“They’re who we’ve come here to see. Well, who you’ve come to see. You’ve got a message to deliver to them – a very special one.”

Then he laughed, and after a moment, Maureen – although she didn’t know why – began laughing too.

* * *

Maureen walked through the mall, scanning her surroundings as she went. Situational awareness was important when you were a cop, and it had long become second nature to her. She took in the people – mostly old folks and mothers with young children at this time of day – walking past her, heading in the opposite direction. She glanced into the shops as she walked by, her gaze zeroing in on the registers to make sure no one was being robbed. People avoided meeting her eyes, and those who did looked at her quickly and then looked away. People treated cops like predators whose attention they didn’t want to attract, and while this response was one of the things she liked least about her job – after all, she’d sworn to serve and protect these people, not frighten them – their reluctance to focus their attention on her was useful now. No one questioned the presence of a cop in public. An armed cop. They just wanted to go about their business without said cop hassling them. This meant no one would think to stop her before she reached the play area, before she could complete the task she’d come here to do. She was a little fuzzy on why she had to do it, though. Rauch had explained it to her in the car, and it had seemed to make perfect sense at the time. But now that she was inside the mall, alone, she was no longer so certain of her mission. Maybe she should go back to the cruiser and talk with Rauch some more, make sure she fully understood what she was supposed to do, and why it was so important. Rauch had stressed that it was absolutely vital that she complete the task she’d been sent to do, that the Balance depended on it. Maureen didn’t know exactly what the Balance was or why it was so important, but Rauch had made a big deal of it, and Maureen saw no reason why the man would lie. She trusted her partner, even if she couldn’t remember when they’d become partners. Still, she didn’t feel right about the job she’d come here to do, felt unsettled, doubtful. Good cops knew when to rely on their gut, and hers was telling her she needed to rethink the situation, get a better handle on it, get some clarification. Because once she got to work, she would be fully committed, no take-backs.

She stopped walking, was about to turn around, when a recent memory flashed in her mind. She saw Rauch sitting in the front passenger seat of the cruiser, the upper half of his body turned so that he could face Maureen.

Do you understand what I’ve told you?

Yes, Maureen had answered.

Good. And just to make sure you don’t have second thoughts….

Rauch’s neck gills had widened. He’d closed his mouth, tightened the muscles in his neck, and a chuffing sound had filled the cruiser as jets of black gas shot forth from the slits. A black cloud enveloped Maureen’s head, cutting off her vision. The gas smelled sour and rank, like spoiled milk and rotten meat. She’d been caught off guard, and she inhaled the noxious stuff before she could stop herself. As bad as the shit stank, she hadn’t coughed, and the cloud quickly dissipated. She’d felt calm then, relaxed, compliant, happy – even eager – to do whatever Rauch asked of her.

The memory of that awful stench wiped away her doubts as effectively as if she’d gotten a fresh dose of the gas. She’d come here to do a job – an important one – and she intended to see it through. She unsnapped the safety strap on her side holster, put her hand on the butt of her Glock, and continued on toward the play area.

* * *

“Look at me, Mommy!”

Brian climbed on top of the bulbous yolk of a gigantic over-easy egg and jumped. Reeny watched as he landed on a section of egg white. The plastic was slick, and his feet slid out from under him and he went down on his butt. She rose from the bench where she’d been sitting, intending to go to him and see if he was hurt. But he got up laughing, stepped off the egg, and started running toward an equally gigantic waffle covered with plastic syrup and a plastic pat of melting butter. Her assistance not required, Reeny sat back down and marveled at how resilient children could be. Why couldn’t people keep that quality and take it with them into adulthood? It would make getting through life a hell of a lot easier.

She’d intended to take Brian to the park after picking him up from preschool, but the rain had necessitated a change of plan. Instead, she’d brought him to Horizon’s Edge. A silly name for a cheap, tacky place that always smelled like greasy fried food, popcorn, soda, and cotton candy. Unlike some kids, Brian wasn’t tired after school. He was always revved up, so Reeny took him to the park to burn off some of that energy before she took him home. If she didn’t, he’d run around like a little lunatic and drive her crazy while she tried to make dinner. But the weather being what it was, she’d brought Brian to the mall today. More especially, to the play area, not far from the food court. And maybe its proximity to food was why it had been designed in such an unusual way. Instead of standard play equipment to climb on, jump on, or slide down, the area contained giant plastic sculptures of breakfast food: eggs, pancakes, waffles, sausage links, muffins, tall glasses of milk and orange juice, and even a mug of coffee. The drink sculptures were too large for children to climb, so they mostly ignored these, although occasionally some kids would chase each other around them. Running, climbing, and jumping were the primary activities children could engage in here, and while school-age children would tire of the breakfast sculptures quickly, toddlers and preschoolers didn’t need much in the way of outward stimulation in order to make their fun – thank god.

There were maybe a dozen kids playing, a roughly even mix of boys and girls, running around, laughing, and yelling while their tired parents sat on benches positioned around the play area. Some, like her, were watching their children have fun, while most gazed down at their phones. She watched Brian fall into a game of tag with several other children, smiling at the easy way they played together. If only adults could make friends so easily. Brian looked like his father – lean, narrow-faced, thick brown hair – but he didn’t have his father’s athletic grace, not yet anyway. Charles owned and operated a cleaning company called We Got It Maid. But he’d been on both the football and basketball teams in high school, and now he ran several miles each morning and played doubles tennis with her at the weekends. She hoped Brian would inherit his father’s physical abilities. She’d been awkward and clumsy growing up, and she hoped her son could avoid having to deal with other kids teasing him because he wasn’t good at sports. Neither she nor Charles were shallow people, at least she hoped they weren’t. They didn’t judge others by their physical gifts. What was inside a person’s mind and heart was infinitely more important than whether they could do a layup or hit a fastball. But the reality was that the fast, the strong, and the agile had an easier time of it in this world – certainly when they were young – and as a mother, she wanted her child to have the best life he could.

Her thoughts drifted toward Lori then. Her sister had been on her mind ever since their lunch earlier, and she hadn’t been able to concentrate on anything else. She was worried about Lori – deeply worried – and she wondered if she’d made a mistake by not staying with her after their talk at A Taste of Thai. Maybe she should’ve canceled the afternoon’s showings and invited Lori over to her house where they could’ve continued talking. Maybe she should’ve tried to convince Lori to check herself into a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation. Lori’s mental health had been good for the last…had it really been seventeen years? But Aashrita’s death during their senior year in high school had hit her hard, and it had taken her some time to recover. Sometimes Reeny thought Lori had only partially recovered. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t talk about Aashrita, but every once in a while one of their parents would bring up the subject, and when that happened, Lori became distant, distracted, almost as if she went into a kind of trance. Reeny didn’t need to be a psychologist to know her sister had unresolved issues regarding Aashrita’s death. She’d tried talking to Lori about it a couple times over the years, but she’d gotten nowhere, had only elicited blank looks and silence, so she’d given up. Now she wished she hadn’t. Maybe if she’d been more persistent, had been able to convince Lori to get help, she wouldn’t be having delusions about being persecuted by some otherworldly secret society.

She’d texted Lori a couple times to see how she was doing, but she’d gotten no response. She’d called and left voicemails too, with the same result. She’d tried calling Get Moving! in case Lori’s phone was dead, but no one answered. She told herself that Lori was there, just so busy helping clients that she hadn’t had time to get back to her. She’d call or text when she got a chance. These thoughts, however, failed to reassure Reeny.

Maybe she should collect Brian and drive over to Get Moving! and see for herself how Lori was doing. If nothing else, it would make her feel better. She started to stand—

—and that’s when she heard the first shot.

Reeny’s head snapped toward the direction of the sound and her eyes searched frantically for its source. Someone screamed – she didn’t see who – and another shot split the air. More screams, and still she couldn’t see the cause for these cries of fear and shock. She thought she might be in shock herself, sitting frozen on her bench, gaze darting this way and that as she tried to determine the location of the threat. Her eyes fell upon a small body lying on top of the large plastic waffle. The girl lay face down, the back of her light blue T-shirt dark and wet with blood. Not far from the girl, she saw a little boy lying on the floor, arms splayed outward, the red ruin that had once been his face pointed toward the ceiling. Someone was shooting, she realized. At kids. Someone was killing kids.

She didn’t yell, didn’t scream. Instead she jumped to her feet and began running toward the last place she’d seen Brian playing tag with the other children – over by the giant mug of coffee. Hysteria bubbled beneath the surface of her consciousness, and she fought to keep it at bay. She couldn’t help her son if she surrendered to the terror blazing like a wildfire within her.

It’s happening, she thought. Right here, right now.

These days, everyone in America lived with the possibility that they and their loved ones might get caught up in the wave of gun violence that had swept through the country over the last several years. Now it had finally come to Oakmont.

She didn’t see Brian as she ran toward the mug. She was aware of other people as only blurs or smudges, ill-defined objects that took up space but which couldn’t be identified or named. Some of these objects moved, some remained motionless. Some were quiet, and some made sounds as equally indistinct to her as their forms. And then just like that, everything snapped into place, and she saw children, saw mothers – and even a few fathers – running, some toward each other, some away, fleeing without intention or direction as they tried to escape death.

Another gunshot, and this time when she looked in the direction of the sound, she saw a middle-aged police officer standing in a shooting stance, gun gripped in both of her hands, just like cops did in the movies and on TV. Was she trying to stop the shooter? She saw the body of a young mother lying on the edge of the egg sculpture, her blood splattered on the white plastic, a squalling infant lying on the floor near where it had fallen. Reeny experienced a momentary impulse to run toward the baby, pick it up, and carry it to safety, but she shoved the feeling aside. As cold and cruel as it was, Brian was her child, and he was her first responsibility. She shut out the baby’s cries and kept moving.

She called Brian’s name, shouted it as loud as she could. She could barely hear her own voice over the tumult all around her, and she doubted Brian could hear her. She’d just have to keep looking.

Another shot.

She winced, expecting to feel a bullet slam into her back, but nothing happened. Had someone else gone down, injured or dead? Another child or parent? She prayed the shooter had missed this time, but from what she’d seen of his work so far – weren’t these killers always men? – he hit whatever he aimed at. Maybe that last shot had come from the cop’s gun, though. Maybe she’d managed to take out the shooter. Reeny was tempted to turn and look, eager to get visual confirmation that this nightmare was over, that they were safe. All who hadn’t taken a bullet yet, that is. But she forced herself to keep moving forward. She couldn’t afford to take a chance that the shooter had been stopped. She had to find Brian, had to protect him, make sure he was safe.

She shouted his name again, loud as she could this time, and she almost burst into tears when she heard him cry out, “Mommy!”

He’d been hiding behind the giant sausage link. Now he came running around it toward her, tears streaming from his eyes. He held out his arms to her, wanting her to scoop him up and carry him away from this awful place, and that’s exactly what she intended to do.

Another gunshot.

Brian’s head jerked as a bullet struck the side of his neck. Blood sprayed the air, his body went limp, and he started to collapse. As he went down, time seemed to slow to a crawl, and Reeny got a good close look at her dead son’s face. His eyes were wide in what appeared to be almost comical surprise, and his lips had contracted into a small O, creating an overall grotesque cartoonish expression. This is death, she thought. Sudden and stupid, without even a shred of dignity. A split second ago this had been her son, Brian, a boy who loved to eat Cheerios only when they’d floated in milk long enough to get soggy, who loved TV shows with happy talking animals whose adventures were simple and not too scary, who begged her to read the same book to him every night – a collection of silly poems about food – and who slept on his stomach, head to the side, knees drawn up, butt in the air. A boy who laughed too loud and ran in the house no matter how many times she reminded him to walk. But he wasn’t Brian anymore. Now he was only meat.

Time returned to normal speed then and Brian hit the floor and slid several inches before coming to a stop, leaving a smear of blood to mark his path. She staggered toward him, her vision narrowing until it seemed she was looking at him from the far end of a very long, very dark tunnel. Her vision went black for a moment, and when it was restored, she was on her knees next to him, holding his hand, gripping it tight without any memory of how she’d gotten there. She examined Brian’s wound with numb, almost clinical detachment. The bullet had torn a chunk of meat from his neck, severing an artery in the process. Blood flowed from the wound, so much of it. The heart stopped pumping when you died, so the blood flow should stop soon, too, right? She wondered how long it would take. A minute or two? Longer?

She felt something warm flowing down her face. At first she thought some of Brian’s blood had hit her, but when she reached up to touch her face with her free hand, her fingers came away wet but not red.

You’re crying, she thought.

People were still screaming and shouting, running away from the ridiculous play area in all directions. She heard footsteps approaching her, the stride slow and deliberate. She looked up and saw the cop walking toward her. The woman held her gun in her right hand, down at her side, and the expression on her face was one of puzzlement and, perhaps, some small portion of regret.

As soon as Reeny saw the woman, she knew she was the shooter. There never had been anyone else. She’d killed her son and now she was going to kill her. Good. The horrible reality of Brian’s death hadn’t fully hit her yet, but it would, and soon. She didn’t think she could survive that kind of pain, and she wanted to die before she could experience it.

The cop stopped when she reached Reeny. She looked at her, then at Brian, then back to her.

“I have a message for you,” she said. “Actually, it’s for your sister.” She paused and frowned, as if trying to recall the words, wanting to get them just right.

“Confess and atone.”

She raised her gun, but instead of pointing it at Reeny, as she hoped, the cop placed the muzzle against the underside of her jaw and pulled the trigger. There was blood of course, and this time a fair amount splattered onto Reeny, much of it on her face where it mingled with her tears. The cop went down and hit the floor with a dull thud. She too was only meat now.

The bitch had cheated Reeny out of her own death, and she’d escaped without ever having to face justice for what she’d done, killing not only Brian but the others that she’d shot before him. Reeny wanted to scream at the staggering unfairness of it all, was on the verge of doing so, when she felt Brian’s small hand grip hers. Startled, she looked down and saw that his eyes once more gleamed with life and awareness, and his mouth stretched into a wide grin, displaying flecks of blood on his teeth.

“Or suffer,” he said.

It took her a second to realize he was finishing the cop’s message.

He sat up. Blood ran down the side of his face, on to his neck, soaked into the collar of his shirt. He continued holding onto Reeny’s hand, his grip tightening to the point of being painful.

“Let’s go see Aunt Lorlee,” Brian said. “We need to give her the message.”

“Yes,” Reeny said thoughtfully. Then stronger, anger in her voice. “Yes.”

* * *

Driving on the Nightway was beyond surreal. There was the monotony of moving through a world of unvarying blackness, a realm where the only things that were real were what the headlights of your vehicle touched, as if the light solidified the darkness, forced it to coalesce so that you’d have something to drive on. She wondered what would happen if she turned off her headlights. Would the surface of the road suddenly become insubstantial, would her car plummet downward through an endless void, tumbling end over end forever? It was not a theory she wanted to test.

Without markings to delineate the sides of the Nightway, Lori had to drive more slowly than she’d have preferred – thirty-five, forty miles an hour – to ensure she didn’t veer off the road into whatever lay beyond. She had the heater blowing full blast, but the air that emerged from the vents was barely warm, as if the Nightway refused to let those who traveled it get too comfortable. The blanket she had wrapped around her body helped somewhat, but she still shivered from time to time. Why she couldn’t have entered this world wearing her clothes, she didn’t know. Then again, considering they’d been soaked from her standing outside in the rain at the cemetery, maybe it was a good thing her clothes hadn’t come through with her. She’d be freezing if she’d had to wear those wet things. She supposed that was one thing to be grateful for – along with escaping the shadow creatures, of course. She hurt, too. The wounds she’d suffered at the hands of the Cabal, wounds which hadn’t followed her into the real world, had returned to her body the instant she appeared on the Nightway. None of them were life threatening – she hoped – but the pain was distracting.