He dropped back down into the squidgy muck and began to count.
“Cal?” came his sister’s voice, from somewhere behind him.
“Wait,” he shouted.
“Cal?” she said again, from somewhere to his left. “Do you want me to keep talking?” And when he didn’t reply, she began to chant in a desultory voice, from somewhere in front of him: “There once was a girl went to Yale—”
“Just shut up and wait!” he screamed again.
His throat felt dry and tight, and swallowing took an effort. Although it was close to two in the afternoon, the sun seemed to hover almost directly overhead. He could feel it on his scalp and the tops of his ears, which were tender, beginning to burn. He thought if he could just have something to drink—a cold swallow of spring water, or one of their Cokes—he might not feel so frayed, so anxious.
Drops of dew burned in the grass, a hundred miniature magnifying glasses refracting and intensifying the light.
Ten seconds.
“Kid?” Becky called, from somewhere on his right (No. Stop. She’s not moving. Get your head under control.) She sounded thirsty, too. Croaky. “Are you still with us?”
“Yes! Did you find my mom?”
“Not yet!” Cal shouted, thinking it really had been a while since they’d heard from her. Not that she was his main concern just then.
Twenty seconds.
“Kid?” Becky said. Her voice came from behind him again. “Everything’s going to be all right.”
“Have you seen my dad?”
Cal thought: A new player. Terrific. Maybe William Shatner’s in here, too. Also Mike Huckabee . . . Kim Kardashian . . . the guy who plays Opie on Sons of Anarchy, and the entire cast of The Walking Dead.
He closed his eyes, but the moment he did, he felt dizzy, as if he were standing on the top of a ladder beginning to sway underfoot. He wished he hadn’t thought of The Walking Dead. He should have stuck with William Shatner and Mike Huckabee. He opened his eyes again and found himself rocking on his heels. He steadied himself with some effort. The heat made his face prickle with sweat.
Thirty. He’d been standing in this one spot for thirty seconds. He thought he should wait a full minute but couldn’t, and so he jumped for another look back at the church.
A part of him—a part he’d been trying with all his will to ignore—already knew what he was going to see. This part had been providing an almost jovial running commentary: Everything will have moved, Cal, good buddy. The grass flows, and you flow, too. Think of it as becoming one with nature, bro.
When his tired legs lofted him into the air again, he saw that the church steeple was now off to his left. Not a lot—just a little. He had drifted far enough to his right so that he was no longer seeing the front of that diamond-shaped sign but the silver aluminum back of it. Also, though he wasn’t sure, he thought it was all just a little farther away than it had been. As if he had backed up a few steps while he was counting to thirty.
Somewhere, the dog barked again: roop, roop. Somewhere a radio was playing. He couldn’t make out the song, just the thump of the bass. The insects thrummed their single lunatic note.
“Oh, come on,” Cal said. He had never been much for talking to himself—as an adolescent he’d cultivated a Buddhist-skateboarder vibe and had prided himself on how long he could serenely maintain his silence—but he was talking now, and hardly aware of it. “Oh, come the fuck on. This is . . . this is nuts.”
He was walking, too. Walking for the road—again, hardly without knowing it.
“Cal?” Becky shouted.
“This is just nuts,” he said again, breathing hard, shoving at the grass.
His foot caught on something, and he went down knee-first into an inch of swampy water. Hot water—not lukewarm, hot, as hot as bathwater—splashed up onto the crotch of his shorts, providing him with the sensation of having just pissed himself.
That broke him a little. He lunged back to his feet. Running now. Grass whipping at his face. It was sharp-edged and tough, and when one green sword snapped him under the left eye, he felt it, a sharp stinging. The pain gave him a nasty jump, and he ran harder, going as fast as he could now.
“Help me!” the kid screamed, and how about this? “Help” came from Cal’s left, “me” from his right. It was the Kansas