And so the Preacher rose before her, rose from the dirt and the bushes, rose in her path like an avenging angel, like an emissary of the Lord, like a large, drunk man waving a loaded gun, and commanded her to leave.
“These are my woods,” he intoned. “Begone, creature of the dark.”
The demon stumbled backward and issued a pitiful, almost human cry, and asked for help.
“I know what you and yours have done,” the Preacher said. “I know what you raised from the pit. Begone!”
She went.
He liked the woods, his woods. He liked the smell of wet bark and the taste of whiskey and dirt. Beyond these trees, the army of the apocalypse had mustered, awaiting the dark times. But in the canopy of green, all was peaceful. All was quiet. The Preacher liked the quiet now. It helped dampen the noise in his head.
No more noise. No more people. No more warnings issued to strangers who laughed and hurried their way to hell. So much time wasted, prying open their eyes.
That time was over now. The demon’s trespass had proved it.
The new era was dawning. The time to reclaim that which belonged to him. To save that which could be saved, and leave the rest to burn.
By the time Cass heard the footsteps pounding toward her and recognized the voices they belonged to, it was too late to flee. She considered her dubious options: The shed was filled with crap, none of it large enough to disguise a full-sized human. Milo’s sleeping bag was made for a child. It would cover her feet or her face, but not both, not unless she curled herself into a ball with her cheek pressed to the gritty, mildewed floor, hugged her ankles, and tried not to breathe. So that was what she did.
They were just outside the door. She recognized Baz’s voice. Daniel had warned her about the Watchdogs. It had been no surprise to hear that Baz had appointed himself their leader. It hadn’t occurred to her that West would have gotten himself involved with them. Or that he would be taking orders from a thug like Baz. But there was no mistaking his voice, either.
“We got a tip she was in this area,” Baz said.
“And how is that your problem?” Daniel’s voice.
“You don’t think it’s everyone’s problem?” Baz said. “A killer on the loose? Don’t let the hot thing fool you. She’s dangerous.”
Cass wasn’t sure which was stranger: to hear Baz describe her as dangerous, or as hot. The last time she’d seen him, a year before on a strained triple date to the movies, he’d barely spoken to her. But she’d overheard him needling West in the parking lot, assuring him that he could do better.
It hadn’t been easy, this past year, to shut the door on her old life. But she’d somehow managed it, accepting that her parents were gone, her future was gone, the Cass Porter she’d seen in the mirror for seventeen years was, effectively, gone. It hadn’t seemed easy, at least, but now she realized how much harder it could have been. It was one thing to accept the end of her old life while she was locked in a cell at a remote facility, everything familiar an impossible distance away. It was different back in Oleander, so close to home. It was one thing to hear a nameless doctor or guard or judge call her a murderer. It was different hearing it from the senior quarterback, the guy who’d asked her to dance at their eighth-grade formal, tried to cheat off her tests all through pre-calc, and once pantsed her at a kindergarten picnic.
It was one thing to imagine the people you’d grown up with calling you a monster. It was different to actually hear them.
“She’s not here,” Daniel said. “But my father is, and I’ve got to warn you, he doesn’t like strangers snooping around the house.”
“That guy spooks me,” whined someone she didn’t recognize. “Maybe we should skip…”
“I’m shaking.” Baz raised his voice to a high, flighty register. “Oh, please, bad preacher man, don’t thump me with your Bible. I’ll be a good boy, I promise.” He snorted. “Come on, let’s go.”
“You take the house, I’ll take the grounds and the shed,” West said.
She was suddenly certain: he knew. Maybe from Daniel’s bluster or from whatever expression was perched on his transparent face, maybe because the “tip” had been more specific than Baz let on and they were just playing with her. Somehow, he knew.
“Whatever.” The footsteps departed, Baz’s light and sure, a rhythmic goose step thumping after him.
She curled tighter beneath the sleeping bag and squeezed her eyes shut.
“I’m telling you, I haven’t seen her in a year,” Daniel said.
The door creaked open.
Footsteps.
Please, she thought, though maybe she was praying for the wrong thing. Maybe it would be good for them to find her and drag her away, to jail or to a lynch mob or, if her suspicions about Baz were right, simply off to some secluded cornfield where she would scream in the moonlight, be used and then discarded, and lie in the corn and cover herself and cry. She couldn’t stay here forever, waiting for Daniel to realize his mistake, waiting to be discovered, waiting for life to magically right itself.
Still: Please.
The sleeping bag shifted, slightly, as someone pulled it away from her face. She felt the night breeze on her skin, and opened her eyes. West looked back, his face impassive. Was he thinking about their nights together on her parents’ couch, avoiding all discussion of why they were the only couple home alone that Saturday night actually watching the movie? About the sophomore formal, back when she’d thought that his asking her actually meant something, and she’d spent all her money on that shimmery silver dress and wasted an hour puzzling out her mother’s makeup and another gathering her newly blond hair into some kind of upsweep she’d found step-by-step instructions for online? They’d danced cheek to cheek with his palm warm on her exposed back, and he’d kissed her on her front step, just like in the movies, her first real kiss, not with tongue, but with mingled breath and starry eyes and hands cupping her cheeks, and for a few feverish weeks she’d decided she was in love. But he probably didn’t want to remember that – who she’d been, who they’d been.
She’d been sort of prettyish, once. Not beautiful, not ugly, but officially “not bad.” Passable enough to score a fake boyfriend and a free pass to the extreme outer fringe of the popular crowd. That was then. Now, after a year of no mirrors, after a week of no showers and a literal bed of filth, she suspected even the sort-of-pretty was gone.
That wasn’t why she couldn’t stand for West to look at her.
The sleeping bag dropped back over her face. Maybe he couldn’t stand it, either.
“Guess she’s not here after all,” West said. “I’ll get the rest of them out of here.”
“Uh… yeah.” Daniel sounded uncertain. “Do that.”
Cass didn’t understand.
“She was a good friend,” West said.
Daniel made a noncommittal noise.
“She was. A good person. I don’t know what she did, but… she was always good. To me, at least.” He cleared his throat. “You don’t have to worry. We won’t be back.”
West didn’t trust them with Cass. Not after that night at the ice cream parlor, and the look in Baz’s eyes as he’d slammed Jason’s head into the ground. Worse, the look in his eyes as he’d watched his putative best friend die. It was the nonlook that bothered West, the emptiness. Anything was permissible, that look said. Anything that Baz deemed fun. And so when it came to Cass, West watched the Watchdogs. He would protect Cass, because she’d protected him. But beyond that, he was out. No more nightly patrols, no more looter hunts. So after the Ghent house, West ignored Baz’s entreaties and insults. He went home.
Broken dishes littered the front entryway and kitchen. He found his mother on her knees, sweeping the porcelain shards into a dustpan. Maddie Thomas lounged on the living-room couch, a bag of frozen ravioli lying across a swollen face.
“What happened? Where’s Dad?”
“Nothing happened,” his mother said, in a curiously flat voice. “Mrs. Thomas
and I just had a small disagreement over sugar proportions, didn’t we?”
“Just a small one,” Maddie said wearily.
“Then what’s with all the broken dishes? And with Mrs. Thomas…” He lowered his voice. “Mom, did you… did you punch her?”
“And your father, since you asked, went out hunting.”
“At night? What the hell is going on?”
“You won’t use that language in this house,” she said.
“Oh, right. Because we have certain standards of behavior to maintain.”
“Nor will you use that sarcastic tone with me.”
“Mom.” He took her shoulders and raised her to her feet. Amanda West was stout but small, and normally nothing roused her from a bad mood like her oversized son manhandling her into a waltz around the kitchen. But this was more than a bad mood. He looked down at her, thinking how strange it was to have a foot of height on his mother, to look down on the person to whom he was most supposed to look up. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“I told you, dear,” she said, still in that same frostily polite tone. “Nothing’s wrong.” She shot a sharp look at Maddie Thomas. “Not now.”
“Nothing’s wrong. You’re punching out the neighbors. Dad’s hunting. In the dark. Where’s Mr. Thomas? Chained up in the basement?”
“Your father took him along.”
“Mr. Thomas doesn’t believe in hunting.”
“Then why ever would he have gone?”
It was an excellent question, one West suddenly didn’t want the answer to.
“Enough, dear. It’s late and I’m tired.”
“But…”
She pressed a finger to his lips. “You don’t see me prying into your dirty little secrets, do you?”
When Johnson West told the story of how he’d courted and won his wife, it always began with the tale of how he’d asked her to the prom. Appalled by the thought of attending the dance on the arm of (in Amanda’s words) “a cross-eyed farm boy,” she’d laughed in his face. Amanda always denied it, and West, unable to imagine his stout, ruddy-cheeked mother as a svelte mean girl, believed her. But there was a nasty note in her laughter now that made him reconsider.
She was his mother, only and always the person who loved him best.
But he was afraid.
“Don’t ask, don’t tell, dear,” she said, and he stopped breathing. “Speaking of which, you have a visitor waiting for you in the den.”
She left him alone. It was surreal; it was crazy; it was, just maybe, the end of the world.
And in the den, it was Jason, the kid from the ice cream store. Jason, who called him Jeremiah, though they’d never even met.
“What did you say to my parents?” The rising tide of panic had to be suppressed, could not reveal itself to any stranger, much less this one.
“Pretty much ‘Hello, is Jeremiah here?’”
“That’s it?”
“Other than the part where I told them I was a serial killer waiting here to set you on fire? Pretty much. Then your mom beat that other lady up. And gave me some cookies.”
“You didn’t say anything else?” Everything was jumbled in his head. He couldn’t worry about Jason now, not when his mother might have punched out the neighbor. But on the other hand, how could he worry about recipe tiffs when Jason was here running his mouth off to anyone who would listen? He had to get this guy out of the house.
“I said thank you for the cookies. Though between you and me, they were kind of stale.”
West assured himself that his parents couldn’t know. They believed that the episode from his youth – that’s how they’d referred to it, before they erased it from their communal memory – was behind them. He was already on his second chance. They’d been clear: he wouldn’t get a third.
The whole night was just a misunderstanding, he told himself. His mother did not give people black eyes. His father did not drag people into the woods at midnight, with a gun. “What are you doing here?” he said.
“Where were you all night?” Jason countered. “Out with your lovely friends?”
He was too tired for this. He wanted to climb into bed and wake up six months from now or, better, six years from now. Sleep through the hard part. Why not? Right now he felt like he could sleep through the rest of his life. “What do you want from me?”
“What are you doing with them, Jeremiah?”
The bent wire of tension snapped. “Why do you keep calling me that?”
“Why does it bother you?” Jason smirked. “You don’t want to play the question game with me. I can keep it up all night. Ask my older brother.”
“That’s it.” West took a step toward him.
“Big, tough football player’s going to toss me out?” Jason waved his arms in mock terror. “Oh, no, please. Don’t.”
“Get out of my house. Now.”
Jason rose to his feet. “Look, I’m sorry. I’ll stop. You’ve got to understand, I’ve been playing this conversation in my head for so long, I’ve been so freaking curious about you, and now here you are, in the big slab of flesh, and you’re just…” He shook his head. “From everything he said, I was picturing Superman. But you’re… a little disappointing.”
“Everything who said?” He was afraid he knew.
“Not physically, of course. I see where he was coming from on that. I always have. But everything else? The whole package? You know what they say, lust is blind.”
The door was shut; the den was soundproof. Could his mother hear anyway? Did she need to?
“Shut up and get out,” West said.
“You really don’t know who I am?”
“Jason, whose father owns the ice cream store. And who apparently doesn’t hear very well. I asked you to leave.”
“Jason, Nick Shay’s best friend. Or former best friend. Ex–best friend? I don’t know the official term for it.”
“Nick Shay.” West hoped he looked sufficiently incurious. “The dead kid.”
“Really? ‘The dead kid’? Nice.”
“Look, I’m sorry that your friend died —”
“Ex-friend.”
“Right, I’m sorry—”
“See, we were best friends for years, did everything together. I even watched these stupid sci-fi movies as a favor to him – he was into that kind of stuff, did you know that?”
West shook his head. His mouth was dry. “Why would I know that?”
“Best friends, and then we got in a fight. Seems like a stupid fight now – well, especially now. See, he started dating someone that, okay, I didn’t particularly like the sound of, but I’d like to think I can rise above my own preconceptions for the happiness of my friends. This guy, though? This guy was obviously a nightmare, closet case, head case, and Nick wasn’t happy, not really. Any idiot could see that. Well…” Again, that nasty smirk. “Maybe not any idiot. So I told him what I thought, and he told me what he thought, and that was the end of it. I take it this story doesn’t seem familiar to you?”
“Should it?” Of course, it made sense that the two of them had been friends. It even made sense that West hadn’t noticed, because he’d turned not noticing what people like Jason and Nick did into an art form. But that was before he and Nick were together. After, he was supposed to know things. Nick was supposed to tell him.
“I thought he’d come crawling back in tears,” Jason said. “I mean, it’s not that I was hoping for it… Well, maybe I was, sort of. I like being right. I thought he’d end up miserable. Not dead.”
“That was an accident,” West snapped. “I mean, I heard.”
“Who said it wasn’t? But you know how it is: Unfinished business. Regrets. Things you wish you could have said. Like maybe I should have been easier on him and on this guy of his.”
“Sounds like it.”
“That’s what I thought, until I figured out that you had no idea who I was.”
“Look, I’m telling you, I barely knew Nick —” It was supposed to be a
lie.
“That he never talked about me at all. Never…” Jason gnawed at the edge of his thumbnail. “So either he didn’t care enough about this guy to tell him what was really going on, or… Well, the alternative is obvious, right? Even to an idiot.”
It wasn’t just Jason he’d never said anything about. It was his parents, it was his limp, it was his entire life. West had never questioned it, because it hadn’t seemed important, not as important as the two of them in their secret world, together.