Then Davey was on him, squeezing his injured hand, other thumb in his eye, screeching like a rusted hinge. Alan tried to see through the tears that sprang up, tried to reach Davey with his good hand, but the rage was leaking out of him now. He rolled desperately, but Davey’s weight on his chest was like a cannonball, impossibly heavy.
Suddenly Davey was lifted off of him. Alan struggled up into a sitting position, clutching his injured hand. Davey dangled by his armpits in the implacable hands of one of the golems, face contorted into unrecognizability. Alan stood and confronted him, just out of range of his kicking feet and his gnashing teeth, and Darrel spat in his face, a searing gob that landed in his eye.
Marci took his arm and dragged him back toward the cave mouth. He fought her, looking for the little Allen, not seeing him. Was that him, there, in the shadows? No, that was one of the little bone tableaux, a field mouse’s dried bones splayed in an anatomically correct mystic hieroglyph.
Marci hauled him away, out into the bright snow and the bright sun. His thumb was bleeding anew, dripping fat drops the color of a red crayon into the sun, blood so hot it seemed to sizzle and sink into the snow.
“You need to tell an adult, Alan,” she said, wrapping his new little thumb in gauze she’d taken from her pocket.
“My father knows. My mother knows.” He sat with his head between his knees, not daring to look at her, in his nook in the winter cave.
She just looked at him, squinting.
“They count,” he said. “They understand it.”
She shook her head.