There was a blanket on me. I pushed it off. The inside of my forehead felt soggy, like the outside of my forehead. A flashlight lay nearby on the carpet.

The carpet was red.

I sat up, an oversized heart pounding on my neck. Between each dark beat I saw more of the room. The backpacks full of food and water, the blood, so much blood, and in the blood handprints and footprints, everywhere handprints and footprints. They had come into the house, the children. They had come walking and crawling to the music, fog stained and desperate, and the bear had come with them.

With my eyes, I followed the flashlight's beam down the hall. The trapdoor to the loft was cracked open, like someone had tried to pull it down in a hurry and failed. Past the cushions stood a shadowed doorway. From that doorway came a moan.

A girl's moan.

I moaned back. Then I crawled the other way, still moaning, unable to stop. I moaned across the carpet. I moaned out into the night, the bloodied and dying night, and I dragged myself down the staircase on my stomach, step after step after step. Got any splinters in your butt? called Nip. Wouldn't know, I answered, want to check? Down into the gravel, through the gravel to the van, its front door open and its engine on, moaning an invitation, saying come and let's moan together, let's moan like lost children, like young lovers, like Ash in the moonlight. Let's run the way she and your friends ran for the loft before the bear caught up to them, and trapped them, and tore and tore and tore at them in that room at the end of the hall.

I climbed behind the wheel. Carl Rascoe reached for me over the backseat, his body wedged between the headrests. His hands opened and closed on the air, and that reminded me of my own hand a little while ago. I looked over and there, on the floor by the half-empty milk jug of gasoline, was the drumbeater. I picked it up. It was heavy. It was right. It knew exactly what it was born for, what it was made to be.

A foot pedal.

I shoved the drumbeater down between my legs and pressed the heavy end to the gas. With my other hand, I shifted into reverse and released the emergency brake. The van peeled across the gravel. I yanked the emergency brake and the back tires locked at the edge of the slope, not one foot too soon. Then I sped down the driveway. The loft's window flashed in the rearview mirror, wide open, dark inside. I choked on a sob. The sob came out a scream and I rode the scream all the way to the Road, the real road, the road that ran south through Honaw's broken heart. The curves flung me about in my seat. In the back, Carl was still reaching out to me. His arms swung like he was on a rollercoaster, like he was having all the fun.

"You having fun, Billy's dad?" I said. "You having a blast?"

He was a bomb. That was hilarious. I laughed until tears filled my eyes and the road turned blurry, until I realized I wasn't laughing at all but screaming, still screaming. I hammered at the dashboard with my fist. As the woods ended and Honaw pulled into view below, my hand fell off the foot pedal. The van rolled to a stop.

A heavy, slow drumbeat pounded from the speakers.

The bear was in the road, walking away down the double-yellow. It turned its head. Its eyes were dark and full of pain. Its eyes were my eyes.

The drumbeat grew, throbbing in the closed air. I felt Ash and Nip in the van with me, as they had been on that first ride, for that first song, the one that had refused to play ever since then. Until now.

I wrapped my fingers tight around the foot pedal.

I shoved it down.

The van launched down the hill, bass like thunder, guitar like lightning, and the bear began to run.

♫

I had it. So many times I had it and it slipped away at the last second, dodging up onto the sidewalk or putting on a quick burst of speed. I had it by the supermarket, I had it crossing the highway, I had it by the burned crisp of the McDonald's. Rivers poured red down the Road, yesterday's storm following gravity along the asphalt and through the gutters. At the gas station I came so close I almost kissed its hind end, but the drumbeater slipped out of my grip and the bear pulled ahead. The vocals howled. I howled with them. The woods closed around us once again. I leaned over the wheel, panting, moaning, my heart the bass, the bass my heart. BOOM, BOOM, BOOM. The van fishtailed around every curve and the bear stayed always just out of reach.

It went like that until the song ended.

The sky was violet to the east and starlit to the west. To the south there was no sky at all, only fog, and below the looming redness yawned the mouth of the Beast. It was wider than imagination, and deeper than despair. I glimpsed it first from the woods and the sight of it through the trees, their bones caught between its colossal jaws, stole my breath. For a few seconds, I forgot all about the chase. I drifted in silence. The bear disappeared around the upcoming bend. I would not see it again on the Road.

Not this road, at least.

I emerged from the woods and, stretching across the horizon, was a cliff. Directly in front of me, the lip of the cliff was bumpy and black.

The lip was not a lip.

It was a tongue.

The van bounced up onto it, and I felt the tires sink like they were riding in thick mud. At the edge, I pulled the emergency brake. Falling away into the fog below lay the longest and steepest and softest ramp in the world. Perhaps in any world. The tongue was no more than thirty feet wide, skinny in proportion to the mouth. And yes, it was backwards, as backwards as it was unbelievable, as unbelievable and unthinkable as the face buried beneath Honaw. To either side of the tongue stood mountains, rows and rows of mountains, jagged and white and so slippery not even the fog stuck to them. They jutted sideways from dark red flesh, their peaks curled like hooks, their ranks fading to pale shadows in the distance.

The bear was a hundred yards down the tongue. A football field's length.

I watched it run.

I thought of the blanket that had been thrown over my body. How long had it taken my friends to hide me from the bear? A second? Two? How much had those seconds cost them? I reached over and picked up the milk jug. Nip had filled the tank at the mine just like Ash asked, and he had carried what was left of the gas to the front seat with him. I took off the cap. A sweet dark smell perfumed around my face. The smell was soaked in my pants, too, and in the back of the van. Carl reached and reached for me. He had eaten more than his fill, had filled his body up most of the way, but not all.

Not quite.

I took the package of PETN from my pocket and stuffed it into his wide-open mouth. His fingernails peeled my arm open as easily as gift wrap. I didn't feel a thing. All I felt was my head pounding and my legs aching and my heart doing both at once.

"You know what the trick is?" I said. "To giving a hit?"

I splashed gasoline on his face. On the backseat. I took a burning swig and emptied the rest of the jug between my knees, onto the floor. Then I jammed the drumbeater against the gas pedal and locked it there, the stick wedged against my seat. Smoke wisped from the van's battered hood. Breath stirred deep within the mouth.

"You can't be scared. No." I squeezed the emergency brake, tension knotting my forearm, hardening my stomach. "No."

The engine howled like something caged. Like a beast.

I released it.

Ash's van rocketed over the edge, and the world flipped on its axis. Momentum shoved me up and back. I fought it. I leaned forward, I leaned down, my butt lifted off the seat, my hands tight on the wheel. Fog blew against the windshield. Far below I made out the brown, running form of the bear. It looked no bigger than a mite.

"You have to feel the hit before the hit."

The tires chewed up tongue and spit out raw, wet velocity. Red sky filled the rearview mirror.

"You have to feel it in your bones, that impact."

Bone glistened all around me. I saw whole buildings splintered against mountainous teeth. I saw crumbled sidewalks and basketball hoops and dead grass, dead trees, mud on their roots. I saw rooms turned inside out, desks with chairs still attached to them. I saw a library of soggy books. I saw cars smashed into bloody pieces. I saw children and teachers clinging to gums like plaque, their bodies too broken to move but moving anyway. I saw pain. Everywhere, undying, pain.

I screamed.

"And you have to want it!"

The needle maxed out on the speedometer. The van went faster. Down into the swirling fog, down into the gathering breath, down into the black hole of the Beast's throat. The headlights burned red. The wheel rattled in my grip. I reached into my pocket and pulled out Billy's lighter.

"Need it!"

The spark became a flame. I let the flame go and it became many flames, leaping up my legs from the floor. As the sky closed off around me, a bright orange glow filled the van and revealed the bear. It had grown. Its jaws stretched thirty feet wide. I held up my hand in surprise and against the darkness of the bear's mouth, I noticed something missing from my middle finger. Then all was swallowed in blazing white fire.