Chapter 43

1

There had been no time to process what happened. He didn’t think chaos would allow for it anyway. His idea of chaos anyway. To Adam, chaos had always been about disorganization, of the world turned upside down. And that’s what this felt like.

            The wind spliced his face as he rode his bike; it stung, freezing the tears to his cheeks in icy trails. So much had already happened, so much he could not have accounted for, that the latest news, the event, struck him with the realization that everything he’d been warned about, everything Grimwood had said and prepared him for, wouldn’t just strike him close to home, but would tear asunder the world as he knew it. The world as he’d grown to like it. It wasn’t something grampa could prepare him for. It probably wasn’t something grampa had known.

            Adam could hear the sirens. It seemed like Reedy Creek was made of sirens now, like an alerting call over the world, destroying its solace with utter contemptibility.

            The Low Breeder had died in the hallway leading to the front door, his father flat on his back now staring up at the ceiling, the gun at his side, taking it all in. Patty had been crying upstairs. Crying but okay. That’s what counted. Adam had gone to his mom and tried to wrestle her free of the rope, relenting when he couldn’t untie the knots and grabbing a knife from the boards on the counter and sawing the twines. He’d slowly pulled the dish cloth out of her mouth and looked away as she gagged; he avoided her left hand, three of its fingers broken and swollen. “Is Patty okay?” It was the only thing she whispered, looking at Adam as he helped her to her feet, trying to support her as she wobbled. His father took her under the arm, setting grampa’s gun on the table.

            “He’s safe,” Adam said. And the three of them cried. It was all they could do. Cole Moore had come in the patio door, cradling his camera, looking at them with the white-washed pallet of one who’d seen a ghost.

            “Is everyone okay?” he’d asked, and Barb would only laugh. It was a hoarse laugh, something disbelieving, but at the same time liberating. Adam loved to hear it. Because it meant something powerful. It meant they could grow past this, that what had weighed them down, their history, their past, it could be overcome. Trevor had grabbed a towel and wrapped up handfuls of ice from the freezer, crushing it under the cutting board before applying it to Barb’s hand after she sat at the kitchen table.

            “Will you get Patty?” she said, staring at the towel, and then up at her husband. Adam thought he could see something beyond forgiveness in that look; she didn’t blame him for any of this. And maybe that was the power at work. Adam figured his dad would talk to his mom about everything, when there was time. He would tell her everything he believed, everything Adam had told him. From there things would happen as they may.

            “I don’t want him to see this,” Trevor said. Adam knew he meant the body in the hallway. “I don’t want him to see you like this.” He offered a wry smile and then wiped his eyes. “Christ, baby, all of this…” He choked back a sob and then looked away.

            “I’ll cover the body,” Cole said. “With a blanket or something.” And so he did.

            He draped the comforter from grampa’s room over the body of the man on the floor, and he looked up at Barb, Trevor, and Adam: “I tried calling the cops at your neighbors’ place. The lines were jammed. When I did speak to dispatch, I’d actually been patched through to Davenport. Operator said the Creek’s communication lines are down.”

            “What does that mean?” Barb asked. She was nursing her hand. Trevor had already given her Advil. He stood now with Patty in his arms, cradling his neck. The boy was still clutching to the letter, its corners sort of creased now, worn. Adam thought he’d give it to Patty for good. Its magic had done what it needed to.

            “We can’t even get an ambulance here?” Trevor said. He looked at Barb as she pressed her hand upon the wet towel. He could tell she was trembling. Her nose had stopped bleeding, and they’d washed as much as they could off her face before grabbing Patty from his closet. Because they knew what nightmares the Boogeyman could induce. Adam knew.

            Cole only looked down. “Everything you guys have told me. Everything. It goes beyond this.”

            “I don’t understand,” Trevor said, running his hand through Patty’s hair.

            “Operator said there were multiple shootings at the school. The police are tied up between active responders on site…and apparently breaking up organized riots at the ethanol plant and city hall. There are growing protests. State troopers are here. Operator said county cops are being dispatched. It’s—”

            “Chaos,” Adam said. “My God.”

            So he rode his bike. He came to the field and saw the growing tumult near Main; he could see the flashing lights, could see cruisers pulled up on the grass and an ever-swelling arc of people running toward the school. Screaming. They were parents. They were afraid, they wanted answers, and he could hear the murmur of each and every one of them as their voices rose above the sirens, listing over the field like an autumn fog. Adam jumped off his bike and let it roll against the backstop at the diamond. He ran into the crowd.

            “He’s my son. His name is Wesley. Is he in there? Is he okay?” It was a lady wearing a fur trimmed denim coat, her hair messily pulled into a pony-tail and her fists clenched as she rushed the cordoned walkway and grabbed the nearest officer.

            “Ma’am, we don’t have any answers.”

            “I want my fucking son!”

            “Lanny Ellison. Is he okay?”

            “I want to see Britney. Britney Paulson. Let me through. Damn you, let me through.”

            Adam watched them and he felt hollow. This is on you, isn’t it? On all of you. Because you were pulled into a world you shouldn’t have been. And when you were pulled in, you pulled everybody in. You drew this entire town into this game. And now its debt is due. He watched the women scream when the officers holding rank to control the growing crowd had to sternly turn the wailing away; he understood how afraid the police were, how something of this magnitude could happen in this town had never really occurred to them. He looked at the school rising over the support team, its brick countenance so unassuming right now, so haunting, the sockets of its glass doors and windows like the vacant stares of so many ghouls.

            “Adam!”

            He heard his name. There were so many people here now, so many tangled into the cluster trying to get closer to the cordoned walk, piling in from Main as traffic came to a dead stop and left their cars parked in the middle of the street, clogging the Creek’s artery.

            It was Danny. The Jew.

            Adam ran to his friend. The tall kid with the curly black hair, matted by his ears and unruly at his crown, long slender legs tucked inside Levi’s jeans and always ready to kick up in a Guidry, opened his mouth to a smile. A genuine smile.

            “You got out.” Adam threw his arms around Danny, pulling him in close. He saw Danny’s dad watching them both, watching them with what looked like his own version of thankfulness; there weren’t many in this crowd with that appearance. Not now. “Jesus, man, I was so worried.”

            “Me too. Were you in there? When it happened?”

            “No,” Adam said, clapping Danny on the back and wanting with everything in his soul to cry again. To cry like he had in the kitchen when there was a moment of peace. When that strange pull of grampa’s memories, of the purpose he left, dissipated with the fulfilled promise of a vanquished boogeyman.

            “Me neither.”

            “Like we weren’t supposed to be. Does that make sense?”

            Danny only nodded. “I think it does. Pug? Croak?”

            Adam looked back at the school. “Jesus, Danny. Do you think?”

            “I don’t know what to think, Adam. I don’t think I ever did. But I know what I feel. And I bet you felt the same thing. Pug and Croak too. We weren’t supposed to be together. It couldn’t happen if we were together.” Danny inhaled and then swallowed. He looked down at the grass thoughtfully.

            “Chaos,” Adam said, his tone one of agreement.

            “Yeah. I think so. This, all of this,” he said, looking around at the terrified onlookers, “it’s the Creek purging, Adam. It’s the Creek doing what it’s had to do from the get go. Since the cameras. Since…since everything we’ve seen. It’s purging.” He looked back at his dad and the man nodded, quietly watching the scene. Adam wouldn’t notice the blood on the cuff of the man’s slacks; he wouldn’t notice the man’s enflamed knuckles, the jitter in his fingers. No, he just noticed something like relief in his eyes. Peace.

            “Did Grimwood do this?”

            “He wanted this. The devil doesn’t do. The devil has others do for him.”

            Adam looked at Danny. He looked at him because he knew Danny would have the answer. He always had the answer. “Could we have stopped it?”

            “Together, maybe. But he didn’t want us together.”

            Adam pondered that for a moment. He thought of grampa’s letter. He thought of what grampa had written, that Adam and his friends were special, and that what they’d made together was something Grimwood feared could stop him. What did you make together? Adam thought about the only thing that could stop magic. “Magic,” he whispered, and Adam knew. He understood.

2

Pug wasn’t in the school. He’d been given something of a solid, and maybe that was the greatest benefit of his assisting the man whose touch was death. Was that even how it worked? He wasn’t sure. Because Grimwood’s promise was that his sister would be okay. And she was.

            She was alive.

            Wendy had stayed by Angela’s side, pressing down on that gaping wound in her throat, feeling the warm pressure under her sweater, looking deeply into her sister’s eyes and screaming while the sparrows dispersed. They were discovered out by the 34, nearer the farmhouse and crows than Reedy Creek’s proper, by deputy Steve Neidermayer, who was staffed with Allen Webster for the morning, and had decided to drive the perimeter when Allen called him with a favor: clock him in for the shift and they’d meet up for a late lunch. “What’s going on?” Steve had asked, sitting in the bullpen. A few hours before hell would break loose. “Just some personal shit, good buddy.” And that was that. Steve had taken the panoramic route outside the Creek, looping back down the 34 toward Woodvine, so he could take a look at the morning clouds as they touched the golden horizon sweeping to the north and south. He would later say it was providence that he saw the girls. Wendy had attempted to drag Ange closer to the roadside; had she remained by the culvert where Dave pulled in with the Odyssey, Steve figured he might not have seen them. He’d think about that for a long time. Think about this day for a long time. Because he’d found Angela Nelson with the slit throat, and he’d driven her to the Reedy Creek Clinic, who arranged for an emergency transport to Davenport General after a temporary suture was applied. Steve had asked Wendy for a report, but in her shock, in her unwavering support for her big sister, the information she could relay wouldn’t suffice. Not in detail. He’d asked if she could give him a description of the assailant. She only told him the boy’s name was Brad Jenkins. And Steve could only bite his lip. That was the mayor’s grandson; the name carried a sort of lineal power in Reedy Creek, and ever since the federal subsidies had pulled the town out of the quagmire, Mayor Jenkins’ reputation as a deal maker had gone through the roof and given him something of an immunity against bad press. Steve knew the guy had a problem with what Allen called the nose candy; and he knew there were rumors of out-of-town ladies of the night being bussed in by the bunches to placate an unnatural sex addiction. The mayor’s acreage outside the Creek had turned into an illicit den of depravities. The joke among the bullpen had been the unrelenting hope to one day receive an invitation for a night out at the manse for an unremitting eve of perverse indulgences. The guys never put it that way. Exactly. He jotted down Wendy Nelson’s brief report, wondering if he should take the caustic accusation up the line to Sheriff Andy. Steve understood there were levels of influence in this town now with the big city wigs; and he understood now with Ned running around killing people that to further incite panic would only underlie the paranoid assumptions of those looking at every guy with a badge as if he was the deranged serial killer running amok. Steve called the girls’ house and couldn’t get a response. He did leave a message on the machine, and he tried the girls’ father at work. Wendy had fumbled over the numbers in her mind and had given him a few options to try. The third got him Norm Nelson’s secretary, who told him he was in an exec meeting and incommunicado.

            The girls were transported to Davenport under Steve’s authority. He signed off the release. And later that day, when the phone rang about the reported gunshots at the school, he forgot about Brad Jenkins and the girl with the bloody throat he’d found by mere chance. Especially when he came upon the boy lying in a pool of blood. That was the way Reedy Creek worked, and Pug understood it better than anybody. Had Allen Webster never met Lewis Forsmythe, he would not have been inducted to join Cole Moore’s ranks as a result of getting blackmailed by a fat kid with pictures of him stealing a gun from lock-up; Allen would have been in the car with Steve Neidermayer, and Allen would have insisted first thing to stop in at the Diner for a free cup of Joe while the brews were fresh, and the two would have sat at their table with a view of the street while Angela Nelson bled out by the street. Maybe the trade in the end was Allen’s life for Angela’s. By virtue of Reedy Creek’s poetic nature, his throat was slit as well.

            The Nelson family stood in the hospital room, gathered around Angela as she lay unconscious, the doctors already having closed the wound on her throat, her arms strung up with IVs, the metronomic pulse of her heart through the machines keeping her comfortable, Wendy sitting half asleep next to her big sis in the chair she pulled over to the bed. When Pug arrived with his parents, Wendy was holding Ange’s hand. Brenda had burst out crying while Norm stood at the door; his indiscretions were lost for now. This was the last time they would ever feel like a real family. A wholesome family. A whole family.

            It was the sound of the television on the wall that kept any semblance of calm in the room. Before Pug had turned it on, the silence was worse. The silence broken only by the sound of Ange’s machines, of the hospital itself beyond the closed door, the frantic footsteps of nurses and doctors. Pug hated it. But he hated the silence between his parents, hated the way his dad couldn’t look at him. Because he knew his mother had confronted him. He’d given her the tape, and he knew she watched it. He knew because he could see the truth in her eyes, beyond the morose concern for Ange, beyond the strength of any mother who wanted to appear in control for the sake of her children, for the sake of the family. His mother only asked Wendy who did this, and Wendy sobbed until she was taken into her mommy’s arms and held, comforted. Wendy would carry a guilt about what happened this day, and she would carry it for a long time. It brought her closer to Angela. Closer than they’d ever been, and Pug would see that in the years to come, he would see how the event of this day, how Reedy Creek itself, proved how important the girls were to each other.

            When the breaking news hit, Pug was mindlessly watching a rerun of Little House on the Prairie. It was one of Ange’s favorite shows. She thought Michael Landon was handsome. His dad was sitting in the corner, his arms folded, his lips pertly pulled together in a line, his hair messy and his face doughy. Soon the man would turn to booze; depression had the sort of arm-twisting power to find temporary reprieve outside reality, and for Norm Nelson, that would be the liquor. He’d already forsaken so much of the church, it wouldn’t come as a surprise when he found a new mistress. At least not for Pug. His mom was sitting on a couch they’d pulled in from the edge of the room; she was holding Wendy in her arms, the girl fast asleep, her face red and her eyes still streaked with tears, leaving her lashes gobbed with the mess of her smudged eyeliner.

            Darrel Janz spoke clearly and without emotion. He shared his viewers’ shock.

            “We have multiple reports from Reedy Creek that there have been shootings at the local Secondary school. Our correspondents from the Creek Post dispatch have not relayed any information about who the shooter might be, if there were any casualties. We do have conflicting reports about the number of gunshots heard on the scene. Some witness observations claim seven, others eight. A few have insisted the number is closer to twenty-five. The local police are on the scene, as well as State Troopers, and an amassed operation of surrounding county clerks.”

            Pug swallowed deeply and felt the color drain out of his face. He thought about Croak. He thought about how he left things with his friend, with the boy who’d thought they would be brothers, thinking not of what those implications might mean for the Nelson family. Because he was thinking selfishly, because he figured it was his turn to know what a real family felt like. Pug couldn’t fault him. He couldn’t.

            “My gosh,” Brenda whispered. Wendy slowly woke up as her mother shifted, wiping her eyes. She looked at the television as well, at the old man sitting in front of the sunny mural, of that long stretching horizon of prairies illuminated a golden hue.

            There were feeds transmitted from the scene, portraying the hectic fury outside the school, the growing swarm of people collecting like rumor-hungry watchdogs. Troopers were gearing up in what Pug thought had to be riot gear, while Creek deputies helped to manage the parents, the crowd, those people who watched the serenity of their town quickly crumble to anarchy.

            “Some expert opinion on the matter ranges from a confrontation with alleged serial murderer Ned Stevenson, who is claimed to have found temporary housing in the school’s boiler room.”

            “It’s not Ned,” Pug said, more to himself, as he watched the events unfold, as he watched the cops slowly enter the school, carrying assault rifles, the sort of military grade stuff you only saw in the movies. He’d have the same thought as Adam, as Danny, even as Croak; that this was the end, the result of the Creek finally losing itself to sickness, of all the strings holding it together snapping to the tension. The cold clarity of what was happening back at home, of what Pug could have been at school to experience, his sisters too if Ange’s throat hadn’t been cut, prompted Pug to realize Grimwood’s payback wasn’t just about what he was watching on television, but his virtue of having been saved. His family. In spite of what his father had done, his private life behind closed doors, Grimwood saved his family; they weren’t one among the swollen crowd begging to know if their children were all right. “This is…Reedy Creek coming to terms with the skeletons in its closet.”

            “What? What are you talking about, Horace?” Brenda asked, still looking at the TV.

            “Reedy Creek needed this. An event…an action…something of…of magnitude to finally put the focus on the town. Knowingly.” He was stuttering, but it made sense to him. He knew it did. What he was a part of with Grimwood, it was about stopping the council, about stopping that secret organization spying on people, spying on them and killing them; like Danny, he understood this was a purging of that experiment, it was Reedy Creek finally reacting to the sickness, casting the focus on the town itself, to hopefully weed out the filthy spies, those who participated in the operation that killed Robert Wilson, Clayton Miller, Dr Halliburton, the nice man who gave him his prescriptions, and his cute assistant who sometimes flirtingly talked to the boys over the counter, gave them a sense of confidence even when they knew they’d never have a chance with a girl who looked like her.

            Brenda went to say something, but then thought of the tape Horace had given her, the tape she watched before losing all sense of propriety and driven to the plant to confront her husband and the whore down the street; she understood something about Reedy Creek that Pug already knew. There were secrets in that place, secrets long repressed, and the town was finally releasing the valve. She ran her hand through Wendy’s hair.

            “We would have been there,” Wendy said, crying and sniffing. “If…if Ange didn’t—” She stopped herself. “We would have been there.”

            They watched the news in silence. An hour later Darrel Janz had new information:

            “We don’t yet have an identity of the shooter. But confirmed reports state there were seven distinct gunshots at the school. Initial details stating the number in the twenties were overblown. A growing protest has resulted due to the shooting. Reports state it began as a peaceful march on the Pure Ethanol plant at Reedy Creek’s north end, a controversial federally subsidized corporate interest that has clashed big city activity with small town values as a result of the growing immigration from more urban centers. This peaceful march turned into anything but when a handful of masked rioters appeared from the fringes, these men and women wearing Hornets ball caps, perhaps in allegiance to the school’s team name and in response to the shootings that have torn this community asunder. The fire department was dispatched, in addition to further law enforcement to combat the increasingly violent rioters, who’ve begun throwing Molotov cocktails into the parking lot after having driven through the security booth at its front gate.”

            Pug watched the scene unfold on that television. He watched the black smoke rise from the asphalt as cars burned, as men wearing bandannas over their faces like train robbers, like cowboys, fired hunting rifles into the sky; it was a chaotic, and sclerotic assemblage of Creekers, of loyal lifers finally fed up with what this brand new industry had cost their town, had cost their community. Pug wondered if these rioters knew about the cameras. If they knew as much as he did. He supposed they could. He supposed they’d just waited to react until the right thing struck their fancy.

            His father had stood up and moved toward the television. “Why are they doing this?”

            “They blame them for what happened,” Pug answered without looking at his father. The traitor. “They blame all of us, all of us who came to Reedy Creek…they blame us for the changes, they blame us for the toll it’s taken. They just needed a reason to…to act.”

            His father only stared at Pug, not sure of what to say. It would be like that for a long time. No words to share. The man only clenched his fists and left the hospital room.

            “Our life. All of it. It’s gone up in flames today,” Brenda said. It was self-meditating. Self-medicating. Perhaps both. “He just needs to cool down. We all do.”

            “I know,” Pug whispered, still watching the television.

            “We have witness reports that a group of masked men stormed city hall during the mass protest at the ethanol plant. These men physically assaulted Reedy Creek’s mayor, Harold Jenkins, tying him with rope to the flagpole in the courtyard outside facing the smokestacks to the north. To watch the plant burn. A placard was left hanging around his neck that read: CREEK TRAITOR. Mayor Jenkins is currently on route to Davenport General, sustaining injuries to his ribs and blood loss. He is in critical condition, but is expected to survive.”

            “Turn it off,” Brenda said. Wendy was crying, watching silently as the world burned. “Horace, please. That’s enough.”

            Pug looked at her, wanting to absorb everything, to watch that shitty town finally die, to watch the infestation of its organs finally rot her to weed out the virus. “Mom, I need to see this…”

            “No,” she said, nodding her head. “That. All of that. It’s behind us now. We look forward. We move forward.”

            Pug exhaled. In the end his mom was right. He knew that. He went to turn off the TV, to shroud the room in the unrelenting silence of their broken family, when Pug heard a familiar name. He stopped in his tracks. Wendy exhaled and let out an audible shriek.

            “We have special correspondent Mary-Jane Rasmussen on site, currently with reports the shooter has been detained and that the first of the students will be released. Hello Mary-Jane—”

            And Mary-Jane spoke to a girl pulled from the line exiting the school, a girl Pug didn’t recognize. But Wendy did. Wendy said her name was Bella, or at least she liked to call herself that. It had everything to do with sounding and appearing different. Exotic. “Do you know the shooter’s name?”

            For a moment the girl, Bella, just talked and talked, trying to fit the pieces together. She looked shaken. Not there. And then she said the boy’s name.

            “Randy Hopson.”

            Wendy gasped.

            Pug turned off the television. He felt hollow. He felt guilty.

            “Croak…”

3

“You okay son?”

            He’d found the boy in the bathroom, lying on his stomach, his face turned toward the closed stall door, breathing currents into the blood pooling around his body. He was the only one alive left on the scene. Steve knew the police were hesitant not to throw cuffs on his wrists, but found the gun inside the locked stall, on the lap of another boy who’d set its end in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

            “Kyle, can you get me some towels? Please?” Steve Neidermayer had helped escort the young man out into the hallway, away from the bodies. Away from that sick ambiance. Steve had already heard over the radio that squad B had come across another bloodbath in the principal’s office. Right now they were looking for a clear connection between what happened in the cafeteria, the men’s room, and the office. There were two guns found in the school. The Sheriff’s and the kid’s who ended up slumped on the shitter. Steve took the towels from an officer and dabbed the boy’s face, his eyes just gleaming opals in a red well, staring at him and staring at nothing.

            Steve found those two girls in the morning, and was radioed by dispatch about the shooting around the time he would have met Allen Webster for lunch at the Diner; his stomach gurgled as he kneeled by the boy, his shirt still moist with blood, his hands trembling. There was something incredibly wrong with this day. Something the Creekers would later call D-Day. He’d already gotten radio bursts of emergency calls about a riot at the plant, and he heard through the grapevine that a group of men beat the shit out of the mayor; they’d strolled right up the steps into city hall, tore past the receptionist in the lobby to his office, and dragged him out in the courtyard to tie him up to the flagpole beneath ol’ Glory, as it flapped in a stiff breeze applauding the anarchy below as if with ironic satisfaction. He’d only remembered recently what that Nelson girl said at the clinic when the nurse sutured her sister’s throat. Brad Jenkins cut her. And when they came into the bathroom here with guns drawn, officer Barry Watnick only exclaimed, after deputy Jack Hollerann vomited in the closest urinal next to the body of a boy against the stall’s wall, “Jesus Christ, that’s the mayor’s grandson. Bastard will have to have a closed casket funeral. Fuckin’ heads are gonna roll.”

            Steve only stared at this poor kid now, tall and gangly, his hair moist against his forehead, his lips quivering. He gently wiped more of the blood from his face. Why this kid was alive while the other three in the bathroom were not remained the biggest mystery besides the disconnect between what happened here and the bodies in the principal’s office, the body of their dear departed Sheriff Andy, who’d apparently been at the school during the shooting, and had, according to what he’d heard, fired off a couple of shots himself.

            “Napolitano’s in the office here. We have four bodies in here. Four. Principal’s dead. Knife to the head. And one of his fuckin’ eyes was pulled out. Repeat, pulled out. Mary Napolitano was stabbed multiple times. Andy’s body is beneath some foreigner with biceps like Arnold. Swear to fuckin’ God. Like Arnold. Guy’s face was blown clear off. We can’t identify the guy unless we got a database inventoried by pompadours.”

            Steve had wanted to kill his radio. It sounded like William Harris on the other end, narrating the investigation by the lobby. Maybe humor was his MO when dealing with this shit, but Steve had seen enough today that he’d prefer the silence. He took the boy’s hand in his and caressed it. He didn’t have kids of his own. And until now, he didn’t think he wanted any.

            “You need anything? A drink?”

            The boy slowly shook his head and rolled his eyes to look at Steve. “Is my brother okay?” he finally whispered.

            “Your brother?”

            The kid nodded his head. “They bullied him. They…terrorized him.”

            “Your brother was the shooter?”

            “Yes.”

            “What’s your name, son?”

            “Cory. Croak. Hopson.”

            “And your brother?”

            “Randy. Is he okay?”

            “Son, Cory. Or Croak. Do you prefer Croak?”

            “My friends call me Croak,” he whispered.

            “Okay, Croak it is. We’re friends, I think. Did you talk to your brother?”

            Croak nodded.

            “What did he say?”

            “He told me…that he loved me. He never said that before. I never would have believed it, ya know.” Croak was crying. It was a silent cry, a manly cry if Steve had to comment. A tear marked its way down Croak’s cheek, washing away any of the blood the towel couldn’t clean. “He…he shot himself.”

            “Yes, son, he did.”

            “He’s gone now. I saw him leave the bathroom. He left with the…with the man in the hat. I think…it’s called a fuh—fedora. Old-fashioned, ya know. Cause the guy wearing it is old. I bet he’s thousands of years old. He put up all the cameras. He lives under the town. He watches everybody. You. Me. My bruh—brother whispered something to me…”

            Steve knew what this was. He did. It was shock. He wanted to hug the kid. Wanted to take Croak in his arms and tell him everything would be okay. But right now he knew it wouldn’t. And he knew the kid would probably sense the lie. “What did he say, Croak?”

            “He told me not to forget about him. But not to do by him. And he told me to tell mom…to tell her that he loves her. He always did. That was it.” Croak smiled.

            “We’ll call your mom, okay bud? You and me.”

            Croak nodded. And he took Steve’s arm with a firm grip and stared long and hard at the officer, into him. Steve would later say he felt uncomfortable by that look, that he thought the kid knew something he probably shouldn’t have. It was the look of somebody who believed otherwise for some time, who maybe thought the events of this day were needed, were required, like a bloodletting.

              “Your town will be safe now.”

4

The first kids that came out the front door did so to what amounted to thunderous applause. Adam wasn’t sure why it started, but he understood what it represented. Moms and dads cheered when those first officers escorted out lines of kids, of boys and girls, most holding hands. A pretty girl holding hands with the pimply geek behind her, and the handsome jock holding hands with the four-eyed fat girl who otherwise would never get asked to a dance. It was connective. Spiritual.

            A lady Adam recognized had worked her way toward the front steps at the entrance with her cameraman. Her name was Mary-Jane. He knew her from the boring onsite reports that were sometimes on the evening news when grampa had nothing better to watch than the Davenport subsidiary. She was pretty, her dark hair swept up out of her face with enough hairspray to ensure it must have felt like clay to human touch. She stood there speaking, taking cues from somebody talking into her earpiece. When the kids came out the door, she rushed toward them, bypassing two officers that had stood guard at the stairs; they were the sort of bumpkin cops Adam knew Don Knotts was emulating in those black and white shows that were sometimes on as reruns late at night. After Carson. It was distasteful the way the newshounds pounced. A scent for blood, Danny would whisper as he watched them as well. Everything that had happened today, everything that was still happening as smoke rose to the north, leaving Adam and Danny to wonder if there was a fire somewhere, near enough to the smokestacks to intermingle the columns of billowing darkness, had a sort of apocalyptic air, as if society had come to the edge of a cliff and was fighting to work its way back. It was a strange thought, but even stranger guesses would be made later when people much smarter than Adam sat down to discuss Reedy Creek. Because this day would make Reedy Creek a national conversation. It was what Grimwood wanted. He wanted Reedy Creek to slide out of the shadows; he figured his dad wanted the same thing, that he and Grimwood agreed it would work best this way. A calamity was required to cull the bad weeds. He wouldn’t know it then, but the thought was very similar to something his dad wrote in his book, that bestseller Adam once hated to look at.

            Mary-Jane was able to snatch a girl coming out of the school, her eyes rubbed red and the liner smeared in charcoal freshets down her face.

            “Are you okay?” Mary-Jane asked. It was an opener. Something to break the ice before she really dug in, before she gave her viewers the real story. Because people somehow had a right to know everything.

            The girl nodded her head, staring at the camera strangely, the cops by the stairs radioing somebody in power to get this reporter escorted away, both apparently lost for words to do it themselves.

            “We are all praying for you, for the students here. All of those watching are praying for you.”

              The girl didn’t smile. She just nodded again while more students were led out, and some teachers now too. Including for Mrs Simone and Mr Johnston and their herded survivors from the music room; the picture of this exodus would be paraded alongside another in the months to come.

              “Can you tell me what happened?”

               “The boy…he just…the boy came to the table, he just walked up and shot Oliver. Shot him without saying anything. He was crazy. My God, he was crazy…”

                Mary-Jane saw a Trooper coming toward her now, his eyes intent, furious. “Do you know the boy’s name? The shooter’s name?”

                 The girl wiped a tear from her eye. Later, the girl’s parents would file an injunction against Davenport’s Local 5 News Team, and would later sue for malicious intent; the case would be thrown out of the courts after a settlement was reached, but Mary-Jane, having reached a certain notoriety for the brazen interview, would find work as an NBC correspondent out of New York City when the networks came calling for the girl who stared down the law for a front page grabbing story. “He told us all his name,” the girl said, staring at the camera with a deadpan earnestness that would serve as pictorial evidence of her trauma when the lawyers put together a case against Local 5. “When we were running out of the cafeteria, he told us his name…Randy Hopson.”

               “Did you know him?”

               “Not until today. But I won’t forget him.”

                The cops pulled the girl away and escorted Mary-Jane down the steps as she screamed about the freedom of the press, and the Trooper pushed down the camera with his gloved hand and told her about fucking decency.

                Adam watched this with a morbid interest until he heard the name of the shooter. Until everything clicked together, as things like this were wont to do. Because there was a certain connectivity to everything. Danny would later call it the Creek’s scar tissue. Randy was there at the beginning, he connected the boys to Lazarus, he was a gateway to the farmhouse; he was involved by virtue of the four bringing him into the fold via Adam’s idea to blackmail Ange to date the ugly Hopson brother.

                Who did he kill? Because somebody most certainly died here. You know it. Chaos requires lives. Doesn’t it?

                “Croak,” Adam whispered.

                “He’s fine,” Danny said, watching the tumult, watching Mary-Jane scream at the cops pushing her toward Main, watching the other media outlets try to push back, to get better visuals of the horrified students, the best shot for the front page of USA Today. “He’s protected. Like you and I are protected. Like Pug is protected.”

                “How do you know?”

                “Because this started with us. Didn’t it?”

                 Adam noticed Danny was crying. He wasn’t sure why, but when he saw it, he felt the urge as well. He let the tears fall down his face. Nobody was looking at them, nobody cared about or knew what they had done in this town. But they were both enveloped by the power of their knowledge, their understanding. It was cathartic.

                 “If it wasn’t us…if it wasn’t us, it would have been somebody else. Like Grimwood had a list. A list of kids, a list of us that he could draw. But we actually went. We actually went and we…we fucking opened the door to this, because we wanted to know. And he used our curiosity against us. He’s the devil, Adam. I believe that with my heart and soul.”

                 “Maybe he used us, but he isn’t the devil. I think the devil was already here,” Adam said, “I think the devil forced Grimwood’s hand. That’s what I think.”

                  Danny looked at Adam for a moment; there was silence between them. The world around was noisy, filled with people and voices, filled with exalt and sorrow. But the quiet between them was stronger.

                 “Grampa wouldn’t have made a deal with the devil.” Adam said it more to himself than to Danny.

                 “What is that supposed to mean?”

                  “I think grampa might have played us from the get go.”

                   Danny smiled. “Crafty old bastard. God, I miss him. Sounds like you have a story to tell, Adam.”

                   “Pug’s the storyteller,” Adam said. “Grampa had a plan all along. That’s it, that’s all.”

                   Croak came out the front doors with Steve Neidermayer, the boy under the cop’s arm, a fresh towel around his shoulders. Adam and Danny watched silently; for some reason, though their hearts swelled at the sight of him, neither called his name. Maybe Danny was right. Maybe the four of them were protected. That was their price in all of this.

                    The cameras flashed as the boy came out. Croak’s face would be plastered across national newspapers, and an image snapped by a photographer from Omaha named Clinton Howell, would appear on Time Magazine as the cover photo delineating this entire event, trying to explicate how a town, so peaceful in the years prior, could fall to tatters in a matter of months. It would look into the wider charges implicating a group of people found dead on D-Day, and the man behind it all. The man who invented a serial killer. It was a picture of Cory staring out toward the calamitous crowd, Neidermayer’s arm gently placed around his neck and bunching the towel, whose rim was smudged some by the blood marking his face in spots; his eyes were disbelieving and so lonely. It would be dubbed the saddest picture of 1988, proving in but an instant how the broken emotions of one could be so delicately captured in the briefest of glances. “That was your brother’s blood in the photo, correct?” Phil Donahue would ask.

                   “Yes sir,” Cory would answer.

                   “He did this in front of you?”

                   “He was inside a bathroom stall. But yes.”

                    “I know this question has been asked of you countless times, but why? You are such a decent boy. A good kid. What could have driven your brother to do this? Bullies are one thing, certainly, but to react with such, such hatred, it seems inconceivable.”

                    Croak would look up at the white-haired man with a stoic affirmation that would become a mainstay on his face. He was trying to come to terms with closure, perhaps, but in reality you could never just grow out of something, or forget it for the sake of re-claiming normalcy. It didn’t work that way.

                  “He didn’t want to be invisible anymore.”

                  Adam stood at the cordon by the stairs with Danny as Croak was led toward the parade of cruisers and ambulances, their lights flashing, and the mass of students who hadn’t yet been swallowed up by their parents. Croak would look down at them and they’d catch eye contact. The three of them.

                  Adam knew they’d never be normal again. But he knew that didn’t matter. His grampa told him stories about the war, about the men he met fighting in Korea; he told Adam that the bonds made in war are eternal. If a friendship can form in hell, then it can flourish during adversity and survive anything. Because it’s not a friendship anymore. It’s family.

                  “The world was so much better when you were Ron Guidry,” Adam whispered to Danny as Croak was led behind the police cars. Away from sight.

                  “The world’s always better when you’re a Yankee.”

5

Paul Holdren lives out of boxes. He doesn’t expect to stay anywhere for long. Because his experiments have yet to reward him with his ultimate prize. His house in Reedy Creek is barren, most of the lights having never been turned on. He purchased it site unseen from a realtor named Helen Craven, and he paid her cash. His neighbors didn’t know he lived there. Because he was a drifter and moved where the next opportunity swept him. He has suitcases of cash, most gifts from the Saudi investor Paul recently drowned in the man’s bathtub when the project here went belly up. He knew it would. He could convince those he invited that the experiment itself was partly the test to gauge how far one was willing to go under specific orders for an environmental cause; Norris was certainly enticed by this reasoning, as it fulfilled his own mandate. A man who likes to kill, who enjoys the hunt and the art of conversation, would love to believe his expression is one of symbolic necessity, that murder for an idea is somehow unburdened, that it qualifies as poignant for what it represents. But Norris’s ideals got him killed; you didn’t keep a prisoner and feed him if your intent was to remain a shadow. The potential always exists that power can shift. And it did.

            Paul will leave the furniture, meant to stage an act of livability. He will leave the television in the front room across from the kitchen. He does not watch television. The television sitting on the red oak stand isn’t even plugged in; it is for show, like most of what Paul presents to the world. Like Cole Moore—or Scott Cole—Paul Holdren isn’t his name but a mask, something he wears in the context of his theater. When he and Norris gained the reins of Project Gaia from Herbert Cole, after the man was found lynched from a tree by his own innards, he was elected as a reaction to so coarse an enemy that could de-humanize their movement with such disregard. Paul was going to kill them all. Kill the entire board, the donors, the members. Because he figured that would gain him entrance to where he wanted to go. To whom he wanted to become.

            But somebody, something, was working against you then. In Washington, there was a spy or a force that didn’t want you to succeed, that perhaps feared what you were trying to do. Over a thousand people lived who should not have.

            And so Paul came here. To this little town, under the direction of a foreign partner looking to delegitimize the ethanol production on American soil; he was given plenty of money, so long as he could create imbalance. And Paul would. In steps. Kill the sick, first, then the sinners. If the experiment had gone far enough, Paul would have convinced his council that bombing the plant was a necessary precursor to the world’s environmental redemption. Global Warming fed on the combustion of fuel, sustainable or not. Those who could conjure the scientism so prevalent in the industry would have to die, he would have argued, in order to kill the idea at its root.

            The foreign man with the endless pocket book ebbs atop the dirty scrim of bathwater now, his face mottled and purple, both swollen and sagging, his wheelchair set against the curb of the tub. His Walkman bobs by the longer strands of hair that curl around his ear, no longer humming the tunes of westernized pop the Saudi listened to in protest to the conservatism of his own people. Paul had pushed the man into the bathroom as he struggled, trying to wedge his atrophied legs into the wheels, his sandaled feet into the spokes. Paul did not say a word when he tipped the chair toward the bath he’d filled, and he leaned against the skirt and held the Diplomat’s head under the water until those choking gargles, the bubbles on the water’s surface, ceased to an utter stillness and quietude that reminded Paul of a graveyard.

             He remembers the place where his parents are buried. He remembers standing by their gravestones and screaming at God. Screaming at the power that took them from him. It started then. Because he was in the car with them; he watched his parents die as the hood crushed into their bodies and he was left buried beneath the shattered shroud of glass and his mother’s petticoat draped over his face to save him from any cuts. And the man in the hat and coat came to the wreckage and peered in at him; his eyes were studious and indifferent, and grim beneath the brim of his cap, his face lineless but somehow incredibly old. The man didn’t cast a shadow. Because he wasn’t a man.

            Death was random. Imprecise. So he would change that.

            Paul would become an artist. A poet. Death would be his ink.

            The television turns on.

            Paul looks at the screen as he stands by the open box filled with paper, the briefcase on the kitchen counter full of cash. The TV is not plugged in.

            “News from Reedy Creek will be concentrated on what happened in the school. As it should be. Because what happened at the school yesterday was a terrible thing. But new footage was discovered from yesterday’s atrocities, what locals have already started to call D-Day.” The man speaking is Darrel Janz. It says so superimposed on the picture under the knot of his necktie, the man’s oily hair parted to the right and dark beneath the grim, almost somber mural of a full moon pregnant over the indigo fields. When he speaks, he does so with the hint of a smile, and sometimes he is missing teeth when his mouth opens, and other times it seems he has far too many of them wedged into his maw, bulging against his lips. It is so strange, so constant, a flicker between both extremes. Paul cocks his eye. There is a screenshot to Darrel’s right now, and his eyes strangely look at it, even as he is facing toward the camera, facing Paul Holdren: “As you can see, the E10 council in Reedy Creek, infamous as a peculiar curiosity in the town’s government, and headed by a man without name, met its demise in a concerted and calculated attack.”

             There is footage now from the principal’s office. Paul knows there is not a camera in Hector’s office. He knows because they held so many meetings in there, had so many off-the-record conversations. He watches the large man that once pushed around the Diplomat in his wheelchair, who promised Paul he would do this very thing, plunge a knife into Mary Napolitano’s chest. Paul watches her voiceless scream as she collapses, and he watches this man throw that same knife in an unyielding arc at Hector as he charges; the knife sticks like a fence board catapulted by a tornado above the bridge of his nose. And Andy shoots the lumbering pedophile. Paul watches this with a growing fascination as Darrel enjoys the silence, as he stares at the man standing in the kitchen by the boxes. The big man stabs Andy in the gut, falling on top of him, and then with a quick flash, the top part of the pedophile’s head disappears to a mangled collection of detritus that seems to float in the air.

            “Nobody survived. Nobody,” Darrel reassures. “Not even the doctor, the man masquerading as Ned Stevenson, innocent of any crimes and the smear tactics of a council trying to frame him for murder. Norris Serkis died at about the same time that Andrew Napolitano put a bullet through his assailant’s head. Who was not innocent in any of this, mind you. The man had a very sickening penchant to fuck young boys.”

            Paul gasps. He knows this isn’t real. That it cannot be real. But he is drawn in anyway. He goes into the family room and kneels in front of the television; he sees the ingrained wrinkles in Darrel’s face, so deep and hard, almost unreal, caked under applications of make-up, his eyes sometimes black and then grey. He watches the new feed of Norris Serkis taking a fork to the neck, from a vantage point in Norris’s basement that he knows does not have a camera. He gave the council members their privacy. He watches Ned stand against the furnace after having wrestled the gun away from the dead cop’s holster on the floor, and he shoots Norris. There are distinct, successive flashes, and he watches Norris’s handsomeness recede and disappear to darkness. To blood.

           He sees Trevor Kramer next, squirming along the floor in his home, the big man coming after him, the big man Trevor always called the Low Breed, the big man Paul brought to Reedy Creek to start the process of disconnecting. There is no better way to put it. He watches Trevor shoot the man with a gun he did not know the scholar owned; he watches the big man fall to his knees, Barb tied to a chair behind him, tilted against the table. He watches this understanding his plan, everything he has conducted in this symphony, is unraveling.

           “What is this?” Paul whispers. He tries the knob on the television, tries to turn it off. Tries to change the channel.

            “This is your life,” Darrel says to the man, winking at him with a fluttering, jittery eyelid that opens and closes with jarring slowness. For a second Paul sees a clip on the television of a car crash, of a truck running through a stop sign in a swerve and hitting a blue Plymouth, its hood collapsing with indifference as the windshield shatters, as the driver and his passenger are crushed while the boy behind them lives.

             And then he sees himself, as he is now, kneeling in front of the television. There are no cameras in your house.

             And there is somebody sitting on the chair watching him.

             Paul turns and looks at the man. He knows who he is. Maybe he always knew. There is a camera in the ceiling now, staring at him with the lidless black eye of an insect. Or crow. When Paul sees it, mounted against the juncture of wall and stipple, the lens explodes like a shaker of salt, and the dust rains onto the tile floor in glittery piles.

             “It’s you,” Paul whispers. Darrel Janz is no longer on the television; the screen is black now. “It’s finally you.”

            The man sitting in the chair wears a fedora. His legs are crossed and he is holding a videocassette. “Hello Paul. It’s about time we met. I’ve taken a name in this town just as you have. Here I am Grimwood. Because that was the service you contracted for the surveillance operation in Reedy Creek. Grimwood Security Inc. They were paid in full, I will let you know, as penalty for a contract defaulted on your part. For their sake, of course. They haven’t any blood on their hands. There is still some innocence left of your time here.”

            Paul stands up. He gestures to the television. “Those are nice parlor tricks, Grimwood. But you don’t know a fucking thing about me.”

            “I know you question the way I do things.”

            Paul smiles. “You seem so bored. So indifferent to us. You take for granted what you are. What you can do. I question your approach. How random you are. How you can put alcohol in a man driving a truck and think that is natural, that is okay, and leave a sole survivor with every memory intact of a life that should have been.”

            “You cannot make your pursuit of me personal.”

            “Fuck you,” Paul screams. “Fuck you! Have I offended you, finally? Is that why you’re even here? Because you envied what I could do with just a few bodies? You envied the poetry I could write by taking the decisions away from nature?”

            “Pride cometh before the fall,” Grimwood says with a smile. He taps the tape in his hand. “I don’t like it when people think my job is theirs to take. There are many just like you, Mr Holdren. Some make it about an idea. They are convinced ideology can impact the forces of nature. Joseph Stalin. Mao Zedong. These were men who directly challenged me, who took far more from the world than you could ever dream; but theirs was hubris, because they made themselves Gods by ruling kingdoms of godlessness. I heeded their call far too late. Many died that should not have. I’ve watched you for many years now because I knew the potential in your heart; and if I’d left you to stampede with all of your ambitions, perhaps the ideas you hold could convince followers to make you a leader worthy of their admiration and obedience. What you conceived of in this town, democratizing murder, reasoning for one life over another, it could have flourished undetected for many years and given you the foothold you seek in history as an admirable heir to my throne.”

            “So you’re here to kill me, then? When you should have killed me in that fucking Plymouth.”

            “That’s never my choice.”

            “Then whose is it?”

            “His, perhaps, or his. Or hers.” Grimwood gestures with his hand. “Human life is just a result of so many interactions, of a crossroads of choices. Humanity is potential.”

            Paul looks up and sees there are people standing around him now, standing in front of the windows, blocking the doorways. They are staring at him with unblinking eyes, standing corpses, because Paul recognizes them. Each and every one of them. They are his candidates.

            Standing by the stairway is a man named Clayton Miller, his face purple and sickly, a needle plunged into his arm and swaying this way and that with the momentum of his gaunt body, his breath pungent, rotten; by the rear patio door is the fat man named Robert Wilson, his skull crushed in where it likely hit the steering wheel, his arm held crooked against the side of his body and his knees sort of buckled, giving him the stance of a gigantic chicken.

            “I was going to change. I was going to diet. Got on some strong coke, give me the energy to run. To lose this weight. I know that ain’t right, using drugs, but it was my last resort. Nothing’s ever really written, but a version of me, a version I never got to be, would have died thin, happy. And old. You didn’t give me that chance, you fuck. You didn’t even know me. But you made a choice anyway, didn’t you?”

            Paul is silent. He just looks at the dark blood trickling down the side of Robert’s fractured skull, matting his hair, his eyes round and unblinking.

            “Didn’t you, you fuck?”

            There is a pretty girl standing in the corridor by the foyer, side by side with a man, both bloody, both dishevelled; she is wearing a lab coat, opened to reveal the sides of her supple white breasts, marred by smeared blood, and his trousers are around his ankles in a frozen rumple. “I fucked him to get out of Reedy Creek. That isn’t a crime. You made it one. You made it one. I saw a version of my life where I did get out, where I succeeded. Now my mom’s depressed. She won’t eat. And my dad thinks about killing himself. He sits in the barn with his Colt and spins the cylinder. Listens to the clicks. Because of a choice you made.”

            There are more bodies, standing on the stairs. The body of the boy, Matthew Hodges, looking over the railing at him, his wrist slashed, the word RAPIST bleared on his forehead above his snarled brow, written with his blood, his throat a collage of perse sickness, like a wilted orchid. And below him is an old woman, one of the first in Reedy Creek’s Project, Coriander Handelman, her neck similar to Matthew’s but tilted, angled, her face disjointed as a result, her stare cross and piercing, her body thin and frail as she stands naked and unashamed. Because she died this way.

            “You can join us,” Mary Napolitano says. She is standing next to Paul. He did not see her approach. Did not hear her. Her eyes are dark and morose, her chest sunken beneath the pulverized soft tissue of her breasts, gored and bloody, smattered and gruesome. “There isn’t anything to regret here. Maybe you do see what could have been, but is that always better than what was?” She smiles and it is wrong. Paul hears the sound of her stiff jaw nearly breaking to hinge her lips into something of a snarl. “Because what was, Paul, what was would have been your little fucking body going through the windshield, just a mark on the road, just a footnote. What was. What should have been.”

            “Stop this…” Paul says. “Stop this. Now.” This time louder.

            “That’s your choice now. I just came here to bring you the last candidate. Isn’t that why you contracted my services, Mr Holdren?” Grimwood stands up and the dead bodies lurching in the house, clotted and decaying, leaving the space musty and cloistered, breathing into the room the scent of death, watch him with something like reverence. “You had names for them all. The Whore. The Adulterer. The Addict. I thought this one was very befitting, all things considered.”

            Grimwood hands Paul the tape. He knows what it is before taking it. Written on its front is: THE PROPHET.

            “You’ve led others to kill for an idea. Your idea. Because you want to control something you don’t understand.”

            “Please. Make them leave,” Paul whispers, feeling the bodies inch closer, smelling them now, the age and decay, of the coppery tinge of blood and earthen musk, of the claustrophobic inclination that he will be dragged into an open hole to join those he damned.

            “A prophet can will it, Mr Holdren.”

            Paul closes his eyes. And when he opens them, they are gone. The dead. Like they’d never been in the house. Grimwood is gone. The tape is still in his hands, that word, that damnation—THE PROPHET—still printed there in red ink. What those premonitions are replaced with is the bleating sound of sirens and the flashing red and whites scarring his walls.

            He hears the front door break down; he hears the trampling footsteps. He gets down on his knees when the police tell him to. Order him to. He drops the tape when they tell him to drop his weapon. The tape is dust when it hits the floor. Because it is an illusion. Like everything in Reedy Creek. The misdirection of a magician who is better at his job.

            Paul sees Cole Moore—Scott Cole—standing with the officers, standing with Trevor Kramer, and he understands. Pride cometh before the fall.

            Fuck you, Grimwood.