few steps through the sea of boys, panning the gun over their heads. “Maybe I’ll have to do all this work myself.”

“I’m good.”

There was a gasp. From the bloody porch of the burning orange trailer Luke Evers rose to his feet and made his way across the circle. He was agleam in blood from the waist down, so much blood Clark wondered how he could possibly be alive.

But alive he was.

“Luke, don’t do this. Don’thelphim!” Clark called to him.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” Garrett shouted.

She felt the AR turn her way but she didn’t stop. “They shot you, Luke. I saw it—they tried to kill you.”

Clark should have saved her breath. Luke bent down slowly and rose up with one of the monogrammed Glocks. He tested its weight in his hand.

The ground quaked.

Garrett let up a twisted whoop.“Altoleth golesh shah.”

“It’s been feeding on you.” Joel’s voice cracked. “It’s been feeding on all of us. It sucks on our shame and our fear and our pain. It wants us to hurt. It wants us to bleed.”

In response, the ground opened with a crack beneath Mitchell’s body. One moment the boy lay there, the back of his head scattered over his feet, and the next he had slipped silently, smoothly, into a hole in the earth. From very far below, Clark heard water sloshing, the sound echoing and warping up the walls of the stone hole—the trench, of course, even the trench her mother had spoken of had been real—but she never heard a splash when Mitchell’s body landed.

She and several boys tried to push themselves away from the hole. They froze at the sound of gunfire.

“Nobody moves!” Garrett said. “He’s coming.”

Luke gave the hole little more than a glance and stepped around it.

“Garrett—Luke—the fuck are you doing this for?” Whiskey shouted. “We’re your fucking brothers!”

Garrett answered with a bullet in the back of Whiskey’s knee. The boy keened into the dust.

A singed Polaroid drifted gently into the hole. Dirt whispered as it slipped over the spreading edge, just like Clark had heard in her dreams and a moment later, with a humid rush of air, the smell of rot billowed up from the open earth and overwhelmed her. The whispering voice rode on the stench, forced itself up Clark’s nose and down her ears and into her mouth and noosed itself around her mind and choked off every thought.

hatedhim, Bosheth whispered.youhatedhim

Clark couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t see her hands in front of her face. She was blinded by a vision of her brother, standing at the kitchen sink, telling her how afraid he was of this town, this county, this filthy trailer park where God knew what had been done to him. And how had she answered Troy?

By cursing him, running him out of her house, spitting on his truck. Troy had been trying to ask her for help—it was so obvious now—and Clark had been too petty and jealous to imagine that the man against whom she was always compared might need her help just as bad as she needed his. Cruel. Had anyone ever been so cruel as Starsha Marilynn Clark?

couldhavesavedhim

The voice was right. She could have saved him—could have loved him—but she had despised him instead. And now she couldn’t save anyone—not her brother, not her town, not a single soul here at this awful place. She had failed them all. She had always, would always

failthem

All around her, Clark heard a hungry sucking nose as the creature drew air into the pit, feeding on every doomed soul in the circle, because

—because now now now was the time, now was the time he had been waiting all these many years for, the reason he had hidden here, sleeping and licking old wounds and leaking with dreams. Now—at last—now he had burned enough blood to break open the trench and take shape in the dirt world, had found a vessel that could keep him tethered there, this boy who would help him stare at the stars again, yes.