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Jackson straightens, puffing his chest out slightly. He stands a few inches shorter than Jim, though unlike the latter, fear does not drown his gaze. “I’ll be back in a bit,” he says.

“I’ll go with you,” Thomas adds. “Strength in numbers, right?”

Jane’s eyes widen as she looks at her brother, standing there in the store’s entrance in his favorite Athens University sweatshirt, cut up to accommodate his long arm cast. His normally toned, confident stature has fallen soft from weeks of inactivity, leaving him with the sort of graceless lankiness he used to have when he was in middle school. Still, this doesn’t seem to deter him in the slightest from going to face whatever might be lurking outside. No, he doesn’t look like he cares much at all.

Jackson gives Thomas a solemn nod of acceptance, like they’re both soldiers being deployed. They glance back somewhat expectantly at the two other men in the group, but Jim has shifted back even farther from the doors, until his back is pressed against an aisle shelf and his eyes are focused once more on Billy’s shredded body.

Evan meets his wife’s anxious stare as she shakes her head no, now clinging to him in the way he’s clung to her all evening. It isn’t until Jackson has his hand on the door handle that Evan offers to join in a reluctant whisper.

Ashley grips his arm with both hands. “Baby, please don’t,” she pleads. “Just stay inside. Stay inside with us,” she adds, cupping her protruding belly.

“We’ll be fine if you want to stay, man, really,” says Jackson.

But something primally resolute seems to befall the husband as he takes in the state of his pregnant wife next to the dead body on the ground. He pulls off his glasses and wipes the lenses with his shirt. When he puts them back on, he kisses her cheek and grabs the hot-pink Taser from her hand.

“We’ll be right back,” he promises.

Thomas briefly meets Jane’s terrified eyes. Say something, she thinks desperately. Tell me you’ll be right back. Tell me that it will be okay.

But her brother remains silent as he turns and goes out into the night.

Five

and threatened to break her apart.

It is that in-between state where night and day have kissed each other goodbye in their brief passing, with any lingering sun tinging the edges of the sky a deep charcoal. Stars pepper the wide expanse above them now, bright and vivid from the lack of light pollution, and a sliver of moon hangs above the barren treetops. Thomas imagines how easy it would have been if they had simply gone straight to the cabin rental to meet their family—he’d be sitting outside somewhere by himself, looking up and away from his life below.

His eyes slip to Jane’s RAV then as if driven by a phantom thought. He could just leave, couldn’t he? Run to the car and make a break from the absolute loony show going on inside. Sure, he has a slight fear of driving now, but he’d gladly endure it if it meant getting the hell off this mountain.

Of course, there’s the issue of his sister waiting inside the store—Jane with her sad puppy eyes, actually buying into every word that drunk says about monsters and devils and claws. The image from the store’s bathroom flashes through Thomas’s mind again, sharp and cruel like the cuts across Billy’s body.

It’s impossible, he reminds himself. The hick has lost his mind.

The guy who acts like a permanent Boy Scout, Jackson, quietly walks toward the Jeep Wrangler, where a German shepherd has popped its head out of the cracked open window. It whines with the unfettered excitement of a puppy, though when he shushes it and opens the door to let it out, the dog looks big enough to knock any of them over. She greets him urgently, pawing at his stomach until he holds up both hands. When the dog obediently drops back down into a sitting position, Jackson signals to Thomas and Evan that he is continuing toward Jim’s Chevy.

Thomas nods noncommittally as he searches around the edges of the dark parking lot, lit up by only one weak streetlamp along the bumpy access road they came in from. The lamp flickers for a few seconds, casting their exit in short intervals of total black. It is eerily quiet save for the steady brush of wind through the trees and the German shepherd’s curious sniffing along an invisible path in the red leaves blanketed over the dirt.

Evan, the man that’s got a death grip around his wife’s hot-pink Taser, blurts an apology as he steps on the back of Thomas’s heel.

“I’m so sorry,” the man whispers again after stepping on Thomas’s heel a second time.

Thomas grunts, waving him off while fixing the back of his Nikes.

In front of them, Jackson glances around before opening up the passenger-side door to Jim’s truck. His dog watches him as he rummages around behind the bucket seat, then pulls back with a polished shotgun in his hands. He slides open the glove compartment next, tossing aside food wrappers and a crushed pack of Newport shorts before grabbing the box of extra shells. He holds it out for Evan to take.

“Oh, no thank you,” Evan replies, like he’s turning down a slice of pumpkin pie.

Thomas fights back a sigh as he keeps watch on the swaying tree line. He imagines how easily someone might get lost in these woods, how one wrong turn could lead to a limitless spiral amidst the breathing darkness, until you’ve simply disappeared altogether.

Jackson shoves the box of shells into Evan’s hands. Around them, the wind picks up. It shoots a cold chill through Thomas, and he grits his teeth at the ache that throbs within his arm, deep and ever present, like coals flaring red. His orthopedic surgeon had told him pain is a good sign—that it means his arm is healing slowly but surely and that the nerve damage might not be as catastrophic as they initially anticipated—that there’s hope, however small.

But where there is pain, he also experiences numbness; sometimes it’s where his upper arm meets the elbow, where pins and screws were placed in intensive surgery nearly eight weeks ago to the day, and other times, he feels it spread all the way down to the tips of his fingers, strong enough that objects slip from his grasp. He despises the numbness—the numbness that feels more and more like a villain lurking beneath the surface of his skin, waiting for the most vulnerable moment to attack him.

Lately, Thomas finds himself waking up every morning wishing for pain.

“That looks like it was a bad break,” Evan says from next to him, eyeing the sling supporting his bulky cast.

“Certainly wasn’t a good one,” Thomas mutters, shoving down the thought of whatever bleak inevitability the X-rays would reveal at his doctor’s appointment next week. He glances between his current companions, this time not holding back a bored sigh. “We done here?”