Page 73 of The Serpent King

Lydia fought tears, frantic and despondent. “Officer, please. I’m begging you.”

“Miss, I am sincerely sorry. I can’t give you any more information at this time. I apologize.”

Lydia broke down.

“Please,” Dill said, also starting to lose composure. “Please tell us where he is.”

The young officer had a pained expression. He glanced from side to side. His fellow officers were putting up crime scene tape. An officer took a photo of a bloodstain on the pavement.

The officer leaned in close. “County.”

They didn’t even stick around long enough to thank the officer. They tore away.

They drove in deathly silence. The engine whined as Lydia pushed it, going twice the speed limit most of the way.

Please God. Please God. Please let him be okay.

They squealed up to the hospital, parked haphazardly, and bolted inside.

Time seemed to slow for Dill as he looked around the garishly lit emergency room. There was a strange disconnect between what he saw and the way his mind processed it—or rather, didn’t process it.

Travis’s father, sitting in a corner, beating the sides of his head with his fists and weeping, two police officers standing next to him, looking uncomfortable.

Travis’s mom, lying on the floor, sobbing, three nurses stroking her back and trying to comfort her.

Something broke loose inside Dill’s mind. Something that had been moored against the roaring tumult. It came untethered and crashed around with reckless abandon—burning, shattering, consuming. He stopped seeing color and all became a swirling, howling, leaden gray desolation. But the pain hadn’t arrived. The way the sea recedes before a tsunami, so every part of him receded. And then the pain struck.

Dill had never manifested the gift of tongues. The Holy Spirit had never moved in him that way, just as it had never permitted him to take up the deadly serpent. But on the floor of White County Hospital, he screamed in some anguished and alien language of bereavement. He was unaware that Lydia knelt beside him, gripping his arm like she would plummet off the Earth if she let go, doing the same.

His mother’s tone was sharp when he finally walked in. “Where were you?” But when she saw his eyes, his face, her tone became guarded concern. “Dillard? What’s the matter?”

He already loathed the words, and he hadn’t actually spoken them aloud to anybody. As if they were some terrible incantation that made it more real. They felt like thorns on his tongue. “Travis is dead.”

“You don’t mean your friend Travis do you? Bohannon?”

He sat and put his head in his hands. He stared at the kitchen table. Numb. “Yes.”

Dill’s mom gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. “Sweet merciful Jesus,” she whispered. “Poor Anne Marie. What happened?”

Dill shook his head.

“Was…he saved?”

Dill expected the question and still had to think about how exactly to answer. “He had his salvation.”

“I have news,” Lydia said as Dill climbed her porch steps. “Let’s sit down.”

Lydia’s porch swing creaked as they swung slowly. “They caught the guys who did it,” Lydia said. “My dad heard about it from one of his patients who works for the sheriff’s department.”

“Are you serious?” Dill asked.

“Yes.”

“It’s only been three days.”

“Yeah. Seems like longer.”

“I know.”