But truth be told, I’ll never know for sure.

For that was the precise moment when men dressed entirely in black, their goggles and helmets reflecting the evening sun, burst from the woods on all sides of us, ordering us to hit the ground, facedown, hands up. For an instant their long guns were like fingers of darkness sprouting from the shadows. Daniel and Abigail made sounds I’d never heard them make before. Not just cries of alarm but furious wails and profanity I wouldn’t learn the meaning of until later.

A boot heel pressed Abigail’s face to the leaf-strewn soil. Daniel made a run for it before he was tackled to the ground. I was knocked backward and dragged away, the bluebird alighting from my suddenly open hands. What saved its life? My refusal to kill, or chance?

I wish I knew for sure.

I

In light of the conflicting and in many cases inaccurate press accounts of a recent event in the Burnham College Talks Series, the program coordinators have decided to post both a partial and a full transcript of the event to their website. The partial transcript appears below.

“OF HUMAN MONSTERS,” A TALK WITH LOWELL PIERCE AND HIS DAUGHTER, TRINA PIERCE, DISCUSSING THEIR BESTSELLING BOOK OF THE SAME TITLE AS WELL AS THE SAVAGE WOODS FILMS THE BOOK INSPIRED—BURNHAM COLLEGE, COLORADO SPRINGS, CO

(Excerpt)

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Mr. Pierce, we’ve certainly heard a lot from you today, but we haven’t heard much from your daughter, and so I’d like to direct this question to her.

LP: Sure. Of course.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: So this week the fifth film in the Savage Woods franchise was released, and while it’s common knowledge these films are based on your exp— TP: They’re not based on my experiences.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: Right. But . . . I mean, not literally, but they’re inspired by—I guess what I’m saying is if you’d been forced, I mean . . . they were holding you hostage, so it’s not like people wouldn’t understand if they made you— TP: Are you asking me if I killed someone on that farm?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: I’m asking you if what we saw in the first Savage Woods film might have some more basis in reality than you’ve been willing to discuss.

TP: So you’re asking me if I shoved someone into an incinerator while they were alive? When I was seven?

LP: Trina, let’s just—

TP: Let’s just what, Dad? I mean . . . again? Again with this question?

LP: (inaudible)

TP: (inaudible) . . . No. The answer’s no. I’ve never killed anyone. The movie’s a bunch of lies. It doesn’t have anything to do with me at all.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1: But it was based on your life, I mean— MODERATOR: All right, maybe there are some other questions that can steer us back toward the book so we can focus on— TP: It was based on a book my father wrote about my life when I was eight.

(Murmurs onstage, inaudible. Crowd noises.) LP: What Trina means is that in order to give an accurate picture of what she went through at the time, a lot of us had to work together to make the book a reality. There was not only the matter of her age but also the trauma she’d been through and— TP: Translation: I had nothing to do with that book.

LP: Well, of course you didn’t; you were only eight years old. I mean . . . an eight-year-old can’t write a book.

MODERATOR: Do we have another question?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: Yes, I . . . I mean, is it OK to ask about the movies, like, at all?

(Laughter.)

TP: No.

(More laughter.)

TP: No, I mean, whatever your question about the movies is, the answer’s no. No, I haven’t spent my life being stalked by the Bannings’ cannibal cousins. Because the Bannings weren’t cannibals, and they didn’t have any cousins. And, no, everyone I get close to isn’t horribly murdered.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 2: OK. But is it true you die in this one?

TP: Fingers crossed.

(Laughter. Some applause.)

LP: Trina, that’s enough. Why don’t we— TP: Is it enough, though, Dad? Is it finally enough? Can we finally stop doing this every time a new movie comes out?

MODERATOR: OK. Now I’m confident that someone out there has some questions about the book, which presents some very valuable, if harrowing, lessons on how we can spot and avoid psychopaths who might seek to— LP: Exactly. Why don’t we take one more question about the book, and then we’ll begin the book signing? There’s a hand up in the back, I think.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: So . . . um . . . Burning Girl.

TP: Don’t call me that.

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Excuse me?

TP: I said don’t call me that name.

(Crowd noises. Scattered boos.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: I wasn’t going to call you that; I was just bringing it up as an example . . . OK. You know what? This is cute and all, like, this little display, I guess you’d call it. But you’ve been profiting off what happened to you for almost a decade now. I’m just wondering where all this self-righteousness comes from all of a sudden. Why are you upset now?

(Light applause.)

TP: I’ve been profiting? You do know I’m sixteen, right?

(Laughter.)

LP: OK. That’s enough. Look. Trina and I have devoted our lives to turning her terrible experience into a set of tools people can use to avoid falling prey to monsters like the Bannings. This is our life’s work. It always will be. Now, as I have said repeatedly, we can’t be held responsible for the creative license Hollywood takes with Trina’s story. We’re not producers on the Savage Woods films. We never granted script approval, so it simply isn’t— TP: He gets a percentage of the gross. Do you guys know how that works? It’s a Hollywood thing— LP: Trina!

TP: If they promise you a percentage of the net, you’ll never get anything because they’ve got accountants who can make it look like the movie never made a profit. But if you get part of the gross, you always get paid. He gets a part of the gross on every Savage Woods movie, including the one where I supposedly shoved someone in an incinerator. Where are you going, Dad?

(Lowell Pierce removes his microphone and leaves the stage.) TP: It was supposed to be a miniseries, you see? Real fact based, true to life. But then they came to him and they said it would make a lot more money as a horror movie franchise. They could make them real cheap. They wouldn’t have to cast any stars. Maybe pump out a lot of sequels. And he said yes as long as they gave him a cut of the profits. As long as he could quit his job. Cheap torture porn about his own daughter. That’s his life’s work. And mine, too, apparently. Now, are there any other questions before I go vomit like I always do after these things?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 3: Yeah. I got one. Why are you such a bitch?

TP: I don’t know. Why are you a basement-dwelling psychopath who gets a boner watching women get tortured?

(Inaudible outburst. Sound equipment distortions. Security escorts Trina Pierce offstage.)

1

Jason Briffel reads the transcript again.

His hands are shaking. If anyone inside this roadside diner notices how badly he’s sweating, they’ll probably blame the baking desert heat outside.

But it’s not the heat.

It’s the same full-body reaction he experiences every time he reads the ten-year-old record of the last time Trina appeared onstage with her birth father.

Normally the transcript focuses him, which is why he picked it up after the plate of steak and eggs in front of him failed to ignite his appetite. He thought it would collect his scattered thoughts, channel his anxiety and doubt into action.

It’s been seven years since he showed up on the doorstep of her grandmother’s house in California, even longer since he mailed her those letters explaining how her birth father and her so-called rescue by the authorities had averted her true destiny. Her soul was being starved. Together, the two of them could reawaken that exceptional and enlightened young girl Daniel and Abigail Banning had coaxed into being.

But today the transcript hasn’t worked its usual magic. Reading it has left him angry and confused.

He’s gripped now by the humiliating memory of what happened to him that fateful night at Burnham College. He’s feeling the vise grip of the two blazer-clad security guards who’d appeared out of nowhere right after he entered the auditorium. The ones who’d threatened to call the cops as they carried him out so quickly he could practically feel the wind in his hair.

A hopeful, perhaps foolish part of him had been convinced that someone in Trina’s inner circle would have seen the wisdom in his letters.

Abigail Banning certainly had.