Chapter 42 — REEDY CREEK - A Weekly Online Novel by Ryan Christensen

Feb 5

Feb 5 Chapter 42

It’s a feeling you’ll get. Like you’ll know it’s the right time. The universe will tell you.

Randy Hopson went to his locker. He was nervous, but he figured that only came with the territory. Pre-game jitters, his dad might have told him. Before he left and never came back. Randy opened the locker and glanced around. Made sure nobody was looking. And for the most part, he was invisible. He took what he called his Reminder out of his backpack and stuck it under his hoodie, into the waistband of the jeans he wore the night Brad and his minions kicked the shit out of him. Because Henry said there were echoes; if you wanted to make a point, you found where life rhymes and you start from there.

He walked from his locker’s hallway toward the lobby. It was just before lunch. The bell would ring soon. He saw Dave and Oliver and the scared part of Randy ducked his head so they wouldn’t catch eye contact when they passed him. He nearly shrivelled up and collapsed into the row of lockers behind him near the trophy case that showed the Hornets’ MVPs from years past.

He watched Dave and Oliver go to their own lockers, both talking, both colorless. They kept looking back and he could only cower so they wouldn’t notice him. You don’t have to be afraid. He couldn’t help it. He figured it was the natural recourse of one tormented by bullies. The reflex of a victim. He thought of their faces as they looked lit in the wavering flicker of chrome Zippos; he thought of their sneering grins and the shadows coursing over their eyes; and he thought of their laughter as he lay dying on the path. Or what he thought dying must have felt like. It was a sort of death, though. What you thought you could become, how you thought you could change, that version of you died. It died in the dark woods under the looming specter of fireworks. Randy noticed the two were plaintively watching the Sheriff as he walked through the lobby toward the admin pool. Randy watched the officer. Andy. He moved with a specificity in mind, with a particular purpose. Randy wondered if the universe had given him a message as well. Because that was the way the universe sometimes worked.

Does he know?

Don’t be ridiculous, he nearly whispered.

You have to make a mark if you want to be remembered.

And today Randy Hopson would be remembered.

“Today’s the day,” Henry said.

Randy looked up from his perch on the couch. He’d stayed up all night. He had a stack of VHS tapes, and he watched one after another. All individual moments categorized of his father’s new life with his new family. The tapes sat on the table, stacked in a lopsided tower; Randy’s first inclination had been to take them down into the parking lot with some lighter fluid to watch them burn. But then he thought about how strange it had been to even have access to these candid moments. Like the universe wanted you to see them, he thought. And so he watched. When Henry came into the room, Randy was watching his father standing at the barbecue, an apron draped down his front and snug around the waist, a twine looped around his neck. He was grilling hot dogs while his new little boy ran through the sprinklers in a backyard whose lawn was nicer, greener than Randy’s own. He looked back at the television for a moment, long enough to watch his father remove a plump wiener and set it on a plate by some buns and ketchup.

“I’m scared,” Randy whispered.

“You want him to remember you? You wouldn’t be watching this if you didn’t.”

“I hate him.”

“I’d say embrace the hate, but that sounds cliché as fuck.” Henry chuckled. “We’re doing anything but coloring inside the lines.”

“Why is that kid so special? What makes him better than me?” The kid on the screen dove through the sprinkler again. Randy could not remember a time when his dad cooked hot dogs for him, when he stood on the deck watching him play in the yard.

“You have to make a mark if you want to be remembered.”

Randy cocked his eye, looking at Henry. Unaware it would be the last time he’d ever see him again.

“You want me to tell you that piece of shit stays awake at night thinking about Randy Hopson. Wondering about him. A name’s a name, bud. You were in his life and then you weren’t. Anyone who can walk away like that has the ability to forget. So you remind him. An act, an event, that’s what people talk about. You want your dad to be reminded of what he gave up, what he did to you?”

Randy nodded.

“Then give him one.” Henry handed Randy a gun. It was the same gun he pulled on Randy out in the woods the night of the barbecue. The night Randy got his ass kicked. The night that set everything in motion.

Because there were rhymes. There were echoes. And Reedy Creek was like a piece of poetry.

“The Low Breed are gangsters?”

But they were more than that, Trevor thought as he veered the wheel nearly tilting the Acura. He’d taken Adam’s assertion on blind faith. But was it really blind? After everything you’ve learned about this place? You had to know, to understand, that the past is like any monster; and if the past took the shape of a childhood nightmare to warn you about it, then you had to know whatever is really going on in this town has made you a piece of the puzzle. And it wants you to…survive. Cole only stared at him, waiting for an answer.

“The Low Breed is the reason we are here,” Adam said from the backseat. Trevor knew his son saw something, had learned something he would never understand; he’d said Lew left him pieces, something like memories, and he could somehow access them. If Death was working in this town, was working to fix what Holdren and the council had appropriated, he had to believe, at least in some context, that the magic his son kept referencing had to have actual applications beyond the imagination. Because he knew about Barb’s cancer. Because the farmhouse was different, was older and deserted. Because the windows were broken now. Because of the crows. And because of Grimwood. Because of what you could see in his eyes, what he knew.

“And you’re certain they’re here?”

Cole had turned around to look at Adam. But his son’s eyes were distant. His mind was elsewhere. Trevor understood the distinction, the demarcation between childhood and adulthood. He figured that line, that boundary, was always prominent, was always thick and real, but it took an accepting mind to reveal it, to acknowledge it. And for a long time Trevor was unaware, had remained ignorant of the line because his childhood, who he used to be, was not compatible with whom he’d become. You never lost that part of you, that history, because the past was always lingering; what you lost was the acknowledgment of the memory.

“If he says so,” Trevor said, “if he believes it, then they are. Then it means Paul Holdren never paid my debt to bring me here. He holds leverage over everybody, Cole. Everybody. This is mine.”

“The timing feels right,” Adam said. “Everything is happening right now. Grimwood called it chaos. It’s like that feeling when you’re sick…those tingles in your body before you…before you throw up. Reedy Creek feels like that. Do you guys feel it, too?”

Trevor looked at his boy in the rear-view and thought his face looked pale. He wasn’t sure what he felt. It was a combination of disbelief and fear. Did you do the right thing, going to Cole? Did you do the right thing telling the council? Word was always going to get back to Paul, it was, and this would have sent him over the edge. Would have given him the kill order, to put the noose around your throat.

“I feel it,” Trevor said. And maybe now he did believe it. He did believe Reedy Creek was ripping apart, was sick, and he could only feel regret for the choices he’d made. He pulled into Deermont Arc, his tires squealing; he remembered the signs he saw last time, he remembered being followed, seeing men in suits, seeing towncars. That paranoia was palpable. Now it was far too sudden to comprehend it, because his picture of the world had shattered so quickly.

“If it’s true, Trevor, it’s something the cops should deal with. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t think the cops here would know what to do.”

“The cops here will be busy today,” Adam said, and there was a certainty to his tone that Trevor did not like.

And he saw the Lincoln towncar. It was parked across the street from his house. It had an out of state license plate, something he figured was removed from a car in a parking lot, maybe at the airport in Davenport; the hood was pretty clean of insects, the grille quite polished. The car hadn’t taken a long trip down the 34. Trevor suspected it might have been stolen in Reedy Creek. But it was a very specific car. Dark and brooding. Like something a bureaucrat might drive. He expected to see a faceless agent from the EPA watching him speed down the street, perhaps waiting to go over some minutes with him about environmental impacts at the plant. But the car was empty. Like the towncar you saw out your window in Mass, in the house of cards you built that was just beginning to come down. Trevor pulled into his driveway, looking at his house with suspicion, hoping the windows might hold some evidence. Barb would have figured it was a well-wisher about her father; she would have opened the door and expected another casserole, or whatever small town treat these nice people ingratiated in order to retain their sense of community.

“We’ll go next door. Borrow your neighbor’s phone. Call the police. There has to be some sense of duty in this town, Trevor. You have to believe that.”

Trevor looked at Cole and shook his head. “This isn’t about the law, about process or what’s right and what’s wrong. I don’t think it ever was. Not here. Cole, we screwed up. You have to see that.”

“You were tricked. Paul has that charisma.”

“And he found an opponent in somebody, something, that has turned this town into something that it never used to be. I think…I think a part of what’s happening is coming to terms with what we’ve done.”

“You’re going to get yourself killed. And your son. I mean, are you even thinking about this?”

“We have to do this,” Adam said. “Grampa, he left me one last piece.”

“What piece, Adam? What? I can’t let you come in here with me. This is about what I’ve done. Me. I won’t do that again to you.”

“Dad. I have to. I’m supposed to.”

“You’re both nuts. Fucking nuts.” Cole opened the door. “I’m calling the police. I hope you do the right thing and wait.” He got out of the car, looked at Trevor and Adam with a mixture of appreciation and confusion, and then rushed across the yard toward the Prangers’ place next door.

Trevor exhaled and looked at Adam in the mirror. “I don’t think it would matter if I begged you to stay, would it?”

“Dad…I think Reedy Creek wants you to forgive yourself.”

“I don’t know how to.” He could see the earnestness in his son’s eyes and he thought he might break. He didn’t know what they were going to find in the house, but he suspected it would be awful.

“It’s…it’s taking the power away from your past. Grampa thought you were haunted by…you.”

Trevor wiped his eye with his thumb and bit his lip. Is this place just an experiment to make you a father? To make you the father you always should have been? Is that Lew’s intent here? His big fucking practical joke?

Adam opened the car door and started walking toward the front door. Trevor unclasped his belt and raced after his son, reaching him just as he approached the front door, the sick, cold feeling about what awaited pressing on him, on his soul.

“I think we’ll be okay,” Adam said, looking up at him. And he opened the door. It wasn’t locked.

“There he is, ladies and gentleman. The star of the show. Mr New York Times Bestseller, finally making an appearance. Bravo.”

Reedy Creek was a piece of paper. Trevor’s future was written on one end, the past on another. And the page was folding in half.

Trevor took Adam’s shoulder and pulled the boy behind him. The man was standing in the foyer, wearing a nicely tailored black suit, a dark tie knotted beneath the irregular jut of his Adam’s apple, a few new scars on his face, near his mouth, and his hair greased back with the same pomade that showed how much it had thinned in the intervening years. His deep-set eyes were curious, unafraid, and he clapped his hands, his free palm smacking the broadside of a hardcover book Trevor knew the moment he saw it; he remembered how its cover felt against his face. There were even old stains on it, his blood for sure, like ideographs across his type-faced name, across the title. Population Problem.

That’s why I came to Reedy Creek. To solve that problem. Because with all my hubris I thought it was something I could do.

“Where is my wife?”

Somewhere in the house he could hear Patty crying. And he knew his boy was still alive.

The man cocked his brow and sneered. It was likely the most he could project of a smile. “Nice digs, Writer. Not like the old ones. No. Maybe you wised up. Hey kiddo. Long time no see,” he said, looking at Adam as the boy peered around Trevor. To look at this monster. His son’s monster. The thing his boy still dreamed about. Trevor wanted to kill him. He wanted to kill this man with the peppermint breath. “Tell your kid to go upstairs. Like last time. Well, not exactly like last time. Last time that crying little fuck was in your wife’s tummy. Made her heavy to haul around. My back ain’t what it used to be, so remind me to thank her for spitting out that cud.” The man licked his teeth. “Go upstairs. Into the closet, boy. We’re having ourselves a little do-over. And do be a good big brother and shut the little fuck’s yapper for me, will ya?”

Trevor nodded his head and ushered Adam toward the stairs. “It’s okay,” he whispered. He watched Adam tentatively move toward Peppermint, who only skirted aside for the boy, still sneering, still patting his hand against the book, turning to watch the boy climb the stairs without looking back. He could hear Patty, and his cries were intermingled with a word. Something he couldn’t make out, the boy’s voice stilted and choked. He could only clench his fists and look at this man, this man who appeared to have come alone. Who had the confidence to do this himself.

“My wife?”

“I thought we’d have a little déjà vu, Writer. What poets call a rhyme. Only fitting, isn’t it?” He took Trevor by the neck and pushed him forward down the corridor. Trevor looked into the front room where his wife held Lew’s memorial service. The man’s pictures were still sitting out, witness to this. And he hoped Adam was right. He hoped the magic was right. Was real.

Barb was sitting in the kitchen. Her nose was bloody. Her eyes red and welled with tears. Her mouth was gagged with a dishcloth, and her hands were tied to the chair.

An echo. A rhyme.

He was surprised by how unafraid he was of the man with peppermint breath. The man he’d dreamed about for years now. He understood that conviction was a result of something he took from grampa’s memories. I wouldn’t have made the trade I did, Adam, if it meant I couldn’t help. It was his grampa’s voice, soft but assured.

Adam could hear Patty. He could hear Patty the same way he heard him the night of the storm, the night he found the boy teetering precariously at the top step ahead of him, screaming the same word over and over again.

“BAMPA!”

Adam knew where to go. He understood something was different this time. When the Low Breed had last come, when they’d nearly killed his father, Adam hid in his parents’ closet with his mom, and he listened to everything through a closed door recognizing the reality of death, of mortality, without knowing those were the concessions he was making. No, Patty wasn’t in his parents’ room, and even if Peppermint had stored the boy there, he was drawn somewhere else, like he had been since the storm. Because the magic in Reedy Creek trickled of its own currents and pulled where it had to; Patty could see the currents, could feel them, and Adam imagined his brother ambling down the hallway toward his own room. Toward the closet that had snared him with a rather specific sort of adoration.

Adam opened the closet door in Patty’s room, the Adam West Batman night light turned off, and the blinds open to the golden hue of the backyard; his brother was sitting on the floor next to the hamper, rocking back and forth with a white towel clutched against his chest, pinned between his arms. His nose was runny with snot, his cheeks marked with the forked trail of tears.

“Dam dam,” Patty said with a hint of exhilaration. The boy lunged forward and Adam took him in his arms, feeling his heavy sobs.

“It’s okay, buddy. Adam’s here. Adam’s here.” And he could feel what Patty felt, he could feel the strange and familiar warmth in the space, as if the closet itself continued forever, like the wardrobe to Narnia. Or like the old corridor under Reedy Creek that was gone now. If it had ever even been there.

“Bampa here. Bampa here.” Patty gestured to the towel and Adam looked down at it. He was inside the closet now, the same closet where he’d found the pack of smokes currently wedged into his pocket. “Bampa mad at bad man. Hate bad man. Hate.” Patty was no longer crying and there was anger in his tone. Something he wasn’t sure his brother was able to articulate.

Adam couldn’t see grampa. And he was disappointed because a part of him thought that was the last piece, that he’d discover the old timer waiting for a hug and a hint that everything would be okay as he stood in Patty’s closet; but the reality of that assumption was only wishful thinking, and in the end he would understand where much of the focus of grampa’s memory had been and why.

“Patty, did bampa give this to you?” Adam gestured to the towel and Patty nodded. “Did you see him?”

“Touch him. Here.” Patty tapped his chest, his heart, and he smiled. It was an adult smile, a knowing smile, and Adam felt his insides burn. With hope. With admiration. He thought he saw what Patrick would look like in twenty years, shorn of the sight childhood had burdened him with, and he wondered if the boy would ever truly remember this. Or even if Adam would.

“He love us, Dam dam. Bampa love us.” Patty handed the towel to Adam and he took it in his hands, feeling something hard and heavy inside; there was a vibration through the cloth, as if the shroud contained something very powerful, a tuning fork that was grampa’s last testament.

Adam unwrapped the towel, its ends folded neatly like a present.

He was holding a gun. The same gun he watched his grampa hold against Lazarus’s head the night he spoke to Grimwood. The night he made the trade. His life for his baby girl’s.

When Adam touched the gun, he remembered one last piece. He remembered the night the Low Breed came three years ago. The night he awoke staring up at his ceiling of glow-in-the-dark stars. And he remembered the promise made.

He followed them into the cafeteria, and like a wallflower, he stood back and watched, listening to the chatter around him. Oliver had gone to grab a tray and stood in the queue for a burger, progressing down the assembly line and fishing out some change from his pocket. Randy watched Oliver steady the tray and take a seat at the table near the back wall by the windows, the table where Dave was sitting, and a bigger guy named Morris, a girl named Lois, and her equally hot cousin, Amy; they’d all already dug into their meals and were lost in conversation. Dave was silent. He stared only down at his hands, and they were trembling. Brad hadn’t joined them.

He imagined what his father would think when he found out; he imagined what thoughts would be going through his head. If the man would remember him right away, or if, in his haste to shed that part of his life, he’d succeeded at convincing himself his first two kids didn’t exist, that the cute chick named Avery was only an actress he recalled seeing in a movie he couldn’t quite remember the name of. Because the mind worked like that. It was strong enough to tangle what was real with what wasn’t, to confuse the two. If you’re on camera. If you do end up on camera, you tell that motherfucker it was his fault. You tell him. You look into that lens and you tell Edward Reed (you’re a Hopson now, mom says, you’re a Hopson cause Reeds are quitters) you saw him with the boy running through the sprinkler, you saw him with the hot dogs, you saw him with his new family, and you wanted him to despair at realizing that ideal life had skeletons in its closet. It took a coward to do it all over again and forget the first time. A coward.

Randy walked through the crowd. He felt invisible. Like a shadow people automatically avoided. He thought he could sense, could smell and taste their fear, even if they didn’t quite understand it. He went toward that long table by the window, that long table only the popular kids could sit at, that long table he’d be excluded from till the day he graduated because he listened to the wrong music or cut his hair the wrong way or tried, ever so briefly, to be somebody he wasn’t. For a girl. Oliver sat with his back to Randy, leaning forward to speak to Dave. Morris was talking to the cute cousins, who both paper bagged their lunches and laughed demurely whenever the cornerback made a joke.

“You think the Sheriff knows? He hasn’t left yet. Ted said he saw the guy with Mrs Napolitano, and they were both pretty upset…and his cruiser’s still outside. He might be questioning people about it…”

Dave listened and shook his head. “You’re not wearing cuffs, and neither am I.”

“I won’t. We didn’t do shit. I have your word you’ve got my back, right?”

Dave was silent. Randy could hear all of this with a strange clarity. Dave hadn’t noticed him approaching.

“I need your word. Brad’s crazy. I don’t give a fuck who his grandpa is. If…if she died, Jesus…if she did, Dave, it’s his word against ours.” Oliver looked at the cute cousins and then at Morris. They were lost in their own conversation and the boy finally took a bite of his burger. He chewed slowly. Dave only exhaled.

“It was in my van. The evidence is all over the back seat. Cops see that and it’s me. It’s me.”

“Then we step forward before it gets that far. You know in the movies, how people get, I don’t know, deals. We could do that.”

“Brad would kill us.”

Oliver was still chewing when Randy stepped behind him. He wouldn’t get the chance to swallow. Randy drew the Reminder from his waistband, its weight having already sagged the denim, and he pressed it to the back of Oliver’s head. Dave only looked up at him.

“What the fuck do you want?”

In that instant things would change. And Dave saw that. He saw there were consequences. And just as Sheriff Andy pulled the trigger of his service pistol in the principal’s office at the man who’d just murdered his wife, Randy did the same to one of the boys whose faces blared atop the flickering Zippos the night he died in the woods. The night he really died. The night Reedy Creek gave him a new cause.

The rhyme was poetry.

Dave’s face was pelted by blood, teeth, and pre-chewed burger. He fell back out of his seat, his eyes just contrasted white marbles against the scarlet skinmeal slashed across his face, and with a fumbled roll, he disappeared in the stampede; Morris screamed and swivelled by Lois, knocking her over and breaking her arm against the linoleum, and Amy went into shock, staring only at Oliver’s head as it drowned in the coleslaw on his tray, his visible eye having rolled up to its white like a dull candy. Chairs clattered with boisterous force and students screamed. Randy could just hear footsteps. Frenetic footsteps. It was all he would hear before somebody pulled the fire alarm. But that would come after the second gunshot. The gunshot that would cleave the exotic mug of a foreign dignitary named Salim.

It all seemed rather unreal to Randy. It seemed like something he was watching, outside of himself. Like the tapes Henry had given him. The tapes of a father that had moved on. A father that could discard what he’d once cherished with the indifference of one tossing a crumpled napkin. Maybe that’s all this was. A rotten dream. He looked down at the gun and thought it felt vaguely alien in his hand, that it looked like an eldritch mechanical attachment. He looked up at the cafeteria as it drained, as the cooks ran into the kitchen, as a few girls huddled under the table, holding each others’ mouths to stifle their heavy breathing, while others raced to the exits, the sounds of their screams, of their fear, almost pleasant. Because they see you now, you’re not invisible, you’re not a shadow, they see you for more than just what Brad had done to you, they see you as you, they see you as your father once saw you.

Some of these kids only stopped to look at Randy as he stood over Oliver’s body, smoking gun in hand, and they would cement in that image a symbol that would forever scar them, that would preach to the depravities of humanity. That would have them question God.

“My name is Randy Hopson,” he told them, his voice wavering but still somehow stolid. “When they ask you who did this, you know what to tell them.”

“Please. Let her go. She hasn’t done anything.”

Peppermint walked toward Barb and played with her hair as he stared at Trevor; he lifted thick strands of it up to his nose and sniffed deeply, closing his eyes. “She takes good care of herself, Writer. You should be pleased. Most women let themselves get fat. Especially after spitting out kids. Not this one. This one has pert tits. Did she breastfeed? Sometimes women have huge tits and then the baby, it just gulps them down a few cup sizes. I’ve always preferred a handful. But I’ve got large hands.” He smiled, turning his deep eyes to slats. Barb only stared at Trevor, her brow turned to sorrow, the blood absorbing into the cloth dangling from her lips.

“I have money,” Trevor whispered. “If that’s what this is all about, I have money. I can pay you. I can pay what I owe. Plus interest. This place has been lucrative, and the contract I signed, it paid for living expenses for the first two years. I’m not a negotiator, I’m not, but I thought that sounded pretty fair. If Paul…if Paul Holdren didn’t pay out my debt before I came, I apologize. I was assured he had. I was. Or I wouldn’t have…I wouldn’t have brought my family here until we were square. I swear to God.”

“You don’t believe in God. You say so in this fuckin’ book of yours. Christ, this book. Thought I could forget about it, ya know, but you get a call a few years after having to skim the words and you’re reminded again about the scummy shit people believe. I think God makes more sense than this. Than, what, deferring authority to pipsqueaks like you? Shit, I’d take my chances with God before I’d kneel to a fuck who doesn’t even respect me.” Peppermint stood beside Barb and kneeled down by her. He’d already let go of her hair, and some of it stuck to the stream of blood coming from her nose when it fell back in her face. He set the copy of Population Problem on her lap and tapped it with his thick finger.

“I can pay you now. To leave us alone. Please.”

“You don’t get it, do ya? It’s sad to see. Seems to me, you’ve been fucked twice. Once by your banker friend, guy who put a Sig in his mouth and left his brains on the wall, an’ then by your boss. Paul Holdren. Rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?” He squeezed Barb’s knee and she only whimpered. “Paul already paid me. Paid me three years ago. Paid your debt and an overage. A retainer, if you will.”

Trevor cocked his eye. “I don’t understand.”

“Writer, you either got mush for brains or you put your trust in the wrong fucking people. Paul Holdren paid your debt and paid a long-term retainer for your hit. He took out a life insurance policy on you when he hired you. Thought you might try and fuck him. I don’t know. All I know is, this fella calls me and transfers a shitload of money to my account with the strict instructions that I keep a line of communication with him until I’m needed again. I don’t question jobs, my friend, but your boss saved your life only to fucking end it.”

Trevor felt the air go out of him; he felt his legs buckle and he grabbed the chair closest to him to maintain balance. He watched the world swim and focus blur; this wasn’t any different than had he just taken the whiskey and sleeping pills way back when. Just ended it then. Because Paul hadn’t saved him. He’d just kept him on life support. A name to smear in this little experiment. And he would likely try to hang the operation around his neck, to take his writing, to take the underlying thesis from his bestseller and try to frame Reedy Creek by its intentions to create a simple equation where one life could be taken to make room for another. It never mattered if he went to the press or not. Paul was always going to have him killed.

“Jesus, man. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. No. I figure if it’s your time, you might as well go out knowing the truth. Your boss fucked you, Writer. You were here on borrowed time.”

“Let my wife go. Let my kids go. That’s all I ask,” Trevor whispered.

“Well, how about that. Different sentiment than last time. Maybe you grew a set of balls. I remember when you told me to call your father-in-law. That he would pay me off. Especially if he thought his little girl was in any danger. Guy was a prick to me on the phone. He even threatened me, if I recall. But he paid. He took care of your family. Maybe cause he knew you couldn’t. Maybe cause he saw you like I see you. A fucking coward. I usually don’t hold retainers. But for you I’d make the exception. For you I’d break every finger on your other hand. For free. You know what I think? I think I went about it the wrong way back when it really counted. I did. When you were late on your payments, I shouldn’t have given you my patience, or extended any sort of lenience when my principal was hankering for his fucking money; I should have held your family for ransom. That would have lit the wick under your ass. Maybe all of this could have been avoided. Ya think?”

“You’ve already destroyed my family. My son. They don’t deserve anymore.”

“Fuck you. I was just a reaction. You destroyed them. With your cynicism, your blind allegiance to this movement shit. Look where it got you. You took a loan on a bad bet and your fucking banker friend screwed you. He was screwing you from the start. All you eggheads and blowhards think you’ve got the world figured out, you think it all plays out like your books, like your little fantasies, but what I do, what I see, the debts, the actual gears paying for your madness, that shit’s over your head like clouds of acid rain. You think you can write this shit and it will make a difference but you can’t even control your own fuck ups. That’s the height of ego, Writer. I’m not sure if you can even see that.” Peppermint picked up the book and swung it against Barb’s face, rocking her head back against the chair, nearly splitting the slats; her nose spurted more blood in a fierce pool down her face, and she only slumped forward, her fingers manically gripping the chair, chafing against the rope. “That’s what your words do. I can read every regret in your eyes when it’s personal.”

Barb was breathing in stilted gasps, bubbles forming in her nostrils, her eyes dazed. Trevor felt helpless. He remembered that utter weakness that had once defined him, that had him watching the deer in his yard as he contemplated killing himself, contemplated giving his family a life without him. Your past is a monster. Everyone’s past is a monster. It’s those who don’t have the will to confront their past that are deemed to suffer because of it.

“I am going to kill you, Mr Bestseller. I want you to know that. But I want you to suffer. That’s on me. Your boss only paid for your murder. The rest is for sport.” Peppermint took Barb’s pinkie finger as it clasped weakly to the chair, and he snapped it back; the sound was the same as last time, when the flare of pain radiated throughout his body, when each of his fingers dangled uselessly and he sought any out he could find, any chance. Barb’s scream was muffled through the cloth. Her eyes distended from their sockets.

Trevor rushed forward, rushed at Peppermint, and the big man only struck him in the throat with a quickness, a rapidity that proved he could never overpower this professional. He stumbled back into the table and struggled for breaths.

“No. That’s not nice.” Peppermint only inhaled. “There’s something in the air here. Something about this town that makes me feel…nostalgic.”

Echoes.

Peppermint reached for Barb’s next finger, her wedding ring already choking the billowed skin, her knuckle swelling, turning into a matted dimple in flushed dough. He stared at Trevor as he took it gently in his hand, caressing it for a moment. Barb rocked from side to side, trying to fight against her restraints. Trevor shook his head.

“Please. No more.”

Rhymes.

Peppermint pulled her finger back and Barb screamed toward the ceiling. The sound was a clogged pitch, a horrible, choked squeal, and Trevor fell to his knees, pleading.

“Please…”

“You haven’t many words anymore, do you, Writer?”

The fire alarm was shrill and loud. It reverberated down the halls and set the tone for the utter panic, the pandemonium. Kids who’d never looked at him, guys and girls who walked past him every day, who regarded his presence with a sullen indifference, were lying face down on the floor, too scared to look up at him as he traipsed down the corridor, going from door to door to quickly look through the windows. Students in the classrooms were under their desks. It reminded Randy of those old movies, the black and white ones from the 50s, where the common reaction to any nuclear strike was finding cover under gum-laden pine desks that were as flimsy as paper, but were expected to be some divine shield against an atomic blast.

He’d seen the flashing lights reflecting off the wall. The police had already shown up. Called after the first gunshot. Pedal to the metal by the second incident of gunfire that Randy thought was his imagination, was just the lingering memory of what he’d done to Oliver. A part of him still couldn’t believe it; that sort of power, the insistence to decide who lived and who died, made him suddenly matter. Made him important. He wasn’t concerned about the second shot. He had his purpose here. You could only push someone so far before he hit the edge. Randy had found his.

The edge of madness.

But he didn’t quite like that characterization, because he didn’t feel mad. He felt vindicated. Or he would.

“Where is Brad Jenkins?” He looked at a couple of girls on the floor, girls with their hair puffed up with hairspray, their lips red or orange, and their cheeks flourished with rouge; their eyeliner was running down their faces and they both looked like clowns now, the effort they put into looking a particular way to fit a particular role having dissolved to the utter ridiculousness of the paint splattered, and dripping, down their countenances like portraits run through the wash.

“Please…please don’t kill us…”

He looked at them both. They were everything he used to want to be. Everything he wanted to be a part of. And now he just pitied them. “Do you even know who I am? Who the fuck I am?”

The girls sobbed and buried their faces in their arms. The guys, some of them he recognized from the football team photos from last year, guys with the machismo of Stallone, only curled into fetal positions, offering no help to these damsels-in-distress, proving their visages of toughness, of bravado, were just the acts of insecure kids trying to find a purpose or a place in this universe. Like Randy. When push comes to shove, they’re all a little like you. Lost. Maybe they’ve discovered temporary bliss, but shit, look how easily that was taken away.

“My name is Randy Hopson.” His footsteps echoed beneath the aural veneer of that alarm. “Say it!”

There was only silence.

“Say my fucking name!”

“Randy…Randy…Randy…Hopson…” The voices were all intermingled, but they said it, these kids, these people who’d ignored him when he didn’t matter, who’d found their roles in the world and avoided those who didn’t fit in.

“Brad Jenkins!” Randy screamed, his hand pumping around the gun Henry had handed him. “Where are you, Brad, you fuck, you slimy fuck?”

He screamed it again. And again. His voice echoing, accompanied by the wheeee of the screeching alarm, almost becoming a part of it.

“BRAD!”

“He’s there…there…I saw him run there…” somebody whimpered, somebody Randy recognized as Philip Orantes, his arm outstretched toward a door ahead. And he knew the guy. He knew him because that’s how this all worked. He was starting to see the patterns, starting to understand the plan. He’d bumped into Philip Orantes in this hallway before. That’s how he even knew him. Because then, back when he’d first seen him, he was a stranger just like them all, an inconspicuous player in the grand scheme. The guy had poured juice on him. Made it look like an accident, but it wasn’t. It really wasn’t. Because it was a part of a different plan. Randy remembered the feel of that juice on his hoodie, the stickiness, and he remembered what happened after, what it all led to; he went to the guy on the floor, the guy who wouldn’t look back, who covered his head with his arm. Randy got down on his knee and prodded Philip’s skull with the barrel of his gun.

“It wasn’t an accident, was it? When you poured the juice on me.”

Philip didn’t answer.

“Look at me.” Randy grabbed the guy’s chin and turned his head, revealed his scared eyes. “You meant to pour that juice on me. Didn’t you?”

Philip only bit his lip and slowly nodded his head. “Buh—Brad made me do it. Said if I didn’t, he’d…he’d pull my dick through my ass…”

“That wouldn’t have been nice. That sounds awful. You had to do it.”

Philip stifled a cry.

“Was it worth it? Listening to Brad? Doing what Brad told you? He never threatened you with a gun, did he? Who has the bigger balls now?”

“Yuh—you…”

“That’s right, you fuck. Me. What’s my name?”

“Ruh—Randy. Randy Hopson.”

Randy stood up. The door ahead was the men’s room. The men’s room where Randy was newly baptized and re-born in Henry’s image, his font the pubic-hair-lined rim of a yellowed urinal. And he went toward that door, listening to Philip cry behind him, listening to a boy who for just a moment believed he would die for spilling juice.

The door was locked. Randy shot the handle, listened to the ping of the bolt snapping and falling to the floor with shards of fiber-board. He kicked the door open.

The kids on the floor behind him, Philip and the damsels, scurried to their feet and ran. Toward the flashing red and blue lights. Toward safety.

The lights were flickering in the bathroom; he could hear the plink of water dripping from the faucet, could hear the murmur of one of the toilets running. And he could hear crying, sniffing, whimpering.

It was Dave. He’d fallen against the side of the stall doors and sat in a squat against the divider, his face still streaked with Oliver’s blood, with bits of teeth, some having actually broken skin and jutted like irregular splinters of bone in his brow. Brad was standing at the back of the bathroom, nearest the farthest sink, just watching Randy curiously. Angry but timid.

“Jesus Christ, man, I’m sorry…so sorry. About Ange…I am. It was…shit, it was Brad. Okay. He’s nuts. Randy, he’s fucking nuts, you know that, it wasn’t me. I swear to God, man, if she’s dead…if she died, fuck…it wasn’t me. I’m so sorry!” Dave’s words fired rapidly, stammered and broken but coherent.

“Eat shit, Dave!” Brad retorted. “You fucking punk.”

Randy ignored him. He’d stepped into the bathroom, holding his gun up, aimed, his dexterity precarious but lethal. The mess on Dave’s face proved that. “What? What did you do to Ange?”

Dave whimpered as Randy got closer. There were bits of Oliver on the guy’s shirt, dripping down his neck where he was already showing signs of razor burn. “Brad cut her throat…”

“Fuck you! You rat! You little rat!” Brad screamed. He looked as if he was going to pounce, but he stayed put. “He’s lying, Randy. He’s lying. He doesn’t know shit.”

“He did it in my mom’s van…there’s blood everywhere! I swear! Randy, I swear. I would have stopped him…I…let me show you, let me show—”

Randy shot Dave between the eyes as he looked up in solace, the rest of his formal plea slurred in a throaty gargle as his head smacked into and dented the stall’s wall, leaving only a spattered splash of his blood and brain, and squiggled in its bull’s eye the curled loop of hair and scalp that stuck to the divider like pilled carpet.

Brad yelped. Like a scared dog. A hurt dog.

“Jesus…Randy. Jesus. Is he dead? Is he dead?”

Randy walked toward Brad, watching him shrink back, reduced to nothing but a terrified child. It was everything Randy could have ever hoped it would be.

“No…man…no. Come on. Come on. We were just playing. We were…it was just for fun.”

Randy stopped, watching his bully strangely.

“No…not fun,” Brad said after seeing Randy’s eyes, seeing the queer emptiness and resolve. “Stupid. It was stupid. She’s your girl. She is. I just…I missed her. I hated that she liked you. Okay. That what you want?”

Randy was silent. It was far more eerie than words. Some of Dave’s blood had gotten on Randy’s hand, specks of it having dotted his throat and chin. He didn’t seem to mind.

Brad looked at Dave’s body; he could see the guy’s legs splayed, his toes pointing toward the ceiling. The stall covered most of the carnage, the body, but he saw his hand on the floor, saw his fingers curled uselessly, as if holding something invisible, and he could see the pool of blood forming beneath him, so reflective, so bright. “Okay, Randy, okay. I get it. I have money. Lots of money. You know who my grandpa is, right? You’ve gotta. Feds are throwing fucking money at him left and right to host this whole corn shit…he’ll pay you, pay you to make sure I’m okay. I swear to God, Randy. I swear to God. You let me walk outta here, I promise you he can make sure you don’t get in trouble for this. I swear to God. That…that won’t even matter,” he said, gesturing to Dave’s body. “I swear to God. Please. Please.” Now Brad had gotten on his knees, as if in prayer, and he was looking up at Randy. The same way he once looked up at Brad. “You don’t wanna do this, man, you don’t. You and I both know there’s no way outta this, not without my help. My grandpa’s help. You know that. You know that. Please, Randy. Please.”

“You pissed on me.”

Randy pulled the trigger four times. Once Brad hit the floor, what was left of his face stared with open-eyed wonder at the flickering fluorescent lights above as his legs kicked a neat little jig through the puddle of urine that blossomed under his body. Because Brad Jenkins pissed his pants before he died. While he begged for his life. To a greaser.

It was over.

Randy stepped into the stall beside him and locked the door.

Mrs Simone and Mr Johnston had ushered the kids into the music hall. Later they would be commended for their quick thinking; the pomp and circumstance of recognizing heroes after terrible events kept the focus on humanity’s good will. At least that was the point of the pictures and medals, the nationally syndicated puff pieces. When the shots were first fired, the teachers were in the lounge; Carrie Simone dropped her coffee and the glass shattered on the floor. She knew that sound. Because her father was a hunter, and because she’d been going out to the woods with him since she was a little girl. She and Wade Johnston rushed into the hallway and herded as many students as they could manage into the tiered music hall, and told them to hide behind the desks near the back of the room, away from the instruments nearest the door.

This was where Croak ended up.

He’d been scooped up as part of the stampede after the first shot, all of those expectations, those hopes of becoming a part of a new family, of gaining a new brother, a father, broken into brittle shards of what Reedy Creek kept on taking and taking until even the strongest friendships lay barren to the desolate truths of what adult lies can expose. And here he sat cowered, his face still stinging but the memory of Pug hitting him more painful; here he sat with scared, crying kids who were confused and wanted their parents, who looked for any excuse to believe this was a drill, to believe the world couldn’t be this cruel. But Croak knew that was a lie. He knew because Reedy Creek taught him how cruel the world could be behind closed doors.

There were phones in each classroom, and Mr Johnston had kept attempting the admin pool and principal’s office.

“It keeps ringing.”

“They’re doing the same as us. Or they have the police on the line.”

“They shouldn’t have the police on the line,” Mr Johnston whispered. “The cops should already be here. With the staties. I think those were gunshots, Carrie.” He looked at the kids, all of them clutching to chairs, staying out of sight. “I need more information. Do we barricade the door?”

“You’re wondering who the shooter is,” Mrs Simone said.

Mr Johnston nodded and picked up the phone. He dialled again, listened, then hung up. “If a tire blew in the lot…if Hilton fired an air compressor near the ventilation shaft…there’re always possibles. Always. Usually. You know. Which means there are impossibles.”

Mrs Simone exhaled. She went to the door and looked out into the corridor. It was empty. Croak studied them both as they tried to control the situation.

This is the world as it looks when the fires burn. When there is no order. When there is only chaos. It was a strange thought, but it was something he would share with Adam, Pug, and Danny, all at the same time; they would each realize that in every story there was an ending, an event, a downturn before the upswift. And this was it. Adam would have the feeling while at home fighting the man from his nightmares; Pug while in the hospital; and Danny while with his father listening to the car radio as they raced to the school.

“Try the science lab. It’s closer to the lobby. Maybe they saw something,” Mrs Simone whispered and Mr Johnston picked up the phone.

He stood there, staring at the empty desks, trying to ignore what was happening. He listened to the ring tone, and then somebody picked up.

“Hello…hello, this is Mr Johnston,” he said, relieved, the stiffness in his posture letting out, allowing him to hunch and the paunch of his belly to puddle over his khakis. “Harold, thank God. I’m not getting any answer from the front office. Do you know—”

He stood there and listened. Croak watched the man’s eyes widen. He didn’t have Mr Johnston as a teacher, but he respected the hell out of him right now because he was protecting them. In body and in mind. Because whatever news he’d just heard wasn’t good. Croak could read reactions. So could Mrs Simone.

“Christ,” he finally whispered. The color had gone out of his face. He nodded his head and murmured something under his breath before hanging up the phone.

“What is it?”

He turned his back to the kids. Croak crept forward around the chair, crawling down the steps. “It’s bad, Carrie,” he whispered. “Harold’s in the lab with about fifty kids. A lot of them from the cafeteria. And Moises, the cook, he stumbled in too. Said a student shot a kid while he was eating his lunch. Just stepped behind him and…Christ, there weren’t even words between them. He just.” He shook his head.

There was another gunshot. The kids screamed. Croak thought it sounded far away, but it was still damning. Like thunder in the middle of the night. Like thunder when the lights go out in the basement.

“My God, Wade, my God,” Mrs Simone shuddered. It was always a fear. Always. That a kid might snap one day. That a kid might snap and take out his aggressions on the school, because she understood a place like this was a fount for bullying, for problems; but those were the nagging paranoid assumptions of every red-blooded human, that one day insanity would prevail. It was the nature of the beast. And today, apparently, the beast had awakened. “Do they know who it is?”

Croak could still hear them. He could. The kids behind him were breathing deeply, trying to be quiet but failing through choked sobs. He was so near the front of the room now, where the instruments were elevated on the stage, that he could hear the teachers’ stilted breathing, their groans, the reality that they were just as afraid as the kids they’d helped. Mr Johnston was by the table with the phone, where the music teacher (Croak thought her name was Ms Willis) would sit during exams or to watch the kids practice Vivaldi. Mrs Simone stood by the bass drum with the Hornets logo plastered across its snare.

They stood for a moment, listening to the eerie calm, the silence following the last shot. “Harold said the cook heard the kid. The shooter. Heard him speak to a few of the students who, I don’t know, watched him. Froze.”

“What did he say?”

“He told them his name. Sounded like an artist signing his…Jesus…his work.”

Croak held his breath. A part of him knew. A part must have known. When he saw his brother at his locker this morning. When he saw those strange bugs on his face, Pug’s bugs, coursing into his nose and eyelid, scarring one side of him with the effluent revulsion of scuttling tar. Bugs his brother didn’t even notice. Were they a warning, something he was supposed to see, supposed to decipher? If they were, you failed, Cory. You failed everyone. And then he thought only of what his brother said. That the Creek rejected him. That he was going to make their dad regret abandoning them. His heart was racing.

Regret.

“Randy. Randy Hopson,” Mr Johnston finished.

Croak stood up and ran for the door. Mrs Simone pinwheeled.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

That’s when they heard the next gunshot. The dull thud of it through the walls like the school’s pulse. It was the shot that killed poor Dave. Croak reached the door when Mrs Simone grabbed his arm.

“It’s my brother! Randy’s my brother! Get your fucking hand off me, I can stop this!” He watched her stagger back, her grip loosening as her eyes showed she recognized what he’d said, that he knew the shooter, that he might conceive of some way to stop all of this; he swung open the door while the kids behind him screamed, and while Mr Johnston stood by the phone unable to say a word.

He sees his mom. Sees her sprawled on her bed, sees her belly, and he knows this is then, this is the before. If there are bookmarks in life, this is one. A focal point. A nexus. Because he sees the man in the dark suit, the man with the slick hair and the thick fingers, the man with the peppermint breath; he sees the man holding the telephone that is sitting on his dad’s nightstand. His mom dialled for him and he shoved her back against the headboard. And here she is now. Breathing and crying. There are other men in the room but Adam doesn’t think they matter. Not the Adam then and not the Adam now. They are fillers. Intimidation by numbers.

“What’s your father’s name?”

“Lew…Lewis,” his mother whispers, watching him curiously.

The man nods, one hand covering the mouthpiece, and then he smiles as he speaks. “Hello Lew. Nice evening, isn’t it? Assuming it’s evening where you’re at.”

“Who is this?” Adam hears his grampa. He hears his voice with a clarity that wasn’t there the first time. Because this is the touch, this is his piece. This is grampa’s reach. Adam understands there’s a truth here, one he is supposed to uncover.

“Doesn’t matter much who this is, Lew, not at all. What matters is who’s in the room with me. You have a grandson, don’t ya? Cute little guy. He looks pretty nervous right now. Angry, too. And your daughter. Barb. Plump with babe, she is. These two are rather nice hosts. Trevor is a bit of a squealer, if I don’t say so myself.”

“Who are you?”

“I’m a collector, sir, and your son-in-law, well, he has something I’m here to collect. But you know what, he says you might have what I’m looking for. Because he sure as hell doesn’t. So I thought I’d make the call while in the presence of your beautiful family here. Your daughter is crying, sir. How can I make her stop?”

“Listen to me. I don’t know who this is, I don’t, but put my daughter on the phone. Put Barb on the phone.”

The man with peppermint breath nods his head and looks at Adam’s mom. He holds out the phone for her. “Say hello to daddy, won’t you.”

“Dad. Dad!”

The big man slaps his mom and that younger version of Adam, from before, he shrinks back and bites his lip. He sees a monster in this man, sees the thing that will haunt him for years, that will make him fear the dark. He is still in the closet, trying to hide now, to become invisible. His mom clutches her face and muffles another cry. “Did you hear that, sir? Your little girl is alright.”

“Who the fuck are you?” grampa screams. Adam can imagine how the man looks. How he must be standing now, clutching that phone until his knuckles turn white. Why aren’t you seeing grampa’s memory? Why are you seeing this here, outside yourself, outside your own experience? Adam decides it’s a combination of two experiences, of his and grampa’s. And maybe he chose to watch from here because it would hold more meaning.

“Your son-in-law. You must be so proud of him. Must have been ecstatic walking your little girl down the aisle. He owes me quite a lot of money. He borrowed a substantial sum, you see, and he’s past his due date. When people break the rules, the boss sends me out to pick up the pieces. And that little fuck owes twenty-six Gs. I was told I wasn’t supposed to leave the house without it. And sometimes…that means I have to leave the house with something if there ain’t any deposits worth the paper they’re printed on. And I’ve gotta say, your daughter’s sexy. And your grandson could be a looker.”

“Okay. Enough. I get it. I get it now. Trevor…he fucked up.”

“He did.” The big guy is smiling. “And he said you could fix it. And ta-da, here we are. So, Lew, fix it.”

“I don’t…I don’t just have that kind of money lying around.”

“Your son-in-law seemed to think you did.”

“He was mistaken.”

The big guy reaches out and pulls Adam’s mom toward him, stroking her hair as she struggles against his powerful grip. “Do you hear that, sir? Do you hear your daughter? I ain’t really big on bargaining chips, but in this case I’ll make an exception. Ya see, I don’t leave empty handed. It doesn’t look good for business. This can go several ways. Right now I’m seeing a staged murder. I’m seeing your daughter hacked up on this bed, your grandson choked to death on his father’s balled socks, and your son-in-law at the fuckin’ helm of a jerry can and lit match. Good news, you get to see them on TV when the news breaks. Bad news, you gotta fit your old balls into a suit for three fucking funerals. Though I figure you might skip one of them considering the respect ya got for the writer. Or you come up with that money and this conversation never happened.”

“You’re right. I don’t give a shit what you might do to Trevor. That’s God’s honest truth. But you leave my family alone.”

“It’ll cost ya.” He smiles.

“I can cash in my pension. Re-mortgage the house. It’s paid off. I’ll need time.”

“You don’t have time.”

“You have my word and that counts for more. I’m sure Trevor said the same, but his head’s in the fucking clouds. You’ve talked to him. You know that.”

The big man laughs. It sounds unnatural. The other men in the room are just standing pensively, guarding the doorway. Adam hears his father coughing downstairs and he wonders if the man is conscious. “I like you, Lew. You’re funny. Jokes have a ring of truth to them. I’m gonna give you an unrealistic timeline, I hope you know. And if you’re late, I’ll mail you three of your girl’s fingers.”

“If you touch her, if you touch any of them, I will fucking kill you,” Lewis says.

The big man chuckles some more and his great chest heaves. “You’ll kill me? I ain’t in the business of taking threats, Lew. Say, if I hit your pregnant daughter right now, just rock her head till her nose looks like her gut, will you reach through that phone or something? You magic, now? Because what I hear is a scared old man, Lew. You have no power here. Your threats don’t mean jack to me. I’ve heard them a thousand times, from guys bigger an’ tougher than you. What matters is your promise. You get me that first loan payment, Lew, and your girl’s okay. The rate’s shot up to an even thirty now. Cause you pissed me off. It’s on your word now. I want to trust you, Lew. I do. And I can see your daughter agrees with me. It’s on you. And if you don’t honor that deal, if you don’t, I’m going to fuck your daughter, Lew. Before I slit her throat. I’ll let you listen. How about that?”

Grampa is silent for a moment. Adam knows he is angry. And afraid. Because he is so far away. Because he can’t do anything right now. And that helplessness is like a disease with no cure. “I’ll pay their debt,” he finally says.

“Good man.”

“But that’s not my promise. I’ll pay their debt. What I can. That’s my obligation. No, my promise to you is that this isn’t over. I promise that if you ever go near my daughter…my grandson again, I’ll be there to stop you, you low breed motherfucker.”

“We’ll be in touch, I’m sure,” the big man says and he hangs up the phone.

And Adam understands. That part of him so attuned right now, so attuned since finding his grampa’s body in the family room, since eavesdropping on his conversation with his dead wife, with the woman he’d last seen in the hospital with deep pits for eyes, is like a dial that he can turn. And so he does. Because Reedy Creek is a tuning fork. Grampa left these pieces because in his death he was given a glimpse, and Grimwood’s lingering presence here had modulated the rules. Grampa knew the Kramers weren’t yet done with the Low Breed. Because every act had its reprisal—

Adam looked at the gun in his hands. It was grampa’s promise.

He heard his mom scream, her voice choked, and he was pulled away from the past, pulled away from the pieces, and he looked at Patty. His baby brother. He shoved the gun into his pants, tucked away under his shirt, and he took Patty by the shoulders and hugged him close again. “We’re gonna be okay, buddy. Do you believe me?”

Patty only looked at him with his curious eyes. He slowly nodded, but the tears were still forming like globules of dew on his lids. Adam took something out of his pocket. He looked at it for a moment before handing it to Patty. The little boy only pinched the envelope tentatively and stared at it with open-eyed wonder.

To my Best Friend, Adam Kramer #14.

“This is for us, Patty. Grampa wrote it for us. It’s a magic letter. Feel it. Can you…can you feel how powerful it is?”

Patty hugged the envelope tight to his chest and the paper sort of crinkled. “Miss bampa,” he whispered.

“He’s right here. And will always be right here.” Adam tapped the letter. “You keep this on you and you’ll always be safe. Because grampa is magic, Patty. He wouldn’t ever let anything happen to you. Or me. Or mom. Even dad. That’s what this is. I want you to sit back in the closet, and I want you to hold onto that letter with all your might. Because when you hold it, you’re magic too.”

“I am?” Patty whispered.

“Oh yeah. You are. You’re invisible.”

Patty smiled, turning the envelope over in his hands, and then checking his fingers to see if they were still there.

“If you’re still there, baby bro, if you are, stay put. Okay? Whatever happens, you stay put. I’m going to get mom and dad. I’m going to get them to see if they can find you.” Adam stood up, trying his hardest to smile, even as his mom screamed again, the pain in her muffled tone agonizing. He bit his lip and squeezed back the tears as Patty playfully ran his hands across his hanging pants and overalls. “See ya, bud,” he said, closing the closet door on his brother, watching him truly disappear in the narrowing sliver of light. He felt the heft of the gun in his pants and he wondered if he would ever see Patty again.

Adam went down the stairs. No longer sneaking the way he once had when he overheard his grampa speaking to a ghost. He walked to the foyer and followed the sound of the voices into the kitchen.

And he found his father kneeled on the floor, clutching to the chair ahead of him; his mom was tied to a chair pulled over by the fridge, a dirty dish rag stuffed so deeply into her mouth he thought he could see its outline bulging from her throat. Her hand was swollen, the skin around her knuckles swallowing her wedding ring like a kinked hose.

“Mom,” Adam whispered.

And the big guy from his memory, the memory he shared and combined with his grampa’s, glowered down at him with vacant eyes, with remorseless clarity. “Get the fuck outta here, kid. Don’t you listen?”

Adam thought about everything. He thought about Reedy Creek. This had already happened. It’s why they even came to this place. This place, this town, was the nexus of terrible pasts, was the crossroads of several journeys, and Adam considered the reason why he ever made due, why he ever made the friends he had and played baseball in that special field Pug had found and they’d turned into Fenway, was because Reedy Creek needed him to. Needed them to. Because this place was a nexus for bad things. But it was an opportunity to fix them. And this man, this man with the lumpy head and slicked back hair, this man with peppermint breath, was Adam’s bogeyman before Reedy Creek. Before Grimwood. And when you had magic on your side the spirit of serendipity took on a whole new meaning. Adam could change everything now. He could fix everything. Because as sick as the Creek was, he always figured he was a part of the cure, of the fix. To pull the splitting seams back together. And life was not unlike a town on the brink. Everybody had their shit. His father brought this bastard into their lives because he made a mistake. The past was an ocean you could get lost in. That’s why he figured Pug was so nostalgic. Because as a writer, he liked getting lost. But the past always had a way of finding its way back.

Like now.

This man.

Adam pulled the gun out of his pants and held it steadily, aiming it at the man his grampa called the low breed motherfucker.

His mom’s eyes widened, in shock, curiosity. She only shook her head at him, hoping he wouldn’t shadow his conscience, hoping he wouldn’t make a decision that would forever haunt him. Adam didn’t care.

“Adam,” his father whispered. “Where did you—”

“Ain’t this rich? Well, howdy cowboy.” The big guy offered a bow, cutting off his father.

“Do you remember the man you spoke to on the phone?” Adam asked.

“I spoke to a lot of men. Be specific.” He licked his lips. He was standing so close to his mom that any shot would likely go through her first. Do you actually mean to pull the trigger? Do you? Because you can’t wash away that memory. Remember that. You can’t undo that.

“This man made you a promise. I’m here to keep it.”

The big man’s eyes darkened and he kneeled down next to Adam’s mom. “You talkin’ about your grandpa, squirt?”

“His name was Lew.”

“Was?” He smiled. It was evil. Awful. His eyes squinted and wrinkled into mere slits in his round face. “Listen, kid. I like your gumption. I do. But, ya see, you’re aiming that fucking thing at me, and it’s making me uncomfortable. I’m not big on guns. They’re too quick. I like…” He took his mother’s middle finger and pulled it back with a snap like a graham wafer breaking. “Pain.” He smiled as Adam’s mom leaned forward and murmured through the cloth, her eyes round and terrified, her brow etched with the mark of agony—

And then there was a flash.

And another.

“What the fuck?”

The big guy stood up and turned. Cole Moore had his Nikon trained on the gangster and he was snapping photos in a rapid burst; he stood at the back window over the sink, and the light from the camera threw a veneer over the kitchen.

Trevor took the gun from Adam, nearly wrestling it from him as Adam struggled to watch his mom fight against the restraints, to ease the biting pain radiating from her dimpled knuckles. Adam looked at his dad, and in that moment he understood. Grampa’s giving your dad his own redemption. Isn’t he?

The Low Breeder had stupidly moved toward the window, had bought into the act of fate that somehow convinced the Post’s journalist to risk his life to buy a little time. Because a little time is all Trevor needed.

“I’m taking my family back, you sonofabitch!”

Trevor pulled the trigger on a gun stolen from evidence lock-up. A gun Lew had wanted to scare his way into a meeting with Grimwood; a gun, he’d later realize, was meant for something else. Someone else. Allen Webster would have never found the gun rooting around Lew’s room; the power in this town would have never let it happen. Never. Because this was supposed to happen.

The big guy’s back was turned to him. Cole had already retreated from the window and had rounded back into the rear yard. Trevor’s shot hit the Low Breeder with peppermint breath just below his shoulder girdle; they watched blood pelt the glass pane and counter, and a few clean dishes that were sitting to dry and would have to be run under the tap again. Or thrown away. Barb ducked to the side intuitively.

The big guy’s hand went to the wound and he turned on his heels; he knocked Barb’s chair over and she fell against the table with a muffled oomph that saved her head from colliding against the floor. She was out of the way. Trevor pulled the trigger again.

“You fuck!”

This time Adam watched a deep red flower bloom on the man’s chest, under his pressed white shirt.

“You dirty fuck! Those aren’t the rules! Those aren’t the rules!” He grabbed Trevor and threw him against the wall. Adam watched the wallpaper and drywall crater beneath his dad’s weight; he watched a painting his mom had framed a few years back fall from its nail and rip against the top of a chair. His dad scurried back toward the foyer, the click of the gun hitting the floor as it wedged against his hand.

“I’m going to kill them all!” the Low Breeder screamed. “You’re gonna watch me kill them all!” He fell forward now and grabbed Trevor’s leg, pulling him back. His father kicked and struck the big man just under the gunshot. He tottered on his ass, dazed, uncertain how things could have changed so fast. Aware, likely, of the feeling in this town as he drove in, of the change in the air, of the lingering feeling that things might be working against him.

Trevor turned on his back and scuffled back farther. Adam had already gone toward the family room. Barb watched from her precarious perch against the table, her hand flaring, but her adrenaline surging. Trevor was against the stairwell wall, close enough to the foyer he could feel the beat of the sun through the window. He looked at the big man down the carbon ridge of grampa’s gun and pulled the trigger again. This time there was a muted thud as the Low Breeder caressed a newly bleeding stomach. Adam thought he smelt shit. He thought the big man’s bowels had ruptured, and a very sick part of his mind, the part still ensnared by the grips of childhood, imagined peppermint Tic Tacs spilling out of the guy’s gut like a piñata.

“Should’ve broken both your hands. You fuck.” The big man staggered on his knees, shuffling down the hallway toward Trevor, leaving a trail of black viscous now, one hand holding his belly, the other hanging useless at his side.

“Please. Just die,” Trevor whispered.

For a moment he would look like Mr Spigget, down on his knees with both hands propping himself up on a mop, his eyes yellowed and ancient, his teeth broken behind the mottled leer of wet lips. Adam wouldn’t see this, no, and once Trevor closed his eyes and looked again the image was gone. But it was there. Just like the old janitor had been on the second floor of the farmhouse. Strange things happened in Reedy Creek.

“Cause you asked. So nicely. You fuck.” The big guy smiled and fell forward, turning his head to look at Trevor. To watch him in the end. And with one last breath, the bogeyman was dead.

A promise fulfilled.

The last four shots were rapid. Nearly disappearing into one another. He imagined thunder sounding the same way from the sky.

And then it was silent. In some parts of the school he could hear the screaming. He could hear the scared kids, the scared teachers, he could hear them all in their specific pockets, isolated, trying to find cover. And beyond them he could hear the world outside, the scuffle of panic, the police sirens as the Creek awoke to the horrible certainty that the ills of man, the evils of man, could prick so fine a town.

Croak was in the hallway near Randy’s locker. He wasn’t sure why. He thought it felt like the best place to start. And when he heard the gunshots, they were near enough now to know that his intuition wouldn’t fail him. Not the way it had when he saw those bugs, those goddamn bugs crawling all over his big brother’s face like the monsters they were. Eating him. Burrowing into him.

“It’s your brother, isn’t it?”

Croak thought he was alone. He didn’t know anyone was in the hallway. The school felt like a graveyard; it was an apt quietude now considering what happened, considering what Randy had been driven to. Croak could only feel the emotions well in his throat and he couldn’t say anything. He really couldn’t.

The boy was standing behind him. He was a few years older, wore a black T-shirt with an emblazoned ‘A’ encircled by a splattered red wreath that reminded Croak of a blood-rimmed hole, and his hair was long and unruly. Like Randy’s, once upon a time. And like Randy, this kid’s face had seen better days. His nose was broken, his right eye bruised, and his lip split; the coloring under his right eye, spreading like an ink flourish on his cheek, was a mottled purple, a bruise that reminded Croak of the night sky.

“He snapped. Someone was going to. I knew it.” The guy tried to smile but couldn’t. His face quivered for a moment and then he gave up. “He’s in that bathroom. Up there. That’s where he found them.”

“Found who?” Croak finally managed, whispering, his voice tremulous.

“You can be a monster at any age, kid. I say the fuck got what was coming to him. A guy does this to you,” he touched his face, felt the swelling in his cheek while his forefinger danced upon the turgid bridge of his nose, “and you learn to go the other way when he’s around. But it’s hard when the monster’s looking for you.”

“Who are you?”

“A concerned citizen. This is a good day, kid. Your brother did a good thing. I hope you know that. You don’t…well, ya don’t negotiate with monsters.” He glanced once more at the bathroom, the corridor leading that way so still, so eerily quiet. Croak could hear the buzz of the lights above them, could hear even the mechanical tics of the school itself, the noises so amplified when he crawled through the ducts. The interloper stuck his hands in his pockets, looked up at the ceiling where Croak noticed a camera, one of many he’d already seen in this school, and then made his way toward the bend and disappeared. The guy’s name was Byron. Croak would never learn that. He would never learn just what happened to him that day under the bleachers, that day Ange had been introduced to the Minitrue. That day when a monster named Brad Jenkins was feeling especially jealous. Croak would never really see him around again. He just watched him, his heart hammering, still confused but aware Reedy Creek had its messengers and played its tricks. He looked toward the bathroom. He noticed a chunk of the door was missing, and that he could see light where there was usually a handle.

He went there.

To the killing room.

Croak pushed open the door and walked into the bathroom. The hum of the lights echoed in the room like a deep cavern, the sound of water dripping, the smell of wetness, of an earthen hollow.

And Croak muffled a scream. Because the first thing he saw, beyond the row of urinals against the wall, the stained and sticky tile floor, was that bushel of dark hair and scalp plastered against the dented stall wall, glued to the surface by the serrated splash of blood that trickled down and down to that huddled body at its base, a face turned down awkwardly against a clavicle between two collapsed arms, hands sickly and useless in their eternal perch on the floor around which the blood had continued to pool. He couldn’t see the boy’s face, couldn’t see his glazed eyes; just the result of the gunshot, the peeled flesh at the base of his skull where that chunk of hair defiantly clung to the wall and would likely stay there while the blood clotted and ossified into something like acrylic art.

The second body was against the far wall by the sinks, just under the window whose pane of glass was frosted, letting in only a cool white light that was anything but natural. It just added to the grisly finish of the room, cascading the scene with a muted spotlight. This boy’s head was propped some by the radiator heater at the base of the wall, a heater that usually smelt of piss; Croak assumed a few shitheads figured pissing through the grate would be funny, but realized when the heat did kick in, the place started smelling like a truckstop that hadn’t seen a cleaner’s fine touch since grand opening. The body’s face was gone; the space where eyes would usually peer from, gawking, was just an absent gored hole, so dark Croak didn’t think he was seeing blood. He could feel his stomach turning. He couldn’t imagine what might have prompted his brother to do this. He couldn’t. But that boy in the hallway, he seemed to know what had happened, and he seemed happy about it. Because his face looked like Randy’s.

Croak could only swallow. He knew he wasn’t alone in here.

“Randy?” His voice caromed back at him, disembodied, hollow. He didn’t like the sound of it. How unnatural it seemed. “It’s me, Randy. It’s Cory.” He walked to the only stall whose door was closed and latched. Croak didn’t even have to look under the door, in that minute space, to check for his brother’s shoes. Because he could feel Randy in there. He could hear the slight chittering of those bugs. And even if it was just his imagination, the reality of the sound was palpable.

“You ever think there’s a plan?”

His voice sounded broken. Sounded dull. Croak only touched the stall door with his hand. He was so mad at Randy. So mad. Because this changed everything. It changed the course of Reedy Creek. It changed the course of his family. He’d come to school this morning thinking, believing, he’d found his new father and had gained a new brother in the mix. Now he’d lost everything.

“What do you mean?”

“These assholes, man, they wanted me to suffer. They pushed me. But maybe, I don’t know, maybe they were supposed to. Like, maybe there’s something we’re dropped into, so we play a part. That’s what this feels like. Just…the convenience, ya know. The convenience of having tapes of dad, of seeing him again, the way he is now, his new life. Seeing that bastard with his new family. His do-over. It couldn’t have been packaged better. Like it was supposed to work this way. What this town, what it did to me…the convenience of mom picking the Creek, of all the towns she could have chosen on the map. It’s so neat. Like it was already laid out for me. I feel like I was being prepared for something…”

“Randy…I don’t understand. Why don’t you open the door? Okay?”

Randy chuckled. But it was false. The sound one makes when one is in deep disbelief. “I didn’t think my day would go this way. I didn’t wake up this morning and picture myself standing in the shitter like this. With a gun. I’ve never fired a gun before. I just knew how to. I just did. And it felt right. You get pushed…farther and deeper…and then you realize you don’t matter anymore. That you’re as useless as a fucking piece of dead skin. And you see why dad left. Because he found something better. Than us, Core. Than us. And it reminds me why I even tried in the first place, why I tried to win him back. Why I…why I fucking put it on mom. It wasn’t just her. It wasn’t. How can you just start over again and forget? How?”

“I don’t know. Please, Randy. For me. Open the door. Please.”

“I wanted dad to see what he’d done to us. I did. He can’t just…move on. It doesn’t work that way. You can’t just leave. You can’t. You have to know the pieces you left behind, they don’t just put themselves back together. That’s why I did it, Core. It wasn’t because of you, because of mom. Shit, I don’t even think it’s because of this place. I did it because dad needs to know it’s his fault.”

“Randy. We can get you help. These guys…they were bullies. Weren’t they? They beat the shit out of you, didn’t they? People will understand. They will.” Croak could hear the click of the gun scuffing the door. He knew Randy was still holding it. That it was still dangerous.

“Nah, bro. Maybe it was the same for Henry. You can use loss. You never get over the people who choose to leave you. That’s a big hole to fill. Henry knew it, cause it was the same for him. He did it to himself. Did you know that?”

“Did what? Fuck, Randy, come on. Just come out. We can go outside together.”

“Henry put a gun in his mouth because he couldn’t have what used to be his. Things, they just tend to rhyme in this town, ya know. Those fuckers pissed on me in here, Cory. They had me kneel by the urinal and…and Brad pissed on my head. And I let him. I was a powder keg. Henry wanted that, because all of this, it’s supposed to mean something in this town. Supposed to push it over the edge. I think this is part of it. I think, maybe, Henry was looking for somebody to take his place. He ain’t normal. I don’t even think he’s alive. He doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t eat. And he had those tapes, Core, those tapes of dad. So many of them. How did he have those? I don’t even know. Maybe they weren’t even real. Maybe none of it was.” Randy cleared his throat. “I stayed with Henry when I ran away. And sometimes, sometimes when I was closing my eyes, just falling asleep, everything in his apartment flickered. It was there and then it wasn’t. Like an illusion or something. Made out of smoke. I think that’s what Henry is. Lazarus. Scarface. Whatever. He ain’t real. But maybe he wants to be, and he needs somebody to fill in for him. Maybe that’s me. Maybe that’s the plan. It would be nice to be wanted again.” Randy chuckled again.

“Randy, please. Come out and talk to me. Please.”

“I’ve been thinking, Core. That’s what this is. All of it. A circle. Henry lost a girl and he did something about it. He wears his shame on his face now.” Croak thought about the bugs he’d seen on Randy’s face, and he imagined they were there now, just swirling to and fro, making their skittering noise as they marched. Maybe they were something else, though. Not disease, like Pug thought, but the future. “I think…I think that’s what this has always been about. I’ve been ashamed that I wasn’t enough, like I didn’t show dad how much I loved him. I just put it on mom’s shoulders. Christ, it’s a burden anyway you look at it…but I’m giving back now, Core, I’m giving dad back what he took from us. I know you won’t forgive me. Not mom. But it’s all I have left to give. I’m just tired now. Tired of hating. Maybe I can make up for that, ya know.”

“Randy, open the door. Open the fucking door!” He tried pulling the lever. It was locked. Croak pounded on the surface of the door now with the balls of his fists; the sound carried up and around the room. He could ignore the dead bodies, could ignore the smell, that awful stench of death and what it brought, but he could not ignore the assumption that those bugs represented the future. That they represented a form of Lazarus, a new scar, or the potential for a scar. Fuck, Croak didn’t know. It was a mystery. Like Reedy Creek was a mystery. Like everything he’d done since the end of summer was a goddamn mystery.

“Maybe I can become something other than me.”

“Randy! Randy!”

“Maybe that’s the plan, Core. Maybe that’s how I could do any of this. How I could just…fucking pull the trigger. And not even think about it.”

Croak heard the gun cock. He knew what the sound was, what it meant. It wasn’t even the movies he’d watched; it was understanding the tone of his brother’s voice, of looking at what he’d already done and knowing the guilt wouldn’t let him leave. Croak pounded the door and kicked it, feeling his body rebound, feeling the latch nearly give, and he fell swiftly to the floor, onto his belly, to try and look under the door, to reach under and grab his brother’s ankles, to pull him, to prove any sort of touch was a remedy. It had to be.

“I was a dick to you, Core. But that’s what big brothers do. I always loved you. I hope you know that.”

“Randy!” Croak screamed, trying to cinch under the door now, trying to fit in that miniscule space, under the threshold that represented his big brother’s life. “Randy!”

Gunshot.

The last gunshot.

Croak closed his eyes. That dull clap reverberated. And it would continue to do so in his dreams. His nightmares. The sound was finality. He heard the ruffle of his big brother’s body fall back onto the toilet, and when he did open his eyes, he saw Randy’s sneakers, covered with blood, some of his own and some likely from the bodies in the bathroom, the body in the cafeteria; one was planted firmly on the floor, the other was turned in an awkward pivot when Randy’s ankle rolled over after his body sloughed down.

“Please, Randy. Please,” he whispered. “We don’t need dad. We don’t need dad. We have each other. I love you, Randy. Do you hear me? Randy?”

There was no answer. Not from the other side.

But Croak continued to talk. He stayed on the floor and spoke to that space, that little gap under the door that represented everything he could have done, should have done. He talked until the outside world breached the quietude of the school, and the marching footsteps filled the hall; he talked until the police found him, lying on his stomach in a growing pool of his brother’s blood. And he didn’t think he would be normal ever again.

Because Reedy Creek takes.

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Hey Ry-Guy.

Feb 5 Chapter 42

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Jan 29 Chapter 41