The Hive: Season 3

unDEFEATED

Daddy, like most men of his generation, loved football. In the fall, he went to every Spotsy home game on Friday, watched a few college games on Saturday, and settled in every Sunday for a few hours to curse and fume at the Redskins. He loved it so much that he even played it in high school, a fact he liked to remind me of. Frequently. He really liked to bring it up whenever he watched my soccer or field hockey games, which was pretty much every time I had a soccer or field hockey game.
"It's like Coach used to tell me all the time. 'Jett! You need to be more aggressive!'."
"Is this the time you made that one interception or the time you blew your coverage during the playoffs?"
"You can be as smart-alecky as you want, little girl, but I know what I'm talking about. I was the—"
I joined in to finish the sentence with him.
"—starting linebacker for the Spotsylvania Knights three years running."
"Haha, 'Manda. You can make fun of me all you want, but we—"
"Won states two years running."
He usually fell silent after that, and I'd have to spend the rest of the day being extra nice to him. Sometimes it worked, but Daddy could be prickly, so if it didn't, the best course of action was complete avoidance. You might call that cowardly, but I call it smart. Time heals everything, from fist fights to murder, and hurt feelings ain't no different. And I definitely was not a coward. I wasn't weak or shy out on the field. I played my position, I did my job, and I never got angry, even if we were losing bad, even if the other team played dirty.
The one time I expressed something close to poor sportsmanship (we lost a soccer game to a team that liked to cheat and get physical for no reason, then complain about it, and I refused to shake their hands afterward), Daddy chewed me out when we got back in the truck.
"But Daddy, they were throwing elbows and kicking our knees."
"I don't care 'Manda. Learn from it and figure out how to beat them next time."
"That ain't right. Why should I take the high road when they obviously can't?"
"Because it's not what we do. They want to act like jerks, let 'em. But I'll be a monkey if I'm going to let my own daughter do the same."
When it came to that particular subject, it didn't get any better between us the next season. That was the year I turned thirteen and started eighth grade. The trials and tribulations of The Sexy Seven were two years behind me, and I, along with the rest of the school, had moved well past them sorry little witches. Oh, there were still cliques and cabals. Our school was firmly stratified into a dozen different categories. Of course, there were the conventional striations. Jocks. Goths. Nerds. Losers. Pretty People. But as we grew up and took on more interests, even those time-tested groups began to cleave. Some of the Jocks were also smart. Some of the Pretty People were also Goths. It was downright confusing to most of the adults in our world, but the kids knew what was going on.
As for me, I staked my flag firmly with the Soccer Girls. We were a lively bunch. Maybe we weren't the most academic, and maybe we weren't the best looking, but we stuck to each other as tight as ticks, from the sleekest striker to the brawniest back. Nobody messed with us, not even the remnants of The Sexy Seven (now pared down to the Sexy Three).
It was all because of our coach, Wendy Wulfang. (We all called her Windy behind her back, not because she liked to talk or even because she was out of shape (she wasn't) but because we were kids and we couldn't come up with nothing better.) Windy Wulfang was the exact opposite of my Daddy in every way possible. Actually, that's not completely true. They were both about six feet tall and weighed somewhere between two twenty and two thirty-five. After that, the similarities stopped. Where Daddy was quiet and reserved, Coach Wulfang was loud and brash. Where Daddy avoided conflict like the plague, Coach Wulfang didn't just invite it, she created it. And where Daddy's view on competition was "play fair, play good, and respect your opponent," Coach Wulfang's was "win at all costs." It was a dichotomy that led to some pretty tense situations, and not just between Daddy and Coach Wulfang.
To Daddy's credit, after one particularly heated discussion in which he finally had enough and confronted her on the wiseness of her decision to have me take out their lead defender, an action that got me red-carded, he dropped the whole thing. I remember the conversation well. He was driving me back from the game, one hand on the wheel, the other picking at his lip. He wouldn't talk to me or look at me, and when I turned the radio on, he reached over and turned it off.
"Daddy, are you mad at me?" I asked.
I actually saw him decide to pull himself together. He took a breath and let it go. Then he cleared his throat.
"No, 'Manda. I ain't mad at you. I don't like what happened out there on that field, though."
"I get that."
"Are you okay with it?"
It took me a bit of figuring, but eventually I said, "Yeah. Yeah, I am."
"You don't think that was the least bit uncalled-for?"
"It's a part of the game. That's what you've always told me. Someone tries to take me out, tough. Shut up and do your job, right?"
That quieted him down. We came to a stop sign, and he sat there for a while. The turn signal ticked and tocked.
"'Manda, you might've wrecked that girl's knee."
"I know, Daddy. I don't feel good about that part."
"Do you feel good about any of this stuff?"
"What stuff?"
"Soccer. This year. Your coach."
I didn't even hesitate.
"We're undefeated."

Undefeated was the exact opposite of the way I felt the month after them hive balls destroyed my house, my farm, and everything and everybody I had left in the world. Barring Timmy Carter, of course. To be honest, I don't know exactly how I felt other than angry. And that anger boiled up inside me day in and day out, hotter than the summer sun, and that year was one of the hottest I'd ever experienced.
"It's not healthy to hold on to all that hate, Amanda," Timmy Carter said.
"I don't care."
"I don't think you know what you're talking about."
"Maybe I don't, Timmy Carter. But maybe you don't, neither."
"Okay."
"Do me a favor, huh?" Timmy Carter looked at me, waiting for what I was going to say. Almost made me feel bad. "Keep your mouth shut, okay?"
"What?"
"Unless you want to talk about killing Macks or burning Hives, there ain't nothing for us to say to each other."
I shouldn't have been so nasty to him. He'd stuck by me through nearly everything so far. It wasn't like he hadn't suffered a loss. We never did find Frankie. But I was still a teenager, and I was immature, and I felt like my pain was the only thing that mattered. Worse thing was that I knew I was acting selfish, knew I was wrong, and I wasn't particularly proud of that, so I tried to overcome it the only way I knew how. Revenge. I was going to kill The Girl, and I was going to make sure it hurt.
The one miraculous thing about the destruction of my family house was the fact that the gun safe didn't fly away. Daddy'd anchored it into one of the metal support beams which itself was anchored into the concrete foundation. Sure it bent backward, but it remained intact. That's good old American construction values right there.
All of Daddy's guns were in perfect condition, too. Timmy Carter and I had a devil of a time taking the bolts out and moving the safe into the hole that used to be the cellar, but we managed. That's where we camped out. Put a tarp up to keep out the weather, gathered what cans we could find, and made due. At night, we hugged our guns and hoped for the best. During the day, we did us some hive hunting. Would've made Daddy proud, dedicated, as he was, to recycling and hunting and all.
I've talked about Virginia weather before, how we could see all four seasons (with all their subtleties and quirks) in a day, usually in spring and fall. But summer in the state that kills tyrants could be downright oppressive. I know, I know. My lone star brothers and sisters might have a bone to pick about that particular complaint (not to mention my creole, dixie, and sooner relatives), but that's like making fun of Californians for freaking out during a cyclone. Weather is relative. We're used to what we're used to.
The morning we set out to kill The Girl and all them was one of the hottest, most humid mornings I could ever remember. The night hadn't been all that much better, but at least the sun wasn't out. Once the old girl peeked over the tops of the trees and spread herself over the earth, our tarp caught the brunt of it, and sleep, as elusive as it was before, was more than an impossibility.
We set about the makeshift camp, quietly getting ready for the mission. I boiled some water from the stream for our coffee, and Timmy Carter broke out the fancy stuff for breakfast: SPAM and peaches in syrup, both of them straight from the can. We ate and pondered. I started to feel bad about how I'd treated Timmy Carter the day before, so I said, "Timmy Carter?"
"Yeah."
"I'm sorry about what I said."
"What'd you say?"
"About not talking to me unless we were talking about killing." He did his silent thing, as he was wont. "You're right. I'm angry. But it feels good right now. I think I need to use it."
"I get it."
"I knew you would."
He up-ended his can of peaches and drank the syrup, and when he was done, he put the can in the crate we were filling up with the empties. Then he said, "You mind if I give you some advice?"
"As long as it's good advice."
"Hate's a powerful engine, 'Manda. You let it burn too long, it'll blow you out."
I didn't have anything to say to that. I wasn't ready.
We geared up, strapping as many weapons as we could to our arms and legs. I took my Magnum and Daddy's Bowie knife, of course, as well as one of his hunting rifles. Timmy Carter took a shotgun, a Glock, and a machete. I watched him strapping all of that firepower to his body, wondering how it'd turn out if we actually ran into something that needed that many bullets to put it down. Not that it mattered. We were low on ammo. Gun's useless without it. Maybe that's why he took the machete. He climbed out of the foundation pit and reached down to pull me up.
"You sure you want to do this?" he asked.
"Yeah, Timmy Carter. I think I told you enough times."
"You didn't exactly have a positive experience there."
"Listen, I appreciate you being concerned for my well-being, but there ain't no need for you to protect me. You're not my daddy, you're not my husband, and even if you was, I'd still tell you to back off."
"That's not what I meant."
"Would you have asked me that if I was a man?"
"Amanda, you need to back off."
"Then don't—"
"There's no reason to do this. Why can't you just let it alone?"
"It ain't only about her. You remember what we ate for breakfast this morning right? And for dinner last night?"
"Yeah, but—"
"We're out of food. The Food Bank is empty. This is the only place I know that might have something."
"How can you be sure?"
"I ain't, but you saw the place. It's got plenty of land, and solar power, and greenhouses. There's bound to be something there we can use."
"Okay."
"Okay? That it? No more arguing? No more lecturing. No more asking me if I'm sure I want to do this?"
"Okay is okay."
"Well, okay, then."

We filled our canteens from the boiled water left over from breakfast, then headed south, following the creek that paralleled Brock Road. After about two miles, we turned east. It was going to be a long hike. And hot. I'd sweated through my clothes by mid-morning.
The woods were thick and lush already, reminding me of mid-summer even though it wasn't even close to mid-summer yet. And things were crashing around in the brush that were bigger than what I normally heard crashing around in there. I wasn't no expert on nature, but I seen me an episode of National Geographic or two, and I swear at one point I heard a heavy huffing, like the sound a gorilla made, and if you don't know anything about gorillas and Spotsylvania County, Virginia, the Piedmont area is not their native habitat. Seconds later, I caught a glimpse of the rear end of a kangaroo bouncing away, leaping through the bush like a, well, like a kangaroo, which was a bit of a shock as kangaroos were also not native to this place.
"Timmy Carter. Did you—"
"Yeah, I saw it."
He slapped the back of his neck, grimacing, and when he pulled his hand away, it was covered in green gook and his own red blood, and the insect, or whatever it was that bit him, was crushed in his palm. Timmy Carter had himself a lot of palm, too, and that bug was squished all over it.
"That don't look like no mosquito I ever seen," I said.
"No kidding."
"Is that fur?"
"I think so."
He wiped his hand off on a tree.
"Let's get out of the woods, huh?"
We double-timed it as best we could, but it was pretty hard to march and keep an ear out for weird creatures at the same time. Timmy Carter took the lead, using his machete to cut away the creepers and the palms that seemed to belong more in a jungle than they did here. We reached a clearing about halfway to the reservoir, and I stopped to take a drink.
"You ever feel it this hot this early?" I asked.
Timmy Carter had paused right in front of me, seeming to listen to something out in the woods. Then he fell into a squat and yanked me down with him.
"Shh!" he hissed.
"What is it?"
"Listen."
I did, and I heard what he was talking about. A clicking sound followed by the noise of millions of little things moving through the underbrush. Fast. And I knew exactly what was heading our way.
"Timmy Carter, we've got to get out of here."
I spun around, looking for an escape. Maybe we could find a cave or a rock fort, something we could hide in, but there wasn't too much in the way of caves or forts of any kind in that part of the Spotsylvania wilderness. But we did have trees. I pointed at a nearby oak.
"There!"
"The branches look dead."
"Not the lowest one."
"How do you know?"
"It's that or nothing."
The lowest branch was a doozy, plenty thick and plenty strong, but it hung a foot higher than I could jump. After the third, futile leap, Timmy Carter said, "Let me try."
He jumped and jumped, even took a running start and used the trunk to kick off, but he still couldn't quite grab the branch.
"I'll hoist you up," he said, and he linked his hands for me to step into them.
"And then what? You think I can pull you up myself?"
"You're right. Got any rope?"
"No I don't got—you know I don't have any!"
The clicking and chittering grew nearer, reminding me of a wave of cicadas, rising and falling, rising and falling.
"We're out of time," I said. "You get on my shoulders and grab the limb."
"You can't hold my weight."
"It's all I got, Timmy Carter."
He paused, doubtful, and a polar crab scrabbled out of the brush, one of them gnarly leg-eaters that killed Uncle Zeus. It stopped when it saw us and raised up on its hind legs, front claws waving in the air. It might have been cute if I didn't know what it was capable of. When it was done with its little dance, it shot forward, aiming for Timmy Carter's feet. Timmy Carter backed up, shocked, and I lunged forward and crushed the nasty critter under my boot, stomped it three times, four times, ten times more just to make sure it was dead. Timmy Carter looked like he'd swallowed a bug—maybe that furry one that he smashed against his neck.
"Is that—?"
"Yeah, Timmy Carter. I told you about them. Now are you going to get on my shoulders or what?"
He nodded, still looking at the mess of white fur and gray and green guts that used to be the polar crab, but he didn't move.
"Hey!" I snapped. I clapped in his face and his eyes clicked on mine. "Let's go!"
I didn't have to squat down too far for him to get on my back, but he was right about the weight. I couldn't stand up straight. First I fell into the trunk with my face, then I reeled back and started to stumble the wrong direction.
"Wrong way! Wrong way!" Timmy Carter yelled.
"I'm trying!"
The first big wave of polar crabs scuttled through the dead leaves to my left. They weren't heading directly at us, not at first, but when their eye stalks seen us, the whole swarm turned as one.
Timmy Carter leaned back toward the trunk, and once our momentum started, we couldn't stop. I stumble-ran, tripped and fell, and then the weight was off my shoulders, and I was face down in the dirt. The first polar-crab bit into my boot and I pushed myself off the ground.
"Amanda, here!"
I reached up blindly, and Timmy Carter grabbed my wrist yanked me off the ground. The polar-crab kept gnawing away, its teeth piercing my leather boot, and then I was on the branch, hanging like a sack over either side. That dang polar-crab didn't seem to be bothered one bit. It finally chewed through the leather and its teeth bit into my toes and I screamed like I never screamed before.
I been plenty injured. Already told you about most of them. But there was something about getting eaten by that weird space crustacean that freaked me out. I guess it was because I'd seen what it did to Mother Absalom and Uncle Zeus. I'm not sure how to explain it, but I think it must have tapped into one of my deepest, darkest, most primal fears.
If pulling yourself up on a branch and turning around to sit on it is a delicate maneuver on its own, try doing it with a space crab eating your foot. When I was finally in position, I whipped out my Bowie and sliced off its stalk-eyes. Timmy Carter tried to pull it off, but it just sank its teeth into my meat and I screamed.
"Ahh! Jeez! Knock it off, Timmy Carter!"
He put up his hands in surrender. That polar-crab was latched on tight, I'll tell you that much, but I knew what to do. See, every summer, Daddy liked to have himself a crab feast. Invited all his army buddies and a couple of our neighbors over to the farm, set up a whole bunch of picnic tables, and spent the afternoon drinking beer and eating crabs.
My point is that I wasn't a stranger to crab anatomy, and if these was in any way similar to the things I'd ate for as long as I could remember, then getting it off was only a matter of cracking it open. Hurt like a bitch turning my foot to get to its underside, but pain's a mighty good motivator (as well as the threat of having my toes eaten while I was still alive). I jammed my knife into its apron and yanked up, pulling its shell in two, and it sprayed Timmy Carter in the face with a squirt of black bile. Then I gutted it with six quick swipes, scraped the bottom half off and dropped the top after it. Both pieces landed in the herd rushing beneath us below.
I'm not sure which I liked better—the relief of getting that damn thing's teeth out of my foot or the look on Timmy Carter's face.
"You okay, 'Manda?"
"I'll be fine, I—"
Then the whole tree shook so hard that I thought it'd been rammed by an elephant, or maybe that kangape thing I'd seen earlier. I nearly fell off. We waited, holding onto the branch as tight as we could. I even wrapped my good leg around it. Then another blast came, and another, and another. The trees to my left shook and cracked and fell, sending birds scattering into the air, and out of the brush a huge bug, a bug the likes of which I'd never seen, marched into the clearing.
The polar-crabs were weird enough, but at least they was built on a scale I understood. This new thing was big and weird and scary. It had a fat, clunky body and clear wings, and its face looked like a mess of strawberries with tumors growing out of them. Its head had a single stalk sticking out the top with what looked like hairy helicopter blades that ended in ugly, pock-marked balls. It lumbered along amongst the much small polar-crabs like a tank, scanning the path in front of it. Soon another one followed, and one more after that. Three in all. One at the font, one in the middle, and one towards the back.
Two squirrels, frightened by the alien march, leaped from tree to tree, trying to escape, but squirrels being squirrels, one freaked out and jumped the wrong way and right into one of the larger creature's open mouth. Damn thing didn't even seem to notice. The other squirrel zoomed a little too close to the one in the back and got impaled on the creepy horns sticking out of its head.
For some reason, that made me mad. Poor little critter was probably just waking up from its winter hibernation and lo and behold, a stupid alien bug-thing scares the hell out of it and spikes it dead on its stupid space-horns. It would have been one thing if the squirrel had gotten eaten by a hawk or an owl or a fox or a snake. That was natural. But them damn aliens certainly was not, and those squirrels were our squirrels.
I said, "I don't know about you, Timmy Carter, but I'm sick of this."
Timmy Carter was farther out on the branch than I was. He didn't seem too concerned about what I was saying. I shifted my weight again and the branch creaked.
"Wait. Stop. Don't move," Timmy Carter said.
I scanned the parade below us. Bug after bug after bug was marching through the forest. Gnarliest creatures I ever did see. When the last wave of them trundled under, a mass of polar-crabs, one of them tank-bugs, and another mass of polar-crabs taking up the rear, I don't know, I guess I just got angry. I guess I felt like they were getting away with something. I took out my anger by stabbing the trunk with my knife.
"Stupid aliens."
Chock. Chock. Chock.
"Think they can come here and do this to me."
Chock. Chock. Chock.
"Amanda. Stop moving so much."
"Took out everybody I ever loved."
Chock. Chock. Chock.
"Amanda. Calm down."
"Killed my daddy."
Chock.
"My farm."
Chock.
"My dog."
Chock.
"Amanda!"
"Ain't you mad about Frankie?"
"Yes. But right now all I'm concerned wi—"
The branch creaked and cracked and Timmy Carter held out his arms like he was trying to stay balanced. We looked each other right in the eyes.
"Amanda," Timmy Carter began, and then there was a squeal like a rusty steel beam breaking in half, and the branch snapped, and down he went.
At the last second, he managed to grab onto the end, his legs dangling in the air. The final tank-bug lumbered underneath him, and his feet were inches from its hairy bladed stalks. I grabbed onto his forearms and tried to pull him up, but he was just too big.
"Can you reach the trunk with your legs?" I asked.
But before he could do anything, the creature below stopped and looked up. All of the little polar-crabs behind it stopped, too, and they started to swarm like ants. The monster's tongue zipped out of its mouth and snapped around Timmy Carter's leg like a lasso, and the rage and anger boiled up in me, washed over me like a wave. I thought, "Uh-uh. Not today."
Without a second thought, I jumped down onto the thing's head. My foot screamed when I landed, but that wasn't going to stop me. The thing tried to shake me off, and I latched onto its spiky horns. The polar-crabs behind it crawled up its legs and onto its back, heading for me. I only had a minute. Two at the most. The monster's tongue was pulled tight, yanking on Timmy Carter's leg, but he didn't let go, and I knew exactly what I needed to do. I crawled out onto that disgusting thing's warty face, flipped my knife in my hand, and started sawing away at the base of its tongue.
"Hurry up, Amanda!" Timmy Carter yelled.
"I'm trying!"
I told you before how Daddy kept his knife in tip-top shape, and since he died, I did the same, so you can believe me when I tell you that that blade could have sliced a truck in half. But that monster's tongue must've been made out of space metal or something because no matter how hard I sawed and hacked and gouged, the damn thing wouldn't give.
"Hold on tight, Timmy Carter!" I yelled.
I took out my .357, placed it up against the slimy surface, and fired. That did it. A chunk of its tongue blew off and black stuff poured out of the wound. I went back to hacking away at the rest, ignoring my burning skin, and cut all the way through. The monster screamed and squealed, rearing up on its hind legs, sending all the polar-crabs heading my way falling off this way and that. I flew back and hit my temple on its head-stalk. Stars dotted my vision, but I managed to wrap my legs around . . . I don't rightly know. Something that was sticking out of its body.
Wasn't nothing left for me to do but stab and stab and stab, and that's what I did, making my way back up to the front of its head and going for its eyes.
"Stupid bug!" I screamed. "That's what you get! That's what you get!"
It was squealing and squealing, but it couldn't do nothing more than fall down, and that's when I jumped off and shoved my rifle in its mouth. I had seven rounds. Six in my pocket and one in the chamber. I fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, fired and reloaded, kept at it until I didn't have any more left, and the thing had stopped squealing. But I wasn't done. I tore a chunk out of its face with my knife. I beat the side of its head with the butt of my rifle. Any time one of them stupid crabs came scrabbling up, I kicked it, or stomped it, or mashed it, or stabbed it.
I guess you could say that I was in my first bonafide frenzy. Hadn't ever felt anything like it in my life. I'm not going to lie. I liked it. I liked it more than staving Seb Mac's head in with the grip of my gun. I liked it better than hitting Annie O's face like it was a baseball. I liked it more than the time me and that banshee girl took out Hangnail. When I was done, I was breathless and spent and covered in bug gook, but that tank-bug was D E D, and there were at least thirty of them polar-crabs lying smashed on the ground around me.
"How about that, Timmy Carter!" I yelled.
But when I looked up, he was gone.

Coach Wulfang had us so pumped up with aggression by the end of the soccer season that I had turned into a bully. I was shouldering kids in the hallway, laughing at kids who looked different, and I even stole a little sixth grader's hot bun at lunch one day just because I could. When a few of my teachers told Coach Wulfang what was going on, she paid lip service to them about disciplining me, but the only thing that happened was that I had to run a few extra laps after practice one day.
"I hear you've been making some noise," she said to me when I was done.
"I guess."
"Your grades up?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Okay, then."
And she gave me a wink.
Daddy didn't like my behavior at all, and he did what he could as far as it pertained to his house and his rules, but when it came to soccer, ever since he told Coach Wulfang off, he'd adhered to a strict diet of I'm-going-to-let-Amanda-deal-with-this-one.
It all came crashing down during the last game of the season. I won't go into all the nitty-gritty, but all you need to know was that we were finally playing a team that was equal to, if not better than, us. Even worse, they played clean. I was like about to lose my marbles.
Second half. One to one. Five minutes on the clock. Coach Wulfang was apoplectic. She had gone from smugly watching on the sideline (arms folded over her chest, wrap-around sunglasses hugging her temples) to screaming and hollering and pacing back and forth. None of us knew what to do. Our brand of smash-mouth soccer wasn't working. Rather than coach us, Coach Wulfang mocked us.
"Stop plodding around like slugs!"
"My grandma's faster than that!"
And my favorite, "You're passing like a bunch of left-footed lepers."
I got so heated that on one play, a girl from the other team beat me and was about to score, and I just took her out. Slide tackled her from behind, making sure to hit the back of her calf with my cleats. She screamed and went down, her leg all wonky. They carted her off the field on a stretcher. The refs red-carded me, of course, and my teammates had to hold some of the other girls back as I left the field. They beat us anyway. Took us down three to one, and they didn't need to break nobody's leg, neither.
Daddy was not happy, and he punished me accordingly. It wasn't the double chores that bothered me so much as the silence. It felt like something had broken between us, like he didn't really want to be around me all that much. I could take him being mad. I could even take him yelling at me. But the notion that he'd lost respect for me was too much to bear. It was two weeks before I scrounged up enough courage to talk to him.
It was a Saturday, and we were eating breakfast, and he was about to get up and start loading the truck for the Farmer's Market.
"Daddy?" He didn't say anything, but he stopped. "You mad at me?"
"No 'Manda. I ain't mad."
"You're disappointed, I know."
"No. It ain't that, neither."
"Then why won't you talk to me? I'm about to die over here."
"I think you know the answer to that."
"I don't."
"Then you really need to start asking yourself some hard questions."
"What questions? Can you give me a hint?"
He sighed.
"All that anger, all that aggression . . . sure, you played hard, but are you proud of yourself?"

I trailed the line of monsters as they roamed their way across the county. At first, I thought the direction they were heading was a coincidence until I realized it wasn't. They were aiming for Hangnail's farm. I hid in the woods once we made it to the front gate. It was wide open, and sure enough, standing there ushering all the monsters in, was one of the boys who attacked me at The First Country Baptist Church.
So The Girl called those stupid monsters, huh? Probably had the whole thing planned out since last winter. And now Timmy Carter . . .
I let the idea roll around in my head. Timmy Carter was gone. It was just like all the rest. People I loved, people I barely knew, people I hated. Charlotte. Lynn. Daddy. Toni. Ray. Gary T. Mother Absalom. Uncle Zeus. Frankie. Maggie May. And now, Timmy Carter. He was the only person left in the world who gave a damn about me and who I gave a damn about.
I turned back into the woods, numb. I was angry, yeah, angrier than I'd ever been in my life, but all I could think about was what Daddy said to me so many years before. Once again, I let my anger get the best of me, and once again someone got hurt.
No, Daddy. I wasn't proud of myself back then, and I wasn't proud of myself when it happened again.