The second thing you should know is: Oceanrest is haunted. I don’t mean “haunted by the ghost of the city it used to be,” either. I mean haunted. I mean it in the way people talk about deep Louisiana bayou and old derelict plantations and the dark woods of Romania and the unlit catacombs of Paris. I mean there are things here that ought not to be anywhere at all.

“You don’t get more after this, Randall,” Deirdre said, her voice calm and icy. “I’m the only one in the goddamned state who makes this shit. You fuck with me and you’ll never see another bag of it.”

“Don’t think we’ll need much more, in earnest. Now, you planning to put down the gun, or are we gonna have to start off enough fireworks to bring every cop this side of the border down on your little homestead?”

They adorn themselves in bone. They hood themselves in buck’s skulls, cow’s skulls, bull’s skulls, wolf’s skulls. They wear necklaces of teeth, phalanges, tarsals. Their fingers gleam in ivory rings, claw-tipped, leather-skinned. They might be human. They might not be human.

US Highway 1. A gray snake of concrete writhed past her. The Oceanrest exit let off onto an artery road, two lanes on either side of a double yellow line, a dying pulse bloodletting into the sea. Before the iron lung economy, there’d been a trailer park by the highway, and an ice cream shop, and a very large church. Their razed bodies curled in shallow graves, their bones hidden in underbrush. A monster licked the skulls empty, scavenged the flesh.

I have been dead, now, for longer than I ever lived.

I can’t recall the exact year it happened. I remember my husband’s scream, my daughter’s footsteps sprinting the hall. I remember my son’s face blood-speckled, the stab of hot betrayal opening my innards. I remember lying on the kitchen floor, a cutstring puppet in crimson slick, going cold…

Out there in the woods, a tree unfurls its roots; they are nooses, its branches, bone. It claws at the clouds until sunlight spills out. Its decades aren’t carried in the rings of its trunk, but in the bodies hanged up unrevenged. How many children have hanged there? How many boogeymen have added to its collection of endings?

Virgil stepped back from the front door and drew a non-standard-issued sidearm—a large-mouthed weapon of history. A hand-me-down from an officer in one of those wars that were supposed to end all those other wars. For a few long seconds, Paul heard only rain.

Then came the breach.

I don’t remember when it started. Some time after the program. A lot of people who never had a problem are leery of the program but it works. I’m almost one years sober. You resurrect from the inside out. It starts small and grows. You have to let the dream inside, you have to let the hope inside of you, like a seed. It grows into the future.

He woke up itchy and hot on the floor of the flophouse, insects fleeing his body.  He raked his fingers against his ribs to kill off the slower vermin; panted for air.  The room’s other occupants shifted on lice-ridden burlap and ignored him.  The nightmare burned the last of its hellfire fuse through him and left him cold and pointless.  His cot, so much as it was his, was damp with his sweat.

She shows me a card. The back is absence-white, color of nothing and everything at once. “I need you to focus on the card,” she says. “I’ll know if you don’t.”

She’s not lying. I’ve danced these steps a dozen times. I haven’t had a choice. Legally speaking, I signed up for this. Technically. There’s a contract somewhere, my name’s on it.

I focus on the card. Blank white. Nothing white.

“What do you think is on my side of the card?” she asks.

He woke up, again, to the same alarm as always: static hiss of radio underscoring the accentless newsman as he said, “…he went to the gun locker, opened it, and took out the rifle.” He slapped the radio off before he heard the rest of the story and pushed himself up out of bed. Sarah shifted on the mattress next to him, an airy sigh slipping from her lips as she curled up in the covers. She never heard the newsman, no matter how many times he said the exact same thing. They’d had a fight about it, once. She always heard a rock song, from Oceanrest Rock & Blues Radio. The same song, every time…something by Nine Inch Nails, but he couldn’t remember the title. He only ever heard the news report, the same news report, over and over again.