Page 37 of The Fire Went Wild

Fortunately, I find the electrical breakers fairly easily—there’s a panel of them in the garage. I shut off everything, snapping the breakers tooffone after another. But when I go back out to the fence, it’s still humming and coursing with power.

“Motherfucker,” I say.

It must be powered by a generator or something. Some outside source. I didn’t see anything obvious when I walked the perimeter earlier, but I try again anyway, sweeping the flashlight around so that it illuminates the swamp in blurry patches: a rough glimpse of trees, a spray of palms, a burst of tall, rippling grasses. The fence keeps humming, mocking me.

But then I come up on the shed I could see from my window. It squats like a toad, the windows two black eyes that reflect my flashlight beam back into my face.

Something about it gives me a queasy feeling in my stomach, like what I felt after I attacked Jaxon.

After IkilledJaxon.

I peel away from the fence and approach the shed, light dancing over its side. The door has a huge padlock with another keypad. No surprise there.

But there’s also a small, bare bulb shining with light. This shack still has power.

I stop and listen for a generator. All I can hear is the buzz of the fence, the howl of the wind?—

A man screams.

I freeze, my skin prickling. Did I imagine that? It happened so quickly that I can’t say where it came from. The swamp? The house?

No, it couldn’t have come from the house.

My heart thuds furiously in my chest. I move cautiously away from the shed, swinging the light around, listening for a generator. Here, the fence disappears into the swamp, and I’m wary of going into the overgrowth in the dark.

“Shit,” I whisper, turning back around. This is pointless. I can’t do anything in the middle of the night. Even with the flashlight, I can barely see a few inches in front of me.

That’s when I hear something.

Not another scream. A rustling. Almost like?—

Footsteps?

Fear clenches in my chest, and I dive back over to the shed, pressing up against its cool, metal wall. Then I listen.

Definitely footsteps. Slow, quick, careful. But they’re coming from the direction of the swamp.

I switch off my flashlight and edge carefully around the side of the shed, hardly daring to breathe. The darkness creates monsters out of everything, and the fence’s constant, steady hum is the loudest sound in the world?—

More rustling. And voices. Low. Soft. Male.

I freeze, squeezing my hand tight around the flashlight. Why the fuck did I assume Jaxon was acting alone? Why hadn’t I realized hemusthave someone else working with him, someone who?—

The humming stops.

It takes me a second to understand what I’m hearing. The fence’s electrical hum had become such a constant that its absence suddenly sounds enormous. And then the implications rush through my head.

Someone turned it off.

The footsteps. The voices.

“Clear,” a man says. “Cut it.”

I take deep, shuddery breaths. Cops? Did the cops track me down somehow? Or did they know about Jaxon, and I just got lucky?

Are these even cops at all?

Who else would they be?

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