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Its screech rings out again, this time powerfully enough that Thomas thinks his ears might be bleeding. Winnie’s barking turns into a trail of weak whimpers as the dog shuffles backward until she is behind Jackson’s legs. He stands utterly frozen with the gun in his hands, gaping at the form where it emerges from the shadows with long, quick strides.

Thomas shoves Jackson roughly. “Move!” he says, before taking off toward the store front. Soon he can hear footsteps pounding the ground behind him, and he glances back only once to check that it’s the Boy Scout. “Open the door! Open the door!” he screams, nearly smacking into the glass.

It is Jane who shoves it open. Thomas and Jackson fling themselves through it, collapsing to the floor as if their brains have finally short-circuited and their legs simply cannot carry them any farther.

Winnie pauses at the entrance, barking and shifting on her paws as another earsplitting screech rips through the night.

“Winnie! Come on, Winnie!” Jane shouts.

Thomas’s sister steps outside and grabs the dog by the collar before her gaze freezes. She stands there in the reach of the store’s bright light, confused and entranced by the wrongness of what’s out there and as stuck in place as Jackson had been. Then she jerks her eyes away and yanks Winnie inside.

Kimi slams the door shut, flipping the lock. “Help me barricade this now!” she orders, and it is like a spell has finally broken over Jim. He clumsily shoves a nearby display table for Thanksgiving decor in front of the entrance, fitting it up against the glass as packs of holiday tablecloths and napkins slip off and scatter to the floor.

“I told all you, dammit, I told you!” Jim shouts, practically hyperventilating as he latches on to Kimi’s arm and stumbles back from the door.

In the rush of movement the cashier trips backward over Thomas’s legs, nearly sending her crashing to the floor and atop Billy’s bloody corpse, though Thomas simply lies there, staring out into the night as tremors roll through his body in cold, harsh turns.

“Where’s Evan?” someone asks, while Thomas looks down at his body, first accounting for all his limbs and then clutching tightly to his chest. “Hey!” the voice says before fingers snap in his face.

At first he is confused, his mind unable to process why this random woman is bothering him. But then he glimpses her full belly, and it is like being doused with a bucket of ice water.

“Where’s my husband?” Ashley says, with the same wide, frightened eyes Evan wore as his life was being taken from him.

Thomas can only shake his head as he stares back at the woman, practically feeling the cortisol radiate from her body. Near him, Jackson sits ghostly pale and barely seems to register that Winnie is desperately licking his face.

Ashley moves toward him next. “I don’t understand,” she says, while gripping tightly to Jackson’s arm. “What happened?” She shakes him then, eliciting a sharp bark from Winnie. “Would you say something!”

Like Thomas, Jackson is slow to realize she is addressing him. When he finally crawls to his feet, he leaves the shotgun lying on the ground, staring at it like it might reveal the secret to life. “I shot it,” he says, so quietly Thomas wonders if the guy even realizes he is talking out loud. “I shot that thing right in the chest. I swear it didn’t—it didn’t even flinch.”

“Shot what?” Ashley nearly screams. “What the hell are you talking about!”

Thomas can feel his sister standing over him, looking down like he’s a piece of shattered glass. It reminds him of when she first visited him in the hospital after the accident, all painfully gentle tones and careful words.

Now her voice trembles in a whisper, filled with a fear he knows no cure for. “Tommy, what’s going on?”

He ignores her outreached hands and climbs to his feet on his own.

“What’s out there? What did you see?” she asks as the frown lines etch deeper into her eighteen-year-old face; he thinks they might turn into a permanent fixture, as much of a promise as the scar over her right eyebrow.

“Go on, tell ’em, boy,” Jim says from where he stands hiding behind Kimi, gripping tight to either of her shoulders. “Tell ’em what you saw! Tell ’em it ain’t no bear.”

In front of him, the cashier’s hands visibly shake as she eyes the bloody footprints that have been trailed across the floor all around them. When she looks at Thomas, her stare is wide and as dark as the night lurking outside. “Well?” she says.

Thomas drags his focus over to Jackson. The Boy Scout’s hair is mussed and his face still flushed from cold wind and the impossible. They hold each other’s eyes for several seconds before Jackson returns his own haunted ones back down to the shotgun.

Thomas exhales very slowly. “It wasn’t a bear.”

Six

She set off to climb the tallest mountain

Thomas has seen many types of crying over the past two months. There is the silent one, where the person brushes away tears before they can become noticeable stains against cheeks—this is his mother and Jane’s specialty. There is the crying where the person forces hollow laughter as tears build to the brink though somehow never go spilling over; his father and Cassie tend to favor that one.

Then there is the type of crying that overtakes a person with a tidal, heaving force. It is breathless and irrevocable in its threat to drown, and there is nothing anyone else can do to stop it. The wave must simply run its course until it decides to release its captive, empty and ragged, for the world’s taking.

Thomas knows that Ashley is spiraling toward this particular state of unrest with a wicked and violent velocity. The urge to escape it is almost as strong as his fear, though he cannot seem to make his body move. He stands uselessly in the entrance of Blackwell’s Country Store, in between a dead body and the glass doors that separate him from something he has no earthly explanation for.

“Thomas,” someone says. “Thomas, are you sure you’re okay?”