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late to turn back. Miss Lois would never for- give him, and since he’d become a left-back, Miller Walker stopped looking him in the eye, or calling him “good buddy.” He kept digging, and pulled out another bone.
    His fingers were cramped into loose fists. He was so thirsty that his mouth had dried out and he couldn’t move his tongue. He’d lost a fingernail. It had torn from his pointer finger, and he hadn’t even noticed. There were more bones. He traced their edges until they were free. His bloody fingers dripped as he eased the bones onto the inky soil outside the hole. There was a skull, and toes. He smiled. The skull was human.
    He piled the bones in a red heap. He was bleeding a
    lot now. There were cuts all over his hands and arms that he didn’t remember having gotten. The wind picked up. Dead trees gnashed against each other until the sound wasn’t music; it was screaming.
    Sweat dripped from his brow, and his face was set as still as a plaster cast. His blood laced the bones. Marked them with color. It didn’t hurt. A part of him, most of him, was sleeping. Something hot was in James’s trousers. Another stiffie? No, not a stiffie; he’d wet his pants.
    He saw, he didn’t know how he’d missed this before, that along the edges of the clearing were dead animals; skunk, squirrels, birds, and deer. Their husks piled the rim of the expanse like stacks of wood. The buried thing had done this. It had gotten inside their minds and told them to attack each other so it could taste their spilled blood from under the ground. It wasn’t ink that had made this dirt black.
    James felt the wrong emotion. He couldn’t help it. He clapped his hands together and laughed.
    Everything you want , the thing promised, and James knew it was true. In his mind’s eye he saw his parents gored bodies. In his mind’s eye his brother, Danny, was the mental cripple, and James sat on the Walker family throne.
    A raccoon from the woods approached. Its teeth were bared, and its eyes were black. More came. Their fat- tened bodies wobbled toward him. They swayed on small legs like they were sick, and they smelled so bad that he cupped his raw hands over his mouth and stopped breathing.
    They’ve gone mad , he thought, just like me .
    He knew what was going to happen. The thing whis- pered it in his ear. If he’d been a sane little boy he might
    have run. The swerving raccoons gnashed their teeth. His blood spilled, and laced the bones, and he thought about Gimpy. He knew then, during the last moments, how his rabbit had felt.

    PART TWO ‌

    INCUBATION

    T H R E E ‌
    Splitting Atoms

    O

    n the Tuesday morning that James Walker went missing, Meg Wintrob was crawling underneath
    the foundation of her house. The paper boy had missed his mark with the Corpus Christi Sentinel again, and she got on her hands and knees to retrieve it. Her hips shrieked in protest, and she bit down on her lower lip through the pain. Bursitis. Sure, she kept in shape and dyed her hair jet black with the help of Miss Clairol, but stuff like this made it hard to forget that she was middle-aged.
    The crawl space was about two feet high and ran the width and length of the entire house. The Sentinel wasn’t far out of reach, but as her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could also make out her son David’s lost Sit ’n Spin from fifteen years ago, a cluster of three-leafed plants that looked suspiciously like poison ivy, and a collection of aging Sentinel s from days, months, and years past. Jack Frost had peed on this morning’s pa- per, and its pages adhered to one another in a soggy clump. She shook her head full of tight black curls and thought: For once, just one frickin’ year, could the town hire a paper boy who didn’t throw like a sissy?
    She’d only been in this crawl space a handful of times.
    Spiders were down here, she was sure. At this very mo- ment she could feel one of their thick webs flossing her cheek. The wooden beams down here