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him swear to Jesus, and she’d never made him swear to Jesus before. He’d been afraid to move or breathe. He’d heard other footsteps in the house, the awful sound of crashing and breaking. A single terrible scream. It could have been his mother, or father, or neither—he just didn’t know.
    Followed by silence, for one hour, two, three. Then the hardest part. The worst part.
    “Show me your math homework, Kendrick.”
    The danger word was the special word he and Grandpa Joe had picked because Grandpa Joe had insisted on it. Grandpa Joe had made a special trip in his truck to tell them something bad could happen to them, and he had a list of reasons how and why. Dad didn’t like Grandpa Joe’s yelling much, but he’d listened. So Kendrick and Grandpa Joe had made up a danger word nobody else in the world knew, not even Mom and Dad.
    And he had to wait to hear the danger word, Mom said.
    No matter what.
    By the time Kendrick dressed, Grandpa was already outside loading the truck, a beat-up navy blue Chevy. Kendrick heard a thud as he dropped a large sack of wrapped jerky in the bed.
    Grandpa Joe had taught him how to mix up the secret jerky recipe he hadn’t even given Mom: soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce, fresh garlic cloves, dried pepper, onion powder. He’d made sure Kendrick was paying attention while strips of deer meat soaked in that tangy mess for two days and then spent twelve hours in the slow-cook oven. Grandpa Joe had also made him watch as he cut the deer open and its guts flopped to the ground, all gray and glistening. “Watch, boy. Don’t turn away. Don’t be scared to look at something for what it is.”
    Grandpa Joe’s deer jerky was almost as good as the lumberjack breakfast, and Kendrick’s mouth used to water for it. Not anymore.
    His jerky loaded, Grandpa Joe leaned against the truck, lighting a brown cigarette. Kendrick thought he shouldn’t be smoking.
    “Ready?”
    Kendrick nodded. His hands shook a little every time he got in the truck, so he hid his hands in his jacket pockets. Some wadded-up toilet paper from the safe room in Longview was still in there, a souvenir. Kendrick clung to the wad, squeezing his hand into a fist.
    “We do this right, we’ll be back in less than an hour,” Grandpa Joe said. He spit, as if the cigarette had come apart in his mouth. “Forty-five minutes.”
    Forty-five minutes. That wasn’t bad. Forty-five minutes, then they’d be back.
    Kendrick stared at the cabin in the rearview mirror until the trees hid it from his sight.
    The road was empty, as usual. Grandpa Joe’s rutted dirt road spilled onto the highway after a half-mile, and they jounced past darkened, abandoned houses. Kendrick saw three stray dogs trot out of the open door of a pink two-story house on the corner. He’d never seen that door open before, and he wondered whose dogs they were. He wondered what they’d been eating.
    Suddenly, Kendrick wished he’d stayed back at Dog-Girl’s. She was from England and he couldn’t always understand her, but he liked being behind her fence. He liked Popeye and Ranger and Lady Di, her dogs. He tried not to think about the ones that were gone now. Maybe she’d given them away.
    They passed tree farms, with all the trees growing the same size, identical, and Kendrick enjoyed watching their trunks pass in a blur. He was glad to be away from the empty houses.
    “Get me a station,” Grandpa Joe said.
    The radio was Kendrick’s job. Unlike Dad, Grandpa Joe never kept the radio a secret.
    The radio hissed and squealed up and down the FM dial, so Kendrick tried AM next. Grandpa Joe’s truck radio wasn’t good for anything. The shortwave at the cabin was better.
    A man’s voice came right away, a shout so loud it was like screaming.
    “…and in those days shall men seek death and shall not find it…and shall desire to die and death shall flee from them…”
    “Turn that bullshit off,” Grandpa Joe snapped. Kendrick hurried to turn the