served and the guys he’d served it with. Some of them had never made it back home, like Tyler Henry from York, Pennsylvania, killed when their convoy hit an IED while crossing through the desert; Will McCann from central Ohio, killed by a sniper inside the Green Zone; or Don Bloom from Trenton, New Jersey, who’d been captured by the renegade remnants of Saddam Hussein’s fedayeen, tortured and then, after being rescued, had gone AWOL somewhere inside the country. Nobody was sure why, or where he’d gone, or what had happened to him. The rumors ran the gamut, each one wilder than the previous. Bloom had fallen in love with an Iraqi girl and was hiding with her family. Bloom had crossed the border into Jordan and became a smuggler. Bloom had crossed the border into Syria or Iran and was selling them military secrets. Bloom was working for a private security contractor. Bloom had joined up with Black Lodge, the paranormal paramilitary group that didn’t even exist but was the wet dream of conspiracy theorists all across the Internet. All kinds of crazy theories, and Donny was pretty sure that none of them were true.
Donny thought of Henry and McCann and Bloom often, but he thought even more frequently about his friends who
Donny Osborne was twenty-four going on eighty-four.
He glanced back at the house again, and his gaze lingered on the for-sale sign in the yard. The sign was new—less than a week old—but already looked weather-beaten and worn, just like the house itself. The realtor (a red-headed woman named Mallory Lau who, despite being twice his age, had mercilessly hit on Donny even though he kept declining her advances) had promised him she’d do her best, but Donny wasn’t holding his breath. Brinkley Springs was full of similar signs, many of them from her real-estate office. With the economy still down, it was a buyer’s market right now—except that there were no buyers. Each morning, new realtor signs seemed to have sprung up overnight. The houses weren’t selling. New construction was nonexistent. In short, the town was old and sick and weary. The town was dying. No, not dying. Maybe the town didn’t know it yet, but Brinkley Springs was dead.
Just like his mother.
Donny could have stayed in the military after his second tour of duty. He’d certainly wanted to stay in. He was decorated—including a Bronze Star— and he’d already made E-. He’d been the type of soldier they needed more of, and the brass hadn’t been shy about letting him know that the army offered him big bonuses and all sorts of extra benefits if he’d re-up again. He’d planned on doing it. It wasn’t that he desired to make a career out of the army. He could do without combat, and the endless hours of monotony in between firefights—the “hurry up and wait” mentality so prevalent in the military.
But he really didn’t have any other options that appealed to him. He could have taken advantage of the G.I. Bill, of course, and let the government pay for his college education, but there was nothing in particular that Donny had wanted to study. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. All that he knew was that he didn’t want to spend that life trapped in Brinkley Springs. The army provided him with a way to do that, a way to escape. Unfortunately, in the end, Brinkley Springs had sucked him back. A line of dialogue from the third Godfather movie ran through his head.
“Just when I thought I was out,” Donny said, doing his best Al Pacino imitation, “they pull me back in.”
He could have re-upped, could have gotten the big reenlistment bonus and the offer of full retirement at age forty, and never had to set foot in Brinkley Springs again, except for the occasional holiday when home on leave, had his mother not gotten sick.
The cancer had been slow but deadly, ravaging her body one cell at a time with unerring precision. The doctors down in Beckley had discovered it by accident. Mom had gone in for a checkup while Donny was still on his second tour in Iraq. They’d discovered a lump in her abdomen, but had assured her it was merely a lipoma, a benign tumor composed of nothing more than extra fatty tissue. And they’d been right. The lump they’d removed was benign, but the tumors they discovered beneath it during the operation were malignant. So were the ones that followed.
His father had died when Donny was ten years old. He’d been coming home from work late one night after a full day of cutting timber on Bald Knob and had rolled his truck down a mountainside between Punkin Center and Renick. After plunging eighty feet, there wasn’t much left of him or the truck. Investigators were never able to determine what had happened. Maybe a deer had run out in front of him. Maybe he’d fallen asleep. Maybe another car had run him off the narrow road. Or maybe it had just been one of those things—dumb luck, the kind that altered lives forever. In any case, no matter what the reason, his father had never come home that night.
His mother had never remarried. As far as Donny knew, she’d never even dated again. He had no siblings, so when his mother got sick, he’d returned home, come back to Brinkley Springs to take care of her. He slept in his old bedroom. At night, after his mother was asleep in a haze of painkillers and sedatives, Donny had lain in that old bedroom and stared at the ceiling. It felt like a prison, and with each passing night, the walls had seemed to draw closer.
Mom had lingered for just over a year. They’d tried various treatments, but none of them had worked, and some of them had made her sicker than the cancer itself. In the end, she’d succumbed. Donny had been by her side in the hospital when it happened.
Now she was gone, and in a minute, as soon as he climbed back in his pickup truck and started the engine, Donny would be gone, too. This time for good.
“I’m sorry, Mom.”
The street lights blinked out. Donny stared up at them, waiting for the illumination to return, but it didn’t.
“Fucking town. Nothing works around here anymore. Even the lights are dead.”
Something screamed in the night. Donny jumped, startled. It sounded like an injured woman or child. The cry came from the woods, shattering the stillness. After a moment, he realized what it was. The shrieks belonged to a screech owl. He’d been terrified of that sound as a young boy, but had forgotten all about it in adulthood—as adulthood had given him all new things to be afraid of.
“Damn it.”
With a third sigh, Donny turned away from the house and clambered up into the cab of the truck. The seat springs groaned as he climbed inside. He slammed the door, rolled the window down and slipped his key into the ignition. He was about to start it when someone called his name.
“Donny? Donny, wait!”
Surprised, Donny leaned his head out the window and glanced behind him. The streetlights still hadn’t returned, and at first, all he saw was a shadow. Then, as the figure drew closer, he recognized it. Marsha Cummings was hurrying down the street toward him. Her flip-flops beat a steady rhythm on the pavement.
Swallowing the sudden lump in his throat, Donny turned the key in the ignition. Nothing happened.
“Shit.”
He tried it again, but the engine refused to turn over. When he tried the headlights, he found that they were dead, as well.
“Donny,” Marsha called again. “Wait a minute, goddamn it!”
Sighing a fourth and final time, Donny let his fingers fall away from the keys. He waited for Marsha to reach him, and repeated the Pacino line under his breath.
“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”
And that was when the dogs began to howl.
***
“Yo, turn this shit up,” Sam said, reaching for the computer mouse. On the monitor, iTunes had just segued from Redman to Kanye West. The bass line thumped softly from two speakers and a subwoofer hooked into the back of the computer.
“Leave it alone,” Randy warned, smacking his friend’s hand away. “My parents are still awake. We don’t need
