Panic

SATURDAY, JULY 2

THE NEXT DAY, THE NOTICES WERE EVERYWHERE: PINK betting slips, papering the underpass, stuck to gas pumps and in the windows of the 7-Eleven and Duff’s Bar, threaded between the gaps in the chicken-wire fences that lined Route 22.

The betting slips blew all the way to Fresh Pines Mobile Park, carried on the soles of muddy boots, snatched up by the metal underbelly of passing trucks before escaping on the wind. They found their way to Nat’s quiet residential street. They appeared, half-sodden, sunk in the mud in Meth Row.

There were a third as many players now as there once had been. Only seventeen players had even made it over the fence—of those, ten had managed to get something from Donahue’s house.

But there were other notices too: printed on large, glossy sheets of paper, inscribed with the crest of the Columbia County Police Department.

ANY INDIVIDUALS FOUND TO BE PARTICIPATING IN THE GAME COMMONLY KNOWN AS PANIC WILL BE SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.

In smaller letters, the pertinent criminal charges were enumerated: reckless endangerment, destruction of private property, breaking and entering, intent to do grievous/bodily harm, drunken disorderliness.

Someone had squealed, and it was obvious to everyone that it had either been Cory Walsh, after his arrest at the water towers, or Byron Welcher, who had, it turned out, been mauled pretty badly by one of Donahue’s dogs, and was now in the hospital over in Hudson. There was no getting to Byron, at least not until he was released, so a few people took out their anger on Cory—and he ended up in the hospital too, his face beaten to the pulpy purple of a bruised and rotten tomato.

That was only a few hours before Ian McFadden found out from his older brother—a cop—that actually it hadn’t been either Cory or Byron, but a quiet junior named Reena, whose boyfriend had just been eliminated from the competition.

By the time the sun was bleeding out over the horizon, fading into wispy pink clouds and streaks of electric-red, so the sky resembled a gigantic lung, pulsing its last breaths over Carp, all the windows in Reena’s car had been smashed, and her house had been covered with a fine, trembling sheen of egg, so it looked as though it had been enclosed inside a membrane.

Nobody believed that Panic would stop, of course.

The game must go on.

The game always went on.