Then, to make sure the gun didn’t come up in Taylor’s hand, she pulled the blade out, moved the tip an inch or two to the side, and stabbed upward again.

  Tabitha and Lizzie, shocked, both looked green, ready to vomit.

  What? Vivian thought.

  It was the way you were supposed to kill a lobster, before putting it in the boiling water.

  It was humane.

  Taylor fell to the floor beside his friend, fingertips and feet convulsing slightly.

  Had Vivian really picked up Colby’s knife “just to have something to hold,” or did she know this was where it would end?

  It didn’t matter.

  She unlocked the cell door.

  They all could leave now.

  Outside, the singing was over. The screaming had begun.

  The wood was wet.

  Too wet.

  Quinn’s father was far from an outdoorsman, but when Quinn was little Glenn and Samantha Maybrook had taken her to the Poconos and they’d built fires then. And she’d seen pros do it at the overnight camps she’d tried out as a tween, before deciding she’d rather stay home in Philly, attend day camp for volleyball.

  Point was that Quinn knew you couldn’t build an effective fire with wood that hadn’t properly cured. Or wood that had sat outside, uncovered, while it rained.

  The smoke she was seeing wasn’t smoke, it was smoke and steam.

  “Quickly! We need more kindling!” Alton said from the stage. “And one more time, join us in song.”

  There were small fires covering the oversized Frendo head, but it wasn’t burning hot or evenly enough to be called a pyre.

  They seemed to think it wasn’t enough.

  If they stuck her in that thing right now, Quinn would surely die of smoke inhalation. She’d die horribly, every inch of exposed skin scalded with steam.

  But she wasn’t going to be the one to point that out to them.

  The torchbearers were back, now each carrying armfuls of hay. A conga line of volunteers had begun to jog out to nearer the forest, collecting up freshly fallen branches, breaking them into twigs.

  “No, you’re going to wreck it,” Dozer yelled from behind Quinn as he pushed her to the knees again. “Stay there,” he said, passing over her, waving to two men who were trying to adjust a log near the bottom of the structure.

  Was this really happening?

  The front few rows of the crowd had thinned, the spectators who were still alert enough helping to stoke the flames.

  Quinn looked up toward the stage. It was maybe twenty-five feet to run, then three stairs, and she’d be within stabbing distance of Jason Alton.

  Fucking idiots.

  If she’d been waiting for a chance—or divine providence—this was it.

  Quinn lifted her shirt, took out the steak knife, and began to run.

  “No,” she heard Dozer yell. Probably realizing how big a mistake he’d made leaving her unattended.

  “. . . makes everything better. Open up and—”

  Alton was singing along, but stopped as she approached the base of the stage.

  “Stay back!” Alton said, not yelling, but his amplified voice booming out over the crowd.

  The singing continued, lyrics garbled. The drugged-up villagers were only humming the words, the rest of the town helping build the fire.

  Jason Alton wasn’t ready to stand and fight Quinn. And he wasn’t ready to sermonize, try to talk his way out of this.

  He was terrified.

  He was going to run for it.

  He knew who Quinn was. And maybe what he’d been telling these people was right. Maybe Quinn was the devil. Because he should be terrified.

  She caught up with him as he turned, ready to dive off the back of the stage but not having a long enough stride to outpace Quinn’s momentum. She slashed at the back of his slacks, the dull but still serrated knife blade connecting with his hamstring.

  There was a pleasant tug to the follow-through that indicated to Quinn that she’d caught more than sock.

  He screamed into his microphone and any villagers who’d still been singing stopped.

  “Let go of him,” Dozer yelled. The man was big but had that top-heavy jog of a bodybuilder. He couldn’t sprint, not even if his savior’s life depended on it.

  That said, Quinn knew there would be no negotiating with the wrestler, no putting the blade of the knife up to Jason Alton’s throat and telling him to drop his ax.

  No. This was an ending. And a good ending.

  Quinn was going to stab this bastard until she was either pulled off his corpse or killed.

  This man had poisoned these people’s already damaged brains, taken what little they’d had left in the world.

  Quinn was going to die. She hadn’t walked into town thinking that, intending on that, but now she knew it was true.

  But she was going to take Jason Alton with her.

  She adjusted her hold on the knife, switching from a saber to reverse grip, keeping all her fingers wrapped around the hilt like Rust had taught her. She needed that power if she was going to punch the blade through the man’s skull.

  “No!” masked villagers implored from the crowd, the bravest of them beginning to rush the stage, crawling on each other’s backs to try to reach Quinn in time.

  At her feet, Jason Alton began to pray quietly, the words picked up by his hidden microphone and broadcast out.

  “Oh Lord,” he said. “Save me.”

  No one’s saving you, Quinn thought.

  And then, as if the man’s prayers had been answered, Quinn spotted the halogen headlights appearing over the rear of the crowd.

  Twenty-Six

  FOURTEEN MILES OUTSIDE SHIPPENSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

  RVs have basements?

  Johnny D remembered asking Quinn.

  Turns out they don’t. Not really. The space under the RV was more like a trunk.

  He wondered, too late to do anything about it, if he was going to be able to open the hatch from the inside.

  Or, worse, if the “basement” was airtight.

  No biggie. If he needed to cut his way out—or drill air holes—he probably had the tools to do it stashed in the pockets of his cargo shorts.

  Not that it mattered: in a few moments Quinn was probably going to open the hatch and find him here, a failure at being a stowaway like he’d failed at everything else.

  But she didn’t.

  Instead, he listened as the RV’s engine turned over and heard the click of the blinker as Quinn merged into traffic.

  Wow. He couldn’t believe that worked, offering to top up her gas and then jumping inside the basement hatch.

  It wasn’t airtight in here. As they hit the highway, he could hear the whiz of air and see dots of light through cracks in the trunk’s construction. To promote airflow to his pits, Johnny slid one of the boxes of T-shirts over so he could lie on his side, his broken wrist throbbing under him.

  So no, the basement wasn’t airtight, but it sure was hot, hotter as the engine worked, warming the metal and fiberglass around him.

  Johnny tried to remove his shirt, but it was tough to do with one hand and he didn’t have enough room to maneuver the sleeves over his shoulders. Instead, he did the only thing he could do—lie there, sweating.

  Johnny stayed awake for the first hour or so of the drive. He fell asleep once there were no more streaks of daylight and the night air had begun to cool the chassis around him.

  He woke when, a few inches above his head, the RV stopped moving and its aluminum storm door clattered shut. A loud sound, yes, but it was still so warm all around him, he shut his eyes.

  It was hard to tell if his eyes were closed for minutes or hours, but sometime during this hazy period, he flipped onto his back. When he woke with a second start, the nap-time drool snaking down his cheek, into his ear, was chilly to the touch.

  How long had they been parked with the engine off?

  Johnny was cold, but Quinn might still be up there. He waited and listened. He didn’t even risk pulling his shirt down.

  After a few more moments of stillness in the RV above, he pawed for the door handle.

  But there was no handle, just a vinyl strap, a hand pull to help ease the trunk open on its hydraulic struts.

  There was no way to open the basement door from the inside.

  Johnny shook his head. This was a clear safety hazard. What if a little kid had gotten stuck playing in here?

  It took him a considerable amount of time to take the basement door off its hinges, only his one hand good for anything. He worked in complete darkness. In the rush to stow away, and because he was so used to having one on his phone, he’d forgotten to grab a flashlight when he was sneaking tools out of Quinn’s duffel.

  Once Johnny was free, his neck and back sore, his first order of business was checking the fridge.

  He drank a carton of orange juice, using it to wash down five acetaminophen tablets while inspecting the tools that Quinn hadn’t taken with her.

  She’d left all the best stuff behind!

  But it was cool, more for him.

  Less cool: she’d taken the keys.

  Which made sense, but he hadn’t factored that into his plan, either. He’d have to get the RV rolling without them.

  There wasn’t an onboard computer system or anything modern like that, so that was good.

  But after a few tries to hot-wire the mobile home, he realized there must have been an ignition immobilizer somewhere along the line.

  “Fuck!”

  Starting to feel the time crunch, he quickly untwisted and patched back together all the wires he’d stripped.

  Ultimately, it was the tried-and-true “screwdriver jammed into the ignition after whaling on it with a hammer” trick that did it. Which only took five minutes, so he should have started there.

  Getting the engine going took about an hour. Or longer. The clock on the RV microwave was blinking midnight the whole time.

  “You stupid asshole,” Johnny said to himself.

  Thirsty and exhausted, he was beginning to get depressed. Whatever dramatic rescue he’d been imagining, he’d totally missed his window.

  He had to have missed it.

  Right? All that time locked in the fucking wheel well, what was he thinking?

  No.

  That wasn’t the attitude Quinn would take. She would keep fucking going.

  Time to commit.

  Even with the road atlas stretched out on the steering wheel, Quinn’s annotations in highlighter, Johnny missed the turn the first time. And U-turns weren’t easy out here, in the dark, driving an RV with one hand.

  The second time he saw it, though, and coming in from two lanes over gave him a better approach, to roll through the overgrown entrance to the road.

  He was a half mile down the narrow road before he realized those might have been rosebushes he’d driven through.

  The tire pressure light was blinking.

  By the time he reached the town, orange dawn bleeding over the treetops, church steeple hazed in smoke . . . the RV was leaned over to the right, close to riding on rims.

  The air coming through the vents smelled like a cookout.

  He came to the end of the road, old cracked asphalt turning to hardpack, and saw the fire glow of the town square.

  There was a lot to see, a lot of strangeness, but slightly above it all, standing over a kneeling man, was Quinn.

  He let out a yelp of relief.

  For once in his shitty little life, Johnny D Lawson wasn’t too late.

  Quinn was there, alive, and armed. But she was surrounded by a whole hell of a lot of angry people in clown masks.

  “Oh Lord,” an amplified voice whispered, “save me.”

  The lights and sound of the RV caused most of the crowd to turn back toward Johnny. Tilted mouths and uneven eyes, the clown masks looking like they were products of the arts and crafts hour at an institute for the criminally insane.

  Johnny eased off the accelerator, but didn’t stop. He tried nosing into the base of the crowd, where the people were more spread out. He honked, but the people nearest the front bumper acted like they didn’t hear.

  “What are you waiting for?” the amplified voice shouted, and Johnny finally placed the voice as the guy kneeling below Quinn.

  It was Fake Tony Robbins.

  “Don’t just stand there. Save me and kill her!” the man screamed.

  No way. Fuck that. Not on my watch, Johnny thought.

  “Hang on, baby-girl!”

  Johnny D Lawson jammed the gas pedal all the way down to the floor.

  The first bodies rolled under the wheels of the RV with a thud. Or a loud, wet splat. Some of the bodies screamed as they were twisted beyond their breaking points, churned up, some were so far gone that they weren’t even aware they were being run over.

  The next wave of bodies was hit in closer to slow motion. By the time the RV had reached the middle of the crowd, the villagers were aware enough they were in danger that they began trying to get out of the way. It was a stampede. Which meant most of the bodies going under the camper’s tires were already on the ground when the pressure reached their legs and spines and skulls.

  Eventually, there were so many bodies that the six-ton mobile home lost traction, spun out, and finally pitched forward into a pool of mud and gore, stopping completely.

  Quinn watched all of this, knowing she only had moments if she wanted to kill Alton before Gabriel Dozer could cut her down, but also powerless to look away.

  Dozer was similarly rapt. He’d stopped running toward her, stood on the steps to the stage, turning his body out to watch.

  The Winnebago sat, nose down on an angle, one of its turn signals clacking, headlights stained red with blood and pulp.

  Quinn looked over at Dozer, Alton squirming in her grip.

  “Cheryl?” Dozer said, blinking. Then he yelled, running best he could out into the crowd of dazed, dead, and dying villagers, “Cheryl, hon? Get the doors open! Don’t hurt her!”

  Alton breathed feedback into his microphone, stunned that he’d been abandoned.

  But, no, Quinn knew that when the wrestler reached the RV, he wouldn’t find his wife.

  Johnny.

  Johnny D.

  That tricky goddamn Juggalo would be behind the wheel.

  Quinn pushed Alton to the footboards, the glass crunching under the man’s hands. He whimpered as she menaced him with the knife. “Don’t be going anywhere,” she said, giving him a slash on his other leg, this one higher, under the kneecap.

  He screamed so loud there was a whistling audio distortion over the sound system.

  It felt good to be cruel to the cruel.

  Not all the villagers had abandoned their leader, some were still climbing up the side of the stage to fight her.

  Quinn stabbed a man twice in the ribs, tipped him back over the edge. He landed in a space with no people, falling into the mud with a squelch, not moving.

  It didn’t scare the rest of them off.

  The next clown mask to pull its face over the lip of the stage, Quinn hit with a straight kick, the flat of her heel to Frendo’s cardboard nose. A gout of blood squirted through the mask’s mouth hole.

  Some of these villagers had been the same people chasing her with torches, some of them still brandished them now, like large extinguished matchsticks. But some had better weapons. Antique farm equipment.

  She chose one, a guy with a curved sickle, red with rust but edge of the blade silvery, recently sharpened, and jumped onto him, stabbing. While the man under her reached up to grab at his injured neck, she traded weapons with him. With their hands up, trying to attack her and protect themselves at the same time, she was able to crowd-surf between a few targets before she fell to the dirt.

  The remaining clowns in front of the stage were either stumbling over themselves in retreat or were the walking dead, watching Quinn rise to her feet, their eyes red and rheumy behind their masks.

  It was harder to see here on ground level, not only because of the smoke and confusion, but because the rising sun was working to warm the mud now, a thin mist hanging at chest height all around them.

  Quinn had lost track of Dozer. That was a mistake, made her feel uneasy. The big man could be hiding anywhere, ready to jump out.

  Through the bodies, she could see one headlight and the right side of the RV.

  The clowns weren’t inside the vehicle yet, but a group of them were banging on the storm door.

  They couldn’t get the door open, there were so many of them pushing the wrong way on it.

  As she watched, they kicked in the glass portion of the door and peeled the aluminum portion free from its hinges and out of the frame.

  They still needed to break down the wooden interior door.

  More clowns were scaling the side of the RV, ready to pull open the sunroof.

  Somewhere to the side of her, toward the jail, there were gunshots and more screams.

  Quinn couldn’t be bothered with that, if that was Vivian Murray and the girls: she wished them luck, but she had to help Johnny.

  A man screamed a war cry, streaming out of the smoke and mud, headed straight for her, a shovel arcing over his head in an overhead swing.

  Quinn sidestepped.

  This deluded chump. An anonymous man in a clown mask was not going to be the one to . . .

  Quinn hadn’t dodged the shovel. Not completely.

  The villager in the clown mask looked down.

  Quinn looked down.

  The shovel was dug into the ground, the sharpened tip of the spade had torn through canvas, but not the rubber sole of her shoe.

  Her foot.

  He’d cut off her fucking foot.

  Or at least cut it in half. She felt herself tip, then leaned back, steadying so she wasn’t putting weight on the missing toes.

  The man in the mask seemed just as surprised about it as Quinn was.

  Locked together as they were by the shovel embedded in the ground, man still gripping the handle, Quinn was able to thread the sickle between the man’s arms.

  The blade cut into the crook of the man’s elbow.

  She yanked the sickle upward.

  The man’s left arm separated at the joint, as simple as if she were clearing tall grass.