Page 29 of The Serpent King

Lydia didn’t have any joke at the ready, which meant she liked the idea. “But not a cave. I don’t want to go crawling around in any caves.”

“The Column,” Travis said, after thinking for a bit. “None of us can draw, but we could write stuff on it that’s important to us.”

“This is good. I smell a blog post in this,” Lydia said. “First things first. Everyone have something they can write? Dill?”

“I have some of my lyrics I can write.”

“Trav?”

“I’ve memorized what Raynar Northbrook had engraved on the marker to his best friend’s tomb. It’s my favorite.”

“Okay. So I’m the only one who needs something. Let me think while I change.” Lydia ran upstairs and returned a few minutes later, having donned a more appropriate outfit for tromping through the woods.

“Okay,” she said. “Permanent markers. Big ones.”

“Walmart,” Travis said. He was rarely the catalyst for their activities, and he was proud.

“Walmart on a Friday night? We’ll get to see all our friends from school!” Dill said.

“Ohhhhh, yes,” Lydia said. “We have been missing out on the Friday-night Walmart hijinks while watching Herzog documentaries. Let’s reassert our social position.”

Starlight filtered through the green canopy of towering oaks and magnolias on Lydia’s street. Sweat trickled down Travis’s back the minute he hit the muggy air. But he didn’t mind. This was as good as Friday nights got.

They pulled into the Walmart parking lot as the moon was rising bright and silver in the sapphire sky. Whooping, giggling, and music came from a clump of parked cars in a corner of the lot as they parked and walked in. Travis left his staff in the car.

“Dilllll­lllll­lldooooo­ooooo­. Chlamydiaaaaaa,” someone shouted.

Lydia shook her head. “This is my life. Getting yelled at in a Walmart parking lot on a Friday night by somebody doing a bad impression of a PG-13 fart-joke-movie comedian.”

“We were just watching a smart documentary, so it’s not really your life,” Travis said.

“I’m starting to think we haven’t been missing out on much with the Walmart parking lot scene,” Dill said.

“Got any cookies, Girl Scout?” someone else shouted.

Lydia never went anywhere without the perfect outfit. She wore a vintage summer camp T-shirt and a pair of khaki hiking shorts and boots from the 1970s.

“I guess I deserved that,” Lydia said.

Do all the losers from your school hang out at Walmart on Friday night? Travis texted Amelia.

Definitely, she texted. It’s like we live in the same town.

I wish. I love my friends but it would be so cool to be able to talk about Bloodfall with you in person.

They bought their markers and drove to the unnamed gravel road that ended in a stand of trees beside the Steerkiller River, which bisected Forrestville. The air smelled like kudzu, mud, cool gravel, and dead fish.

That smell. Suddenly Travis is fourteen. He’s with his mother at Saturday-night worship at the Forrestville Original Church of God. A new family has been attending their small congregation. Crystal and Dillard Early Jr., the wife and son of Dillard Early Sr., the snakehandling Pervert Preacher. The Earlys’ meager congregation has collapsed in their pastor’s absence, and the Original Church is the best they can find in Forrestville to replace it. They’ll get their speaking in tongues and Holy Spirit and laying on of hands to heal the sick. They’ll have to handle their snakes and drink their poison at home if they’re so inclined.

They sit in the back beside Travis and his mom. Neither looks like they’ve slept in months, and they probably haven’t. Dillard doesn’t make eye contact with anyone. He seems to be drawing little comfort from being in God’s house. He looks friendless and forsaken. Travis has had a taste of that. He gets a lot of suspicious looks himself because of his clothes and proven penchant for reading unchristian books.

He also knows something about loss and sleepless nights. His big brother Matt had died in a roadside bomb blast in Afghanistan the year before. Their father had never been especially nice, but he was at his worst when he drank. He started drinking more when Matt died. A lot more. And Travis has changed too. He used to love books and video games about modern soldiers, but now they only remind him of Matt. They remind him of how Matt would email him pictures of him and his buddies sitting on their Humvee, cradling their weapons. Which means his old books and video games remind him of grief and loss and of not living up to Matt’s legacy. So he gets his fix of heroism and combat from fantasy books. He thus manages to escape a world in which big brothers die in faraway places. As soon as his mother figures out how he’s finding solace, she brings him home the first book in the Bloodfall series from a shopping trip to Nashville, a recommendation from a bookstore employee.

Travis catches Dillard’s eye and smiles and waves. Dillard, expressionless, returns the wave. Something tells Travis to speak with him. Travis has always been taught that the feeling to do good is the Holy Spirit speaking, and when you feel that call, you’d better answer. Plus, he’s been feeling a bit lonely himself. One of the consequences of his decampment into the world of fantasy was leaving his meager group of friends—mostly from church—behind.

He slides over to Dillard and offers his hand. Dillard shakes it.

The next time they’re both at youth group, Travis asks Dillard if he wants to go see this cool place his brother showed him before he left for Marine Corps boot camp. It’s a good place to sit and be alone with your thoughts. And Travis doesn’t mention this, but it’s a good place to escape your father when he drinks and watches football, and reminisces about what a great football player your dead brother was, and asks you how you’d like the job of coaching a bunch of African American (but he uses a different word) millionaires and won’t let it go until—to appease him because his belt has been known to come off—you lie and tell him you guess you wouldn’t want that job. And then you hate yourself for being a coward and not saying what you really think. You hate yourself for not being good at sports like your dead brother. You hate yourself for not being as brave as the people you love to read about. And you just want to be somewhere where no one makes you feel that way.