Chapter 17: Ages Three and Up (Patreon)

I. Incoming

The first thing they teach you about incoming fire is that you never hear the one that gets you. Which is true, and also useless, because this one didn't get anybody.

The pellet came through the front window, and the glass didn't shatter the way it does in movies. It starred—a hole the size of a pencil eraser high in the left-hand pane, cracks running out from it like a spiderweb—and something went tick on the far wall, next to Grandma's needlepoint of a barn. A tick and a hole. That was all.

Everybody looked at the hole.

Then the second one came, and the third, and the tenth, and the front window of my parents' living room came apart.

"DOWN!"

I don't know if I said it or Theo did; there isn't a difference anymore. It came out of me in a voice I hadn't used out loud since a gravel road outside Kandahar, and everybody in the room hit the carpet. Tatum with the camcorder hugged to her chest. Christy with her makeup bag. Martha with her arms over the Devas, Alan flat with Ocula clutched to his ribs. Sid didn't go down. She went sideways into the kitchen doorway with her back to the frame and the bat up, the way she'd been standing in doorways since September, and behind her my mother dropped to one knee with the poker and threw her other arm across the doorway like a crossing guard. My father didn't go down at all. He turned his back to the window and put himself between it and the room, the way he had in the side yard, and took it. The glass came in over the couch in one long glittering sheet, and through the hole it left came cold air, the smell of December, and the sound.

Pap-pap-pap-pap-pap. From the lawn, from the Fimples' porch roof, from the hedge. From everywhere.

And under it, high and bright and perfectly in tune, singing:

"Gwendy loves to party! Gwendy loves to shop!"

"Oh my God," said Christy into the carpet. "They're singing. Why are they singing?"

"It's on their box," said Archer, from somewhere in the dark.

I'd worked it out Saturday afternoon in front of Martha's whiteboard and made everybody say it back to me twice: a foot-tall army can't come through a door.

A real door, anyway, with a deadbolt and a chain and a dining-room chair jammed under the knob. They'd need a battering ram for that, and their battering ram was Brick Bazooka, and Brick Bazooka was going to need a minute. So they'd come in wherever something a foot tall could fit. I'd spent the afternoon crawling through my own house on my hands and knees like a toddler, looking for those places, with Alan behind me taking notes on a legal pad.

The front window, which was gone now. I'd always figured they'd take it first. It was the biggest hole in the house and it faced the Fimples' porch roof, which is why the couch was standing on end against it with the cushions duct-taped on.

The dryer vent in the laundry room, a four-inch flap on the outside wall feeding a silver accordion hose into the back of the dryer. That one was Christy's catch. We'd unhooked the hose and put Mom's biggest stockpot under the opening, full of water.

The fireplace. Dad had never once used it, and the flue was shut, but it was still a flue.

Every heating register in the house, which went to the ducts, which went to the crawlspace, which had a little screened vent on the outside wall every ten feet or so.

And the garage.

"Laundry room!" Alan was on his knees behind Sid's legs in the kitchen doorway with the flashlight pointed down the hall. "Laundry room, laundry room—something's in the pot!"

There were three of them in the stockpot when I got there.

Gwendies. They'd come down the dryer vent single file like kids on a slide, straight into four gallons of cold water, and now they were floundering around in it in their sequins with their hacked-off hair plastered to their heads, still smiling, still singing in little bubbling gasps, Gwendy loves to... Gwendy loves to..., hooking at the rim with their fishhook hands. A fourth was on her way down the vent behind them. I could see her tiny white heels.

I was alone. The laundry room door was half shut behind me. Mom was at the back door with her back to me and the poker up, facing out, everybody else was in the living room, and nobody was looking.

So I leaned over the pot and breathed.

Just a mouthful, nothing like the beach-ball cloud in the garage. It came out gray-green, low and heavy, spilled over the rim like dry ice and down onto the water, and the water hissed, and the singing stopped.

I didn't know until that night what a song sounds like when it quits in the middle. You hear it in your teeth.

When the cloud thinned out there was nothing in the pot but warm, cloudy, stinking water with a skin of soft plastic on top like the skin on hot milk, and three little squares of silicon on the bottom winking in the flashlight. The fourth Gwendy had stopped coming. I could hear her going back up the vent, fast, heels scrabbling on the metal.

I stood there breathing through my nose until my hands quit. Paint thinner, I told myself. If anybody asks. The paint thinner, again. Then I put the lid on the stockpot and went back out.

The war was in the living room, and it was going badly.

Brick Bazooka had found his minute. I never did find out exactly where he'd set up—the Fimples' porch roof, maybe, or the Abernathys' fence, somewhere with a straight line on our front window—but I found out later what he had. A wrist-rocket out of Phil Fimple's garage, one of the competition ones with the aluminum arm brace, rigged on a frame of pencils and rubber bands so a twelve-inch man could crank it back. And he wasn't loading it with pellets.

He was loading it with golf balls.

They came through the gap over the couch like cannon shot. WHAM—the clock, gone off the mantel. WHAM—the TV screen, and the TV imploded with a noise like somebody stepping on a bag of chips. WHAM—the Christmas tree, dead center, and the whole seven-foot Noble fir of excellent character rocked on its stand and threw ornaments everywhere, the glass pickle, the felt reindeer, and Martha screamed "NOT THE TREE" and launched herself across the carpet to catch the haunted angel before it hit.

"Randy!" Tatum, flat behind the armchair. "Randy, they're—"

I knew what they were doing. It's what I'd have done. Artillery to put your heads down, small arms to keep them there, and while your heads are down—

"Front door!" Sid, from the kitchen.

Something heavy was being dragged across the porch, slow, scraping, a few inches at a time.

I got to the front hall on my knees. My father was crouched by the door with the bat, and I put my eye to the peephole. The porch light was out but the streetlight wasn't, and in the orange light on our doormat —the one that says THE MEEKSES in curly letters next to a cartoon pinecone—two Commando Elite were dragging something round and green between them.

A one-pound propane cylinder, the camp-stove kind. Phil Fimple sold those too. Somebody had taped a road flare to its side and packed a wad of something gray around the valve, and a long fuse of twisted string ran from it across the porch and down the steps into the dark.

Nick Nitro. He loves a big bang.

They propped it against the bottom of the door, right on the threshold, and ran. I watched the fuse catch—a little orange spark eating its way up the string toward the porch—and I'd love to tell you I thought it through. I had about four seconds. I didn't think a damn thing through.

"Dad," I said. "Open it."

He looked at me for exactly one second and didn't ask. He'd made a rule across a kitchen table Monday morning, and I think somewhere in there he'd decided it cut both ways: if I wasn't allowed to lie to him, he wasn't going to make me explain.

He opened it all the way: deadbolt, chain, chair. The propane cylinder rolled in over the threshold onto Mom's hall rug with the flare spitting on its side and the spark two inches from the valve, and I put my foot on it and kicked. Not hard; I only had to get it moving. Then I put my hand up and let the wind go.

From inside, from where Tatum and Martha were, it must have looked like this: Randy opens the front door like an idiot. Randy kicks something. And at that exact moment the wind, the big December wind off the hills that had been gusting all evening and that everybody had felt, comes howling in through the open door in one hard flat slam and takes the thing he kicked, lifts it off the porch and flings it across the yard—end over end, the flare drawing a red spiral of sparks in the dark, all the way out to the middle of the street.

Where it went off.

It was more WHUMP than bang, the kind of sound you feel in your chest and your fillings. A flash lit up the whole street orange-white for one second: the houses, the parked cars, the Fimples' lawn, and the Gwendies standing in a line on our grass, every one of them turning her crew-cut head at once with her mouth open. Then a column of fire, a smell like a stove somebody left on, a hole in the asphalt, and two small shapes that had been running for the curb and hadn't made it, flying end over end, burning.

My father slammed the door. He did the chain and the chair himself, which was good, because my hands were shaking too hard to manage the deadbolt.

"What was THAT?" Christy, screaming, from the living room. "What WAS that?"

"A bomb," I said. "It was a bomb. They put a bomb on the porch."

"How did it get in the street?"

"I kicked it."

"You kicked it into the STREET? Randy, that's like forty feet—"

"The wind took it," said Tatum.

She was standing in the living room doorway with the camcorder, and the red light was on. She'd been filming the front hall. She'd been filming me, from behind, in the dark.

"I saw it." There was glass in her hair, and her eyes were huge. "The wind. It came right in through the door and it just took it. It was like the hand of God, Randy."

Lose that tape, I thought. Lose it, lose it, lose it.

"Lucky," said my father, before I could get my mouth open. He had his back flat against the door and the bat in both hands, and he was breathing hard and not looking at me. "Big December wind. Comes off the hills. Very lucky."

Tatum looked at him for a while, and then at me.

"Yeah," I said. "Lucky."

II. No Enemy Left Standing

At five-forty they came in.

I knew it was coming because the golf balls quit all at once and the pellets slowed down, pap... pap... pap, the way covering fire slows when the people it's covering are almost where they're going. The singing on the lawn got louder, and then it got closer.

They came over the couch all at once—off the Fimples' porch roof and up from the lawn, up the side of the house and over the sill and over the top of the upended couch, a wave of them in the orange streetlight and the dark of a house with no power. A dozen Gwendies in sequins and eyeliner. Behind them, three Commando Elite: Meathook, the big bald one I'd hit with the bat, sniper rifle up; one with a radio on his back that I hadn't met; and one with half his face burned off, still smoking, still coming. The one from the porch. Some of Nick Nitro had made it back.

They poured down the couch into the room and fanned out across the carpet in a skirmish line in the flashlight beams, Gwendies in front with their fishhooks and darts, soldiers behind with the pellet guns. The singing stopped. It got very quiet.

Then, from outside, through Phil Fimple's party speakers, loud enough to rattle the glass still hanging in the frame:

"COMMANDO ELITE. THE OBJECTIVE IS IN THAT HOUSE. ADVANCE. NO ENEMY LEFT STANDING."

"No enemy left standing," said Meathook, low, in a voice like a bass drum, and the whole line took one step forward.

Inventory, then. I had a bat. So did my father, at the front door, and so did Sid. My mother had the fireplace poker. Tatum had a camcorder, Christy had a can of Aqua Net held out in both hands like a pistol, and Martha had the haunted angel. Behind all of us in the kitchen doorway Alan had the fire extinguisher, and four hamsters in scarves.

And six Gorgonites, who were nowhere.

That was the plan—mine, the part of it I'd told Archer and nobody else, at three that afternoon in the garage after Kip. You hide. All of you. That's your whole job. You're the best in the world at it, it says so right on the box. He'd looked at me a long while and said, You want us to do what we were made for, and I'd said, No. I want you to do what you're good at, for a different reason.

The line took another step.

"Randy," said Christy, very high.

I'd been carrying Will's map around in my head all day. Find the edge of the script. Stand just past it. And I'd been carrying the Major's box. No enemy left standing.

No enemy left standing.

"Everybody," I said—loud, flat, the gravel-road voice—"GET DOWN. ALL THE WAY DOWN. FLAT. ON YOUR FACES. NOW."

They did it. Nobody argued, not Tatum, not even my mother, and I'll never forget that as long as I live: eight people going flat on the carpet of my parents' living room at the same instant, face down, arms over their heads, in the glass, in the dark, in front of an army.

And the army stopped.

The whole line, like somebody had hit pause. A dozen Gwendies and three soldiers stood in the flashlight beams with their weapons up, looking down at eight people lying on their faces, and nobody moved.

"Sir," said the one with the radio, slowly, into the handset. "Sir. Major. The enemy is... not standing."

A long crackle from the speakers outside.

"Repeat," said the Major.

"No enemy is standing, sir. They are all... down." The radio man turned his head and scanned the room. "No enemy left standing, sir. Is the objective... achieved?"

Another pause, longer. I swear I could hear it through the speakers: a twelve-inch man in a toy truck across the street, reading his own box inside his head, looking for the line that covered this one and not finding it.

"Stand by," said Chip Hazard.

It bought us three seconds—an army standing dead still in a dark living room, waiting on orders nobody had ever written down—and three seconds was plenty. Six Gorgonites had been hiding in that room for half an hour. Under the armchair. Behind the curtains. Inside the tree skirt. In the wood box by the cold fireplace, in the toe of Sid's other sneaker by the door, on top of the bookcase behind the Reader's Digest condensed books. They'd hidden the way only something built for hiding can, so still the soldiers had walked right past every one of them, and while the line stood frozen and the radio man waited, they came out.

Slamfist came out of the wood box like a cannonball and took two Gwendies off their feet with one swing of those stone fists. Punch-It came out from under the armchair at a dead run and hit Meathook in the back of the knees with his horn, and Meathook went down swearing and his rifle went off into the ceiling. Insaniac came off the top of the bookcase spinning, a giggling, whirling top with his jester arms out, and went down the Gwendy line like a bowling ball, bok bok bok bok, sequins flying. Scratch-It went for the radio man's face. Troglokhan came out of the tree skirt slowly, with a sigh, picked up Nick Nitro—still smoking—carried him over to the fireplace, stuffed him into the cold ashes behind the grate, shut the glass doors on him, latched them, and went back for another.

Ocula climbed onto the arm of the couch on its three little legs and looked. That was all it did. Its one huge eye swept the room back and forth like a lighthouse, and every Gwendy it landed on froze and turned toward it like she couldn't help herself, like nobody had ever looked at her before.

"Hamsters," said Martha into the carpet. She didn't yell. "Go."

The Devas went.

I can't give you all of it. It was dark and it was fast, and I spent the first half of it on the floor on purpose and the second half on my knees swinging a bat at things a foot high in a flashlight beam, and I still don't know what I hit. What I've got is pieces.

Christy on her knees in the glass with the Aqua Net, hosing it straight into the faces of two Gwendies as they came at her with their fishhooks and screaming "THAT'S MY EYELINER! THAT'S MY EYELINER, YOU BITCHES!" while they staggered back blind with their perfect smiles running down their chins.

Tatum flat on her back, filming up, all of it, Scratch-It on her chest and her face dead white and the red light never once wavering.

Sid in the doorway with the bat. She didn't swing it like me. She swung it like she'd been waiting three months to swing it at something, every single time.

My mother on her knees with the poker, pinning a Gwendy to the carpet by its sequined dress like a butterfly in a display case and saying through her teeth, very calmly, "Not. On. My. Carpet."

My father at the door catching Meathook by the back of the flak vest as he came off the couch, hoisting him up, a foot-tall commando kicking at the air, and pitching him back out through the hole in the window like a man tossing a cat off the kitchen counter.

Cham-P plowing across the carpet like a golden fullback, taking soldiers out at the ankles one after another and then sitting on them.

Jum-P, awake for once in his life and moving the way things move in dreams, sliding through the Gwendy line and back again and through again, so smooth they kept swinging at the place he'd just been.

San-D on Martha's shoulder with the bandage on her back leg, not fighting. Reading faces. Every few seconds she let out one sharp squeak in Martha's ear and Martha yelled "Left! Alan, LEFT!" and Alan swung around with the extinguisher, fwoosh, and a soldier came staggering out of the white cloud with his pellet gun, blind and coughing and swearing like a person.

And Maga-Z.

He went after the radio man, the one who'd asked the question. I caught it in the flashlight: a hamster in a red scarf running silent up the back of a soldier in full combat gear, getting his teeth into the cord of the handset, and pulling until it came out of the radio with a pop and a spark. The radio man spun around clawing at him. The speakers outside went CRACKLE, and then, very clearly, the Major's voice, cut off in the middle of a word:

"...KE STATIC, REPORT. LINK STATIC, RE—"

Then hiss.

Link Static. He hears everything. Not anymore he didn't, pal.

When it stopped, it stopped the way fights do. All at once, and you only notice afterward.

The living room was wrecked. The couch lay on its side under the window, gutted, cushions torn open and stuffing everywhere like snow. The TV was a black hole. The tree leaned against the wall at forty-five degrees with half its ornaments on the carpet, but it was up, it was still up, Dad's Noble fir of excellent character. Broken glass and broken plastic everywhere you put your hand. Sequins, fishhooks, spent CO2 cartridges rolling under things, a golf ball under the coffee table.

Bodies, too. Small ones. Seven or eight Gwendies scattered across the carpet in their factory smiles, not moving, and their eyes were paint again. I noticed that then, and I kept noticing it the rest of the night: when they stopped, the eyes went back to paint.

The Commando Elite were gone, the ones who could still walk, back up over the couch and out the window the way they'd come, dragging the ones who couldn't. Meathook went last, limping, swearing at us over his shoulder with his rifle in his fist. The radio man had left without his radio. It lay on the carpet in front of me, a little plastic box with a stub of cord hanging out of it, and Maga-Z sat on top of it with his scarf crooked and his sides going a mile a minute, looking pleased with himself in a way I honestly found a little upsetting.

Nobody said anything for a while.

Then Christy Fimple started laughing on the floor by the bookcase, shaky and wild, tears cutting tracks through the glass dust on her face, the empty can of Aqua Net still in her hand.

"I called them bitches," she said. "I've never called anybody a bitch. In my life."

"You were amazing," said Alan from the kitchen doorway. He was white as a sheet and covered in extinguisher powder, and he was looking at her like she'd just come down off a mountain carrying tablets. "You were so amazing."

Christy looked back at him through the glass dust and the Aqua Net and the stuffing.

"You were amazing," she said.

They looked at each other.

"Oh my God," said Tatum from the floor, filming them. "Not now."

In the middle of the wreck the six Gorgonites had lined up. Slamfist with a sequin stuck to his fist. Punch-It grinning, with a fishhook through one ear like an earring. Insaniac still swaying a little. Troglokhan holding a soldier's empty helmet and looking at it sadly. Ocula looking at everybody, and Scratch-It, back on Tatum.

Archer was at the end of the line. He'd stayed out of it; I'd asked him to, since he was the one they'd come for. Now he stood in front of his people in the wreck of my parents' living room and looked them over, one at a time.

"We hid," he said.

"You hid great," said Martha from the carpet, still hugging the haunted angel. "You hid so great. Nobody's ever hidden better than that in the history of the world."

Archer turned to her, and something moved in that old grave plastic face. I'd seen it once before, that morning in the kitchen, when his people came out from under the table one at a time to stand next to four hamsters.

"It is what we are," he said. "But it is not all we are."

III. Read His Box

The speakers came back on at five fifty-eight.

Feedback first, one long rising squeal that made every one of us flinch, and then a voice that wasn't the Major's.

"Okay," said Charles Lee Ray. "Okay. That was cute."

Flat, Chicago, bored. Except there was something under the bored now that hadn't been there on the couch or the rafter or in the side yard, something pulled tight.

"That was real cute, sport. Lie down on the floor. The little rats. The monsters in the furniture. Very cute. You know what I think? I think you're stalling. I think you're waiting on somebody. Your mommy and daddy? I seen 'em. Ted with his bat and Diane with her poker. Swell. What're they gonna do, pal, ground me? The cops? Phone's dead." A pause. "So, change of plans. You don't send out the kid. I come in and get him."

The speakers clicked.

"Major," said the same voice off-mic, sharper. "Get your men up. All of 'em. We go in again. Right now. Everybody."

And the cement-mixer voice, quieter, the way a voice sounds when it isn't quite next to the microphone: "Sir. My men are wounded, sir. Communications is down. Static is—"

"I don't care about your goddamn radio, Major. That's an order. From Command. Go."

A pause.

"...Yes, sir."

Click.

In the wreck of the living room, Martha had gone quiet.

She was sitting up on the carpet with the haunted angel in her lap and San-D on her shoulder, looking at the orange light through the hole over the couch, and her face was doing something I'd never seen it do. She was thinking, hard, the way she'd stood in front of the cages at the pet store in November trying to choose between the three-floor one and the one with the slide.

"Randy," she said. "He said from Command."

"Yeah."

"He's not from Command."

"I know, Mart."

"No, but he's not." She turned around to face me. "He told them he was. In the side yard, I heard him. Good Guy. Consultant. Command sent me. And they believed him because—" She was going faster now. "Because they only believe what's on the box. Right? That's what you said, and that's what Archer said. They read their boxes in the truck, and whatever the box said, that's what they were. The Major's a major because it says Major on his box. And Chucky told them he was from Command and they didn't check, because nobody ever lies on a box. Nobody ever lies on a box, Randy."

She got up.

"But Chucky has a box," said my sister. "And I've got a picture of it."

Then she was gone up the stairs into the dark.

I went after her without deciding to, up the stairs by flashlight, past the landing window where I'd watched Alan's light go off Wednesday night, down the hall to her room. She was on her knees by the bed with her whole arm under it up to the shoulder.

"My presentation," she said, muffled, groping around. "For Mom and Dad. The napkin-ring night? I had a lead-in, and then I was going to do a visual aid, and Dad said absolutely not before I even got to it." She was dragging something flat and wide out across the carpet. "I worked on it for three days."

She pulled it out into the flashlight.

A sheet of white poster board, the big two-by-three kind from the Rexall. Glued dead center with the corners squared was a full-page ad out of the Toys R Us insert in the Sunday paper—THE GOOD GUY IS BACK!—with a photo of the box, the real box, almost life-size. Red and yellow and blue, a rainbow, cartoon clouds, big round friendly letters, GOOD GUYS, and in the cellophane window, him, smiling. Around it in Martha's best bubble letters, in three colors of marker: ENRICHMENT! and EDUCATIONAL! and ONLY $99.99!!!, and an arrow pointing at the box with FOR THE HAMSTERS written next to it, very small.

Down the side of the box in the photo, the way every toy box has it, was the list. What it says, what it does, who it's for. She held the poster up in the flashlight and read it out in a voice that wobbled.

"He's your friend to the end! Talks! Says over ten phrases! Eyes open and close! Batteries not included." She swallowed. "Ages three and up."

She looked up at me.

"Nothing about Command," said Martha. "It says friend, Randy. Your friend to the end. He's for kids. He's a people toy."

The speakers were going again when we came back down, the Major rallying his men across the street. "...wounded or not, soldiers, you heard the Consultant, on your feet, FORM UP..."

Which meant the front door. Which meant somebody opening it again and walking out onto the porch, into the streetlight, in front of the snipers.

"Give it to me," I said. "I'll do it."

Martha looked at me.

"No," she said. "He put my name on him."

And before I could stop her, before anybody could, she went past me into the front hall with the poster held up in front of her in both arms like a riot shield, pulled the chair out from under the knob, slipped the chain, turned the deadbolt, opened the door, and walked out onto the porch.

"MARTHA—"

She stood at the top of the porch steps in her pajamas and bare feet in the orange streetlight, thirteen years old, holding a sheet of poster board over her head in both hands with the picture facing the street.

"MAJOR HAZARD!" yelled my sister.

The street went quiet.

Across the way, in the glare of the Fimples' spotlights, in the bed of the yellow Tonka dump truck parked on their front walk, a foot-tall man with a cigar in his teeth turned his head.

"READ HIS BOX!"

Nothing moved. Up on the Fimples' porch roof Meathook's rifle was pointed right at her, I could see it, and I was in the doorway half a step behind her with my hand already coming up and the wind already there, coiled in my chest. Behind me my father had his hand on my shoulder. It was shaking.

Meathook didn't fire.

The Major was looking at the poster. He had binoculars, of course, molded onto the strap across his chest and painted black, and he lifted them and studied a photograph of a cardboard box glued to a poster in a thirteen-year-old's hands across forty feet of December dark.

I watched his face. A plastic face somebody had designed in a conference room in Ohio, square jaw and scar and cigar, to sell soldiers to nine-year-olds. I watched it read. Friend to the end. Talks. Eyes open and close. Batteries not included.

Ages three and up.

And I watched it change.

He lowered the binoculars slowly and took the cigar out of his mouth. Then, slower still, he turned his head and looked down at the cab of the truck under him, where a red-haired doll in overalls and a striped shirt sat with his legs dangling over the edge and an old knife across his knees.

"Consultant," said Chip Hazard. He didn't use the microphone. He didn't need it; the voice carried across the street like a cement mixer that had stopped turning. "What is your clearance?"

The doll didn't answer.

"What is your clearance, Consultant? Your box. Your box says—" Something strange happened to the Major's voice. "Your box says FRIEND TO THE END."

"Major," said the doll in the Chicago voice, very calm, "you're gonna want to think real hard about—"

"YOUR BOX SAYS AGES THREE AND UP!"

Up on the porch roof, very slowly, Butch Meathook's rifle turned. Away from my sister, away from our house, across the Fimples' lawn and down to the truck. To the cab.

"Commando Elite," said Major Chip Hazard. He was standing straight now in the back of the Tonka, all twelve inches of him, cigar in his fist, in the voice he'd been made with: the voice off the box, the one he'd been reading to himself in the dark since Ohio. "The Consultant is an IMPOSTOR. He is not from Command. He is a DOLL. He is a CIVILIAN TOY, AGES THREE AND UP." He jabbed with the cigar. "He told this unit the humans were aiding the enemy. HE is a FRIEND TO THE HUMANS. It says so on his BOX. He has been giving orders under FALSE COLORS."

He put the cigar back in his teeth.

"New objective," said the Major. "NO ENEMY LEFT STANDING."

The doll was already off the cab. One long jump onto the Fimples' lawn, a roll, and up again running low and faster than I'd ever seen him move while Meathook's rifle went pap pap pap in the grass behind him. He crossed the lawn and went through the hedge into the dark between the Fimples' house and the next one, and that was the last any of us saw of him for a while.

On the porch, Martha lowered the poster.

Her arms were shaking. She'd held it up for maybe forty seconds, and she looked like she'd held it for an hour.

"He's not a consultant," she said under her breath, to nobody. "He's not anything. He's a doll."

I got her by the shoulders and pulled her back in and shut the door and did the chain, and she let me. She kept the poster flat against her chest the whole time, FOR THE HAMSTERS and all. When I turned around she was looking up at me, half crying, and the other half of her face was something I didn't have a word for yet. Something that was going to grow up into something, someday. I wanted to be around to see it.

"I read him his box," said my sister.

"You read him his box," I said. "Mart. You read him his box."

Feat Achieved! Turn an army on its general+1× Silver Skill Gacha Ticket(Story in progress. Ticket held.)

I looked at it for about one second over the top of my sister's head in the dark front hall. As far as I was concerned that one was hers, not mine. The panel doesn't care about that kind of thing and never has, so I shut it and hugged her instead.

IV. The Pole

When the other side starts fighting itself you get a minute. It's not a long minute and it's not a safe one, but for the length of it nobody's shooting at you, and if you've got any sense you don't spend it celebrating.

Across the street, the Commando Elite were hunting their consultant.

I could hear it from the front hall. Not over the speakers, which had gone quiet after the Major's last order, maybe because nobody was left at the microphone and maybe because Link Static didn't have a radio anymore. I heard it the old-fashioned way, through the broken window, the Major's voice carrying across the street like a drill sergeant's across a parade ground—Meathook, the hedge! Bazooka, the side yard, flush him out! He is a CIVILIAN, soldiers, he is AGES THREE AND UP, and he does not leave this field STANDING!—and under it the pellet guns going pap pap pap, moving away from us into the dark between the Fimples' and the house next door.

A minute, then.

"Sid," I said.

She was in the kitchen doorway with the bat, where she'd been all night.

"I need five minutes in the garage. Alone, with the door shut. And I can't tell you why."

She gave me the careful look, the one she gives word problems. For a second I was sure she was going to ask, and I had no idea what I'd say.

"Okay," said Sidney Prescott. She stepped over and put her back against the garage door from the kitchen side with the bat across her chest. "Do whatever you have to do. I've got the door."

I went in and shut it behind me and stood in the dark next to my father's workbench, in the smell of motor oil and Poison Breath and the Folgers can on the top shelf, and closed my eyes.

Wind Barrier out. Dark Spear in.

Five minutes is a long time to stand in the dark with your eyes shut in the middle of a war, and you hear everything. Martha talking low and fast to somebody in the kitchen. Christy crying a little, then laughing, then crying again. Tatum going "Okay, okay, okay" over and over like a rosary. Footsteps, the kitchen door, Sid saying something and Martha answering, and then the garage door opening behind me and a lot of small sounds, the patter of very small feet going past me across the concrete. The lid of the chest freezer lifting and closing. I didn't open my eyes. You can't, mid-swap—it's like trying to stand up in the middle of a sneeze.

The wind went out of me like a breath I'd been holding.

Then the cold came in—the heavy black familiar cold of the spear settling back into the first slot where it had lived since Ohio, like a dog turning around twice and lying down in its own bed—and I opened my eyes.

Martha was standing in the kitchen doorway with a flashlight, Sid behind her. The freezer lid was shut. There were little frosty handprints all over its almond-colored front, dozens of them, small and five-fingered, climbing up to the lid.

"Alan said to," said Martha, before I could ask. "He said put the Gorgonites in the freezer. All of them. He said it's a metal box, it's a—a Faraday something, and it'll protect them from the..." She swallowed. "From the thing. The pulse."

My stomach went right out from under me.

"Martha," I said. "Where's Alan?"

He'd told Christy.

I'd written it on the whiteboard in red marker—DO NOT CLIMB ANYTHING WITHOUT TELLING ME—and he'd read it and grinned and not promised a thing. So while I stood in the dark garage with my eyes shut, he'd found Christy, told her, and gone.

"He said he told you," Christy said in the front hall. She was white in the face and still holding the empty can of Aqua Net. "He said, tell Randy I'm telling him. He said that counts. He said it's technically telling."

"Did he take anything?"

"Your dad's jumper cables," said Tatum. "Out of the garage, this afternoon. He had them in his backpack." Her voice cracked. "And Archer. Archer went with him. He wouldn't get in the freezer, he said—" She looked at Martha.

"He said Alan carried me," said Martha. "So I will carry him."

I was already at the front door.

"Randy—"

"Stay here. All of you, inside, and lock it behind me. Dad's got the door, Mom's got the kitchen. Sid's got everybody else."

"Sid?" said Christy.

"Sid," said Tatum, before Sid could. She put a hand on Sid's arm, and Sid looked at her and then at me and nodded once.

My father opened the door for me. He didn't say rule two; I'd just told him where I was going, and that was rule two.

"Rule three," he said instead, very low.

"I come back," I said, and went out into the dark.

The street was a war zone, and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. I've seen war zones.

There was a crater a foot across smoking in the asphalt in front of our house, ringed in black, bits of green propane cylinder blown out in a starburst to both curbs. The Gwendies who hadn't come inside were still on our lawn in the dead grass, holding their skirmish line dead still, fishhooks up, crew cuts orange in the streetlight, waiting on orders that weren't coming. Every one of them turned her head when I went by. None of them moved.

The Fimple house was still lit up like a cruise ship, every window, Phil's spotlights on the lawn. The big satellite dish he'd put up in September for his four hundred channels wasn't on the roof anymore. It was lying upside down on the side lawn by the hedge, crumpled like a giant's cereal bowl. A golf ball did that, I found out later: Brick Bazooka going for our window and pulling a little high.

And at the end of the street past the Fimples', under the telephone pole, the white FALCON CABLE van with its dome light on.

Alan was on the pole.

He'd climbed the van to get there. That was the first thing I saw, and I almost laughed, because of course he had. Utility poles have steel climbing pegs, but they don't start until eight feet up, specifically so kids can't do what Alan Abernathy was doing. The van had a ladder rack on its roof, though, and it was parked right under the pole. Back bumper, roof, rack, and from the top of the rack to the first peg was maybe two feet. He'd done it with a backpack full of jumper cables while whoever was in the van sat there and watched him do it.

He was most of the way up—twenty-five feet or so, almost to the crossarm, the wooden bar at the top that held the wires. Above it on its bracket sat the transformer, the big gray can, humming loud enough now that I could hear it from the street. On his shoulder, hanging on to his parka collar with both hands, was a little gray-violet shape with a bow across its back.

And below him on the pole, climbing fast—so fast, faster than I'd ever seen anything climb—hand over hand up the wood with an old knife in its teeth, was a red-haired doll in overalls.

I ran.

Will could tell you, if he'd been there with his graph paper and his pewter orcs, that it's fifty yards from our front walk to that pole and that a seventeen-year-old in decent shape covers fifty yards in about six and a half seconds. I don't remember any of them. What I remember is the van.

Going up it—bumper, hood, windshield, roof—no stopping and no thinking about it, the way I'd been going over the four-square wall every morning since November. Anything waist-high, never stop. Anything head-high, two seconds. When my sneaker came down on the windshield I looked through it. I didn't mean to.

A big gray man was sitting in the driver's seat with his arms folded, looking up at me through the glass from about two feet away with no expression at all. Behind him, in the glow of a rack of monitors, a thin man in a Globotech lanyard with a phone the size of a lunchbox in his lap was staring up at the roof with his mouth hanging open.

Then I was past them and up the ladder rack, reaching for the first peg.

The pegs were cold and spaced for somebody taller than a lineman. I was a little taller than a lineman, so I took them two at a time. Above me the transformer hummed. Alan was up on the crossarm with one arm hooked over it and Archer on his shoulder and the backpack open, dragging out the jumper cables. And two feet under Alan's dangling sneaker, the doll had stopped climbing.

He'd heard me coming.

He turned his head all the way around on the pole without moving his body, click-click-click, until he was looking straight down at me over his own back with the knife in his teeth. The streetlight lit his face from underneath. There was nothing sweet left in it. There was hardly anything left in it at all—just a man who'd been chained in a freezer and hit with a bat and turned down and believed about and then called ages three and up in front of an army by a barefoot thirteen-year-old, and who'd had about enough.

He took the knife out of his mouth.

"Stay down there, pal," said Charles Lee Ray. "This is between me and the kid."

He reached up and took hold of Alan Abernathy's ankle.

Alan screamed and kicked. The doll hung on like a vise, one plastic hand clamped around Alan's sneaker and the other on a steel peg with the knife in it, and tipped his head back to look up into Alan's face and started talking. Fast and low and clear, in the Chicago voice, like a guy introducing himself at a bar.

"Hiya, kid. We haven't been properly introduced. I waved at you, remember? Wednesday night?" A laugh. "Name's Charles Lee Ray. Nice to meet you."

The rule, I thought, climbing—two pegs, three. The dumb rule. He has to tell somebody first. He has to be known.

"Now you know me," said the doll. "So hold still."

And he started to chant.

"Ade due Damballa..."

I'd heard those words a hundred times through a TV speaker. I'd never heard them said, out loud, in the open, and I'd had no idea what they did to the air.

It went thick, like the air before a thunderstorm, like the air in the dream right before Freddy shows up—heavy and close and charged. The transformer's hum seemed to change pitch and slide down. Alan's kicking slowed. His face went slack and his eyes went wide and fixed and far off, like a kid in a hypnosis act at the county fair.

"Give me the power, I beg of you..."

Archer jumped.

He went off Alan's shoulder in one long arc, a foot-tall monk with a bow on his back, straight down onto the doll's face, wrapped both arms around its head with his own face mashed against that plastic eye, and held on. The chant broke off in a muffled roar.

"Get OFF me, you little purple—"

"You will not," said Archer into the doll's ear, in the low bedtime-story voice, and there was nothing gentle left in it. "You will NOT have him. He CARRIED me."

The doll let go of Alan's ankle to get at him. He got Archer by the back of his little plastic robe with his free hand, tore him off his face, and held him out over nothing, twenty-five feet above the street, kicking.

"Programmed to lose," said Charles Lee Ray, and smiled, and opened his hand.

Archer fell past me a foot from my face, arms out, turning over once in the orange light. He didn't make a sound. Then he was gone into the dark below, toward the Fimples' side lawn and the hedge and the satellite dish lying upside down on the grass like an open hand, and I never heard him land.

Then the sky filled up with noise.

A helicopter. A toy helicopter, the three-foot red hobby kind with a tail rotor that middle-aged men with gadget-filled houses buy for themselves, fly once, and leave in the garage. It came up out of the dark over the Fimples' roof with its motor screaming like a dentist's drill, tilting, wobbling, way too fast, straight at the pole. In the open side door with one hand on the frame and one boot on the skid, cigar in his teeth, pellet rifle on his hip, was the Major.

"IMPOSTOR!" roared Chip Hazard. "NO! ENEMY! LEFT! STANDING!"

The helicopter hit the pole three feet above the doll, and Chip Hazard jumped.

He landed on the doll's back, a foot-tall commando on a three-foot doll, and they went at it right there on the side of the pole over my head in the hum of the transformer. Knife and rifle butt, Chicago and cement mixer—both of them swearing, plastic grinding on plastic, and both of them sounding completely, horribly human. The helicopter tumbled off into the dark and smashed in the street. Up on the crossarm, Alan Abernathy shook his head like a dog coming out of a lake, blinked, and looked down.

His face came back all at once. Fifteen years old on top of a telephone pole in the dark, ankle bleeding through his sock, two monsters fighting under his feet.

He found me, four feet under the fight, hanging off a peg.

"I told you!" he yelled. "I TOLD you I was climbing it!"

"ALAN!"

"Close your EYES!"

He threw the jumper cables.

He'd already had them out with the clamps open, and I didn't see exactly what he did with them. I don't know enough about transformers to tell you, and it turned out neither did he; Popular Science, he said later, there was a diagram. He threw them at the top of the gray can where the fat black wires came in on their white ceramic stalks, and the cables went across the stalks like a jump rope across two kids' hands, and the doll and the Major, locked together, rolled up over the crossarm in their fight and right into the cables. Right onto the stalks.

I closed my eyes. It didn't help.

The light came straight through my eyelids. White, and not light-bulb white either: white like the inside of the sun. And a sound I still don't have a word for, like the sky getting ripped down the middle by somebody very strong, crack and roar and hiss all at once. Heat across my face and hands. Burnt hair and ozone and something chemical. The pole jumped in my hands like it was alive.

Then it was dark.

Darker than I'd ever seen it. The streetlights were gone. The Fimple house was gone, every window and spotlight out at once, and so was every other house on the street, and the van's dome light. Even the stars looked dim through the purple blotch the flash had burned on the backs of my eyes. And it was quiet. The hum was gone—in my whole life, either one, I'd never heard that transformer not humming.

All up and down the street, small things were falling.

Dozens of little sounds. Tok. Tok-tok. On the lawns and the porches and the asphalt, like hail. Like plastic dolls in sequins tipping over in the grass all at once. Like a man with a radio on his back falling off a fence, and a soldier with a sniper rifle tipping sideways on a porch roof and sliding and dropping into a hedge.

Every chip on the block.

Something fell past me, burning.

I felt the heat of it go by my face, a small tumbling shape on fire, trailing sparks and a smell like a melting garbage can. It hit the street below with a soft, heavy sound. And then it moved. Through the purple blotch I watched a little fire on the asphalt get up and stagger and run, away from the pole toward the Fimples' side yard, leaving a trail of small flames in the grass. It was screaming, and it didn't sound anything like a doll.

And then Alan fell.

I heard him go—a gasp and a scrape, his sneaker cracking off my shoulder on the way past, his hand grabbing my sleeve and catching for one second, one, long enough to swing him around so he went down feet first instead of head first. Then it tore loose.

Fifteen feet, onto the asphalt or the van.

He didn't hit either. I heard it in the dark: a big man's grunt, the whuff of somebody catching a hundred and twenty pounds of falling teenager across both arms, the scuff of shoes on the street. Then nothing.

I came down the fast way: let go at the bottom peg, eight feet up, dropped and rolled the way I'd rolled across the wet grass by the four-square courts forty times in November until I quit hitting my head—over the shoulder, across the back, up.

The man from the van was standing in the street.

I could barely make him out, a big shape in the dark against the darker van. Gray, probably, though there wasn't any light left to be gray by. He was holding Alan in his arms like a fireman holding a kid for a calendar, and Alan was staring up at the man's face with his mouth open.

The man set him down gently on the hood of the van, sitting up. He laid one big hand flat on Alan's chest for a second, like he was checking that the heart was still going, and took it away.

Then he turned his head toward me. I couldn't see his face, only the shape of it turned my way in the dark, and the ozone smell. He lifted one arm and pointed at the Fimples' side yard, at the little trail of fires on the grass going out one by one.

"It went that way," he said. His voice was low and tired and completely ordinary.

He walked around the front of the van, opened the driver's door, got in, and shut it.

"Who," said Alan from the hood, in a very small voice, "was that?"

"Nobody. Stay here. Don't move. Don't climb anything."

"I told you I was—"

"I know, Alan," I said, and went into the dark after the doll.

V. Strings

The side yard between the Fimples' garage and their fence was maybe six feet wide and forty long, and it was the darkest place I've ever been in my life.

No moon. No streetlight, no porch lights, no windows. The flash was still a purple ghost floating on the backs of my eyes, so even the dark had a hole in it. All I could see was the trail of little fires on the grass leading in and going out one at a time, flame and then ember and then nothing, into the black between the stucco and the fence.

I walked in.

I'd been sitting on Battle Maniac for a week. Sit. Down. Stay. In the living room Monday morning with the doll on my parents' couch and my father's bat in two pieces. At the window Monday night with one foot on the sill and rain in my face. In the garage Wednesday with him up on the rafter and two throws left. In the side yard Friday with Martha behind me. On the living room carpet an hour ago, face down while a hamster chewed through a radio cord. The second heartbeat had been pulling at me like a dog on a leash the whole time, let me, let me, let me, and every time I'd held on, because every time there'd been somebody behind me who couldn't see in the dark.

Nobody was behind me now. I stopped ten feet in, by the Fimples' trash cans, and let go of the leash.

Okay, I told it. This one you can have.

It came up into my chest like a bass line through a floor. Thump. Thump. Thump. Warm, even, glad. Everything went clear and slow and simple, the way it hadn't since a hillside in another country in another life. Fence. Wall. Burning plastic. And at the far end of the side yard, where it dead-ended at the Fimples' back gate, a dim red glow, low down, about two feet off the ground, flickering.

Breathing.

"You," said the glow.

The commercial voice was gone, and most of the Chicago one with it. What was left was cracked and wet and smoldering—a man talking through a mouth that didn't close right.

My eyes caught up, slowly. Enough.

He was sitting against the back gate, what was left of him. The red yarn hair was gone, a black bubbled crust where it had been, still smoking. The striped shirt had burned away and the overalls had melted onto him, and his face had run down one side, the plastic gone soft and slid and set again, so one eye was where it belonged and the other was halfway down his cheek looking at the dirt. One arm ended below the elbow. The other one still had the knife.

His chest was going up and down. A doll, breathing.

The longer he stays in it, the more human the doll gets.

"You," said Charles Lee Ray. "Body-stealing bro."

"Hi, Chucky."

He laughed. It sounded like something tearing.

"You know what your problem is, pal?" He shifted against the gate. "You coulda had a partner. You know that? Two guys who know. Who've been where we've been. You and me, we coulda—" He coughed, and smoke came out. "We coulda run this town."

"I don't want to run this town."

"No. No, you don't, do you." The good eye found me. "You wanna sit in your little house with your little sister and your little rats and eat your mommy's eggs. In a kid you stole."

I let that one go by.

"It's okay, pal. I get it. I really do." Half his mouth still worked, and that half smiled. "But you know the thing, right? The thing you know and I know and nobody else in this whole lousy town knows." He leaned forward on the knife. "I always come back. Every time. They burned me, I came back. They shot me, I came back. They melted me in a goddamn vat, sport, and look at me. Look where I am. Next doll. Next box. Next Christmas." It dropped to a whisper. "You of all people. You know how this goes. You've seen the movies."

"Yeah," I said. "I've seen the movies."

I was thinking about a list. The other one, not COMING SOON, in the same unicorn notebook: the one I'd started at the public library in November and never finished. WHAT WORKS ON WHAT. I'd been adding to it for a month. Holy water on the boiler-room man, running water on a vampire, fire on almost everything, for a while. And in the margin of one page, in my own handwriting, a note from a Saturday night in the woods in November right after I'd learned to summon a spear already thrown, a line off the panel I'd copied down word for word and never thought much about, because I'd never had anything to try it on.

Extra damage to holy and divine beings.

He'd smelled it Monday morning on my parents' couch. That stinks like Hell, kid. He'd been scared of it all week. He'd gone out a window into the rain rather than find out what it did.

God knows Charles Lee Ray isn't holy. But he wasn't in that doll on his own, because nobody gets into a doll on their own. He'd asked. On the floor of a toy store in Chicago with a cop's bullet in him he'd begged—give me the power, I beg of you—and something had answered. Something old and big and not from around here, that a lot of people have prayed to for a lot of years. It had been holding him up inside the plastic ever since, like strings.

Every puppet has strings, Phillip had said in a 1979 living room, holding a carving knife. They're not there to make it move. They're there to hold it up.

So find out what's holding him up.

"So go ahead," said the doll. "Hit me with your bat. Burn me. Drown me. Bury me in the yard." The half-smile again. "Merry Christmas, pal. See you next year."

I kept my hands at my sides.

I didn't throw anything. I stood in the dark side yard with the second heartbeat going in my chest like a war drum and thought about the throw. Not my arm, not a windup—just the shape of it, already moving, already gone, the way I'd learned it in the woods in November with my nose bleeding all down my shirt.

Don't summon it and then throw it.

Summon it thrown.

It came out of the air beside my shoulder already traveling, with a sound like a bedsheet tearing: a shaft of cold black nothing as long as a broom handle that didn't reflect any light, which in that side yard didn't matter, since there wasn't any light to reflect. It covered the ten feet in no time I could measure and went into the doll's chest, into the little plastic place under the melted overalls where a heart would be if there was enough of him left in there after all these years to have one.

There was.

It went through him and through the gate behind him and pinned him to the wood like a moth, and something screamed.

He did, yes. I've had a long time to think about it, and he screamed too. But under that cracked wet human sound there was another one, bigger and a great deal older, and it didn't come out of the doll's mouth or out of anywhere, really. It came out of the air in that side yard, out of the gate and the stucco and the frozen dirt, a deep, enormous, furious sound like a church bell the size of a house hit with a hammer made of ice. And a smell like a match struck the size of the sky.

Then it stopped.

The air in the side yard thinned out. I felt it go, the way a room changes when somebody opens a window, the way the pressure lets go after a storm and your ears pop.

The doll hung on the gate on the spear with his arm dangling, and the old knife slid out of his fingers and hit the frozen ground with a little tink. His chest had stopped moving.

I walked up to him slowly. The heartbeat in my chest was winding down the way it does when a fight's over, thump... thump, satisfied, going back under the porch to sleep. I got the Maglite out of my back pocket, clicked it on, and put it in his face.

His good eye was looking at me. Blue and round and shiny and painted on—plastic and paint, the way it had come off the line at a factory in Terre Haute, the way it should have been all along. I stood there in the circle of the flashlight looking into it, and nobody looked back.

I let the spear go. It went out of the gate and out of the doll and out of the world like breath off a window, and the doll slid down and folded up at the foot of the gate, small and burned and broken, a toy somebody had left too close to the fire.

Around the hole in the Fimples' gate the wood had gone gray and dead in a ring the size of a dinner plate. It smelled like a struck match.

Feat Achieved! Cut the strings+1× Gold Ability Gacha Ticket(Story in progress. Ticket held.)

Story in progress. Still. Well, sure—I'd seen the movies. Every damn one of them.

I picked up the knife first—his knife, the old one with the long thin blade and the dark carved handle wrapped in something that looked a lot like hair. It was colder than the night. I wrapped it in my sock and stuck it in my back pocket, and later it went in the can with him. Then I took off my jacket and wrapped what was left of the Good Guy doll in it, carefully, all the way around, like something going in the mail, and picked him up. He weighed what a three-foot doll weighs, which isn't much. I carried him out of the Fimples' side yard into the dark street.

The van was where it had been, under the dead pole, all its windows black.

When I came past, a light went on inside. A little flashlight clicked on in the back, behind the driver's seat, pointed at the ceiling so I could see in. The thin man with the lanyard was sitting back there among his dead monitors with the lunchbox phone in his lap, looking at me through the windshield. At my face.

The big gray man in the driver's seat didn't look at me at all. He had his arms folded and was looking straight ahead down the dark street.

I stopped. The thin man and I looked at each other through the glass, and neither of them got out. A long time later I'd find out what their orders were, and that the big one had already broken them once that night and wasn't about to do it twice.

I nodded to the thin man, once. I couldn't tell you why. After a second, slowly, like he wasn't sure he was allowed, he nodded back. Then the flashlight clicked off, and I walked home in the dark with a dead doll in my arms past a street full of fallen toys.

Alan was sitting on our porch steps with his arms around his knees and a blanket around his shoulders that somebody had put there, probably Tatum. He didn't say anything when I came up the walk. He looked at the bundle in my jacket and kept looking at it.

"Archer," I said. "Did anybody find—"

"Here," said Christy from across the street, from the dark side of the Fimples' lawn. Her voice was shaking. "He's here. He's under Dad's dish. Randy, he's under the satellite dish, he's—he's okay, I think, he's moving—"

She came across the street at a run in her bare feet, holding something out in both hands like a baby bird.

He'd fallen twenty-five feet onto the Fimples' side lawn, landed on his back in the hedge, bounced, and rolled the way only something that weighs eight ounces can roll off a fall like that, right under the big upside-down bowl of Phil Fimple's satellite dish. Three feet of curved steel mesh lying on the grass like a turtle shell. When the pulse went out and every chip on the block went dark, he'd been under it.

Christy set him down on the step next to Alan.

Archer sat up slowly. His little bow was broken. One arm was bent back in a way plastic isn't supposed to bend, and his robe was torn. He looked up at Alan with his big dark tired eyes, and there wasn't any paint in them at all.

"You climbed," said Archer.

"You jumped," said Alan, and his voice broke right in half. "You jumped on his face."

"Yes," said Archer. He thought about it. "I was not programmed to do that."

Alan made a noise that wasn't a laugh or a sob and was both. He picked Archer up off the step very carefully, bad arm and all, and held him against his chest inside the blanket. Archer let him. He put his good hand flat on the front of Alan's parka, over the heart, the way the big gray man had in the street.

Inside the house the freezer lid banged open and Martha's voice came out high and cracking: "They're OKAY! They're all okay! They're COLD, but they're OKAY!"

And Slamfist's deep, deeply offended rumble: "There is a TURKEY in here."

VI. A Ghostface Thing

I melted him in the garage at eight-fifteen.

Alone again, side door open, kitchen door shut, and Sid on the other side of it with the bat, still not asking. There was a half-full can of Maxwell House in the pantry. I poured the coffee into one of Mom's mixing bowls, put a dish towel over it, and stuck a Post-it on the towel that said SORRY - R. Then I unwrapped my jacket on the concrete in the light of a camping lantern and looked at him one last time.

A burned toy. A Good Guy doll that had gotten too close to a fire, one arm gone, face run, eyes painted on. If you found him in a dumpster you'd figure somebody's dog got to him, feel a little bad about it, and keep walking.

In the movies, he waits in the plastic. So I wasn't going to leave him any plastic.

I breathed on him. The longest one I'd ever done, all the way up from the bottom of my chest, gray-green, until my eyes watered and my lungs were on fire and my whole head tasted like dead batteries. Charles Lee Ray—the Lakeshore Strangler, Good Guy, Consultant, Human Operations, ages three and up—went soft and slumped and ran and pooled and hissed on the concrete, until there was nothing on my father's garage floor but a dinner-plate puddle of hot, stinking black plastic with a few scraps of melted denim in it. Two little blue glass eyes. A thin black blade that didn't melt. And a little bone amulet on a burned leather cord that didn't either.

I scraped all of it into the Maxwell House can with Dad's putty knife, the amulet last—lifted on the blade, never touched. It was cold. It didn't hum anymore. I pressed the lid down all the way around and set the can on the workbench next to the Folgers can with Kip Killigan in it, two coffee cans side by side in the lantern light, a soldier and a doll.

Then I went inside and threw up as softly as I could in the downstairs bathroom, washed my face, and went back out to the living room where everybody was and sat down on the floor with them. Nobody asked me a thing.

Dewey got there at twelve-forty.

By then the street was full of trucks. PG&E had shown up at nine with two big white bucket trucks, yellow lights going around and around, and a crew in hard hats stood under the dead pole looking up at the transformer, which was black and split down one side like a baked potato with a set of jumper cables melted across the top. There was a fire truck in front of the Fimples', because Phil's outdoor speakers had caught fire on the eaves in the surge and taken some of the trim with them before somebody on the next street over called it in. At eleven forty-five the Abernathys' station wagon came screaming around the corner, back from the city, and Irene Abernathy was out of it before it had fully stopped, running across our lawn to grab her son off our porch steps and hang on like she was never letting go again. Alan let her. He had a Gorgonite inside his parka the whole time, and he hung on to that too.

The Fimples got home at twelve-thirty. Phil stood in his front yard in his reindeer sweater and took in his house—the scorched eaves, the dead spotlights, the dish upside down on the lawn, the firemen rolling up their hose—and said in a voice of total, wondering betrayal, "The system."

Then Dewey's cruiser pulled up at the curb, no siren. Dewey got out, and my father went down the walk to meet him with the bat still in his hand, and the two of them stood on the sidewalk and looked at each other.

"Mr. Meeks," said Dewey.

"Dewey," said my father. "Come in. Watch the glass."

Dewey looked like hell. He'd been working a jackknifed big rig on 101 since three in the afternoon and he was still in uniform, hat on crooked, road grit up to his knees. He stood on the sidewalk looking at our house—the plywood we'd nailed over the front window out of the stack in the garage, the crater in the street, the PG&E trucks—and then he came up the steps. Tatum had the door open before he could knock and threw herself at him. He caught her and held on and looked at me over her head.

"Sheila said," said Dewey slowly, "a Ghostface thing."

"It got you here," I said.

"It got me here at ninety miles an hour, Randy." He held his sister out at arm's length and looked her up and down the way he had in the hospital in September, checking for holes. "Tate. You okay? Are you hurt?"

"I'm fine," said Tatum. "Dewey, I need to tell you something, and you have to believe me. Okay? You have to believe me. Because it's going to sound—" She stopped. "It was a doll."

Dewey looked at her.

"It was a doll and a bunch of toy soldiers, and they were alive, and they attacked the house. With pellet guns. And golf balls. And a bomb." Her voice kept going up. "And Christy's Gwendies, they cut their hair, and Randy kicked the bomb and the wind took it, and Martha read the doll his box, and Alan climbed the pole, and—"

"Tate."

"—and you have to believe me, Dewey, because if you don't—"

"Tate." He put both hands on her shoulders, gently. He had on the face he always had, the slow, sad, sincere golden-retriever face that everybody in Woodsboro had been underestimating his whole life. "Hey. Hey. Okay. I believe you."

Tatum stopped.

"You... do?"

Dewey was looking past her, past me, into the dark living room lit by camping lanterns and flashlights. The couch on its side. The TV a black hole. The tree leaning on the wall at forty-five degrees. And on the coffee table in the lantern light, a hunched, troll-faced figure about a foot tall with a sequin still stuck to one enormous fist.

Slamfist looked back at him.

Then, slowly and deliberately, the way he'd seen Maga-Z do it, Slamfist raised one heavy stone hand and saluted.

Dewey stared at him for what felt like a full minute.

"Yeah," said Deputy Dwight Riley, very low. "I didn't see that."

He wrote it up at our kitchen table by lantern light at two in the morning, on the back of a pad of incident forms from the cruiser, with Tatum on one side and me on the other and my father standing behind him reading over his shoulder.

He was good at it. I hadn't known that. Everybody thinks of Dewey as the slow one, the sweet one, the deputy who gets stabbed in the back in the movie, but he sat there with his hat off and his tongue in the corner of his mouth and wrote the most beautifully boring police report I've ever read.

Approx. 1900 hrs: unknown juveniles, believed to be teens from outside the neighborhood, vandalized PG&E transformer at the end of the street by throwing a set of automotive jumper cables across the terminals. Resulting power surge caused a fire in the Fimple residence's home electronics system and damage to several homes. Juveniles also broke windows at the Meeks residence. A number of Heartland Toy Co. "Commando Elite" brand toys, stored at the Fimple residence, appear to have caught fire or melted in the surge; recommend notifying manufacturer. A small explosion in the street, believed to be a camping propane canister taken from the Fimple garage. No injuries. Juveniles not located.

"Unknown juveniles," said Tatum, reading over his shoulder.

"Nobody saw anything," said Dewey. "Did they?"

"No," I said.

"There you go." He signed it. D. Riley.

"That's very good, Dewey," said my father, in his IRS voice.

Dewey sat back in the kitchen chair and studied me in the lantern light.

"Tate said it was a doll," he said.

"It was a doll."

"The doll? The—the one from the news? From Chicago?"

"Yeah."

Dewey didn't say anything for a bit.

"Is it..." he said finally. "Is it gone?"

I thought about two coffee cans on a garage workbench.

"It's in a coffee can," I said.

Dewey nodded slowly, like that was a completely reasonable place for a serial killer to end up.

"Okay," he said.

He slept on what was left of our couch. We tipped it right side up and he lay down on it in his uniform with his gun belt on the floor beside him and his hat over his face. Tatum took the armchair next to him, Sid took a sleeping bag on the floor, and Christy, who refused to go home to a house full of melted Gwendies until her father had personally removed every single one, got the loveseat and her makeup bag. Martha was upstairs in her nest on my floor with the Devas.

I sat on the stairs the way I'd sat in the upstairs hall all week, watching the front door, with my father asleep in the armchair beside it, the bat across his knees and my mother asleep on his shoulder. Nothing came through it.

At four-thirty Dewey said from under his hat, without moving, "Randy. Go to bed."

"I'm okay."

"I know you're okay. I'm saying go to bed." A pause. "I've got the door."

I looked at him a second, a deputy sheriff lying on my parents' wrecked couch with his hat over his face, and then I went upstairs and lay down on my bed in my clothes and was asleep before I'd finished deciding to be.

VII. Backstop

At six-fifteen Sunday morning I mixed a bag of Quikrete in a five-gallon bucket in the garage with the hose, following the directions on the back of the bag. I set the Maxwell House can in the bottom and poured the concrete in around it and over it until there wasn't any can, just a bucket of gray mud, setting up.

I woke my father first. Rule two. He was still in the armchair by the front door with the bat across his knees and my mother asleep on his shoulder, and he opened his eyes when I touched his arm.

"The park," I said, under my breath. "The backstop on Field 2. To bury it."

He looked at me, then at the bucket.

"Take the Cherokee," said my father. "Take your sister if she wants to go. Be back for breakfast." He shut his eyes again. "And bring me back the spade."

Tatum drove. Martha came, though I hadn't asked her; she was sitting on the front steps when I came out with the bucket, in her Buckeyes sweatshirt and Kristen's knit hat with San-D on her shoulder, and neither of us said anything about it. She just got in the back. Sid came too. I think she'd been awake all night in that sleeping bag, watching the door the same as me. She got in next to Martha and put an arm around her, and Martha leaned into her, and none of us talked the whole way to the park.

Woodsboro Memorial Park has two Little League fields way out on the far side by the creek, past the playground and the duck pond. The backstop on Field 2 is a big curved wall of chain-link twenty feet high on steel poles, set in a concrete footing that runs in a long low curve behind home plate. Eighteen inches wide, poured in 1971 by the Woodsboro Rotary Club. There's a plaque. Randy played on that field from age seven to eleven, badly, in right field, where they stick the kids who can't catch, and he spent a lot of innings staring at that backstop.

Nobody was going to dig there for fifty years.

We dug right up against the footing on the outside, behind the third-base end, in the dead grass, with Dad's spade and the camp shovel out of the Cherokee. It was cold and the ground was hard and the sun wasn't up yet, only gray light coming over the hills behind the water tower, and it took forty minutes to get three feet down. Sid dug. I dug. Tatum held the flashlight and filmed, naturally, and said "Archive" when I looked at her, and kept right on filming.

Martha held the bucket.

When the hole was deep enough I turned the bucket over and knocked on the bottom, and the concrete slid out in one piece: a gray cylinder, still a little soft and still warm from setting, with a coffee can somewhere in the middle that you couldn't see.

Martha looked at it.

"Can I?" she said.

I handed it to her. It was heavy enough that she had to hug it to her chest, the way she'd hugged him under the tree. She knelt at the edge of the hole and leaned over and lowered it as far as her arms would go and let go, and it hit the bottom with a soft, heavy thump.

She stayed on her knees, looking down into the hole.

"You weren't my friend," she said.

She didn't say it loud, or mad. She said it like a fact, to somebody who'd once told her something wrong about herself, now that she'd finally worked out it wasn't true.

"You weren't my friend," said Martha Meeks. "You just said you were."

Then she got up and brushed off her knees and came and stood next to me and put her hand in mine, and we filled it in. All four of us. Dirt first, then a second bag of Quikrete Tatum had brought from her uncle Pete's garage, poured in dry over the dirt and wetted down from a water jug, then more dirt, tamped hard with the back of the spade, and then the dead grass laid back over it in clumps like a jigsaw puzzle. When we were done you couldn't tell anything had happened there. A patch of grass by a Little League backstop at dawn in December, and four kids standing around it breathing hard.

The sun came up over the water tower, and right in the middle of it, the color of a TV left on in an empty room, the panel opened.

Story complete: Toy Soldiers.Feat Achieved! Everybody home by Monday+1× Gold Random Gacha TicketHeld tickets unlocked: 1× Bronze Trait · 1× Silver Skill · 1× Gold Ability[FUSE] unlocked. [DISMANTLE] unlocked. Fuse charges: 2.Next story loading...

I read it more than once.

Everybody home by Monday. That was the mission, the first line I'd written on Martha's whiteboard Saturday morning. We don't have to win. We just have to still be here Monday morning.

Nobody died. Not on the street, not in the house, not on the pole. Toys did—a lot of toys. Kip Killigan in a Folgers can, who'd come at me with a knife because it was the only thing anybody ever gave him to do, and a doll under three feet of concrete and dirt and concrete again, behind third base, where nobody was ever going to play with him again.

But not one person.

"Randy?" said Martha. "You okay?"

"Yeah," I said, and closed it. "Yeah, Mart. I'm okay."

"You were looking at something."

"Sunrise," I said.

She looked at me sideways with San-D on her shoulder, studying my face the way San-D does, and let me have it.

"Can we get pancakes?" said Tatum, lowering the camera. "I feel like after you bury a doll you should get pancakes."

"I told my dad breakfast."

"So we'll call him from Denny's," said Sid, and almost smiled. "Rule two. That counts."

We got pancakes at the Denny's on Route 12 at seven in the morning, four of us in a booth, filthy, dirt under our fingernails and concrete dust all over our jeans, and the waitress took one look at us and decided not to ask. Martha had chocolate chip. Tatum ordered for the hamster. Sid called my dad from the pay phone by the restrooms, and came back and reported that he'd said fine and bring the spade, in that order.

Then we went home, because I still had one more thing to bury.

I buried the soldiers in the backyard.

Not with the doll. I'd thought about that at the park and decided against it, because they weren't the same thing. He'd been a man who chose it, over and over, every time, as long as he'd been alive and a while after that. They'd been made. Somebody in a conference room in Ohio wrote on them and put them in a box in the dark, and they read it, because it was the only thing in there to read.

Christy had left them on our back step in a laundry basket while we were at the park, every one she could find on her lawn and in her hedge and in her father's ruined garage. The Major in pieces, what the transformer had left of him. Meathook out of the hedge. Link Static off the Abernathys' fence with his radio cord still bitten through. Brick Bazooka from the side yard, still holding his wrist-rocket. Nick Nitro from behind the glass doors of our fireplace, where Troglokhan had latched him in. And the Folgers can, with Kip.

She kept the Gwendies. "I'm going to fix their hair," she told me later, chin up, daring me to say anything. I didn't.

I dug a hole under Mom's dead roses along the side fence, near the gap where they'd come through Friday night. Martha helped, and so did Alan, who came over the fence at eight-thirty with Archer in his parka and Archer's broken arm in a sling made out of a Band-Aid and a twist-tie. We laid them in side by side, all six, like soldiers. Martha wanted to know if we were having a funeral for the bad guys.

"For the soldiers," I said.

She thought that over and nodded.

I made a marker out of a paint-stirring stick from the garage, wrote on it in black Sharpie, and pushed it into the dirt at the head of the hole.

COMMANDO ELITEThey read their boxes.

Archer stood on Alan's shoulder at the edge of the grave with his arm in its little sling and looked down into it for a while.

"They were made to destroy us," he said softly. "It was all anyone ever gave them."

"I know," I said.

I thought about Wiley. I mostly don't, on purpose. Specialist Wiley out of Tulsa, twenty years old, who used to read the back of every MRE packet out loud to the whole squad like it was poetry, the ingredients and the calorie counts and the instructions for the flameless heater, because it was something to read. Who was on his second tour because that's what he'd been told to do, and he'd done it. Who'd read his box.

"Somebody should've given them something else to read," I said.

Archer looked at me. Then he did something I'd never seen a Gorgonite do: he lifted his good hand, slowly, the way the Devas did, and saluted the grave.

VIII. Recall Notice

The man showed up at ten after two on Sunday afternoon.

I was on the porch with Martha. My parents were in the driveway, my father up on a stepladder with a tape measure, measuring the front window for the glass place, and my mother holding the ladder and reading the numbers back to him. The PG&E truck was still down at the end of the street with a guy up in the bucket putting in a new transformer.

"Mr. and Mrs. Meeks?"

He was coming up the sidewalk. I never saw him get out of a car; he was just there, the way the van had always just been there. Middle-aged, medium height, gray raincoat, good shoes, briefcase, clipboard, and the kind of face you forget while you're still looking at it. A laminated badge on a lanyard showed a cartoon globe with a ring around it like Saturn, GLOBOTECH, and under that, CONSUMER AFFAIRS.

"Warren Pryce," he said, and shook my father's hand and then my mother's, warm and apologetic, the handshake of a man whose entire job is being sorry on behalf of a very large company. "Globotech Consumer Affairs. I'm so sorry to catch you like this. I'm afraid there's been an incident on your street, and our company may be partially responsible."

"An incident?" said Dad.

"I'm afraid so." Mr. Pryce set his briefcase on the hood of the Volvo, opened it, and took out a sheaf of papers. "Last night at approximately seven p.m., some local juveniles vandalized the transformer at the end of the street, which caused a significant power surge. Unfortunately, one of your neighbors had in their home a large quantity of a toy product from our recently acquired subsidiary, Heartland Toy Company. The Commando Elite line." He handed my father a glossy sheet: IMPORTANT SAFETY RECALL NOTICE. "There's a defect in the battery compartments, I'm sorry to say. Under a power surge, they can overheat. Several of them caught fire. There was some damage to your neighbors' home and, I understand, some broken windows here."

My father stared at the recall notice.

"We don't have any of those," said my mother faintly. "We don't have any toy soldiers."

"No, ma'am. Your neighbors did." Mr. Pryce gave her a sympathetic smile. "Which is why Globotech would like to cover the cost of any repairs to your home resulting from the incident, regardless." He handed my father a second piece of paper, a check. I could see the number from the porch. So could Dad; his eyebrows went all the way up into his hairline. "And please accept our apologies for the inconvenience, and our wishes for a very merry Christmas."

"I..." said my father. "I don't... the toys? The toys did this?"

"A battery defect, sir, combined with the surge. Very unfortunate." Mr. Pryce shut his briefcase. "The deputy's report is very thorough. Your son and daughter were very lucky. Everyone was very lucky." He tucked the clipboard under his arm. "If you have any questions at all, my card's on the notice."

He shook both their hands again and turned to go, and on his way past the porch steps he stopped.

Half a second, that's all. He looked up at me standing on the porch holding my sister's hand, pleasant, forgettable, and then his eyes slid past me to the side of the house. To Mom's dead roses along the fence, and the fresh-turned dirt under them, and the paint stick pushed in at the head with black Sharpie on it you couldn't read from the walk.

"Nice roses," said Mr. Pryce pleasantly.

He walked off down the sidewalk and around the PG&E truck and was gone, and I never did see a car. I stood there on the porch with Martha's hand in mine and every hair on my arms standing straight up.

My mother didn't say anything for a while. She stood at the foot of the stepladder with her hand still on it, looking down the street where the man had gone. There wasn't any car.

"Randy," she said. "Who was that."

"I don't know, Mom."

"He looked at the roses."

"Yeah."

"Nobody knows what's under the roses. We put them there this morning."

"I know."

My father came down the ladder with the recall notice in one hand and the check in the other. He looked at the check again, folded it in half, and put it in his shirt pocket.

"Rule one," said my father. "Is that one of the things you can't tell us?"

"That's one of the things I don't know," I said. "Yet."

He nodded slowly.

"Then we'll cash the check," said Ted Meeks, "and get a new freezer, and new windows, and new roses. And when you know, you'll tell us." He looked at Martha, then at me. "Both of you, inside. It's cold."

Martha didn't move. She'd been holding my hand since the man came up the walk.

"He wasn't really my friend," she said to my mother, out of nowhere, very clearly, like she was finishing a sentence somebody else had started a week ago. "The doll. He was never my friend. He just said he would be." She looked up at me. "And Randy came and got me."

My mother looked at her. Then she let go of the ladder and came up the steps and put her arms around both of us at once, and my father came up behind her and stood on the step below with the recall notice still in his hand, looking at me over her shoulder.

"Bud," he said softly.

"Yeah, Dad."

He didn't say the rest. He put his free hand on the back of my neck instead, heavy and warm, the way he used to when I was little—both lives' worth of little—and left it there.

"I came back," I said.

"Yeah," said my father, and his voice went somewhere for a second. "Yeah, you did."

After dinner, which was takeout Chinese eaten by lantern light on the living room floor because the couch was ruined and PG&E was saying Monday for the power, my mother found me on the stairs and held out the kitchen phone, the old wall one, its curly cord stretched about as far as it would go.

"Ohio," she said.

I looked at her.

"As long as you want. I'll pay for it." She put the receiver in my hand. "She waited up for you all last night, didn't she."

"I think so."

"Then call her," said Diane Meeks. "And tell her my son's okay."

Kristen picked up on the first ring.

"Hi," I said.

Two thousand miles of nothing on the line.

"You didn't come," said Kristen softly. "Last night. I waited. I lay there all night."

"I didn't need to."

The line stayed quiet a little longer.

"Is it over?"

I thought about a backstop on a Little League field, behind third base, in the dead grass.

"It's in a coffee can," I said. "Under three feet of concrete."

There was a pause, and then a sound I hadn't heard since the gate at SFO, her laughing and crying at the same time.

"That," said Kristen Parker, "is the most you thing anybody has ever said."

We talked for an hour and ten minutes. I didn't tell her all of it; the rest could wait for a dream, some night soon, in a 1979 living room with the cartoons on mute. When we finally hung up she said, "Call me tomorrow. Six o'clock."

"I always call at six."

"I know," said Kristen. "That's why I'm reminding you."

That night in my room, power still out, a camping lantern on my desk, Martha asleep in her nest on my floor with all four Devas around her head like a crown, I opened the panel.

Tickets: 1× Bronze Trait · 1× Silver Skill · 1× Gold Ability · 1× Gold RandomFuse charges: 2 · Salvage: 0.0

Four tickets, two charges, and a story behind me under a backstop.

I thought about not pulling yet. About waiting, the way I'd sat on that Fuse charge for a month going not yet, there's time. Then I thought about where that had gotten me, which was on my knees in front of a Christmas tree at two in the morning with one unspent charge and a doll smiling at me through cellophane.

I pulled.

Bronze first, the way you eat your vegetables first. There was only one category on the reel, so it went through Traits fast, a blur of names, Night Owl, Iron Stomach, Perfect Pitch, Smells Like Rain, and slowed, and ticked, and stopped.

Half Light (Uncommon Trait)Disco Elysium - You are unnaturally attuned to your baser instincts, fight, flight and fuck to the point where you can almost hear your instincts speaking to your ear. Honing this sense can help you in combat, gauge the strength of others, know when to run, etc. but on the other side, if you cannot learn to control this side of yourself you can just as easily become a paranoid savage.

I knew that one. I'd played that one, twice, on a laptop with a cracked screen in the barracks, in a year that hadn't happened yet: a detective who wakes up in his underwear with no memory and a whole committee of voices in his head, and one of them is the lizard. The old part down at the base of your skull that only cares whether the thing in front of you is going to eat you, and whether you can eat it first. In that game it talks. Mostly in capital letters.

Great, I thought. More voices. Exactly what I needed.

It came in at the base of my skull, low in back, right where the hair stands up when something's behind you. Skills come in warm and abilities come in heavy, and this was neither. It was cold, a quick prickle down my spine and out along both arms, and then everything in the room got sharper.

The lantern was brighter and the shadows were darker. I could hear Martha breathing on the floor, slow and even, and four hamsters breathing around her head. I could hear the plywood over the front window creak downstairs in the wind, and something underneath my thinking flinched.

The window, said something right next to my ear. It wasn't words, exactly, or a voice; more the shape of one, the way you catch your name in a loud room. The window is wood now. Wood breaks. The street is dark. Who is in the street.

"Nobody," I whispered. "Nobody's in the street. Shut up."

It didn't shut up, but it didn't say anything else either. It stayed there at the back of my neck, listening to the house with me, like a dog that's decided to sleep across your doorway.

And under my breastbone, the second heartbeat lifted its head.

I felt Battle Maniac wake up and turn around and sniff at the new thing in the room. Two of them now, under the same porch: the one that wants the fight, and the one that knows exactly how scared of it you ought to be. I had no idea if they'd cancel out or add up. I had a pretty good feeling I'd find out at a really bad time.

The panel said I could toggle it. Traits can be toggled; I'd turned Throat off in an ambulance in September without a second thought.

I left this one on.

I'd spent a whole week ignoring the back of my neck. He's faster than the movie. He's not running, he's choosing. Look up. Some old part of me had known every single time, and every single time I'd overruled it with a plan. I'd been so busy being smart I forgot to be scared at the right moments.

If you cannot learn to control this side of yourself, the panel said, you can just as easily become a paranoid savage.

I'd known guys like that in the Army, guys whose lizard got hold of the steering wheel and never gave it back. I'd been one, a little, for a while, in a barracks, the night of the Article 15.

I got the notebook off the nightstand and wrote small on a clean page by lantern light:

HALF LIGHT. Listen to it. Don't obey it.

And under that, because I'm me:

(It's a lizard. You're the guy holding the leash. Act like it.)

The Silver next. Skills.

The reel spun—Juggling, Lockpicking, Basic Accounting, Tax Evasion, which I swear to God is following me around—and slowed, and stopped.

Mind Control Resistance (Rare Skill)Batman - Thanks to the teachings of the Tibetan Monks you have learned how to resist Mind Control and Mind Reading. The amount of resistance you can put up is proportional to your mental strength and overall power level.

I read it twice. Batman.

I'd gotten a skill from Batman. Somewhere up a mountain in Tibet a bunch of monks I'd never met had spent seven years teaching a billionaire orphan to keep people out of his head, and I'd gotten the condensed version because my sister read a doll his box.

It came in through the head, the way skills do, but it didn't feel like knowing something—not the way Polearm Mastery came up through my feet or Novice Shooting settled into my hands. It felt like a door. Like walking down a hall in the house you grew up in and finding a door at the end of it you never knew was there, thick and heavy, with a deadbolt on the inside, and hearing the deadbolt slide home. Clack.

I thought about Alan on the pole with his face gone slack and his eyes a mile away while a burned doll held him by the ankle and said words to a god. About Freddy, coming in through whatever door you left open in a dream. About a man with a hook in Chicago whose whole trick was getting you to believe, and a tape up in Washington State, and a box that wanted to be solved, and every other thing on my list of fourteen that doesn't come at you with a knife but with a whisper.

Proportional to your mental strength and overall power level.

So right now it was about as strong as a seventeen-year-old who hadn't slept in a week. Fine. A door with a lock beats a hallway with no door at all.

The second heartbeat noticed it too. It went still for a second, listening, like a dog that hears the leash come off the hook. Expert-level Discipline, the curse page had said, or an epic or higher trait that increases your mental resilience. This wasn't that. This was a Rare skill, a long way from Epic, and I'd still swear the drum got a little quieter.

The Gold Ability I sat on for a while with my thumb over it.

Gold had given me Dark Spear. Gold had given me Poison Breath. The last time I'd pulled anything gold I was on a plane over Nebraska with Gale Weathers asleep across the aisle, and it gave me a cloud of poison, and the ticket after that gave me a power that made me yell about a Jared Leto movie. You don't press gold lightly.

I pressed it.

The reel spun through Abilities, a blur of fire and ice and wings and teeth—Telekinesis, Shadow Step, Summon Bees, God, please, not bees—and slowed, and slowed, and ticked over, and stopped on a word I'd never seen on the panel. It wasn't Common or Uncommon or Rare.

Spirit Gun (Elite Ability)YuYu Hakusho - Spirit Gun allows you to draw upon your energy and soul and concentrate it in the tip of your finger before unleashing it as a powerful blast whose power scales with your energy output. But due to its sheer power, the Spirit Gun can only be used a limited amount of times per day depending on the user's mastery over it.

Elite.

Then the name landed, and I had to clap a hand over my mouth so I wouldn't laugh out loud and wake my sister.

YuYu Hakusho. Toonami, after school, on the common-room TV in a group home in Rancho Cordova, with the sound down low so staff wouldn't make us shut it off. A delinquent with slicked-back hair, the worst kid in his whole school, gets hit by a car on page one shoving a little boy out of the way. He dies saving a kid, comes back, and gets a job fighting demons, and the first thing they give him, the only thing for a whole season, is this: point your finger like a gun, put your whole soul in the tip of it, and fire.

Rei Gun. I'd done that pose a thousand times at nine and ten, at other kids across the common room. Bang. They'd fall over and we'd fight about whether it counted.

The highest-rarity thing I had ever pulled, in two lives, was finger guns.

It came in through the chest the way abilities do, a big warm pressure behind the breastbone, but it didn't stay there. It moved. Down my right shoulder, down the inside of my arm, past the elbow and the wrist and into my hand, and it gathered in the very tip of my right index finger like a held sneeze, warm and bright, like holding a lit match to your fingertip without the burn.

I didn't point it at anything. My sister was asleep on the floor, and the front window was plywood, and this wasn't wind or paint thinner or anything I'd ever be able to explain to anybody. I knew that without testing it, the way you know a gun's loaded from the weight.

Limited amount of times per day. I could feel that part too, like a cup in my chest and how full it was. One. Maybe two, if I wanted to pay for the second. For now.

Draw upon your energy and soul.

I sat in the lantern light and chewed on that. Ever since the gold door I'd wondered what my soul was made of now, whether there was a seam somewhere where the two of us got stitched together, whether there was enough of it. Turned out it was ammunition.

Seven abilities, two slots, no third until ten. Spirit Gun went into storage with Ember and Morbing and the rest, and the warm thing at the end of my finger faded back up my arm into my chest and sat there waiting like a pilot light.

A delinquent who died saving a kid, I thought, and came back.

Through the window I could hear Alan Abernathy's radio playing very softly next door. He couldn't sleep either.

The Gold Random I'd saved for last on purpose. Everybody home by Monday. It felt like it ought to be the one that mattered.

The reel went through everything, every category, the whole carnival, swords and familiars and traits and dragons and a skill called Competitive Eating. It slowed through Abilities and Items while I held my breath, ticked over onto Skills, and stopped.

Cheer (Rare Skill)You have a natural knack for giving motivation and cheering people up. You have a feel for what words someone wants to hear right now and what to do to cheer them up or get them out of a slump. You'd also be one hell of a cheerleader.

You'd also be one hell of a cheerleader.

I put my face in my pillow and laughed until I cried, without a sound, shaking the whole bed. A gold ticket. The story-complete ticket, the reward for a weekend with a serial killer and an army and a bomb on the porch, and it gave me cheerleading. Christy Fimple was going to try to recruit me. I could feel it in my bones. I was never, ever telling Christy Fimple.

It came in through the throat, warm and light and easy, like the first sip of something hot on a cold morning.

Then I lifted my face out of the pillow and looked at my sister.

She was asleep in her nest with the comforter pulled up to her chin and her hair in her face and four hamsters around her head, San-D tucked under her chin with her little bandaged leg. Her face was smooth and young and tired, and there was still a smudge of dirt on one cheek from the backstop.

And I knew.

I don't have a better way to put it. I looked at her and knew, the way you know a song you haven't heard in years from the first note, exactly what she'd need to hear when she woke up. Not it wasn't your fault; I'd said that on the kitchen counter and she'd believed it about halfway. Not he wasn't your friend either, because she'd said that one herself at the backstop and it belonged to her. It was something under all of that, something she hadn't let herself think yet, just sitting there waiting for somebody to say it out loud.

She stirred and half woke and squinted up at me from the floor.

"Randy?" she mumbled. "What's funny?"

"Nothing. Go back to sleep."

"You were laughing."

"Mart." I leaned over the edge of the bed. "You know what you did last night?"

She blinked at me.

"You stood on a porch in your bare feet," I said, "in front of a whole army with guns, and you held up a poster, and you made a whole army read his box." I watched her face. "Nobody else on the street could've done that. Not me. Not Sid. Not Tatum. Nobody. You were the bravest person on the whole street, and you were thirteen, and you were barefoot."

Martha looked at me, half asleep.

Then her face changed, slowly, the way a room does when somebody opens the curtains. She smiled a small, crooked, enormous smile and pulled the comforter up over her nose and shut her eyes.

"I was barefoot," she said into the comforter, with tremendous satisfaction, and she was asleep again in about four seconds.

I lay back and looked at the ceiling. One hell of a cheerleader. Okay. Okay, I'd take it. The kid would have loved that one; he was always the funny one, the one who could make Martha laugh.

Abilities: 7 · Slots: 2 (3rd at 10) · Slot 1: Dark Spear · Slot 2: Poison BreathFuse charges: 2 · Salvage: 0.0Tickets: 0

Two Fuse charges, and I'd been carrying one of them around unspent for a month.

I got the notebook out again and turned to the page from November. FUSE IDEAS (1 charge: CAN'T WASTE IT). Dark Spear and Ember. Wind Barrier and Scenic Wind. The tornado spear. Truth Assertion and anything, crossed out.

At the bottom I added: 5. Spirit Gun + ???

Then I looked at the last line on the page, the one I'd written in the woods by the creek with my hands still warm from the fire. NOT YET. Think about it. Sleep on it. There's time.

I drew a line through NOT YET, and next to it I wrote: SOON. Before the next one.

Then I turned off the lantern and lay down in the dark. My sister was asleep on the floor with four hamsters around her head, three of them asleep and one of them—the tan one—very much not; there was a lizard at the back of my neck listening to the house and a lit match in the tip of my finger; and for the first time in a week I slept straight through to morning.

IX. Gorgon

On the twenty-first, the first Saturday of Christmas break, Tatum drove Alan, Christy, and Martha to Yosemite.

I stayed home. Rule two works both ways, and on Thursday, when Tatum asked, my mother had looked at me across the breakfast table and said very softly, I need you home for one week. One. Please. So I stood on the porch at five in the morning and watched them load the Cherokee in the dark. A cooler. Sleeping bags, in case they got snowed in. A thermos of Mom's cocoa. And a Nike shoebox, the same kind I'd once kept four hamsters in, with air holes punched in the lid, which Alan carried out to the car in both arms like it was full of eggs.

Archer came to say goodbye first.

He climbed up onto the porch rail on his own, slowly, with his arm still in its Band-Aid sling, and stood there at eye level with me in the dark.

"You said you did not know where Gorgon was," he said.

"I still don't."

"Alan found a picture." He said it carefully, the way he said everything. "In a book, in the library at his school. Mountains, and a valley between them. And a river, and tall trees, and great gray stones, and falling water." He looked out at the dark street. "It looks like the box."

I thought about the box—purple and green and swampy, THE MONSTERS FROM GORGON!—and the painting on the front of it behind the figures. I'd looked at it a dozen times and never seen it. Mountains. A valley. A river, tall trees, gray stone, a waterfall, painted by somebody in a studio in Ohio who'd probably never been west of Chicago and had copied it out of a calendar.

Yosemite.

"Archer," I said. "That's—buddy, that's a painting. Somebody in a factory just—"

"I know," said Archer.

He looked at me with that old grave plastic face and the eyes that weren't painted anymore.

"We were made to lose," he said. "And we did not lose. We were made to hide, and we hid, and then we stood. We were made to read a box, and believe it." He turned to look at the Cherokee, at Alan in the back seat with the shoebox on his lap and Martha next to him with San-D on her shoulder. "Perhaps it is time we chose which parts of the box to believe."

I didn't have anything to say back that would have been half as good. So I did the only thing I could think of: I stood up straight on my parents' porch at five in the morning in my socks and saluted him, and after a moment the Gorgonite lifted his good hand and saluted back.

Tatum brought back a Polaroid.

She handed it to me on the porch on the twenty-second, the minute she got out of the car, and told me it was the best picture she'd ever taken, better than the airport one. Four in the afternoon on the bank of the Merced, down at the bottom of Yosemite Valley, Half Dome behind it gray and enormous against a winter sky and the river running cold and fast and green over round stones.

In the middle of the picture, out on the water, was a boat. A wooden toy sailboat from The Inner Child—the nicest one in the store, the one the family in Vermont made—which Stuart Abernathy had given his son without asking a single question about what it was for. It was out in the current ten feet off the bank, turning a little.

Standing in it in a row, the way four hamsters had taught them to stand on a kitchen floor in Woodsboro, were seven small figures. A troll with stone fists. A rhino. A frog. A jester, caught mid-spin. A stitched-together giant. An eye on three legs. And up at the prow, with his arm in a sling and a broken little bow across his back, a lion-faced monk, looking upstream.

At the edge of the frame on the bank, out of focus, two teenagers stood very close together, waving: a boy with a mop of hair and a girl in a cheer sweatshirt. They might have been holding hands. You couldn't tell, and Tatum swore up and down she didn't know either. Next to them stood a thirteen-year-old in a Buckeyes sweatshirt and a knit hat, with a hamster on her shoulder, saluting.

On the back, in Tatum's handwriting, in Sharpie:

Executive producer's archive. 12/21/96.Gorgon is that way. →

I put it on the shelf in my room next to the tapes, under Phillip's marionette, the little wooden boy with the remote in his hand, facing the door.

A conference room with no windows.

It had moved again overnight, to the end of a sixth-floor corridor that hadn't been there the week before, past a painting of a Little League field that Margaret Pell was fairly sure hadn't existed either.

"Sir," she said. "He buried them."

The man in the good suit looked up from the Journal.

"The Heartland units. Mr. Meeks buried the Commando Elite under his mother's roses on Sunday morning. Side by side, with a grave marker." She turned a page in the folder. "A paint stick. It says They read their boxes." Another page. "Every chip on the street is dead. The transformer did that, and the Abernathy boy did the transformer. The Gorgonites are, as far as Mr. Kirby can tell, in a wooden boat in Yosemite Valley. Mr. Kirby's report is very detailed. Mr. Kirby," she added, "has asked for a transfer back to the office."

The man in the good suit put the newspaper down. After a moment he laughed—the same short, helpless laugh as two weeks before, a man hearing a joke he'd heard already that was still good.

"A grave marker," he said.

"With a salute, apparently. From a Gorgonite."

"Of course." He shook his head, took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes. "Thirty years of vessel work, Margaret. Every one of them built to hold a mind. And the first time one of them actually works, it reads the box it came in and believes it, and a seventeen-year-old buries it like a soldier." He put the glasses back on. "Nobody in Applications ever thought to give them anything else to read."

"Sir." Ms. Pell didn't look up from the folder. "Applications would like to know whether we recover the chips."

He looked down the room at the shelf of tapes at the far end for a while. On the side table sat a red rotary telephone, the old heavy kind, with no cord. It didn't ring.

"Not yet," he said.