launches his fist into my face and the world dissolves into black around me.
I can’t…
…think…
…hurts…
Mom…I want my mom….
“—come on, let’s go—wait—Bill, wait—look.”
My vision can’t seem to focus. The whole right side of my face aches, and it’s getting harder to open that eyelid.
“Three! Anyone else want to come out and play?” the old woman says, laughing. “Anyone else hiding in there?”
Three?
There’s a fog around my thoughts and a strange rainbow halo around my vision. It makes it harder to focus on reality—on the dark shape standing in the battered doorway of the house.
Lucas.
“Boy, too,” says one of the men behind me. “Even better.”
“No…wait….”
Sam starts screaming in earnest now. I think for a second that she’s scared for him, that they’ll take him and hurt him, too. The realization crawls up my neck, and I start to shiver.
She’s scared for these people.
Lucas stands there, motionless, as he always is. His shirt collar is stretched out, and standing upright it’s even more obvious that he’s lost too much weight. The bones look like they’re popping out of his skin. I’m too far away to read his steely expression, but the tendons in his neck are bulging, and I see that his right hand is jerking at his side.
I see it happen out of the corner of my eye. The man with the shotgun is standing, in one piece, and then he’s not. The gun explodes in his hands. Both me and the old woman are rocketed back by the force of it, the spray of blood and embers that follows the man’s screams.
The second I’m out of her grip I crawl forward, toward where Sam is rolling herself out of the bed of the pickup truck, hitting the ground hard. She doesn’t stop, just keeps rolling until the hood is off and she manages to get the cloth gag out of her mouth.
“Lucas!” she shouts. “Stop!”
Crack—
Crack—
Crack—
The other man shoots fast and wild in Lucas’s direction, screaming, “Get ’im! Get ’im!” to the old woman, who’s still on the ground. I swing my arm out in the snatcher’s direction, knocking him back against the truck. The second he loses his balance, so do I, and I stumble down again. A hand clamps down on my ankle and rips me back across the dirt and gravel. I hear the sound of barking dogs and sirens, and none of it registers, nothing beyond the fury etched into my brother’s face.
The scene comes into focus, and it takes me too long to understand why: the area is lit—illuminated—by fire. It circles the man who’s still screaming on the ground, cradling the burnt remains of his hands and arms. It’s jumped up to the trees, spread like a carpet across the wild grass, caught the other man’s pants and jacket sleeves and—
The car.
Smoke is pouring from under the hood, and all I can think of is the facility, how the glass blew out—
If the truck explodes, we’re all dead.
He’s…I’ve always known who Lucas is, and he didn’t try to hide it from us when he changed, but this isn’t him. This is a weapon. I don’t understand. Is he protecting us? Or is he just lashing out at a threat?
“Lucas! Look at me! Lucas!” Sam forgets her rules, all of them, as she stumbles toward him. The doorway is ringed with fire, and smoke pours out of the house behind him as it catches and tears through the wood and old, moldering fabric.
I kick at the woman’s head but she’s already letting go, her attention on the driveway and her last route out from the fire. I push myself up onto my feet, chest tight from the smoke, just as Sam reaches him—
There’s no hesitation.
No fear.
Her hands are still tied together in front of her, but it hardly matters. Sam loops them over his neck and then around his shoulders. She doesn’t let go. She holds onto him.
The fire flares white-hot around me, and I have to run forward to avoid being caught in the same wave that’s sweeping toward the men and the old lady as they scurry away like the rats they are.
“Sam!” I shout. “Come on!”
I’m not stupid enough to think that Lucas will try to hug her, return her touch.
He’s going to hurt her—and for Lucas, there’s no coming back from that. Even if I can draw him out later, if he does what it looks like he’s about to do, he will never forgive himself. He will let the shadows eat him