“We don’t need you anymore,” Troy says.

  Kendall deflates further, shrinking against the door. Case imagines it’s a terrible thing for Kendall to hear: that she’s not necessary.

  “What happened?” the girl asks.

  “We had a problem with some birds,” Abby replies—as if that explains anything.

  Kendall doesn’t respond. She just gapes at Abby, clearly confused.

  Abby stoops again, this time to pick up a book that was knocked loose from the shelves. When she straightens up, she turns, facing Kendall directly.

  “We had a problem,” Abby repeats slowly, “with some birds.”

  Case tries, but she’s unable to hold back her laughter. It starts off as a series of snorts, but then explodes into full-blown cackles. A moment later, Abby joins in. Before long, Case can barely breathe. She has to sit on the couch to catch her breath, but her cackles only get louder when she glances to the cushions and to the clouds of white fluff that are pushing out through a giant rip in green velvet.

  “A problem,” Case gasps, “with some birds.”

  Abby is laughing so hard she’s hiccuping. She moves behind Case, bracing herself against the back of the couch.

  Case tries covering her mouth, which somehow makes everything worse. Her eyes are watering to the point that she can hardly see.

  “I’m sorry,” Case says with a snort. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What a bitch,” Kendall mutters, and Abby laughs so hard her screeches rival those of the hawks.

  Really, though. What kind of hard-hearted person laughs at the misfortune of others? Hoots in the aftermath of a mini-disaster? Could it possibly be the same type of person who is plotting to steal a car?

  It’s that puff—that ridiculous purple puff on the entry hall table. It’s taunting Case. It’s been taunting her for hours. Even as she’s doubled over laughing on the couch, she’s homed in mentally on its position: a few feet behind her, through an open doorway. From that table, it’s just a few feet to the front door. From the front door, it’s just a few short strides to the car.

  Case is fast, and she can be quiet. She could be gone before anyone notices. The only thing giving her pause is the possibility she’ll receive more of Drea’s writing from Steph later. But this gift of escape is something she can’t ignore.

  Case is itchy. Case is giddy. There’s a new giddiness layered on top of the recent bird-induced giddiness. She thinks, This is it. The outside world will help her now. She’ll go back to Timmy’s. She’ll find a landline. She’ll call troopers with her remaining quarter and tell them about her missing friend and some weirdo named Charlie and the papers her friend left hidden in the house. Who knows? Maybe there’s more writing in other walls. The cops will come out here, search the house to figure out what happened, and, hopefully, break the whole place apart in the process. Case is even more giddy as she imagines Kendall hemming and hawing about overripe raspberries, and how she has bread in the oven that’s about to burn, and how they—the cops, the intruders—are ruining everything.

  Case has to time this just right. Her wide-mouthed cackles soon soften to giggles, and she’s able to wipe her bleary eyes clear. Around her, the housemates have gone silent in their work. Abby, a dopey grin plastered to her face, is still picking up books one by one, holding them out like dirty socks when they flap open on their broken spines. Kendall surveys the damage for a long while, then leaves to grab a broom from the kitchen, to sweep up feathers and broken glass, she says. Troy is righting some of the furniture—aligning wooden feet with the joints of the floorboards—but mostly looking around with a frown. Occasionally, he lifts his sour gaze to the open back door, to where the hawks have disappeared. His eyes narrow, as if he’s hatching some revenge plot. Or maybe he’s scared. Maybe he thinks Charlie’s prophecy is coming true. First fire, then floods, then being set upon by the animals.

  Case is looking to the open back door as well, not plotting her revenge, necessarily, but plotting her next move. But then, in flies a wasp. Of course, it’s impossible to tell if it’s the same wasp from earlier, because all wasps look essentially the same, but Case would like to think it’s the same one. It finally got what it wanted. It doesn’t have to tap on the glass anymore. It’s inside now, doing a big lap around the room, over everyone’s heads, until it lands on the coffee table, just in front of where Case is sitting. Specifically, it lands on the cover of a fashion magazine. Even more specifically, it lands on the sleeve of a bright pink dress that the cover model is wearing. That wasp thinks the dress is a flower. It keeps dipping its little wasp head down toward the glossy paper. First, the wasp wanted to tap its way through a glass door. Now, it wants to suck nectar from paper. It seems to love impossible tasks. It’s a glutton for punishment—an annoying, persistent thing.

  Still loopy from laughing, Case grins. She can also be an annoying, persistent thing.

  No one else notices the wasp. They’re all too busy trying to put things in order. It’s a good time to make a break for it. While Abby is preoccupied, carrying a teetering stack of hardcovers across the room, and Troy’s back is turned, Case rises from the couch and slips into the entryway. She soundlessly swipes the puff and the attached keys from the table, pushes through the front door, and is outside once again.

  Abby’s car is very old, so Case has to unlock it manually. Even though she’s fairly certain she made no noise during her escape, she still nervously fumbles with the keys, casting glances over her shoulder to the house, until the lock gives. After falling into the seat behind the wheel, Case starts the engine and shifts the car into drive.

  At this point, there’s no more stealth. Case guns it, and, as gravel and dust flies from out behind the tires, she makes a hard three-point turn to get oriented in the right direction.

  Case’s fantasy of escape is short-lived, though. When she steers the car around the bend in the driveway, she’s immediately forced to slam on the brakes. There’s debris blocking the narrow lane, a mess of tangled branches and some hollow logs. None of this was here before.

  She can see drag marks along the ground, dark and new, leading from the woods. The mess in front of her isn’t from a tree that’s fallen or been blown over by weak wind. It’s been pulled into the lane intentionally, to prevent this car from getting out—or to prevent any other car from coming in.

  A memory slides into place: Troy’s hands from earlier, those fresh-looking scrapes along his knuckles.

  He came out here. He did this.

  Case shifts the car into park, jumps out, shoves the keys into her front pocket so that the puff dangles out by her hip, and starts tossing the least heavy branches out of the path. None of this is impossible to move; it’s just going to take time. Case ignores the mesquite barbs that jab into her palm, as well as the sweat that’s beginning to pool at her lower back. She makes a point not to look down the lane, toward that rickety monster of a house. All she focuses on is the act of grabbing branches, then throwing them. Grabbing, then throwing.

  There is still hope and time. She will get reception. She will call the cops. The cops will come.

  At first, Case pretends she doesn’t hear the sound of someone stalking in her direction—the slow, deliberate crunch of gravel underfoot—but after she hauls away another bunch of branches, she looks up and sees Troy. The fireplace poker is down by his side, its iron tip angled toward the ground.

  “You thought I couldn’t move some branches myself?” Case shouts.

  Troy doesn’t reply. Case notices the wrinkles in his white shirt and the sheen of sweat on his neck. He takes a hard swallow, then advances—not toward Case, but toward the back end of the car. In one smooth motion, he lifts up the poker, then slams it down. This time, his aim is true. The curled tip lodges deep into the rubber of the tire, and Troy leaves it there, releasing the handle and stepping back.

  The tire hisses as it flattens. The sound is so loud and eerie that Case can’t help but cringe. She watches the car sag and tilt. It sinks slowly, like the sun setting in summer.

  Abby and Kendall come running around the bend, but they both stop when they see the car and what Troy has done. An expression warps Abby’s face—betrayal, Case thinks—and a quick shine of tears forms in her eyes.

  “What did you do?” Abby asks in a whisper. Then louder: “What the fuck did you do, Troy?”

  “You might have taken her,” Troy says. “Driven her to the city.”

  “I . . .” Abby trails off. She puts one hand to her ear to muffle the sound of the still-hissing tire. “I wouldn’t have done that.”

  “You might have,” Kendall chimes in. “Out of all of us, you’re the most sympathetic.”

  “Sympa—” Abby sputters. “I need the car! We need the car!”

  “There are other cars,” Troy says. “I can get us another car.”

  Abby spins around in a half circle, lifts her gaze to the treetops, and lets out a scream.

  “In the meantime, there’s a spare tire in the cellar,” Troy adds. “It’s flat, but if we end up needing it, I can figure out a way to get some air in it.” He pauses. “Give me those.”

  Troy holds out his hand toward Case, his palm facing up. He waits a second, then does that impatient Come on, come on gesture, twitching his fingers inward toward his wrist. He’s asking Case to give him the keys like she’s a child who’s been caught sneaking a cookie.

  “Give it,” he urges.

  Case lets out a huff of disbelief. This whole time, she’s been clutching a tree branch, which she now drops to the ground. She then reaches into her pocket to draw the keys out by their puff and walks toward Troy.

  When Case gets close enough, she hefts the keys once, into her hand, and then throws them. She’s aiming for Troy’s throat, specifically the tender hollow between his collarbones, but the keys instead collide with his bottom lip. Troy bucks back in shock. He tries to catch the keys as they bounce off his chin, but they fall to the ground.

  Case bends down swiftly, scoops up the keys, and then pitches them sideways, deep into the trees. They create a rustle when they land, hopefully in the middle of a bramble patch.

  “There you go,” she says.

  Abby looks into the trees as if they were an ocean and her keys had been lost to some deep, impenetrable depth.

  “By the way,” Case says, taking a breath, “the cops are coming. In case Abby didn’t tell you, when we went to town earlier, I gave the people who worked at the store the address of this house. I told them I was in danger, and to call the troopers.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Kendall says, but there’s a hitch in her voice that gives her uncertainty away. She looks past Case, down the lane that leads to the highway. “They would be here by now.”

  “Would they?” Case counters.

  “Abby,” Troy says. His hand is covering his mouth, but Case can see a smudge of watery blood there. “Is that true?”

  Kendall spins toward Abby, who is still sadly gazing into the trees.

  “Abby, why didn’t you say anything?” Kendall demands. “You are the sympathetic one.”

  “Christ, calm down,” Abby says. “That’s just what Case told me. For all we know, she could be lying.”

  “I also told them about Charlie,” Case says, playing her ace.

  Everyone freezes.

  “I know all about him,” Case goes on to say. “I know about Charlie, and the river, and—”

  “No, you don’t,” Kendall counters, cutting Case off. “Don’t lie.”

  “I do know. Drea told me in a letter. I know about the birds, how Charlie said they’d attack. And that’s what they just did. It’s the start of something.”

  “There’s no way that’s possible.” Kendall then looks to Troy, helplessly. “What is she talking about? Why is this happening? Why is everything falling apart?”

  “I don’t know,” Troy says. Then he swiftly switches gears. “Nothing is falling apart. Everything is fine.”

  “Nothing is fine,” Kendall bellows.

  “Everything fell apart a long time ago,” Abby adds. “Like, back when the ground exploded and fire started spewing into the sky.”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Case says, though she’s not sorry at all. She starts slowly backing down the driveway, keeping the trio in her sights. “But your time out here is up.”

  Kendall moves so fast—rushing forward, pushing past Troy. She tugs the fireplace poker from the flat tire of Abby’s car. Case sees a face contorted into fury, straight teeth bared, the tip of a braid, a dark blur, and then nothing but white dust.

  There’s a sound inside Case’s head, like the satisfying plink of a stone breaking the surface of still water. It ripples.

  PART TWO:

  NIGHT

  Case is inside—inside a building or just inside her own head, she’s not sure. It’s dark, but there’s a mustard-yellow light, a faraway dot, over to the side. She tries to reach it, tries moving, but her body refuses. She wants to call out to the light, but her tongue is too big and too dry to make a sound. Again, she tries to move. It’s a massive effort. She tells her brain to tell her nerves to tell her arms to reach or her legs to run, but nothing happens.

  That dot of light—it doesn’t move, doesn’t hover or dim.

  It doesn’t care about Case.

  Time has passed. Right? Case is awake. Maybe? She’s awake but still stuck. The light is still there. It seems brighter now, and the shape is different: oblong, like the dot has been stretched, pulled like taffy. This time, Case doesn’t try to move her legs, but instead she tries to turn her head, which leads to a bolt of terrible, clear pain and a lot more light. Light everywhere, bright white and then red. The pain and the light cause her whole body to jerk. That movement produces a sound, a nonhuman squeak from somewhere beneath her. This is the moment Case realizes she’s trapped—like, really trapped.

  Her head, though—what a mess. The pain there is growing, actually unfurling, like the thick, individual petals of a flower, but Case tries again to move. There’s a twitch behind her right eye. When she swallows and releases, it feels like she’s pulling her lungs into her throat and then shoving them back out. Case can move her head side to side, up and down, but when she does that, even slightly, she’s stabbed through the temple. Her legs are too heavy, so she tries an arm, which budges slightly but is caught on something.

  She takes a breath in through her nose—that, at least, feels normal. There’s a smell: damp air, mold, the clean rot of compost. It’s not entirely unpleasant. She takes a few more full inhales and exhales through her nose—gets her breath to a normal rhythm—and then, finally, screws up the courage to open her eyes again.

  She’s in a room. The light is from a small window, above her head, where the ceiling meets the wall. The color of the light isn’t yellow anymore. It’s now the purest, freshest watermelon pink, and the beam is coming in hard, at an angle, crossing the length of the room, a row of shelves, a closed door, a dirt floor, and the dusty tips of Case’s boots.

  Sunset. The sun is setting. The window must face west, because that’s the only way the light could make these kinds of patterns.

  A dirt floor and a perched-high window. What else? On either side of the room, there are shelves packed with . . . Case squints. Jars. Aluminum cans. Paint cans. Coffee cans. Plastic storage baskets. Wound-up lengths of rope and garden hoses. Nozzles for those garden hoses. The split wooden handles of old farm tools. On the floor, leaning against one of the shelves, is a spare tire, flat.

  A spare tire, flat.

  Why is that familiar?

  Case sucks in a breath. The quick action hurts her nostrils and triggers another quick, sharp pain in her head, but it also brings a shock of clarity. She’s in a cellar, the cellar. There’s a spare tire in the cellar, that one guy had said—that one guy named Troy.

  Noises come from above Case’s head. There’s a thump, then a bang, then another bang. Case gasps. She knows those noises, too: the sounds of a violent baker.

  The angle of the light is changing, and Case knows that darkness will come soon. Again, she tries to move but can’t—not quite. She can kick one leg, the right one, but it only scrapes the dust in a semicircle. Her left leg is stuck. When Case angles her head to look down, she can see her left lower leg tied to the leg of a chair. She then realizes that her upper body is also mostly stuck because someone tied her torso to the chair, as well.

  Case’s heart beats faster, wildly. Historically, bad things have happened to her when she’s been stuck inside dark buildings at night. Since it hurts so much to move her head, Case twists her entire upper body side to side to try and wring herself free. She then changes tactics and rocks back and forth, slamming her shoulders against the chair. The rope rasps through the fabric of her shirt and against her arms, but Case has faith in her scarred and sturdy skin.

  Soon, there’s a pop. One of the joints in the chair has come loose, just behind her right hip. When she wiggles her butt, the entire chair wiggles with her. Case is certain she can break the chair, but she’ll have to break it against something. The best and closest option is the floor.

  Instead of twisting or rocking, Case now sways. She pushes off her untethered right foot—once, then twice. The chair starts to tilt. Case also starts to tilt, and her whole body tenses as she braces for impact.

  Case blacked out again, which she probably should have expected. When she comes to, the pain in her head is a full-blown riot. She can barely open her eyes. So she opens one, the left one, only a little. There’s a shaft of light on the ground, still that fresh pink color, and she knows she couldn’t have been out for too long, because the sun is still in the process of setting.

  She’s sideways. Her left shoulder is against the ground and throbbing from the impact. Her left wrist, though—she can wriggle it free, at least freer than before. When she shimmies, things loosen even more. Just as she’d hoped, the joints of the chair busted apart when she hit the floor.