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Just raw meat. Too much of it. Wet and red and wrong against the dirt.

Why was the meat in the dirt?

Then I saw the face.

Ben.

His face was untouched. That made it worse.

I knew him immediately. My mind understood Ben’s face before it understood anything beneath it.

I looked away.

What was intact was harder to look at than the gore around him.

I looked back.

His face was still Ben.

Everything beneath it had stopped making sense as a human body.

This was not the butcher shop.

But there was a butcher.

My wrists were on fire. I looked down.

Red cord bit into one of them. The other had been worked loose enough that a wet strand hung against my palm.

I stared at it.

Something inside me screamed before I knew what I was looking at.

My wrists hurt too much.

Like before.

Wait, what?

I couldn’t remember before.

There was blood everywhere. On my hands. My clothes. Under my fingernails.

I tried to remember how we got here.

Ben’s hands on the wheel. Wade’s arm around me. Trees through the window. Then nothing. Not darkness. Nothing. I pushed harder.

For half a second, Ben was on his knees. His face turned toward me.

Then the image vanished before I could hold it.

A shadow crossed his face. I stopped breathing.

Wade stepped into my field of vision.

His hands were red to the elbows.

Something hung from one of them, metal and narrow and dripping with blood. Not a knife. Something worse. Something made for a more specific purpose.