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one long finger. “You can spend the night with me. You can make me feel like a real woman one last time, like a human being.”
    She fell into my arms and I melted into her as quick.
     
     
    11
    The next morning I found Doc in his little office. He looked surprised to see me. He knew I had something to say and he kept quiet, waited until I worked it out and laid it at his feet.
    “I want to be part of it,” I said.
    “Part of what, Tommy?”
    “You know. The lottery.”
    “You were.”
    I shook my head. “You don’t understand. I want to go with Sonny and Conroy and Ape when they march them out tonight. I want to be part of that.”
    “Tommy—”
    “No, listen, Doc. Maria is my friend. I love her. I think she loves me. I don’t want her going out there alone without a friend. She needs me to be there. To…to see her off. She needs it. So do I. I don’t think I can ever be part of this unless you let me.”
    He sighed. “Tommy, I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
    Before he spent twenty minutes trying to steer me around to his way of thinking, I said, “I know I’ve been a pain in the ass, Doc. I know I’ve been nothing but trouble…but this isn’t easy. You gotta understand how hard all this is for me. For all of us. Just let me do this. This is something I need.”
    Doc just stared at me for a time like he was trying to read what was in my mind, but I had it locked up tight as a vault. He was not getting in there. I emoted sincerity mixed with pain and confusion, grief and loss. But certainly nothing rebellious.
    Doc started to shake his head, then he just sighed. “Are you sure, Tommy? Are you sure this is what you want?”
    I nodded. “More than anything.”
    Poor Doc. He was such a fucking fool. Always in charge. Always having to deal with it all. I almost felt sorry for him at that moment. “Okay, Tommy. If it’s what you want. Go ahead.”
    “Thanks, Doc. This means a lot to me.”
    He smiled and patted my hand like a favored uncle and I left his office. In the corridor I started grinning. None of them knew it, but I was about to bring hell down on each and every one of them.
     
    12
    We marched the six out exactly one hour after dark that night.
    Sonny, Conroy, Ape, and me. We were all armed with pump shotguns and .9mm sidearms. Ape had an Army-issue flamethrower strapped to his back that he had looted from an armory. We were ready to defend ourselves if need be, but it wouldn’t come to that. The lottery didn’t work that way. We were the meat-bringers, so to speak, and you don’t kill the steward that sets your table.
    Ape and Sonny led the way out to the killing fields, Conroy and me in the back, the chosen ones sandwiched in-between. Maria was there, of course. Mrs. Pearson, a young woman named Sylvia whose husband was in the shelter. Three men—Johnson, Hill, and Keeson. They all had the same dead-eyed look of manic desperation in their eyes and to look into them was to know the depths of hell and how hot it burned.
    I wasn’t naïve.
    I knew that Doc did not trust me anymore than I really trusted him or any of the others. That’s why Conroy was stationed behind me. If I caused trouble, I wouldn’t be coming back.
    The killing fields are an easy city block out past the shelter and the parking lot. Like the name implies, just a field. Nothing but grass and a number of wooden poles speared into the ground. I’m not sure what their use was back in the good old days of the weather station, but now they had been put to an extremely dark purpose. As we walked into the grass, a ghost of moon began to rise. And as it did, there came a rumbling, a pounding, a rhythmic hammering from somewhere out in the hills that surrounded us. It was a jarring, discordant sound that echoed around inside your skull. It was like those voodoo drums in old movies, but much more primitive.
    “Hell’s that?” I said.
    “Wormboys,” Sonny said. “Tonight’s the night and they know it. They’re