Chapter 9: After Action (Patreon)

In the Army, after anything goes wrong, and after a lot of things that go right, you do an After Action Review.

It isn't complicated. Everybody who was there sits down, usually on the tailgate of a truck, usually filthy, and somebody with rank asks four questions: What was supposed to happen? What actually happened? Why was there a difference? What do we do next time? No blame, no medals. You take the thing apart honestly while it's still fresh and look at every piece, especially the ones you don't like.

I didn't go back to sleep after he left. I lay in the dark until the alarm went off at five, listening to the house and to the place in the back of my head where nobody was listening back—the fridge humming downstairs, Dad snoring through the wall low and even like a diesel idling, something small and busy rustling in a Nike shoebox on my desk. Then I got up, turned on the desk lamp, opened the unicorn notebook to a clean page, and held my own After Action Review. Just me and a hamster. Just me, now, all the way through.

The hamster was Maga-Z. He'd gotten out of the shoebox sometime in the night, through the airhole he'd spent hours chewing bigger, and now he was at the very edge of the desk, looking down at the carpet and measuring the drop. He'd been facing me when I woke up from the dream. Now that I was up, he'd gone back to work, like an inmate who'd made it over the first wall and was planning the second. He'd probably been at it all night; I had no idea. There was nobody in the back seat anymore to tell me what happened while I slept.

I wrote across the top of the page in Randy's terrible handwriting:

AAR: WOODSBORO + SPRINGWOOD

And under that:

WHY WE WON

Then I sat with the pen over the paper, because I knew what was going on the list and didn't want to write it, which is exactly why you write it.

WHY WE WON ✎✗ Ghostface was two teenagers. Two DORKS. In Halloween store costumes with a voice changer and kitchen knives. No training. No discipline. They monologued. They stopped to argue about their MOTIVES. They had a SCRIPT, and they followed it even when it was going wrong. If they'd been one guy who knew what he was doing, I'd be dead on the Machers' lawn and so would Sid.✗ I had a GUN. It worked on Ghostface, but that's because they were normies with knives, not anything worse.✗ The remote. The other me's dream power. It just happened to be the one thing in the universe that hard-counters Freddy Krueger, whose whole act is TIMING and DRAMA. If the kid's power had been a sword? Dead. A wizard hat? Dead. We rolled the one answer on the test and we didn't even study. And he's gone now, to greener pastures.✗ Freddy runs on fear. By the end, NOBODY was scared of him. We made him a joke in his own house and that WEAKENED him. That wasn't really strategy. That was us being assholes and it happened to work.✗ Kristen. Nancy. Neil. Max. Donald with a crowbar. Seven kids. Gale with a credit card. Dad with his car keys. I did not win anything ALONE.

I read it back. It was a pretty damning document. Under it I wrote:

WHAT I DID THAT WAS ACTUALLY GOOD:✗ Knew the plot (not really actionable in Freddy's case, to be honest).

That was the whole list. I knew the plot, and everything else was dice.

Part of me wanted to argue. That's not true. You shot Stu. You talked the sheriff around. You figured out the batteries. You got on a plane to Ohio. It came up in a voice a little higher than mine and a lot more offended, the way the kid would've said it from the back seat a week ago, except there was no back seat now. It was just me, arguing with myself in two registers.

I shot Stu left-handed from eight feet while he stood still on a lawn monologuing. A twelve-year-old could have made that shot. I got shot first. I got cut first. In the dream I got gutted, and a skinny kid with a remote rewound me, twice—and the remote was gone. Last night it had gone into the inside pocket of a green vest, through a screen door, into a gold light, and it wasn't coming back. Neither register had an answer to that.

That's the trouble with being the guy who knows the plot: the plot runs out. I knew Scream. I knew Dream Warriors. I knew them backward from a hundred rewatches and a channel's worth of videos picking them apart, and I'd still come within an inch of dying in both, with the answer key, against the two softest targets the genre has. A couple of film nerds with a grudge, and a dream demon who's only as strong as you let him be.

Next time it wasn't going to be soft. Next time it might be something that didn't monologue or care about jokes. Something like the Shape in Haddonfield, who has never said a single word in any version of any of his movies, who you can shoot six times and he'll get up anyway, who doesn't need you to be afraid of him, because he doesn't need anything from you at all except to be in the room. Something I couldn't laugh at.

I looked at the page a while. Then I turned to a fresh one and wrote at the top, underlining it twice:

THE RANDY MEEKS REHABILITATION AND GETTING LESS PATHETIC PROGRAMv2: BECAUSE LUCK RUNS OUT

PROGRAM v2 ✎✗ RUN. Every day. 5 a.m. Before anybody's up. Three miles now. Five by Thanksgiving. (Martha is fired as pace car. Can't afford her.)✗ STRENGTH. Dad's old weight bench in the garage (under the tarp, behind the Christmas boxes). Push-ups. Pull-ups. Dips. Squats. EVERY DAY.✗ GRIP. Randy has the grip strength of a wet napkin. Fix it. Climbing? (Flyer at the Y: MISSION CLIFFS — SF — INDOOR CLIMBING.)✗ SHOOTING. Left hand AND right hand. Red Ryder until Dad lets me at the range. Novice Shooting says I learn fast if I train. TRAIN.✗ SWORD. Soul Solid is useless if I can't use it. Fencing? Kendo? Is there kendo in Woodsboro??? (Probably not. We don't even have a sushi place.)✗ FIRST AID. Real class. Red Cross. Kristen bled on a bathroom floor in Ohio and all I knew was "pressure," from the one time I wandered into the wrong class back in Basic.✗ POWERS. Test them all, away from everybody, since the last thing I need is to transform with Martha close by.✗ Ask Gloria for help with strength, grip, and running. She'll be a hassle if I don't consult her.

I put the pen down.

On the desk, Maga-Z had given up on the drop and turned around. He was watching me now, eyes narrowed to slits, front paws rubbing together like a villain in a silent movie.

"What?" I said.

He looked at the notebook, then at me, and then he did something I'd never seen an animal do, and that I would see him do about eleven thousand more times in the coming weeks: he nodded, slowly, like a man agreeing to terms he intended to renegotiate later.

I ran three miles in the dark with Randy's Walkman clipped to my waistband, playing a cassette I'd found in his desk labeled JOHN CARPENTER: THEMES in silver marker. It was exactly as on-the-nose as you'd think, and I'm not apologizing for it.

Woodsboro at five in the morning is a different town. Streetlights still on. Sprinklers ticking. Somebody's dog going off as I passed, then the next dog down, like a relay. The Woodsboro Herald delivery van almost hit me at the corner of Elm and Turner, and the guy leaned out the window to yell "Get a reflector, kid!" and then, half a block later, slowed down and yelled, "Hey, are you the kid from the TV?" I gave him a thumbs-up and didn't stop. He was still yelling when I turned the corner.

By the second mile my left lung was doing the thing where it burns on the way in. By the third I had a stitch under my ribs, exactly where the glove had gone in during the dream, and for one horrible second I could feel it again—the cold, the door opening in my side. I slowed to a walk and put my hand there, and there was nothing, just a sweaty Bradley Video T-shirt and a skinny ribcage pumping like a bellows.

It's not there, I told myself. He took it back. And then, because it was true now in a way it hadn't been on Monday: I took it back. The grammar of that was going to take some getting used to. I started running again. The only answer I've ever found to that feeling is to keep moving until it can't keep up.

When I got back the kitchen light was on. Mom stood at the counter in her robe with a cup of coffee and the radio on low, a man's voice very pleased with himself: ...President Clinton, reelected last night by a comfortable margin, told supporters in Little Rock... She looked at me. I was soaked, steaming a little in the cold kitchen air, and making a sound like a leaky accordion.

"You were in Ohio," my mother said, "yesterday."

"I know."

"You flew home last night."

"Yeah."

"It is five-forty in the morning, Randy."

"I'm training."

She looked at me over her coffee with an expression I couldn't read. I'd been getting better at reading her, but not this one. "For what?"

The only true answer was the next one, so I didn't give one. I drank two glasses of water standing at the sink while she watched, and when I put the glass down she said, softly, in the voice you'd use on somebody standing too close to an edge, "Honey. It's over. Isn't it?"

She meant Woodsboro. She meant Ohio and Kristen and the gun and all of it, and maybe something she couldn't have named—that her son had come down the stairs this morning a little different again, for the second time in six weeks. Mothers notice.

"It's never over," I said. I couldn't lie to her, and I didn't want to. "All I can hope for is a little peace before something happens again."

She held my eyes a second longer. Then she nodded slowly, turned the radio up a little, and made me eggs, and didn't ask anything else.

Four things I learned about the Four Dark Devas of Destruction in the first forty-eight hours.

One: they don't go into storage. I tried. The Gacha has a place in my head where it keeps things—Soul Solid lives there; the sword comes out of nowhere into my hand when I want it and goes back to nowhere when I don't—so I held my hand over the shoebox and thought store, hard, the way I thought sword. Nothing. I tried dismiss. I tried return. I tried Pokéball, which isn't a thing yet in 1996 America, and felt stupid about it for an hour. Four hamsters looked up at me out of the shoebox with polite, patient interest, like waiters waiting for you to finish your sentence. They were here, and they were staying. They were familiars, not items, and you don't put a familiar in a drawer, unless it climbs into the drawer itself and refuses to leave, like the stray cat I found asleep in my underwear drawer a long time ago.

Two: they don't eat lettuce. I tried that too. I brought up a leaf of iceberg from the fridge, a few sunflower seeds from the bag Dad kept for the birdfeeder, and a single Cheerio. The sunflower seeds vanished in about four seconds. The Cheerio was carried off by the big one and hidden in the corner of the shoebox with a great deal of ceremony. The lettuce, all four of them looked at, then at me, then at each other, and then, I swear to God, they turned their backs on it, all four at once, like I'd served them something rude.

Three: they have names. I knew that already. They came with them, the way the remote came with buttons.

Cham-P was the biggest, a solid golden-orange dinner roll of a hamster and easily the strongest of the four. He was the one who'd hauled the Cheerio, a load half his size, and he was always first out of the box to meet anything new, chest out, like somebody had to make sure it was safe and it might as well be him. At night he slept curled around the others like a wall.

San-D was the smallest, orange and white, with the biggest, shiniest black eyes I'd ever seen on an animal. She liked to cuddle. Every time I put my hand in the box she climbed into my palm, walked up my arm, and tucked herself under my chin, and when she looked up at me it was the way Kristen had looked at the kid on the gurney, checking whether I was okay. As far as I could tell, she cared about everything.

Jum-P was asleep. That was his whole personality, as far as forty-eight hours could tell me. He slept in the shoebox, in my sock, in the hood of my sweatshirt, and once, for an entire afternoon, in the cup of my bike helmet. His feet twitched while he dreamed. He was the quietest thing I've ever met, and in two days I'd seen him fully awake exactly twice.

Maga-Z was tan and a little scruffy, with narrow, conniving eyes that always looked like they were planning something, because they were. He was the reason the shoebox had a new hole in it every morning. He'd bitten me twice, both times on purpose, both times after looking me in the eye first. I was pretty sure he could kill a man. I was pretty sure he'd thought about it.

Four: they understand me. Dogs understand sit and stay; these four understand English. Wednesday night after work I sat on my bedroom floor and said, feeling like an idiot, "Okay. Everybody line up."

They lined up. A row on the carpet, smallest to biggest, three of them sitting up on their hind legs at once with their little paws held in front of their chests like a barbershop quartet waiting for the pitch pipe, and Jum-P asleep in his spot, because Cham-P had carried him there in his mouth, set him down gently in line, and taken his own place next to him.

I stared at them. "Cham-P. Go touch the door."

Cham-P went and touched the door with one paw, came back, and got back in line.

"Holy shit," I said. "Holy shit," I said again, and the second one cracked in the middle, seventeen and delighted, out of a part of me that used to be somebody else and wasn't anymore.

"Maga-Z," I said. "Salute."

He saluted. It looked sarcastic.

I put my face in my hands and laughed until I couldn't breathe, on my bedroom floor, while three hamsters in tiny scarves sat in a perfect row waiting for their next order, and the fourth slept.

The only problem with four genius hamsters was hiding them from a thirteen-year-old girl who lived across the hall and had heard my shirt squeak.

That, and they needed things: a real cage eventually, a wheel, bedding that wasn't shredded Fangoria, food that wasn't stolen birdseed. So Wednesday afternoon on the way to my shift I stopped at the Thrifty on Main, where I'd bought forty-eight batteries four days and one lifetime ago, and went to the pet aisle. The pet aisle at the Thrifty on Main is one shelf between the motor oil and the greeting cards, and it held a bag of hamster pellets, a bag of cedar shavings, a little plastic water bottle, and a wheel. That was the whole selection. I took one of each.

The girl at the register wasn't the kid from Saturday. Sixteen, braces, a name tag that said BRITTANY. She looked at the hamster pellets, then at me. "You're the battery guy. Kevin told everybody. You bought, like, every battery in the store."

"Yep."

"Are those for... a hamster?"

"Four hamsters."

"With batteries?"

"Sorry, am I a paying customer?" I said. "Jesus Christ. Can't buy hamster food in this town without getting interrogated."

Brittany rang me up very slowly, watching my face, and when she handed me the bag she said, "You're that guy. From TV. The website guy."

"Yeah."

"My mom says you're a bad influence," Brittany said. Then, after a second: "I think your site's cool." She went bright red, looked down at the register, and didn't look up again until I'd left.

I walked out of the Thrifty with a bag of hamster pellets and a feeling like a balloon going up, which I recognized after a second as the kid's, and a second after that as mine. It was mine now. Apparently a sixteen-year-old at a drugstore register liking my website made me feel ten feet tall, and I was going to have to live with that, the same way I'd have to live with having been kissed exactly once, on the cheek, four days ago, and considering myself an expert.

Bradley Video.

I'd been back at work for a week and a half before Ohio. Mr. Bradley had held my job through the hospital and the funeral season and the week the town went crazy, which he didn't have to do, and I'd been trying to pay him back by being the best employee in the history of the store. I showed up on time. I alphabetized. I rewound returns. I didn't argue with customers about whether Dead by Dawn II was a comedy. Much.

Then I came back from Ohio and started doing pull-ups in the back room.

In my defense, the back room has a perfect doorframe—solid oak, with a good two inches of lip where it meets the wall, right at the height where a six-foot kid can reach it flat-footed. I noticed it the first week and couldn't un-notice it. The whole point of PROGRAM v2 was every day, a four-hour shift is four hours, and the after-school rush at Bradley Video in the second week of November is, conservatively, one customer every twenty minutes. So. Pull-ups.

Not good ones. My right shoulder had a hole in it six weeks ago, and Gloria the physical therapist would've murdered me with her bare hands if she'd seen. I did them mostly with my left, the right just along for the ride, and the first afternoon Randy's body managed four. Four. Theo at his peak could do twenty-two dead-hangs in full kit. Randy did four, and on the fourth his arms shook like a Chihuahua in a snowstorm and he made a sound like a door hinge.

It was pathetic. It was also one more than yesterday, and yesterday I'd done none, which made it technically infinity percent more. That was a Randy thought. It came out of me fully formed and very proud of itself, and a week ago I'd have heard it in his voice from the back seat. Now it was just something I thought, and I let it stay.

Then there were the calf raises. You can do calf raises standing at a register; nobody can see your feet behind the counter. You stand there scanning tapes, slowly rising on your toes and slowly sinking back down, forever, and nobody knows. Except I was six feet tall and the counter at Bradley Video was not, and from the customer's side, apparently, it looked like a very tall, very skinny teenager rising and sinking behind the counter like a buoy in a gentle swell while telling you Never Sleep Again 2 was due back Friday.

"Are you..." said the woman renting Never Sleep Again 2. She was maybe forty, with a kid of about ten hanging on her arm. "Are you okay?"

"Never better, ma'am."

She watched me rise. She watched me sink. "Is it a... medical thing?"

"It's a training thing."

"For what?"

I almost said the next one. I caught it and gave her the yearbook smile instead. "Senior year."

She took her tape and her kid and left, glancing back twice. On the way out the kid said in a loud whisper, "Mom, that's the guy from TV," and she said, "I know, honey, don't stare," and the door jingled shut.

I looked at the empty space on the shelf where Never Sleep Again 2 had been. It was the store's most-rented tape that week—Springwood had been on the news. He's gone, I thought. We watched Nancy pull the tape out. And then the other thing, the one there was nobody left to hide from: in every timeline I'd ever heard of, Never Sleep Again had a part three.

Planks came last. Planks, I figured, I could do in the dead hour between five and six, when it was dark out, the after-school kids had gone home, and the after-dinner adults hadn't left the house yet, and the store was just me and the hum of the fluorescents and the trailer loop on the TV in the window. Planks are invisible. You lie down on the floor behind the counter on your forearms and hold yourself straight as a board, and nobody can see you down there. It's perfect.

At 5:40 the door jingled, and I didn't hear it, because I was in the last fifteen seconds of a two-minute plank and the world had shrunk to the size of my own shaking elbows. Mr. Bradley came around the end of the counter with the deposit bag, looked down, and saw his only remaining afternoon employee lying face-down on the carpet behind the register, vibrating, eyes squeezed shut, making a high, thin sound like a teakettle.

A long silence.

"Randy," Mr. Bradley said.

I collapsed onto the carpet. "Hi, Mr. Bradley."

He was sixty-two and had owned the store since 1981, back when it was mostly Betamax: a mild, soft, gray man with half-moon glasses and a cardigan, who, as far as Randy's memory could tell me, had never once in five years looked surprised by anything. He looked surprised.

"Son," Mr. Bradley said gently, "are you okay?"

"Never better."

"You were... on the floor."

"Planks," I said, from the floor. "They're an exercise. For your core."

"Your core."

"Like the middle of you."

Mr. Bradley considered me over his half-moon glasses. He looked at the back room doorway, where two faint, sweaty handprints now marked the top of the oak frame. He looked at the register, where I'd stacked the returns by weight.

"Is this," he said carefully, "about... September?"

There it was, the question everybody wanted to ask me and nobody would. Are you okay? Are you broken? Is this what happens to a kid who shoots his friends? Mr. Bradley, with his cardigan and his deposit bag, standing over me in the fluorescent light, worried, like a man watching a dog start to chase its own tail. I thought about lying to him. I'd been doing a lot of that. I thought about the collar, and how easy it would be.

"Kind of," I said, which was true. "It helps. Doing something. It's better than sitting around thinking about it."

His face changed slowly and softened, and he nodded. "My brother came back from Korea," Mr. Bradley said, "and he ran. Every morning. Six miles. For thirty years. He used to say it was the only time his head was quiet." He shifted the deposit bag to his other hand. "Do your planks, son. Just do them where the customers can't see you. You're scaring the Hendersons."

"Yes, sir."

He went into the back room, and a second later I heard him say to himself, "Is that a handprint?"

Wednesday night I went into the woods behind the house with a flashlight, a broom handle, and a question, which was: why am I throwing it?

Conjure and launch spears of dark energy, the panel said of Dark Spear, and I had. In October, in these same woods, I'd put one through an oak and killed a dinner-plate circle of wood around the hole. In the dream I'd put one through Freddy Krueger's chest and left a wound that never closed. Every time I'd done the same thing: conjured it, cocked my arm, and thrown it like a javelin, like a kid at a track meet. Three throws and I was done, on my knees and shaking, the energy gone out of me like water out of a cracked glass. Three throws isn't a lot. Three throws is a guy with a half-loaded revolver.

But a spear isn't a javelin. A spear is the oldest weapon in the world, and every army in history, from the Greeks to the Zulus to the Marines with a bayonet on an M16, worked out the same thing: you don't throw your spear unless you have to, because then you don't have a spear. You hold it. You keep it between you and the thing that wants to kill you, and you make it pay to come close.

So, the broom handle first.

The Army had stopped teaching the bayonet as a real skill years before I got there, but we still did pugil sticks in basic: two privates in football helmets beating the hell out of each other with padded poles on a sawdust pit while a drill sergeant screamed KILL at the top of his lungs. I'd been good at pugil sticks. Not great. Good. Short guys usually are; you get under the other guy's guard.

Randy was not short. Randy was six feet of elbows. I stood in the clearing in the dark with the broom handle and went through it slowly, the way the drill sergeant taught us—guard, thrust, slash, butt stroke, guard; thrust, step, thrust—and my feet were wrong, my balance was wrong, my reach was eight inches longer than it had been my whole life, and every thrust sent the end of the broom handle somewhere I didn't expect, like a car with the alignment out. I did it for an hour, until my feet started coming right and the long arms stopped surprising me and began to feel like the advantage they were. Reach is reach.

Then I put the broom handle down, held out my hand, and thought spear.

It came the way it always did: cold first, starting in the middle of my palm and running up to the elbow, and then it was in my hand, black and smooth and a little longer than I was tall, so dark it didn't reflect the flashlight so much as swallow it. The air around it smelled like a struck match. Every instinct in my body said throw it. I hadn't expected that. It wanted to go. It sat in my hand like a held breath, a bowstring at full draw, and I could feel the whole shape of the power leaning toward the trees, waiting for the release.

I didn't release it, and it started to go after about three seconds. I felt the edges soften and the cold start leaking out into the air like an ice cube melting in a warm hand. It was coming apart because it didn't understand what I was doing; as far as Dark Spear was concerned, a spear that doesn't get thrown is a mistake. It came apart in my hand like smoke, the cold went out of my arm, and I stood in the clearing feeling like I'd just thrown up.

I did it again. Three seconds. Smoke. Again. Three seconds. Smoke.

I sat on a log, breathing hard, and thought it through. I could throw three before I was done. Holding them seemed to cost less, a trickle instead of one big pour, but they didn't last, and I couldn't fight anything in three seconds, long arms or not. It wants to be thrown, I thought. So don't stop throwing it.

I stood and conjured it again. This time I cocked my arm all the way back the way I always did, my whole weight on my back foot, and I held the throw—the throw, not the spear. I froze the whole motion at the top, like a pitcher at the top of his windup, and I kept meaning it. I'm about to throw this. Any second now. I'm about to throw this.

Five seconds. Ten. It stayed.

Twenty seconds. My arm was shaking and my shoulder was full of ice, but the spear sat in my fist, black and solid and humming faintly like a high-voltage line, and it stayed, because as far as it could tell I was still about to throw it. Then, slowly, without letting go of the throw in my head, I brought it down out of the windup, into both hands, into guard, and it held.

I stood in the dark woods behind my parents' house with a spear made of nothing in my hands, and every hair on my body stood up.

Thrust. Step. Thrust. It was lighter than the broom handle and went through the air with a sound like tearing silk. I slashed at a fern, and the fern didn't exactly get cut. It went black, curled, and fell over dead, the whole plant down to the root, along the line where the spear had touched it, and the struck-match smell got very strong. I butt-stroked a dead stump, and a fist-sized chunk turned to black powder and blew away.

Forty seconds. My hands were going numb. The cold had gotten into my fingers and knuckles and all the way to my wrists, and my fingertips were white. At forty-four seconds I lost the throw in my head for an instant, thinking about my fingers, and the spear went to smoke in my hands and I fell over sideways into the ferns.

I lay there looking up at the trees. Forty-four seconds, for about the cost of one throw, maybe a little more. I could do it twice, maybe three times, before I was done—or one long fight with nothing left after.

I got up and did it again, and kept at it until a little after two in the morning. Until I could get it into guard without the windup, just by meaning the throw without moving my arm. Until I could hold it for a minute and ten. Until my fingers were so cold I couldn't feel the flashlight and had to carry it in my teeth to get back through the woods.

On the last one, at a minute and ten, with my fingers white and the spear humming in guard, the panel opened in front of my face, and I nearly dropped the spear.

Feat Achieved! Teach a spear to be a spear+1× Bronze Skill Gacha Ticket

I stood in the ferns with my teeth chattering and waited for the other line. Story in progress. Ticket held. Every feat since September had come with that padlock, and the padlock only came off when the credits rolled. It didn't come.

Tickets: 1× Bronze Skill[PULL]

No story, no lock. Just a ticket and a button, in the dark, in the woods behind my parents' house on a Wednesday night in November. It pays outside stories, I thought. It always did. I just never did anything impressive enough outside one. Which, when I thought about it, was a little insulting.

I let the spear go to smoke, put my numb, white, useless hand up in the air in front of me, and pressed PULL. The reel spun through a blur of skills—Calligraphy, Crying (again, God, please, not again), Backflipping, Tax Evasion—and slowed, and ticked, and stopped.

Novice Polearm Mastery (Common Skill)You are reasonably talented in handling polearms such as spears, halberds or scythes. You know how to smack with the long stick, how to cut with the blade at the end of the long stick, you know how to tab people with the pointy end of the long stick, and that is enough for most people.

Tab people, I thought. Somebody in the multiverse needs an editor.

Then it went in. The Gacha skills in September had just shown up in my head, like waking up one morning knowing how to cut hair. This one came in through my feet. My weight shifted before I told it to, back and low, the lead foot turning out. My hands moved on a spear that wasn't there, sliding apart along the shaft, the back hand finding the end, the front one loose. There was a whole grammar to it I'd never had: where the point goes when you're not using it, how you step through a thrust instead of reaching with it, how the butt end is a weapon too and the shaft is a wall.

Novice. Enough for most people. Not enough for Freddy, or for whatever came next. But I conjured it one more time, held the throw, brought it down into guard, and for the first time it felt like holding a spear instead of a broom.

Mom was in the kitchen when I came in the back door at 2:20 in the morning, in her robe, with a mug of tea she hadn't drunk. She took in the dirt on my knees, the dead fern caught in my sleeve, and my hands, white to the wrist and shaking. Without a word she filled a mixing bowl with warm water from the tap, set it on the table, and pointed at it.

I sat down and put my hands in it. It hurt like hell.

She sat across from me and watched, still not saying anything. After a while she got up, kissed the top of my head the way I'd kissed Martha's, and went back up to bed, and I sat there with my hands in the bowl until the water went cold.

Thursday morning I had PT.

Gloria took one look at me walking in without the sling, then at my shoulder, and said, "What did you do," in the voice of a woman who has seen every lie a teenage boy can tell and is ready for the one you're about to try.

"Nothing."

"Your posterior delt is so tight I could play it like a harp. Your rotator cuff is angry at me. It's yelling." She pressed her thumb into a spot under my shoulder blade, and I made a sound I'm not proud of. "What. Did. You. Do."

"Some pull-ups," I said. "Mostly left-handed."

"How many."

"Like... a few. A day."

"How many."

"Four," I said. "Five, yesterday."

Gloria closed her eyes, breathed in through her nose, and let it out through her mouth. She was sixty if she was a day, five feet tall in orthopedic shoes—and she scared me more than Freddy Krueger.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Listen to me. I've been doing this thirty-one years. I've seen a lot of boys come through here after something bad happens. Car wrecks. Football. A boy last year whose dad shot him in a hunting accident." She opened her eyes. "Some of them stop. Just stop. They won't do a single thing I tell them, they just lie there, because they don't want to get better, because getting better means it happened. And some of them go the other way. They want to be fixed. Tomorrow. They want to be stronger than they were before, by Friday, so it never, ever happens again." She jabbed a finger at me. "Those are the ones who end up back on my table with a torn labrum, crying."

I kept quiet.

"You're the second kind," Gloria said. "I knew it the first day. You've got the look."

"What look?"

"Like you're waiting for something," she said plainly. "Like it's coming back, and you have to be ready."

I sat on the paper sheet on the table and had nothing to say to that.

"So," Gloria said. "Deal. I'm going to give you a program. A real one. With pull-ups in it, and push-ups, and the weight bench your father definitely has in your garage, because they all do. You're going to do my program. Exactly. And in six weeks you'll be stronger than you've ever been in your life, and you'll still have a shoulder." She held out her hand. "Or you can keep doing it your way, and you can be in here in March with a surgeon. Your choice."

I looked at her hand.

Theo had had drill sergeants, good and bad. The best was a staff sergeant from Guam named Pangelinan, who told me the week I almost washed out, Alvarez, you can be stupid strong or you can be smart strong, and the stupid kind gets everybody killed.

I shook Gloria's hand.

"Good," she said, and handed me three photocopied pages, and then made me do forty minutes of rotator cuff exercises with a rubber band. I'd call them the most humiliating forty minutes of my life, except I'd once watched a dream demon do an aerobics tape.

Gale Weathers came to the house at four o'clock on Thursday with a cameraman, a sound guy, two light kits, and a bottle of wine for my mother, who looked at it like a live grenade.

"Mrs. Meeks," Gale said warmly, holding it out. "Thank you so much for having us."

"Ms. Weathers," said my mother. She took the bottle, set it on the hall table, and did not say thank you. Mom had watched this woman stand on our lawn the day I got out of the hospital and call her son a horror geek on national television, and Mom had a long memory and a short list, and Gale Weathers was on it in permanent marker.

They set up in the living room. They moved the couch. They moved Dad's recliner, which Dad watched from the kitchen doorway with his arms folded and the face of a man watching a stranger drive his car. They put a lamp with a big white umbrella in the corner and another one by the window, and sat me in a dining room chair in the middle of it all, in a collared shirt Mom had ironed, with a little microphone clipped to it, and I felt exactly like a man about to be interrogated by a very well-lit government.

Dewey had driven her in his own car, off duty, in a civilian jacket. He said hello to my mother like a man apologizing for the weather, went and stood in the kitchen with my dad, accepted a cup of coffee, and looked at the floor.

The cameraman was new. His name was Hector: about forty, quiet, Giants cap on backward, big soft belly, and a Betacam he handled like a sleeping baby. He nodded at me when he came in and didn't say much, and he wasn't Kenny.

That's a stupid thing to think. Of course he wasn't. Kenny was dead. I'd watched him die on the hood of the van outside Stu's with his throat open, four feet from where I stood. I'd known it was coming for two days. I'd saved Tatum and I'd saved Neil, and I hadn't saved Kenny, and for the first week I'd even gotten his name wrong. I'd called him Kevin in my own head.

Hector set up the tripod and checked the white balance on a card. He did everything slowly and carefully and well, and every time he moved, out of the corner of my eye I saw a different guy, younger and skinnier, with a camera on his shoulder on the Woodsboro High lawn, making a face behind Gale's back.

It's not your fault, I told myself. It's Billy's fault. And Stu's. You didn't do it. You were just there. I said it the way the kid would have from the back seat a week ago, and it didn't help much. Yeah, I answered myself. That's kind of the problem.

"Rolling," Hector said.

She started soft.

Gale was good. Everybody who's seen the movies knows Gale Weathers is good. But knowing it from a couch is different from being in the chair under the lights with her four feet away in a cream-colored suit, legs crossed, a manila folder on her knee, looking at you like you're the most interesting person in the world.

School. Bradley Video. How long had I worked there? Did I like it? What was the strangest thing anybody ever rented? (A man in a fishing vest, every Tuesday for a year: Beaches. Never anything else. Never said a word.) She laughed at that, a real laugh, head back. She asked about the rules—the rules, the speech half of Woodsboro High had heard me give at Stu's party before everything went to hell, which somebody had apparently repeated to her word for word.

"Never have sex," Gale read off a card, delighted. "Never drink or do drugs. Never, ever, under any circumstances, say I'll be right back." She looked up. "You really believe that?"

"I believe the people who did that night believed it," I said. "They'd seen every movie I've seen. They were following the rules. That's what made them dangerous. They knew the script, so they knew where everybody was supposed to be standing."

"And you knew the script too."

"Everybody at that party knew the script. I was just the only one who said it out loud."

She smiled, made a note, and asked about the website. She'd read it, she said, all of it, at two in the morning in a hotel in Santa Rosa, and laughed out loud at the part about the cabin in the woods and the book bound in skin. Had I always been interested in survival? Had I been a Boy Scout? (No. Cub Scouts, one year. I set a cooler on fire.) Did my parents worry? What did my little sister think? She knew Martha's name. She knew Martha's age.

"Tell me about Billy," she said after a while. "Not that night. Before."

I hadn't expected that, and I think she knew it.

"Before," I said.

"You'd known him a long time."

"Since we were six." It came out before I could decide whether to say it. "His family moved onto Elm when I was in first grade. Not that Elm. Our Elm. He was the kid with the good bike. He had a Mongoose with pegs, and he let me ride on the pegs to the 7-Eleven, and I fell off at the corner of Elm and Fourth and split my chin open, and he walked me home bleeding and told my mom it was his fault, which it wasn't." I touched the little white line under my chin without meaning to. Randy's scar. Mine. "He was a good liar even then."

Gale didn't write anything down. She listened.

"When we were twelve he climbed up on our garage roof to get a Frisbee and wouldn't come down. Just sat up there with his legs over the gutter for like an hour, looking at the street. My dad finally went out with a ladder. Billy said he liked it up there because nobody could get at him." I looked at the floor. "His mom left the next year."

"And Stu?"

"Stu was Stu." I almost smiled and didn't want to. "Stu was the guy who threw pizza rolls at your head while you were trying to talk. Stu thought everything was funny. Stu once ate a live goldfish at a party for five dollars and then cried about it for an hour because he'd named it." I stopped. "I don't know when that stopped being true. Or if it was ever true. I've been trying to figure that out for six weeks."

"Do you miss them?"

The light kit hummed. In the kitchen doorway, my mother had gone completely still.

"I miss who I thought they were," I said. "I don't miss who they were. I'm not sure there's a difference I'm allowed to have feelings about."

Gale held my eyes a beat longer than she needed to. Then she nodded slowly, like somebody filing away a line she planned to use, and wrote one word on her pad. I couldn't see what it was.

It went like that for forty minutes. She let me talk. She nodded. She laughed at my jokes, which were not good, in exactly the right places, and made it feel like a conversation between two people who were, under everything, on the same side. Then, without changing her voice at all, she said, "When did you know it was Billy?" and I understood that the first forty minutes had been her walking me out to the middle of a frozen lake.

"When he pointed a gun at me," I said.

"Before that."

"I didn't know. I had a feeling."

"Your feeling," Gale said gently, "made you take your father's handgun out of a lockbox, and a tape recorder out of his briefcase, and sneak out of your bedroom window to a party you'd been grounded from. That's a strong feeling, Randy."

"I'd been stabbed the night before. By a guy in a mask. In Sidney's house. It made me a little jumpy."

"You told Sheriff Burke on Friday morning that the man who attacked you was too small to be Neil Prescott. You told me, on live television on Friday afternoon, that it was 'impossible' it was Neil. You were very sure. Everyone else in town was sure it was Neil. You weren't." She tilted her head. "Why?"

Because I watched the movie forty times, I thought. Because I made an entire video essay about the logistics of the double-killer reveal. Because in my world you're played by Courteney Cox, and she married David Arquette, and they got divorced, and it was very sad.

"Because I hit him," I said instead. "With a Maglite. I felt how big he was. He wasn't Neil-sized."

It was true. It just wasn't why.

Gale studied me. I didn't have Truth Assertion slotted—I'd made very sure of that before she showed up. Slot one was Dark Spear, like always, and slot two, the new one, was Wind Barrier, because if somebody was going to shoot me again I would very much like it not to go in. Truth Assertion was in storage, where it couldn't make anybody believe anything, so I could lie to Gale Weathers as much as I wanted and she'd have to make up her own mind like a normal person. She made it up. I watched her do it.

"Okay," she said, smiled, and made a note. "The deal was the night at Stu's. From the beginning. So let's do the night at Stu's."

So we did the night at Stu's. She took me through it the way a lawyer takes a witness through a timeline, which, I realized about ten minutes in, is exactly what she was doing. Where were you at nine-fifteen? Who did you see? Who saw you? She had the times, more of them than I did. She'd talked to forty kids who were at that party and built the whole night out of them like a model ship in a bottle, every spar and rope, and now she was walking me through it to see if I'd step off the deck anywhere.

I'd snuck out the window, over the garage roof, the same roof Billy had sat on at twelve. I'd taken my father's Beretta from the lockbox in his closet, because I knew the combination, because it was Martha's birthday, because it's always somebody's birthday. I'd taken the microcassette recorder out of his briefcase. I'd ridden my bike three miles to Stu's, the last one uphill, in the dark, with my old Little League bat across the handlebars.

"A bat," Gale said.

"I didn't want to have to use the gun."

"But you brought the gun."

"I didn't want to have to use the bat, either."

She let that one go and went to the garage. "Tatum Riley went out to the garage for beer at about ten-forty. You followed her."

"I'd told her not to go anywhere alone. She went anyway. It's a Tatum thing."

"And there was a man in a mask in that garage."

"Yes."

"And you sent Tatum back into the house, screaming, and you stayed. With a garden spade." She looked at her notes. "You cut him. On the forearm. And then, according to your own statement to Sheriff Burke, you drew your father's gun on him." She looked up. "You had him at gunpoint, Randy. In that garage. Alone. Ten feet."

I knew where this was going and kept my mouth shut.

"You had the man who killed Casey Becker and Steve Orth and Arthur Himbry at gunpoint, ten feet away, and you didn't pull the trigger." Very gently. "Why not?"

Because it was Billy under the mask, I thought. Because I'd recognized the way he moved. Because if I'd shot him there in the dark with no confession, I'd have been a weird kid with his dad's stolen gun standing over the body of the town's most sympathetic boyfriend, and Stu would've walked into that garage thirty seconds later crying oh my God, Randy, what did you do, and that's the story that would've gone on the news. Your news. With your music under it.

"I wanted to see if he'd say something. Give himself away," I said. "And I'm not going to shoot somebody I can't really see. That fucking outfit of his blended right into the dark. I couldn't get a proper aim before he ran."

Half true. I watched her decide which half.

"And the closet," she said.

That was the one I'd been waiting for, the one I couldn't explain.

"While Sidney and the others were in the living room," said Gale, "you and Tatum Riley searched the downstairs of the Macher house. Coat closet. Pantry. Laundry room. Tatum says you weren't looking for a weapon, or a phone, or a way out. She says you were looking for something specific." She leaned forward. "And in the back hall, you found a closet with a padlock on the outside. And you took the hasp off the doorframe with two butter knives, in under three minutes. And inside that closet was Neil Prescott, who had been missing for two days, and whom every law enforcement officer in Sonoma County was looking for in a different county." She sat back. "How did you know he was there?"

The whole room waited: Hector's red light, my mother in the doorway, Dewey beside her. Dewey had spent two days driving up and down Highway 1 looking for Neil Prescott's Bronco because I'd told him to, and had found it, empty.

I'd had six weeks to think about this answer. I'd thought about it in the hospital, in the shower, on the five a.m. run, and lying awake listening to the hamsters, and I'd built it the way Gale built her timelines and sanded it down, and it was still the weakest board on the ship.

"Process of elimination," I said.

Gale's eyebrows went up a quarter inch.

"Somebody had been killing people for a week," I said, "and making it look like Neil Prescott. His car turned up empty. Nobody had seen him. If he'd done it, he'd have run, and if he'd run, he'd have taken the car. So he didn't run. So somebody had him. And if somebody had him, they needed him alive, because a dead man can't take the blame for murders that happen after he's dead. You keep a fall guy alive until the last scene." I shrugged with my good shoulder. "And the killers knew the whole town was coming to Stu's party. Every kid in school knew about it, curfew or no curfew. For somebody who liked horror movies—and Ghostface had already shown he did, with his questions—it was the perfect audience. If I were going to stage a last scene, that's where I'd stage it. So he was in that house. And Stu's house is big, but it's not that big."

It was a good answer. It was true, as far as it went, and it was exactly the kind of answer somebody smart and paranoid who'd seen a lot of movies might come up with.

Gale considered it. "That's a very good answer," she said.

"Thanks."

"Did you come up with it before," said Gale Weathers, "or after?"

I smiled at her. It was the first time I'd smiled at her all afternoon, and I don't think she liked it.

"Next question," I said.

She opened the manila folder on her knee. "Let me tell you what I think happened," Gale said, "and you tell me where I'm wrong."

She didn't wait for me to agree. She didn't need to; Hector's red light was on.

"Thursday night, the night after Casey Becker and Steve Orth were killed, a man in a mask attacked Sidney Prescott in her home. You were there. You hit him with a flashlight, here—" she touched the left side of her own head, above the ear, "—hard enough to put him on the floor. He ran. Twenty minutes later, Billy Loomis came running across the Prescotts' lawn, in front of two news crews, to hold his girlfriend." She turned a page. "Freshly showered. With his hair combed down over his left ear."

I said nothing.

"Friday, at school, three different students noticed Billy wouldn't let anyone touch his head. Two of them noticed you noticing." Another page. "One of them, a junior, I won't say who, told me you spent all of lunch on Friday watching Billy Loomis and Stu Macher like you were waiting for them to do something. Her words. Friday afternoon a customer at Bradley Video saw you and Billy have words at the counter. She said Billy left white." Gale looked up. "That's day one, Randy. Day two, at the latest. You knew."

"I suspected."

"You knew." She said it patiently, like somebody talking to a kid who'd broken a lamp and was still holding the pieces. "And here's the part I can't get past. Because I talked to Tatum Riley, too. I asked her what Billy was like after Maureen Prescott died. Do you know what she said?" She didn't wait. "She said, It was like somebody switched him off, and then switched him back on, wrong." She let that sit. "I asked Sidney Prescott the same question. She told me to go to hell." A thin smile. "I'll take that as a yes."

Tatum, I thought. Oh, Tate. She didn't tell me. And a second later: Of course she didn't. She was probably ashamed of it. Gale probably caught her outside the Jiffy Lube with a smile and a Diet Coke.

"Billy Loomis and Stu Macher," Gale said, "killed Maureen Prescott. On tape, they said so. And I think you knew that too. Not on Friday. Before. I think you knew the moment you saw that lump on Billy's head that the same people who killed Casey Becker killed Sidney's mother a year ago." Her voice didn't change at all. "Which means you knew Cotton Weary was innocent."

There it was.

"Cotton Weary," Gale said, "has been sitting on death row at San Quentin for a year for a murder he didn't commit. I wrote a book about it. Nobody listened to me. And you, Randy, if I'm right, knew, and you let him sit there for four more days while you collected evidence like it was a school science project." She leaned forward an inch. "How does that feel?"

I've thought a lot since about what happened in my head right then.

The first thing I felt was respect, which is the stupid part. She was right. She didn't have the how, and nobody ever would, but she had the what—a lump on a head, a kid who wouldn't let anybody touch his hair, a best friend who laughed a little too hard. It was the most basic deduction in the world, nowhere near genius. Burke could have made it. Dewey could have made it, if anybody had let Dewey make anything. But nobody had, and Gale Weathers was going to be the first person to say it out loud, on television, with ominous music under it, because the first person to say the obvious thing gets to own it forever, true or not.

Right behind the respect came a cold, clear understanding of exactly what she was doing. I'd read the book—the one she was going to write in my world, The Woodsboro Murders, every page a hall of mirrors with Gale Weathers standing in the middle—and I knew how she'd write me. The smart one. The nerd who knew. The kid who could have stopped it and hid behind a fern instead, with a tape recorder, waiting for a better ending. And somewhere in the last chapter, a reporter with a split lip and a camera who'd never stopped asking questions when nobody else would. The heroine.

Nothing to see here, chief.

"I didn't know about Cotton," I said, which was a lie. "I didn't know anything, Ms. Weathers. I had a lump on a head and a feeling. If I'd walked into Burke's office on Friday morning and said Billy Loomis has a bump under his hair, he'd have patted me on the shoulder and sent me home. He was already looking for Neil Prescott, who'd supposedly left town on business, according to Sid, not that anyone ever listens to her. Everybody was looking for Neil Prescott. You were on the news every hour telling them to. Besides, there was no proof Billy and Stu had killed Sid's mother. For all anybody knew, they were copycats recreating Mrs. Prescott's death, the way copycats do."

Gale didn't blink. "So you went to a party with a gun."

"After fighting the guy once, and knowing they were tormenting my friends? Yes."

"And Cotton Weary?"

"Cotton Weary is going to get out," I said, "because of a tape. Not because of a feeling. Not because of a book." I let it sit exactly as long as she'd let hers sit. "You wrote a whole book saying he was innocent. How'd that work out for him?"

Something moved at the corner of her mouth—short of a smile, more like a fencer who's been touched and is deciding whether to acknowledge it.

"Let's talk about the tape," she said.

There was a monitor on a rolling stand next to Hector. I'd noticed it when they came in and figured it was for framing, which shows what I knew.

Gale nodded. Without taking his eye from the viewfinder, Hector reached over and pressed PLAY on a deck under the monitor, and the screen went from blue to black to grainy greenish color: a big living room, golf trophies on a shelf, a fake ficus out of focus in the foreground, thirty or forty kids with red cups, somebody's leg slung over the arm of a couch. Stu's living room, from the shelf.

"This was my camera," Gale said. "At the Macher house. I'd hidden it very well. Nobody at that party noticed it. Nobody looked at it once in four hours." A pause. "Almost nobody."

On the screen, a tall, thin kid in a flannel shirt walked into frame along the bookshelf, stopped, turned his head, and looked straight into the lens. Three seconds, maybe four, his face perfectly still, the look you'd give a dog you weren't sure about. Then he turned and walked out of frame.

Hector stopped the tape. My own face hung on the monitor, frozen in green, big ears and all.

"Nobody finds my cameras," Gale said. "I've hidden cameras in hospital rooms and courtrooms and a church, Randy. Nobody ever finds my cameras. You found it on your second lap of the room. I watched you do it from the van. I watched you look at me." She tapped the folder. "That's not a scared kid at a party. That's somebody checking the exits."

She was right about that too, and I had nothing to say to it.

"Now listen," she said, and nodded at Hector again.

He fast-forwarded. The kids on the screen jerked and jittered and thinned out until the room was mostly empty, a couple of kids left on the couch, and Hector let it run. There was no picture of the thing she wanted me to hear—the camera was in the wrong room—but there was sound, very faint, through the front windows of the Macher house: a raised voice, words I couldn't make out, and then a flat, hard crack, like somebody slapping a table with a ruler.

On the monitor, one of the kids on the couch lifted her head and said what was that, and the other one said firecracker, and they went back to what they'd been doing.

"That's you," Gale said. "Getting shot, I believe."

I'd known it was coming. My shoulder knew before I did. It went hot and tight under the ironed shirt where the bullet had gone in, and I sat there and let it.

"And here's what I can't stop thinking about," said Gale. "After that shot, you didn't scream. You didn't run for help. You didn't call 911 from the Machers' kitchen phone, which was twenty feet from where you fell. You took a tape recorder out of your pocket, with a bullet in you, and you put it on the porch behind a fern, and you lay there. You lay on that lawn and listened while two boys told Sidney Prescott how they killed her mother. While she fought for her life in that kitchen. Alone." She closed the folder. "You were waiting for them to confess. You knew they'd talk. You knew."

"I had a bullet in me," I said.

"You had a plan." Very gently. "Which is it, Randy? Were you a hero that night? Or were you just a snake in the grass who let a girl do the fighting so you could get it on tape?"

I understood right then that this was the money shot. Whatever I said next would be the nine seconds they used, and somewhere in a building in Los Angeles a man with a razor blade and a reel-to-reel would cut those nine seconds out of two hours and lay ominous cellos under them. She'd built the whole two hours to get here. Every laugh. Every Beaches. Every question about Martha.

"I don't know. Both," I said. "Probably."

She hadn't expected that. I saw it.

"I couldn't stand up," I said. "My right arm didn't work. I had one shot at that tape, and I took it, and then when they stopped talking I got up and went in. And I'll tell you something else, since we're being honest. If I'd gone in sooner, I'd be dead, and Sid would be dead, and Billy and Stu would be crying on your camera right now, telling you how I did it. That was their new ending, once Mr. Prescott was gone from the closet: the movie geek with his daddy's gun." I held her eyes. "You've seen how they had it planned. You've heard the tape, or somebody's told you what's on it. Neil Prescott in a closet. A suicide note. The perfect fall guy." I shrugged with my good shoulder. "They'd have pulled it off. And you'd have bought it, Ms. Weathers. You'd have had the exclusive."

The room went silent except for the light kit's hum. Out of the corner of my eye I could see my mother in the kitchen doorway, frozen, a dish towel in her hands, and behind her my father, and next to him, in his civilian jacket with his hands in his pockets and his face gone blank, Deputy Dewey Riley. He'd driven Gale here in his own car and spent an hour and forty minutes in my parents' kitchen drinking my mother's coffee, very carefully not watching. He was watching now.

She let the silence run. Then she did something I didn't expect: she closed the folder, set it on the carpet beside her chair, and folded her hands on her knee.

"I was there," she said. "In the kitchen. You know that."

"I know that."

"I came in the back door. I had a gun. I'd taken it out of the glove box of the van." She said it evenly, like a report. "Billy Loomis turned toward me, and you shot him. Twice. He went down in the kitchen doorway. And then he got up. And you shot him in the head." A pause. "And then you kept shooting."

"Yes."

"Until the gun was empty."

"Yes."

"I watched you do it, Randy. I was six feet away." Her voice was very calm. "Did you mean to empty the gun?"

Hector's camera didn't move. Gale didn't blink.

I thought about Billy on the kitchen floor with his eyes open. Billy at six on the Mongoose. Billy at twelve on the Meeks garage roof. Billy at the counter arguing about Dead by Dawn II. I thought about every slasher movie I'd ever seen, where the killer gets up one more time, because he always gets up one more time.

"Yes," I said.

"Why?"

"Because they always get up," I said. "In the movies. You think they're dead and they get up. He'd already gotten up once. I wasn't going to let him get up again."

Gale looked at me, and for a second under the lights she dropped the performance, and she was just a woman who'd been in that kitchen on one knee with a gun in her hands and watched it happen.

"Your gun didn't go off," I said softly. "In the kitchen. When you yelled drop it."

Something closed in her face like a door. "We're not talking about me," said Gale.

"No," I said. "We never are. Kind of funny, huh?"

She picked the folder back up off the carpet.

"Let's talk about Sidney," she said brightly, like the last two minutes hadn't happened, and the gear change was so smooth you could hear the clutch. "You and Sidney Prescott are close."

"She's my friend."

"You were in her house when she was attacked. You were in the bathroom at school when she was attacked. You were at Stu's. Every time someone came for Sidney Prescott this fall, Randy Meeks was standing within ten feet of her." Gale smiled. "That's a lot of standing."

"I was trying to keep her alive."

"Why?"

"Because she's my friend."

"Is that all she is?"

Oh, I thought. Oh, here we go. The tabloid gear—the Hard Copy gear. I could already see the chyron: WOODSBORO HERO: "I DID IT FOR HER."

"Sidney Prescott," I said, "lost her mother a year ago, and then found out the boy she loved killed her. She found that out with a knife at her throat. In front of me. Six weeks ago." I kept my voice level. "She doesn't need anybody on national television guessing who's in love with her, Ms. Weathers. She needs people to leave her alone. Which, by the way, is something you could try."

"She told me to go to hell," Gale said, almost fondly.

"I doubt Satan would've liked the company."

Gale laughed, a short, real laugh surprised out of her, and turned a page. "Your website," she said.

I'd been waiting for that one too.

"There's a page on it called COMING SOON." She read off her pad without inflection, like a grocery list. "How to survive a road trip through rural Texas. How to survive a summer job at a lake with a bad reputation. How to survive Halloween night. How to survive a Dream Demon. What to do if a doll you didn't buy starts talking to you. What to do if you watch a videotape and the phone rings right after." She looked up. "Fourteen of them. The website went up on October fourth. One of them was about dreams. Three weeks later, a girl in a psychiatric hospital in Ohio who'd been writing to you started sleeping through the night, and seven of her friends stopped dying." She let that sit. "What's coming, Randy?"

It was the best question she asked all day. I'll give her that.

"Halloween," I said. "Every year. Like clockwork."

"That's not an answer."

"So? I made my website for my own sake. You're the one who put a spotlight on me when I couldn't have cared less." I shrugged. "I could just be making stuff up. You don't know. You're not half as good a reporter as you think you are."

"Mm," said Gale, and wrote something down, and I'd have paid a lot to see what.

Gale didn't let it go. She never lets anything go; it's the best and worst thing about her.

"Arthur Himbry," she said.

I raised an eyebrow, wondering what she could possibly be pulling now.

"Friday afternoon, in the nurse's office," said Gale. "After the bathroom. According to the school nurse, you asked Mr. Himbry if he was staying late. You asked him not to." She was looking at the folder again, though I don't think she needed it. "And at five-forty that afternoon, according to the phone company, somebody called the school's main line from the back room of Bradley Video, where you were working. That was you, wasn't it?"

"Yes."

"You warned him."

"I tried."

"But you didn't tell him why." Gently. Relentlessly. "You didn't tell him, Mr. Himbry, I think Billy Loomis is going to kill you tonight. You didn't tell Burke. You didn't tell Dewey." She didn't look at the kitchen. She didn't need to. "And by nine o'clock Arthur Himbry was hanging from the goalposts on the football field."

I couldn't answer. I was back in the Bradley Video back room with the phone in my hand, listening to it ring and ring, then somebody picking up and breathing, and a sound like a rope creaking.

"Arthur Himbry," said Gale. "Kenny Jones, my cameraman. And Billy Loomis, who would be alive today in a cell in Vacaville, Randy, if you'd picked up a phone on Friday morning instead of sneaking out on Saturday night with your father's gun." She held up three fingers, neatly, like a woman counting change. "Three people. Dead after you knew. How do you live with that?"

There it was—the other money shot, the one she'd really come for. And she wasn't wrong about that either, which was the hell of it. I'd been living with it every night since September: Himbry, who I'd warned to his face and who died right on schedule anyway; Kenny, whose name I hadn't even gotten right in my own head until it was too late. I'd saved Tatum. I'd saved Neil. I'd saved Sid, and I'd shot the two boys who did it, and people kept calling me a hero, and every night I lay in bed counting the ones who weren't on the list. I counted Himbry. I counted Kenny. Some nights, God help me, I counted Billy, at twelve, on the garage roof.

But Gale hadn't lain in bed counting anything. She'd made a list.

"Kenny," I said.

Gale's face didn't change. "Kenny."

"He died in your van," I said. "On the hood of your van. With his throat cut. I saw it from the lawn." I sat forward in the dining room chair, and the little microphone tugged at my collar. "He was alone. In the van. Watching your monitor. Watching me, apparently. All by himself." I tilted my head the way she'd been tilting hers for an hour and a half. "Where were you, Gale?"

The room went dead quiet.

She'd left him. Everybody who's seen the movie knows she left him. She climbed out of that van with a flashlight and went down the drive to find Dewey, because Dewey was cute and the party was boring and the story wasn't happening fast enough for her, and she left Kenny alone with a thirty-second delay and a killer in the house. I'd watched her do it from the front window of Stu's house and thought, at the time, Oh, you beautiful piece of shit.

I didn't wait for her.

"Ooh, you don't like that, huh?" I said. "You're sitting here giving me shit for bringing a gun to a party, when I had at least a healthy suspicion the psycho was going to go after my friends. So I brought something to defend myself with, and something to get the truth, so that if my hunch was right, I could get Cotton out. And now you're making stuff up, saying I just let two serial killers run off and kill more people. Meanwhile, look at yourself. A grown woman brings a gun to a party full of drunk teenagers and plants a hidden camera where God knows what's going to end up on tape, and you're the good guy? Really, Gale? And you left Kenny sitting alone in that shittily hidden van watching it, and that's what got him killed." Nobody moved. "At least I saved somebody, Gale. What the fuck did you do, besides slander Mr. Prescott and harass Sidney for the juiciest dirt in this backward fucking town? And now this. You didn't even have the decency to take Kenny with you. He'd probably be standing here instead of Hector." I glanced over. "No offense, Hector."

She didn't answer. For the first time all afternoon, Gale Weathers didn't have the next line.

"Gale." Dewey, from the kitchen doorway, not loud.

"Not now, Dewey," Gale said, without looking at him.

"Gale." He came one step into the living room, just one, hands still in his jacket pockets, his voice low, the voice of a man who'd been stabbed in the back on Stu Macher's lawn and had gotten up anyway. "That's enough."

I reached up and unclipped the little microphone from my collar, slowly, and laid it on the arm of the dining room chair, carefully, the way you'd put down something that belonged to somebody else. Then I stood up and looked down at Gale Weathers in her cream suit with her folder on her knee, and said very clearly, for Hector's camera, which was still rolling:

"Here's your exclusive, you weasel. I'm sure you've already got the tape that's supposed to be in police custody, ready to go."

I walked out of my parents' living room, past the lights and the umbrella and the moved couch and my father's recliner, past Dewey, who stepped aside to let me by and didn't look at me, and past my mother in the doorway. She didn't stop me or tell me to watch my language. She put her hand on my arm for one second as I went by, and squeezed, and behind me I heard her say to the living room, in her nicest voice, the one she used on telemarketers, "I think you heard him."

I sat on the porch steps in the dark.

It was cold. The streetlight across the road buzzed. Somewhere down the block a kid was practicing the trumpet, badly. My shoulder hurt and my hands were shaking a little, so I sat on them and watched my breath and listened to them pack up behind me. It took forty minutes. I heard my mother's voice once, short, and Gale's, short, and then nothing. Then the front door opened behind me and closed, and Gale Weathers sat down on the top step a careful two feet away. She'd taken off her heels and carried them in one hand. In the other she had an envelope.

"I called you a weasel," I said. "On camera."

"You did." She set the heels on the step between us. "In your mother's living room. In front of a sheriff's deputy. With a speech." She looked out at the street. "And then you accused me of having a tape I don't have. Yet." She almost smiled. "Almost two hours of tape, Randy, and the last two minutes are the best thing I've shot since—" She stopped.

Since Kenny, I thought. She didn't finish it. She held out the envelope instead.

"What is it?"

"Your fee."

"My what?"

Gale looked at me like I'd asked what color the sky was. "Top Story pays its exclusives, Randy. Everybody pays their exclusives. Hard Copy pays, Inside Edition pays, Extra would have paid you double, if you'd bothered to return a single one of their calls, which I know you didn't, because I asked them." She tapped the envelope against my knee. "The contract says a sixty-minute sit-down. You gave me a hundred and twelve. Don't look at me like that. It's how the business works. You did me a favor. You did my ratings a favor. You get paid."

I almost didn't take it, honestly. I sat there with my hands under my thighs looking at the envelope and thought about handing it back, or tearing it up, something with a little style. Then I thought about four dollars and seventy-five cents an hour, and a group home in Sacramento, four hundred dollars, a GED, and a recruiter at a strip mall. Pride is for people with savings accounts. I'd learned that before I was twelve.

I took it and opened it. A check, drawn on an account in Los Angeles, made out to RANDALL MEEKS in a nice round secretary's hand, signed by somebody whose name I didn't recognize under the words TOP STORY PRODUCTIONS. Seven thousand, five hundred dollars.

I stared at it. Seven and a half grand, in 1996. Randy made four seventy-five an hour at Bradley Video—about sixteen hundred hours of alphabetizing tapes. A used car. A semester at a state school. Theo had never in either life held a single piece of paper worth this much. And in the back of my head, a part of me that had spent most of 2019 reading about the stock market on a phone in a barracks in Georgia—a part that knew exactly what Apple stock was going to do after Christmas, and what a little online bookstore in Seattle was going to do after May—started doing very different math.

"You're welcome," Gale said dryly.

"I'm not saying thank you."

"I didn't expect you to." She almost smiled. "Off the record."

I'd been waiting for it all afternoon. "Okay."

"At O'Hare," she said. "Your neck."

"It was a glow-in-the-dark necklace," I said. "Martha's. From the fair. I was wearing it for a bet."

Gale was quiet a second. Then she turned her head and looked at me in the light from the front window, her face very calm and very interested. "You're lying," she said. "Right now."

I said nothing.

"That's the funny thing," Gale said, turning one of her heels over and over in her hand by the strap. "I can tell. Right now. You're lying to me, and I can tell, the way I can always tell, the way I've been able to tell since I was a little girl. I could tell in there, all afternoon. Every time you lied, I knew." She stopped turning the shoe. "At O'Hare I couldn't. You said it's not dangerous, and I just... believed it. Completely. Instantly. Like a child. And I've been thinking about it every day since, Randy, and I can't think of a single other time in my life that's happened."

Down the block the trumpet hit a high note and cracked.

"A lump on a head," Gale said. "Fine. I'll give you the lump. Any idiot with eyes could have gotten Billy Loomis from the lump. Burke should have. I should have." She said it like it cost her something, and maybe it did. "But you didn't just know, Randy. You knew where my camera was. You knew they'd talk. You knew to bring a tape recorder. You knew there was a girl in a hospital in Ohio who needed you, and you flew there on my dime, and four days later the suicides at that hospital stopped." She was quiet a second. "You figured it out. All of it. Every time. And I can't figure out how. And I'm the one who's supposed to be good at that."

The check was in my hand. I didn't answer.

"So this is what's going to happen," said Gale Weathers. "I'm going to cut that interview. I'm going to cut it beautifully. And I'm not going to air a frame of it until I get my hands on the other tape."

"The other tape."

"Yours. The one behind the fern. Burke's got it in an evidence locker, and the district attorney's sitting on it until Cotton's hearing. But it's coming out, Randy. They always come out." She stood up, heels in hand. "And when it does, all of America's going to hear Billy Loomis say we killed your mother, Sid. And then, right after it, they're going to hear my question."

"Did Randy Meeks know," I said.

"Did Randy Meeks know." She looked down at me. "Nobody's going to remember the answer. They're going to remember the question. That's how it works."

"I know how it works, Gale."

"Yes," she said thoughtfully. "You do, don't you? That's exactly what I mean." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "I don't know what you are. But I'm going to find out."

"I'd expect nothing less," I said, which was what I'd said in the car in Ohio, and she smiled at that, a real one, thin and sharp, and went down the front path in her stockings to the Top Story van, where Hector waited with the engine running.

A minute later Dewey came out of the house and stopped on the step next to me with his hands in his pockets. "For what it's worth," he said, not looking at me, "I'm sorry about that."

"It's not your fault, Dewey."

"I know." He looked at the van. "But I'm sorry anyway." He went down the steps, then stopped and turned halfway. "She's not as bad as that. Most of the time. She just... can't stop. Once she's got the question. She can't put it down." He shrugged miserably. "It's kind of what I like about her."

Then he went down the path to his own car, parked behind the van, and followed it out of our street, two sets of taillights going away into the dark.

My mother was in the front doorway behind me; I don't know how long she'd been there. "Was that a check?"

"Seven thousand five hundred dollars."

My mother sat down on the top step next to me, in the spot Gale had just left, and didn't say anything for a while.

"Your father," she said finally, "is going to want to talk to you about a savings account."

"Yeah," I said. "I want to talk to him about that, too."

Kristen called at six.

She called every night now, from the dayroom phone at Westin Hills, which they'd given back to her after Dr. Gordon's closed-door fight with Simms on Tuesday—nine her time, six mine, before lights-out. She didn't have to call at two in the morning anymore. She didn't have to call to stay awake. She called because she wanted to, and I picked up.

That was the first time it really hurt. The dream hadn't, or the gold light, or the empty back seat at five in the morning, not like this: the phone ringing at six, me picking it up, and nobody to hand the wheel to. For three weeks every one of these calls had been his. I'd sat in the back and looked out the window. Now there was no back and no window, just me with a phone in my hand, and for one awful second I didn't know if I was allowed.

Then she said "Hi" down the line from Ohio, and I knew exactly how I felt about her, all of it at once, and it was mine. It had always been at least half mine. Now it was all of it.

"Hi, Kris," I said.

We talked about nothing, which was the best part. For three weeks every call between Woodsboro and Springwood had been about not dying. Now we talked about the cafeteria at Westin Hills, where Thursday was Salisbury steak day and everybody pretended to be sick. Kincaid had been caught teaching Will to arm-wrestle. Taryn had dyed a streak in her hair blue. Jennifer wanted to know if I had a picture of myself I could send, a real one, not the yearbook one, because the yearbook one was criminal.

"She wants a picture?" I said, and felt my ears go pink. They'd never once done that in twenty-six years of being Theo. They did it all the time now, because they were Randy's ears, and I was Randy.

"For the group," Kristen said quickly. "For the wall. In the dayroom. Everybody wants one. It's not a big deal."

"Do you want one?"

A long pause on the line.

"Shut up," Kristen said.

We talked about the hamsters. I'd been bursting to tell somebody for two days, and she was the only person on Earth who'd believe me. She laughed until she had to put the phone down. She made me line them up and describe it. She made me have Maga-Z salute, and then made me describe the salute, in detail, twice.

"You have to bring them," she said. "When you—if you ever come back. Or if we ever..." She stopped. "You have to bring them."

"Yeah," I said softly. "Okay."

At six-forty she yawned, a huge, jaw-cracking yawn down the line from Ohio, and I froze. For three weeks, every time Kristen Parker yawned, it had been the most frightening sound in my world.

"Sorry," she said sleepily. "Sorry. I'm just... I'm so tired, Randy. I'm tired all the time now. Dr. Gordon says it's normal. He says I've been running on empty for a year, and my body's catching up. He says I'm going to sleep for about a month." Another yawn. "Is that... is that okay?"

I needed a second before I could talk. "Yeah, Kris. That's okay. Go to sleep."

"I'll call tomorrow."

"I know."

"Goodnight, Randy." She was half gone already; I could hear it. "Tell Theo goodnight. And Maga-Z."

"I'll tell him," I said, which is a strange thing to promise a girl about yourself. "Goodnight, Popsicle Kris."

The line clicked. I sat with the phone to my ear long after, listening to the dial tone, wearing a face I couldn't have described and won't try to. She was asleep, just asleep, like a person, with nobody in there with her. Somewhere, I hoped, through a screen door, in a video store with no late fees, somebody knew that too.

I put the phone back in the cradle on the nightstand, gently, as if it might break.

Friday I went to the library.

The Woodsboro Public Library is a brick Carnegie building on Church Street with a green dome and a radiator in every room that knocks like somebody's trapped inside. I got there when it opened at nine, with the unicorn notebook and three pens, and went straight to the 130s—the Dewey Decimal number for Parapsychology and occultism, which I knew because Randy had known since he was eleven, when he went looking for books about Bigfoot, found a book about demons instead, and didn't sleep for a week. I stood in front of two and a half shelves of mostly cracked-spine paperbacks and started pulling.

The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology, Robbins, 1959, big and heavy, with woodcuts. The Golden Bough, Frazer, the abridged one, which was still nine hundred pages. Malleus Maleficarum, the Montague Summers translation, a book by two fifteenth-century monks about how to find and torture witches, mostly useful as a list of everything people have ever been wrong about. The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, also Summers, which I took for reasons I didn't feel like examining. And in the paperback rack at the end, between a book on crystal healing and a book on Atlantis, a black Avon paperback with a gold sigil on the cover: The Necronomicon. The Simon edition, the one some guy in New York cooked up in the seventies and sold to every metalhead in America.

I stood holding it a second. I knew where the real one was. I'd seen it a hundred times on a screen—bound in human skin, inked in blood, sitting on a table in a cabin in the woods in Tennessee, waiting for some idiot with a tape recorder—and this was a mass-market paperback with a $5.99 price sticker. I took it anyway. You should know what people think a thing says. Sometimes that's what makes it work.

I asked at the desk about the Rituale Romanum, the Catholic book of rites with the exorcism in it. The librarian was a soft, round woman in her sixties with reading glasses on a beaded chain and a name plate that said MRS. OKAFOR. She checked the card catalog and then the computer and said they didn't have it, but she could get it through interlibrary loan from Berkeley if I didn't mind waiting two weeks.

"I don't mind," I said.

She filled out the form. Then she looked at the stack on the counter in front of me—witchcraft, demons, vampires, the Necronomicon—and then at me, over the reading glasses, the way Mr. Bradley had, the way Gloria had.

"That's a lot of demons, dear," Mrs. Okafor said.

"School project," I said.

She let that pass. The school had been closed for six weeks, and everybody in town knew it. She stamped the due dates in each book very slowly, and when she handed them over she kept her hand on the top one for a second.

"My nephew went through a phase like this," she said softly. "After his brother passed. He read everything he could find. He said if he understood it, it couldn't happen again." She let go of the book. "You come in anytime you want, Randy. Even if you just want to sit somewhere quiet. Nobody bothers anybody in here."

"Thanks," I said, and meant it, and went and sat in the corner of the reading room under a window until one in the afternoon and filled eleven pages of the unicorn notebook.

WHAT WORKS ON WHAT ✎ (running list, don't trust any of it)✗ HOLY WATER — worked on Freddy's bones (Neil, the junkyard). Needs a priest to bless it? Or does belief matter more? Neil isn't even Catholic anymore. Father Keegan blessed it without asking. ASK SOMEBODY.✗ HALLOWED GROUND — the junkyard wasn't. Neil said the words anyway. It worked. So: intent > location??? Or the words make it hallowed? FIND OUT.✗ IRON — fairies, ghosts, half of European folklore. Cold iron. Cheap. CARRY SOME?✗ SALT — lines, circles. Every culture has a salt thing. Ghosts can't cross it (allegedly).✗ NAMES — Candyman (say it 5x). Freddy (don't say it). Names have power in like every tradition. Don't say things. Don't READ things out loud. (The cabin. The tape recorder. Nobody ever listens.)✗ EXORCISM — Catholic rite. Rituale Romanum. Need the actual text. Interlibrary loan, 2 weeks. Deadites aren't demons exactly? Kandarian. Different rules. Dismemberment works. (Ugh.)✗ VAMPIRES — crosses, garlic, sunlight, stakes, running water, invitations, mirrors. NOTE: some of this is ME now, if I ever use the Morbing thing. TEST BEFORE YOU NEED IT.✗ DARK SPEAR — "extra damage to holy and divine beings." WHY. What kind of power hurts holy things more? What does that make it? What does that make ME, carrying it?

I sat looking at that last line for a while. Then I went to the reference section and checked out a King James Bible, a paperback Tanakh, and The World's Religions by Huston Smith. If I was going to learn what worked on demons, I figured I'd better learn what the people who'd been fighting them for five thousand years actually believed, and not just the parts that sounded good in a movie.

On the way out I passed St. Mary's, two blocks down Church Street, with the bell ringing noon, late. I stood on the sidewalk across the street with an armful of books about demons and looked at the doors a while, and didn't go in. Not yet, anyway.

Tatum called Friday night.

"There's a movie," she said, no hello. "At the Rialto. Some Mel Gibson thing. Ransom. Me and Sid are going at seven. You're coming."

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"I'm training."

"It's Friday night, Randy."

"Training doesn't know what day it is."

A pause. I could hear the TV in the background on her end, and Dewey's voice saying something about the remote.

"Sid wants to see you," Tatum said, quieter. "She won't say it. She'll never say it. But she asked me twice if I'd talked to you this week, and she doesn't ask me anything twice." Another pause. "You okay?"

That made five—Mr. Bradley, Gloria, my mom (sort of), Mrs. Okafor (sort of), and Tatum. I'd started keeping count.

"Never better," I said.

"Uh-huh," Tatum said. "You know what you sound like? You sound like my uncle Pete, the year after his divorce. He built a deck. A whole deck. By himself. In a month. He didn't come inside till it was done." Her voice went flat. "It's a really nice deck, Randy. Nobody ever sits on it."

That one landed somewhere I didn't have an answer for.

"Call me when you're done being a weirdo," Tatum said, and hung up harder than she needed to.

I stood in the kitchen holding the phone. Be nice to Sid, said a voice somewhere in me that used to belong to somebody else. She doesn't know how to say sorry yet. I hung the phone back on the wall and went out to the garage.

Saturday was the Red Cross.

Community First Aid and Safety: eight hours, nine to five, in the multipurpose room of the Woodsboro Community Center, forty-five dollars out of my Bradley Video money, because I hadn't figured out yet what to do with the Top Story check. There were eleven of us: two new mothers, a Boy Scout leader, a lifeguard renewing her card, a retired couple who'd just bought an RV, and two girls from the middle school getting certified to babysit, who recognized me in the first five minutes and spent the rest of the day whispering.

The instructor was a retired paramedic named Ray Delgado—sixty, gray crew cut, forearms like hams, and a voice that had told a lot of people a lot of bad news very calmly. He'd been on the ambulance crew in Santa Rosa for twenty-six years. He knew who I was and didn't mention it. I was the best student he'd ever had, and I scared the hell out of him.

The problem was that I knew most of it already. Theo had done Combat Lifesaver. Theo had done TCCC, Tactical Combat Casualty Care, the whole course twice, the second time in a plywood shack in Kandahar with real blood on the floor from the week before. I knew tourniquets. I knew wound packing. I knew how to put a needle in a man's chest to let the air out of a collapsed lung. As far as the 1996 American Red Cross was concerned, none of that existed yet.

"Direct pressure," Ray said in the bleeding module, "elevation, pressure points. A tourniquet is an absolute last resort. A tourniquet means the person loses the limb. You won't ever need one."

I put my hand up.

"Yes, Randy."

"What if it's arterial? Like, a femoral bleed. From a knife, say. Or a gunshot. Direct pressure won't hold that. They'll bleed out in three minutes."

The room went quiet, and the babysitters stopped whispering.

Ray looked at me a second. "That's... true," he said carefully. "In a severe arterial bleed, in the field, a tourniquet can save a life. But the guidance for laypeople is—"

"Two inches above the wound," I said. "Not on a joint. Tight enough to stop the bleeding, which is way tighter than you think. It's going to hurt them like hell and they're going to scream at you, and you keep cranking. Write down the time. On their forehead, if you have to. Don't loosen it. Ever. Let the hospital do that."

Nobody said anything, and the Boy Scout leader was writing it down.

"Where'd you learn that?" Ray said, low.

"Books," I said.

He studied me. Then he said, "Okay," went on with the module, and didn't call on me again for an hour.

It went like that all day. In the CPR section, when the Resusci Anne came around, I did thirty compressions so hard and fast and exactly that the little clicker on her chest went off on every one, and when I finished the retired lady with the RV said, "Oh my goodness," and her husband said, "Son, you're gonna break her." In the choking section I asked about cricothyrotomy. In the burns section I asked about burns from a fire that's been set, how long a person can last in a room full of smoke, and whether the smoke or the heat gets you first. I asked about knife wounds to the abdomen. I asked what to do if the person you're helping is still being attacked. I took nine pages of notes. At lunch the two babysitters sat as far from me as the room allowed.

At five, Ray signed my card, and then held on to it a second, the way Mrs. Okafor had held the book.

"Kid," he said, low, so nobody else would hear. "I've been doing this a long time. I've seen a lot of guys come back from a lot of bad nights. And the ones who come out the other side, they're never the ones who learn everything. They're the ones who go home." He let go of the card. "Get some sleep. You look like hell."

"Yes, sir," I said, and didn't go home. I went to the woods.

Saturday night was the other question.

Conjure and launch, the panel said—launch, not throw. On Wednesday night, kneeling in the ferns with my hands frozen, I'd started wondering whether I'd been doing it wrong the whole time. Whether throwing was just the shape I'd given it because I didn't know any better, because a spear is something you throw with your arm, and I'd never once tried it without one.

So at ten o'clock on Saturday night I stood in the clearing with my arms at my sides and didn't reach. I looked at the oak across the clearing, the one with the dead circle in it from October, and thought spear, and nothing happened. I thought it harder—spear, there, go—and still nothing. I held out my hand palm open and flat, not gripping, and the cold came, and the spear came, black and humming, lying across my open palm like it was resting on a table, and I thought go and pushed with nothing but my head, and it rolled off my hand and fell in the dirt. It lay there three seconds, a black stick on the ground killing a little rectangle of grass underneath it, and went to smoke.

I tried again. And again. Eleven times. Twelve. Every time the spear came, and every time I let go of it, it fell, like a dropped broom. It didn't know it was supposed to go anywhere. Without ever meaning to, I'd taught it that the only way it moved was in my fist.

Around the twentieth try my nose started to bleed. I wiped it on my sleeve and kept going.

I tried visualizing. I tried what every anime I'd ever watched would have told me: picture a gate opening in the air behind me and the spear coming out of it, the way a certain golden asshole in a certain series fires swords at people out of thin air. I felt like an idiot, and it didn't work. I tried shouting. That didn't work either. I tried not trying, which every martial arts movie recommends, and which also didn't work, because it isn't advice, it's a fortune cookie.

Then, around eleven-thirty, with blood on my lip and my arms hanging and my head pounding, so tired I couldn't remember why I was doing it, I stopped thinking about the spear at all and just thought about the throw. The motion and how it feels: weight on the back foot, the hip coming around, the shoulder, the elbow, the wrist, the release. I'd done it maybe forty times between October and the dream, and my body knew it—Randy's body and mine. So I stood with my hands at my sides and did the throw in my head, every part of it, without moving a muscle, the way I'd been taught to dry-fire a rifle, the way a gymnast walks through her routine in her head before she goes. At the top of the throw, the point where the spear leaves your hand, I thought: now.

There was a sound like somebody tearing a bedsheet in half.

The spear came out of the air beside my right shoulder already moving. I didn't see it form. It was there and then gone, a black streak across the clearing, and it hit the dirt fifteen feet left of the oak at an angle and buried itself to half its length. The ground around it went black in a circle, and the smell of struck matches rolled across the clearing like a wave.

I stood staring at it until it went to smoke. Then my legs went, and I sat down hard in the leaves.

It had cost twice what a throw cost, maybe more. I felt like I'd run five miles with the flu. I'd missed by fifteen feet, and my nose was bleeding again. But sitting there in the leaves, I got it. I'd had it backward for a month. I'd been making a spear and then throwing it—two things, one after the other, a noun and then a verb—and that's not what the panel said. Conjure and launch. One motion. The spear didn't need to exist first and get thrown second. It could come into the world already thrown, already halfway through the release, with all the speed of the throw in it, like a bullet that starts out leaving the barrel. The summoning was the launch, and there was never a moment when it sat still in my hand, because there was never a moment when it was in my hand at all. No hands. No windup. Nothing anybody could see coming. Just a sound like a sheet tearing, and a black line across the dark.

I did it two more times. The second went into the dirt about six feet left of the oak. The third hit the tree—a foot below the dead circle, but it hit, and went through, and kept going out the back of the trunk into the dark, and somewhere behind the tree I heard it go through something else, and then a third thing, before it stopped.

The panel opened while I was still on my knees.

Feat Achieved! Summon it thrown+1× Silver Ability Gacha Ticket

No padlock. I'd stopped expecting one.

I didn't try a fourth. I couldn't have. Before I lay down I got the unicorn notebook out of my jacket and wrote by feel in the dark, in letters that ran off the edge of the page:

SPEAR. Don't summon it and then throw it. SUMMON IT THROWN. (Costs 2x. Aim = bad. Practice.)

Then I lay on my back in the leaves looking at the stars through the branches, blood drying on my upper lip, too tired to be happy about it and too happy about it to get up. After a while I put my hand up into the dark over my face and pressed PULL.

Abilities this time, spinning: something with lightning, something with ice, a giant's arm, a door, a mole. It slowed on a picture of fire, and I thought no, keep going, because the last thing a guy who could turn into a vampire needed was fire. It stopped anyway.

Ember (Uncommon Ability)Allows the user to produce, shape and control moderate flames that can be shaped into a variety of attacks like fireballs and fire arrows.

I lay there and laughed until my ribs hurt. Four days ago, over Nebraska, my curse had given me a power that made me a vampire, with every vampire weakness in the book, and now it was handing me the one element every vampire movie ever made agrees is the end of the vampire. Never slot those two together, I thought. Never, ever. Not unless you want to be the first man in history to set himself on fire by accident while shouting "It's Morbin' time."

It was my sixth ability. Six abilities, two slots, and the third slot didn't come until ten, so Ember went into storage with Truth Assertion and Poison Breath and the rest, and stayed there. Except I'm me, so I swapped it in for Wind Barrier, lying on my back in the leaves, waited out the five minutes, held up one finger, and thought about a candle.

A flame rose off my fingertip, small, blue at the bottom and yellow at the top, the size of a birthday candle. It didn't burn me. It was warm on my face in the November cold and lit the underside of the branches above me, gold and moving. Then I remembered I was lying in a pile of dry leaves in a California woods in a drought year, and put it out so fast I nearly bit my tongue. Tomorrow, I thought. By the creek. With a bucket.

I swapped Wind Barrier back in and lay there another five minutes while it settled, because you don't walk home through Woodsboro in the dark without something that stops bullets, not anymore. I was reaching up to close the panel when it changed.

SYSTEM UPDATEStories complete: 2. New functions unlocked.[FUSE] Combine two results of the same type into one new result of equal or greater rarity.[DISMANTLE] Break down a result you own into Salvage. Spend Salvage on rerolls and tickets.Fuse charges: 1 · Salvage: 0.0

I read it three times.

"You've got to be kidding me," I said out loud to the trees. "You have patch notes?"

My curse had patch notes. It had apparently watched me survive two horror movies and decided I'd unlocked the crafting system. Theo had played enough games to know exactly what this was: you could take two things and make one better thing, and you could grind the junk down into something useful. I thought about my inventory, which was mostly junk—Minty Breath, Crying, Throat, which I'd toggled off in September and never thought about again, Scenic Wind, which made my hair blow majestically indoors. A junk drawer of a soul. Then I thought about Wind Barrier and Dark Spear, and what you'd get if you put them in a pot together, and then Ember and Dark Spear, and my heart did something it hadn't done since I was nine, in a group home, the first time somebody let me play a video game with a skill tree.

No, I told myself. Not tonight. Never make a permanent decision at one in the morning with a nosebleed. I learned that rule in the Army, mostly from watching other people break it. I got the notebook out again and wrote in the dark under SUMMON IT THROWN:

FUSE (1 charge). DISMANTLE → SALVAGE. What's junk worth? What do two good things make? DON'T TOUCH THE DEVAS.

I underlined the last part twice and went home.

It was a little after one when I got there, and the kitchen light was on, and it wasn't my mother in the kitchen this time. My father sat at the table in his bathrobe. He'd made a sandwich, and it was waiting on a plate in front of the chair across from him, under a paper towel: ham and Swiss on rye. Randy's favorite. Mine. He looked at the blood on my lip and didn't ask.

"Sit," he said.

I sat and ate the sandwich while he watched, and for a long while neither of us said anything.

"You were going to say something," I said finally.

"I was going to say a lot of things," Dad said. "I was going to say, you've missed four dinners. I was going to say, your sister thinks you're on drugs. I was going to say, your mother has been sitting up waiting for you to come in the back door every night this week, and she's not sleeping, and she won't tell you that, so I'm telling you." He turned his coffee mug on the table. "I was going to say, Tatum Riley called the house twice, and Sidney Prescott called once, and you told your mother to say you were in the shower."

I put the sandwich down.

"I'm not going to tell you to stop," Dad said. "I'm not going to tell you that whatever you're doing out there doesn't matter. I don't know what you're doing out there. I don't think I want to know." He looked at me. "I know what it's like to need something to do with your hands. When your grandfather died, I rebuilt a whole carburetor. Twice. It didn't need it."

"Dad—"

"But you used to come sit in the living room," he said. "At night. With us. You'd sit on the floor in front of the couch and make fun of whatever your mother was watching. Every night. Since you were twelve." He finished his coffee. "You haven't come in the living room since you got back from Ohio."

I sat there. Eat the eggs, somebody had told me three nights ago, on a couch in a living room that didn't exist. She likes it when you eat them. I hadn't eaten breakfast since Wednesday. I'd been out the door at five every morning. She'd made eggs every morning anyway, and I'd come back from my run and gone straight upstairs, and every morning, I realized now, the eggs had gone in the trash.

"Okay," I said. My voice wasn't working right. "Okay. I'll... okay."

Dad nodded, got up, and rinsed his mug in the sink. On his way past my chair he put his hand on the back of my head for a second, the way he had at the airport. "Go to bed. You look like hell."

That was three people in one day who'd told me I looked like hell, and I'd started keeping count of that too.

Sunday morning I came downstairs at seven, not five.

Mom was at the stove. She turned around when I came into the kitchen, saw that I wasn't in my running clothes and that I was sitting down at the table, and her face did something I'm not going to describe. She made eggs. I ate them. All of them.

Then I went into the living room and sat on the floor in front of the couch. Martha came down in her Buckeyes sweatshirt and looked at me like she'd found a raccoon in the house. Mom put on CBS Sunday Morning, and I made fun of the segment about the man who carved duck decoys, and Martha laughed, and Dad pretended to read the paper and didn't turn a single page for forty minutes.

It was the first time all week I hadn't been doing something, and it was terrible. I sat there with my hands in my lap, and every second some part of me was in the clearing, or the garage, or the library, doing the throw in my head, counting push-ups, running through direct pressure, elevation, tourniquet. I was in the room without being there. But I stayed in the room.

I called Tatum back at noon and said sorry. She said "Weirdo," and then "Next Friday. The Rialto. You're coming," and I said yes.

I didn't call Sidney. I didn't know what to say. I picked up the phone twice and put it down twice, and wrote her name in the notebook at the bottom of PROGRAM v2 and didn't write anything next to it. And Sunday afternoon I went back out to the garage, because I didn't know how not to.

I came up from the garage at ten-thirty Sunday night after Gloria's rotator cuff routine and three sets on the old weight bench under the single bulb—just the bar, unloaded, which made my right shoulder sing a little song about consequences—sweaty and tired, with the Top Story check still uncashed in my shirt pocket, where I'd carried it for three days like a lucky charm, and the beginnings of a plan in my head.

My bedroom door was open. I'd closed it; I always closed it now. I stopped in the hall.

The desk lamp was on, and sitting cross-legged in the middle of my bedroom floor in her oversized Ohio State Buckeyes sweatshirt, with the Nike shoebox open on the carpet beside her, was my sister. She had all four of them.

San-D was curled in her cupped hands, wide awake, gazing up at Martha with those enormous shining eyes, like Martha was the best thing she'd ever seen. Jum-P was asleep in the hood of the Buckeyes sweatshirt with his scarf pulled up over his face, one foot twitching. Cham-P sat on her knee with his chest out, planted between her and the door like a bouncer, until he saw it was me and relaxed and went back to the sunflower seed in his paws. And Maga-Z was on the desk next to the shoebox lid, facing the doorway. Facing me.

The lid had been opened from the inside.

He looked at me. I looked at him. He folded his paws and narrowed his eyes in an expression I can only describe as you should have paid me more.

Martha looked up. She didn't look angry. I'd been expecting angry—you lied to me and Mom! and a whole Martha Meeks production, with music—and instead she looked like a thirteen-year-old girl who'd just been handed the best thing that ever happened to her, by accident, in somebody else's room.

"Randy," Martha said, very slowly and calmly, in the voice of a person who already knew the answer and just wanted to hear you say it out loud.

"...Yeah?"

"Why," said my sister, "are there four hamsters in your shoebox?"

I opened my mouth, and for the first time since September, I didn't have a plan.