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realized that he was dying.
    His mother finally got her husband and the baby to a safe distance. She turned and screamed towards the barn.
    “Heinrich! Raymond! Get over here.”
    She began to move towards John.
    John turned his head to see where the strange man had gone. He saw footprints in the dusty dooryard that headed for the cornfield. Just a few paces away, the footprints disappeared.
    “John? What did he do to you?”
    John turned back to see his mother kneeling over. He tried to smile, but the movement brought on a fresh wave of pain. The sound of the fire was soothing, and the heat was beginning to reach him.  
    John smiled up at his mother.  
    The waves of pain began to recede. John knew that pretty soon, he wouldn’t feel any pain at all.

    #   #   #   #   #

    The pen fell from James’s grip as the alarm sounded its final bell.
    He exhaled and began massaging the meaty part of his right hand with his left. The writing on the page in front of him was smeared and sloppy. He stacked up the night’s papers and collected them with his father’s version on top. As he tried to slip the paper clip over the corner, he remembered his thought about reinforcing the corner. He shook his head and returned the papers to the box.
    James pushed back from his desk and rose to his feet.  
    He arched his back and stretched his shoulders.
    “I need food, sleep, and eye drops.”
    He picked up the big plastic bottle and the dropper. He shuffled towards the kitchen.
    James dumped a can of soup into a pot and turned the burner on low. While the soup warmed, he dumped out the saline solution and mixed another batch. This time he was careful, and it showed in the results. When he squeezed a test drop into each eye, they were instantly soothed.
    James turned off the soup and grabbed a spoon.
    He ate sitting on his bed, leaning on the wall. When he was done, he didn’t bother showering, or brushing his teeth, or even undressing. He stretched out on top of his covers and fell asleep.
    He dreamed of fire.

CHAPTER 4: PRISON
     

     
    Diary of Thomas Hicks, 1977

    I SPENT THE FIRST hour of my faux incarceration trying to get a sense of the place. I imagined the cell block alive with the sounds of other inmates. I imagined arguments and scuffles. I imagined secret trades, passed from cell to cell by reaching hands.
    But my cell is at the end of the line. Any commerce happening here was intended for the occupant. It must have been a lonely place, even compared with the isolated existence of the neighbors. My roommate is the machinery of the building. It’s just me and guards in here tonight, but there’s still a chorus of machines working to heat the place, move air, circulate water, and whatever else those things do. Just when you think everything is quiet, a distant fan will shut off and you realize what quiet actually sounds like.
    The cell has been cleaned out and painted. Even with a space this small and sanitized, it’s impossible to erase the traces of the former inhabitants. I find “ALEX” scratched into the wall where the bed frame meets the concrete. I find a series of tick marks on the floor near the toilet. Perhaps the man was counting his days inside, or maybe the number of times he flushed.
    I flush twice. I realize that Fradeux hasn’t left me any toilet paper, but it hardly seems like a big enough issue for me to start yelling.
    As the sun descends through the windows at the end of the hall, my little cell begins to feel claustrophobic. The lights come on automatically, which lends a little comfort, but I find myself flipping almost frantically through my calendar. I almost hope that I’m wrong. Maybe Jeremy miscalculated the pattern. Maybe I gave him the wrong dates. There was a decent amount of guesswork involved. I’m ninety-percent sure that The Big Four—as Fradeux called them—all became homicidally insane during their time in this very cell. It’s a lot more difficult to pinpoint the exact night