Unforsaken by Sophie Littlefield

was wrong. Rattler did the right thing when it was important. He kept the boys away. He would make sure that when the time came, it was a pureblood boy who came to call, and no other.
    She must have known that. Because where, after everything that had happened to her, was she coming to find safety? Back here to Gypsum. Oh, Rattler didn’t have any illusions that she was coming to him . She had in mind to come see a girlfriend maybe, a favorite teacher. Who knew with girls? They were delicate things, emotional things. Hell, he thought ruefully, rubbing the socket around his scarred eye, they could be quick and unpredictable, and a man had to be on his toes around them.
    But now she was on her way back. Rattler had seen it with his blind and spinning eye that morning as he’d lain inbed: he’d seen the car, the girl, the boy, the Exxon sign lit up in the sky above them.
    Derek took a dispirited swig from his tarnished flask and returned it to his pocket. He didn’t bother offering it to Rattler. Everyone knew Rattler didn’t drink. He never had, even when they were kids, Rattler and Derek and Armand and the rest of them skipping class to smoke behind the Elks lodge. Even then Rattler knew drink was poison; it was what had led so many of their fathers away from the Banished. Drink made them lazy, distracted them, and then they married outside; they sired their bastard broods and drank and did drugs and pissed away their pride and their birthright.
    No more.
    “If they was comin’, they’d be here by now,” Derek said, a little more loudly, disgust in his phlegmy voice. The liquor gave him courage, a cheap and deceptive kind of courage, but one that had to be dealt with all the same. True, the man had let Rattler take over the old house on his dead pappy’s land, and Rattler owed him for that, maybe, though a man who’d live in his mother’s trailer instead of cleaning up the mess his own father had left behind wasn’t much of a man in Rattler’s book. But Rattler had taken something from Derek, and he would remember that when it came time for splitting up the spoils. Derek would be taken care of.
    That was the future. Now was now.
    Rattler moved fast. His hand shot out and seized Derek’s ear and twisted it, and as Derek squirmed and mewled like a puppy, Rattler twisted harder and forced Derek’s headaround so he would have to look across the field to where night was etching a layer of purple-black on the fading glow where earth met sky.
    “Guess you don’t know nothing,” Rattler said softly as an old brown sedan pulled slowly off the road and came to rest a few feet shy of the cattle guard.

H OW COULD WE HAVE SLEPT ?
    I woke with my head resting against the cold glass of the passenger window, the night thick and black on the ground, only Kaz’s outline visible as he slept next to me. I had been dreaming something awful, something disturbing enough to wake me: I’d been back in the locked room in the lab, fire raging behind me, the zombies rising from their chairs, staring at me with their unblinking eyes, their rotting, impassive faces and coming at me. Their feet on the floor clacked and slapped, a rhythmic sound as they came closer and closer and—
    But the sound, the clacking, did not stop, even though I was awake. It was in my ear, on the glass, and I jerked away from it, too late seeing that there was something, some one , out there, silhouetted against the star-dotted sky. I grabbedKaz’s arm and yanked it hard, trying to force his name from my lips. But fear had stolen my voice.
    “What is it?” Kaz woke instantly. “Hailey? What’s going on?”
    “Outside,” I managed to croak, and then I gasped, because there was another figure on his side of the car, this one thin and stooping. Then a brilliant beam of light shone in our faces, blinding me.
    “Open up.” It was a rasping gravel voice thick with the drawl of Trashtown. My father’s voice.
    “Rattler,” I whispered, clutching Kaz’s