Just like my mama.
“I wanna go home.”
“Me too, buddy.”
But my home isn’t in Franklin Springs anymore. It’s locked in a cage three blocks away. Wes is my home now, and by this time tomorrow, he’ll be gone, too.
Because being good is a terminal disease around here.
Which probably means that I’m next.
I’ve been a good girl my whole entire life. Straight As and church on Sundays. Smile for the camera. Say please and thank you. Cheer at your boyfriend’s games. Suck his dick when he wants it. Always wear makeup, but not too much makeup. Look pretty, but not too pretty. Tiptoe around your daddy. You know he has issues. Don’t drink. Don’t smoke. Don’t curse. Respect your elders. Do as they say.
That’s what my mama taught me. She was as good as they come.
And she was the first one to go.
“Death to sheep,” the Bonys say.
How right they are.
As I rub Lamar’s back, the neon-orange stripes on my sleeve almost seem to glow in the dark. I follow them up to my shoulder and across my chest.
I might be a sheep, I think. But this sheep is wearing wolf’s clothing.
“Come on,” I say, giving Lamar a squeeze. “Help me pick him up.”
“What?” He sniffles, looking up at me with heartbroken brown eyes. “Why? Where are we going?”
“We’re going to do something bad.”
May 8
Wes
I take a deep breath, savoring the scent of burning leaves in the cool fall air until my lungs feel like they’re burning too.
The woods are a blazing blur of red and orange as my dirt bike flies over miles and miles of trail. It seems to go on forever, and that’s perfectly fucking fine with me. There’s no sense of urgency anymore, no doomsday clock, no guillotine hanging over my head. It’s just me and my girl and the woods I’ve called home since I was young enough to have one.
We bounce over a tree root in our path, and Rain giggles in my ear, squeezing me tighter. I used to love the way her tits felt while smashed against me whenever she rode on the back of my bike, but I think I love the way her round belly feels even more.
I suck in another breath and marvel at this fucked up new feeling.
It’s not just happiness. I was happy sleeping in a puddle on the floor of an abandoned mall with Rain by my side. No, this is something else.
This is everything else.
All of it. All the things I ever wanted but wasn’t stupid enough to hope for. Safety. Security. Love. Life. Fun. Freedom.
A future.
I close my eyes and inhale another lazy lungful of fresh air, but when I open them, I have to slam on the brakes. Rain squeals and clings to me for dear life as I skid sideways and stop inches away from a fifty-foot-long banner as it unfurls from an oak branch and blocks our path.
Like so many banners I’ve seen before, I expect one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse to be staring down at me—a cloaked demon riding on the back of a smoke-breathing black stallion, ready to chop my head off or light me on fire—but what I find there instead is even more terrifying.
The putrid, pasty scowl of Governor Fuckface. His jowly mouth opens, baring razor-sharp teeth that slam down again and again, missing us by millimeters.
I grab Rain and stumble away from the banner just as my bike disappears into the void of his cavernous mouth. From this distance, I can see the whole image now. It’s in similar shades of black and red and gray, like the April 23 banners we all saw in our nightmares, but instead of April 23 at the top, this one simply has a bull’s-eye.
Right in the middle of Fuckface’s forehead.
His bloodshot eyes dart left and right as his teeth continue to gnash at nothing, but just when I begin to feel like he’s no longer a threat, the trees shed their vibrant leaves in a single, sudden explosion. Rust-colored confetti rains from the sky as every tree in the forest begins to age in reverse. They shrink and shrivel up, twisting and contorting until they’re nothing but saplings again.
Then, they reach for us.
“Mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!” The banner man cackles as spindly branches grab for us like claws.
The sky goes dark, and the wind howls through the barren woods as I grab Rain’s hand and turn to run back the way we came.
“Wes!” she screams just before her hand is ripped away from mine.
“Rain!” I turn to find her six feet above the ground, suspended in the branches of a sapling.
She’s floating in some sort of pink primordial ooze, and the tree appears to be fucking feeding on her, growing bigger and stronger than all the others.
“We must return to the one true law!” Fuckface howls. “The law … of naychuh!”
My vision blurs. My fists ball at my sides. And when he opens his mouth to cackle again, I take off in a sprint. I’m going to rip him down and rip him apart and fucking feed him to himself until he chokes on his own evil hypocrisy, but before I get there, I notice his eyes go wide in fear as they focus on something behind me. I slow to a jog and turn around as people from all walks of life begin to march into the forest. The collective crunch, crunch, crunch of the leaves under their feet is deafening as they surround us, each one with a fist in the air.
“Seize them!” Fuckface shouts.
The trees come alive, snatching children from their mother’s arms, ripping families apart as they scream and reach for one another. Pink plasma surrounds their tangled, trapped loved ones as the trees feed on
