“You’re real stupid, you know that?” he says.

“How’s that?”

“You abused me. I’m going to have your badge.”

“I have a badge?”

The question sounds rhetorical.

Then Cyrus is thrown upward. He expected his arm to cry out in pain and his limbs to spread as he fell. But he’s still strapped to the gurney, and technically that’s what was just thrown toward the ceiling, not him. When it drops, some force grabs it in what can only be a confident grip. Then he’s ascending again, with a few jerks here and there before he levels out. The word he wants to apply to what he’s feeling seems downright inappropriate, impossible even. But there’s no other way to describe it. He’s being held. Not just held, carried. Somehow that bitch threw the gurney’s plank and his entire body weight up into the air as if they both weighed nothing, and now she’s carrying him in both hands over her head.

He’s staring up at the truck’s rusted ceiling when cool night air washes his body. The cargo door’s open, and they’re getting close to it. Panic flares. She’ll have to lower him before she steps out from the back. There’s no way she can . . .

A pathetic-sounding yelp escapes him as he drops down into the night. Impossible, he thinks, fucking impossible.

She just jumped from the back of the truck while holding him and the plank high above her head like they had the combined weight of a basket of feathers. She didn’t even pause to use the drop step on the bumper, and her arms didn’t even recoil slightly from the impact with the ground.

“Wait a minute, wait a minute . . .” He assumed he was just thinking these words; then he realizes he’s saying them aloud, and he sounds both dazed and pathetic. But the woman doesn’t stop; she’s carrying him sideways, away from the cargo door as a shadow, possibly belonging to her partner, lowers the door. With the truck’s engine cut and the taillights dark, the field will descend into almost total darkness as soon as that door’s closed. Somehow that thought frightens him more than being trapped in the truck with these two fuckers.

The gurney’s lowered, then tilts so suddenly his stomach knots. His eyes haven’t adjusted yet, but he’s gone vertical now and the woman’s as close as a lover. Her breath grazes his neck. But that’s the only part of her touching him. He hears a low crackle at his feet. It sounds almost like flame, but it’s too quiet and there’s no light. It’s the sound of earth splitting from constant, steady pressure. That’s when he realizes she’s driving the foot of the gurney’s plank down into the earth itself.

Impossible . . .

He’s thought the word countless times and spoken it aloud even more than that. But never with this much fear, never with his heart roaring like this.

Then she steps away, leaving him standing upright like a stake, and there’s another sound. Footsteps. But they’re loud. Too loud, it seems, to be human, crunching dirt like it’s broken glass.

It’s stress, he tells himself. His mind’s playing tricks. Hell, maybe he’s had a psychotic break.

But the fierce beam of light that suddenly pierces the dark before him doesn’t have the quality of a hallucination. The bright halo of a flashlight hits the dirt a few feet from him, and that’s when he sees little craters in the dirt. Not craters. Footprints. Footsteps made by something impossibly heavy but the size of a human.

The connections his mind is making are worse than the pain of his broken arm. Because the footsteps make him think of the way she lifted him in a two-handed grip, of the power with which she wedged the gurney plank into the dirt, of the sudden, impossible speed with which she yanked him through the divider and strapped him to the gurney.

Whoever’s holding the flashlight, probably the woman’s partner, wants Cyrus to see what he’s been denying now for too long. The woman who left those footprints isn’t impossibly heavy; she’s impossibly strong, and she ground those footsteps into the earth on purpose.

When the flashlight beam finds her, she’s standing at the back of the truck. The sound that happens next doesn’t belong in nature, and it turns most of his skin to gooseflesh. He’s heard giant pieces of metal shredded by fast and furious winds or split-second collisions, but he’s never heard them emit this kind of low protest as they’re torn from something by a powerful force that’s just taking its sweet damn time. In the flashlight beam, he sees Hailey Brinkmann rip the entire length of the drop step bumper from the back of the truck. The metal doesn’t screech; it whines, the tops of the four vertical support beams popping free like fence stakes as she tears the bumper off like a Band-Aid.

Then she drops it to the dirt with a sound like a giant tuning fork.

“I need you to answer my questions, Cyrus.”

Before he can say anything, she places a hand at the bottom of one of the vertical support beams and pulls it free as if it’s made of taffy.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

Some stubborn instinct tries to make him protest, but the sound that comes out of him is so phlegmy and incoherent he thinks he might be having a stroke.

The evil bitch shakes her head as if she’s disappointed.

Then the broken crossbar is suddenly flying through the air toward him, so fast the flashlight beam can’t keep up. When it vanishes into darkness midflight, Cyrus emits a yowl that sounds animallike, braces to be pierced through his center like the lizards he used to torture as a kid. Then there’s a crackling impact. Cyrus winces. The flashlight beam finds the crossbar, speared in the dirt a short distance away. Another few feet and it would have pierced him straight through.

“Are you ready, Cyrus?” the woman who shouldn’t exist asks.

But Cyrus doesn’t answer because he’s realizing the wet heat down his leg means one thing: he’s pissed himself for the first time in his life. And that’s when the pain from his broken arm finally makes him cry.

When another spear hits the dirt a few feet away, he loses control of all the sounds coming from him just like he lost control of his bladder. He hears his wrenching sobs as if from a distance and knows he’s crying out for help from gods he’s never believed in and a host of others. Even thinks, for a moment, that he’s looking down on himself from above and wonders if he’s died from the shock of it all.

But then he feels hot breath on his face, blinks, and sees the impossibly strong woman is standing inches away, her nose practically touching his. That’s when he realizes he’s still very much alive, and his hysterical words revealed something that has brought her close.

“Who’s Mother?” she asks.

III

19

Lubbock, Texas

1969

Marjorie Payne wishes her father was the one driving the Plymouth GTX and the two of them were on another one of their excursions into the vast, empty fields that surround their town. The kind of night when they’d sit together on the hood of the car, drinking Dr Peppers and eating moon pies and trying to spot the satellite that’d been put into space that year, all while her daddy spoke of the stars overhead as if they were a vast, unknowable ocean and the plains of West Texas its only coast.

But it’s her mother behind the wheel, and the woman’s pelting Daddy with a dozen frantic questions about the accident that’s rendered him unable to drive. The same one that had him limping to the nearest service station to call for their help. He’s in too much pain to answer them, but of course, that doesn’t stop her shrill, insistent mother, and once again, Marjorie finds herself stuck in a back seat, gazing out a window and remembering that the curse of being a teenager is knowing how your momma can be a better wife and not being able to tell her because she just won’t listen.