Mom & Pop's had years ago replaced the known-for-its-fries Deb's Diner, just a short ways out of Port Killdeer. The four of them arranged to meet around seven o'clock, desirous of avoiding too many people in town who might recognize them. It'd been difficult for Cris to convince Jeremiah to go. After he'd shrieked and scrambled out from under her crawl space going on about some feral girl and a dead animal, she'd marched inside, retrieved her shotgun, and squirmed under the house herself, but by then, the child had vanished. Cris had no doubt she'd really been there, though; for as unstable as her old friend seemed, he hadn't hallucinated or mistaken the raccoon for something more sinister. No, that damned girl had been showing up on Cris's property more and more frequently, a reminiscence of the past, a harbinger of what was to come. Her presence opened a chasm of resistance in the woman, a desire to exterminate the thing, which was no child at all but some mockery of all that had been, as if they didn't trust Cris to return, as if they'd sent their minion to watch over her.

Jeremiah, who'd not been mentally prepared for the girl, had about lost it. He'd adamantly refused to stay with Cris, even as hesitant as he'd been to return home, and she'd had a hard time convincing him the following day to get back into her truck and drive out to the diner in order to meet Kevin and Heather. But she'd managed, after much coaxing and no small amount of threatening, and they'd arrived ten minutes before their set time.

"Do you really think they'll come?" the man asked sullenly, fumbling nervously with the silverware on the table.

"For the hundredth time, yes," Cris replied, her words in competition with the gently rumbling thunder far above them, presaging rain. "There's no way they'd come back just to try to avoid this. None of us can avoid it. I know you know that."

Jeremiah slid back against the booth, closed his eyes. He looked about as on edge as a caged cat. Pressing his hands to his face, stamping one of his heels repetitively so that the table wobbled, he groaned. "I can't do this. I wanted to be dead, but it didn't work out. I just can't--I don't want to do this again."

Cris hushed him. "Don't talk so loud. Nobody wants to hear about you wanting to be dead, okay? At least you got out of this place for a while. I've had to stay here the entire time while you got to go live a normal life for a while. So don't expect any sympathy from me about not wanting to be here."

He drew his hands away, down to his knees, and quieted himself into a resignation of sorts. Turning to the windows, to the storm-thick skies outside, he sighed. "I didn't have a normal life, whatever that might mean. It was always there, always in the back of everything."

Cris didn't know how to respond to him, so she didn't. Whatever his experience had been, she envied it. Even if he'd lived in the rattiest place doing the worst job, no money, no friends, no family--she envied it. Why she'd been forced to stay behind was beyond her. Of course, none of it mattered, now. She could stop wondering whether they'd gotten away; clearly, they hadn't. All three were back. And while Cris hadn't yet seen Heather or Kevin, if they were as unstable as Jeremiah, she might be the most sane of the bunch.

Rubbing the back of her teeth with her tongue, Cris found herself staring hard at the man across from her. Some mix of empathy and vexation twisted her thoughts. Jeremiah had never been particularly strong. Oh, he'd had a self-assurance uncommon in an adolescent; unlike her, he'd never worried what others thought of him or whether he appeared attractive or weird to other teenagers. He'd been able to strike up a conversation with absolutely anyone, no regard to age or status. But the more Cris had gotten to know him, the more she'd discovered his telling quirks, particularly his possibly unhealthy interest in the post-mortem anatomy of small animals and his menagerie of indeterminate phobias, including a constant yet quiet paranoia of losing control of any aspect of his physical self. The two of them had spent countless hours as fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds watching a variety of horror movies, and while she'd used to appreciate a quality story over a quantity of gore, Jeremiah had been the opposite, expressing an almost unsettling interest in observing the ways bodies could be abused.

She'd known that Jeremiah's father and sister had medical problems--he'd told her as much even though she'd never spent enough time at his house to see either of them, and she'd heard the rumors about his dad--so she'd always figured his interests were medical in nature. He had talked a lot about his career aspirations in that field.

"What have you been doing, these past years?" Cris spoke softly, but her words had a hard effect on Jeremiah, who returned a severe gaze.

Trembling, his features softened, and he shook his head, sighed, lowered his lip as if to speak, but the bell at the door rang, and Cris, seeing the shaggy-haired figure of Kevin walk in followed by Heather, half rose to draw attention to herself. They caught sight, approached, and then, as abruptly as if no time had passed at all, the four of them sat around a table, Jeremiah and Kevin on one side, Heather and Cris on the other, and though their disparate encounters with the world had them steeped in their own brands of weariness, none had changed much, after all. There was Jeremiah in all his nervous energy; Kevin, who was no more than an older version of his grungy adolescent self; and Heather, slender and effortlessly stunning as ever in her sundress, much to Cris's distraction. Perhaps the only thing that had really shifted was the power dynamic, if power were even the right word for the burden of communication that had fallen upon Cris.

She had never been a great communicator; she wasn't one, now. "Thanks for coming." Thanks for coming? Cris knew how inane it sounded the moment the words left her lips. "I'm sorry. Don't--don't look at me like that. I don't know what to say, all right?"

Heather had a distinct air of constraint about her, Cris noticed. The woman clasped her hands in her lap, kept her purse on her shoulder. She didn't present as someone interested in staying. "So what's next?"

Cris didn't want to look at her. She'd never been able to relate to Heather, even after everything they'd been through together. She looked instead across at Jeremiah and Kevin. "I have no idea. They just told me to bring you back, and since you came, I--I figured we should at least meet."

"You have no plan?"

"No, Heather, I don't."

Jeremiah had begun chewing his nails. Cris watched him for a moment, trying to disregard Heather's obvious chagrin. Kevin was leaning against the table, elbows on it, interlaced hands against his mouth. Even after what had happened to the four of them, what had forced them together, Cris hadn't forgiven him for what he'd almost done to Jess. She couldn't look at Kevin without thinking of it.

"They'll tell us what to do next. I'm sure they will. When they're ready."

"So what are we supposed to do," Jeremiah quavered, "just sit here and wait?"

Cris offered him a pair of raised eyebrows. "Yeah. Unless you have a better idea."

"But it's--what if I see--or if something happens like yesterday--"

Heather snapped to. "What does he mean? What happened yesterday?"

Sighing, Cris lowered her shoulders. She didn't want to talk about the girl. "We've been seeing things. Well, I've been seeing things. He just happened to be with me last night and saw it instead."

"So . . ." Heather looked between the two of them a few times, "which one of you is seeing things?"

"Me," Cris insisted, taking over before Jeremiah could respond.

"The kids, right?"

Cris darted a glance at Kevin, who'd raised his dark eyes to meet hers at the same moment. Emotion flared in her, something like resentment. "Yes. Why? Have you?"

"No," he returned flatly. With thumb and forefinger he pushed the hair from his forehead. "But I've . . . I've had feelings, you know. She's there, she's . . . laughing at me."

"Um, ok." Cris was fairly certain Kevin's insecurities played some role in his assumptions. "Whatever it is, I don't want to sit here with you all any longer than I have to. So let's just agree to stick around, all right? Don't anyone go anywhere. And if any of us hears from them, tell the others."

"Do you think they know we're here?"

"Yes," Jeremiah answered Heather hardly before she'd had a chance to complete her question.

Cris frowned. "How are you so sure?"

The orange-haired man raised a hand and tapped at the bandage on his throat, saying nothing, and though none of them quite understood what he was getting at, no one questioned him.

"Anway, just stay around, ok? Because unlike you all, I can't seem to leave, and I have a feeling they'll take it out on me if you try to get out of this."

"What does it even matter?" Heather cried, a slight hysteria edging her words. "None of it matters! It's all over, now; it's just a matter of how!"

A cold blanket of silence fell over them. They cast furtive glances at one another but couldn't argue with Heather's finality. Their conversation now, quite different from their conversations then, consisted of notions best left unsaid and tacit accord to avoid rousing what lay between them, slumbering in all its nightmares. Cris wasn't sure seeing them had done anything at all for her. There was certainly no joy in the reunion, no optimism, either. They'd all known this time would come, and perhaps she'd actually had it easier than the others after all. She'd never been given a false sense of hope, never been able to fool herself into thinking maybe it hadn't happened, into thinking she could get away. The years she'd spent stuck in Port Killdeer had been slow-drip torture, and yet she'd not had to deal with the shock of coming home after erecting an illusion of security.

Lightning struck, suddenly, out in the fields beyond Mom and Pop's, and the power flickered out. The grumbles of disgruntled customers and servers were fast sated by the mitigating glow of emergency lights--the coffee would still be hot! they were assured. All was well! But Cris had seen something illuminated in the burst of light, a black silhouette against neon violet stalks of corn, a gaunt figure, standing still as a scarecrow, two phosphorescent pinpricks pegged into the void of its head. And even in its obscurity, the flash's ephemerality, the posture of the shadow revealed an insolent assuredness. He knew she'd seen him; he'd wanted her to see him.

"Are you all right? Crystal?"

But Cris didn't hear Jeremiah, didn't hear Heather when she repeated his question. She clambered across the woman to get out of the booth, in order to go outside, no matter the hard summer rain now pelting the world. It was no rain, though--not water that soaked Cris head to toe as she pushed out the door into the parking lot, toward the fields where she'd seen him standing. No, another flash of daybright revealed her showered in crimson, running in rivulets down her face and body.

"I'm here, you bastard!" Cris screamed into the storming darkness, toward where she'd seen him. "What do you want from me?"

You know, he returned, his words not without but seething within her mind, and then claws dug into her shoulders, tore through the blood and the darkness to pull her into an unwelcome embrace.