whole way through. Day goes by freaking fast in winter West Virginia: it was only 3:55, but that meant they had maybe twenty good minutes for exploring the town.
The first thing Michael saw on the other side of the school bus were houses, familiar-issue: squat (also depressing and ugly); layered with dust (coal, of course); set with too many too-small windows (covered over with metal and/or wood). The cold air carried that hallmark dead-place smell: sour, rank, coiling, green. But at the end of the road was a building labeled MEETING HALL, and its lawns featured long wooden spikes, pounded into the earth at forty-five-degree angles to repel the dead.
Michael stood with his brother in the husked-out street, calling.
He got a response. But it was, alas and aw crap, the same one as always: a deadened, elongated echo from the Bellows’ daytime hiding places in closets and attics and closed coal bins and woodsheds.
Except.
Wait: Does it sound different than normal?
Michael called out, again, “Hello!” his heart lifting a little.
An image came into Michael’s mind before he could control it, before he could tell himself to calm down. He pictured soldiers coming around a corner, men with weapons, power, and looks of astonishment. Boys! they’d say. Wow! Hell-oh! Wow! Lookit these boys! Lookit this kid, will ya lookit this hero! C’mon, let’s get you out of this place, let’s get you someplace warm, fellas. It’s over, Michael, you did it, you won, let’s get you boys to the Zone—
And Michael was already walking through the Meeting Hall’s lawn of spears when he realized, in the back of his brain, that a few of them were strangely shaped.
Four or five sets of planks had been fashioned into crosses.
He realized why the responses sounded unique: the Bellows’ calls, eerily, were emanating from under the ground, radiating from beneath the snow and earth under his boots. Tacked onto the crosses (the red paint, he noted, was faded) were small wooden signs:
(RANDAL VOLPE) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED
DO NOT TOUCH!!!
(ABEL MASSEY) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED
(GERALD BRAY) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED
(EMMA ZARR) BELOVED, GOD-BLESSED
DON’T DISTURB, BELOVED, MOST-BLESSED
Michael shook his head, feeling a bewildered resentment. Why the crap would people keep Bellows here? The instructions from all Safe Zone flyers and endless radio announcement loops said that Bellows were to be destroyed on sight.
But seriously, even if nobody ever told you, how could people not realize: if monsters show up at your home, you get rid of them.
At least it doesn’t sound like there’s as many Bellows as last night, he told himself. Maybe last night was just a fluke. Maybe—
And sensed movement behind him.
As he spun, the snow grinding under his heels, several nearby crows cawed and exploded into flight. On a house where the vinyl siding had been torn off and hammered over the windows, a series of icicles stretching nearly to the ground collapsed, bringing the storm gutters they’d hung from down with them.
Nobody there, Michael thought, his heart knocking in his temples. He pictured the map, the gray zone, his miniature self lost in all that gray. No Bellows. And no soldiers. No Mom. There’s nobody here, newb. There’s nobody anywhere—
“Michael?” Patrick said. He looked at Michael, his eyes asking, You okay?
I—damn, Michael thought. I thought for a second . . . I really thought . . .
“Just tired.”
“So . . . just Bellows here, then?”
“Yeah. I know where we can stay tonight, though.”
Michael led them under the bus and said, “Piggyback,” as they went back up the hill, Michael pulling the sled behind them.
Stupid to think . . . stupid to think that . . .
“Dinner when we get back,” Michael said, crunching through sunset-shaded snow.
“Okay,” Patrick replied. “I’ll save some of my jerky for Mommy.”
After a second, Michael nodded. “Good call.”
He set Patrick down to walk when they reached the level Main Street, and that was when all the thoughts about being stupid vanished from his mind.
Starlight lay bright and crisp and strange across the snow. Patrick stopped spontaneously, his smile beautiful and alive. They could hear, from some other street, the hoof-falls of the passage of deer in snow. They could hear the crisp crackle of ice splitting in some unknown river. The night, the whole of it, felt like a private thing, as if Michael could grasp the star-rich horizon and pull it over them like a quilt and keep themselves in it forever.
“Michael?”
“Yeah?”
Patrick took his hand.
They ran to the door of the shelter for the night—the business building they’d parked beside on Main Street earlier—which