The car wasn’t far from the woods.

Tire marks were scorched into the pavement, the rubber fused to the asphalt by heat and friction. They trailed into three front yards in a row, into furrows in the shape of tire treads cutting through the grass and casting dirt all over the road. Grass was upturned in a winding pattern, a scar that was continuous in its own nature but a horrid disfigurement on each of the lawns it tore through. A mailbox was bent at the end of the tear, the metal post twisted away from the road as the tire tracks returned to their proper place.

The SUV’s tail lights were bright red at where it had stopped, the hazard lights flashing just below them. It was at an anomalously dark spot in the street, the streetlight above it off and bending down towards the street. The metal creased and twisted where the SUV had struck it, sparking at irregular intervals and cascading over the crumpled hood and grille. The very top of the light swayed in the air, its stability compromised, but the car itself was entirely still, no part betraying any sign of life apart from the driver’s side door, hanging open and conspicuously missing the driver.

Brad wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dying. He was crawling on the ground, one leg trailing behind him emptily, crooked and the knee bent inwards as he pulled himself along the road with all the strength his arms had left. Blood flowed freely from a hole in his hip, the clothing around it already soaked through with blood and sweat. A fresh scattering of cuts criss-crossed his face from the detonation of the airbag, weeping more blood that fell to the asphalt and mingled with the handprints he was leaving behind from the wounds on his hands.

He crossed into the next streetlight over, blinking in the light, as footsteps echoed behind him.

Michael stopped and watched him, eyes tracking from the open door to the blood trail he had left behind. He reached up and pulled a glove off to massage the bridge of his nose, before slipping it back on and keeping his grip on the shovel that he had yet to dispose of properly.

Sarah let out a slow exhale behind him. “Is he even still alive?” She asked the night air.

Michael didn’t reply. He took a cautious step forward, observing and waiting for any reaction. Brad kept crawling, and Michael realized that he was saying something, mumbled under his breath while he dragged himself down the street.

“...gotta get back there, gotta, gotta get back…”

Sarah lunged forward, looking down the direction he was going. “Do you think it’s a stash of something? Maybe he has some medical supplies, or there’s some trick he knows to heal himself. Is there some sort of healing trick?”

“Nope.” Michael shook his head. “It’s definitely none of those.”

“Then maybe it’s a bunker or something. He’s got a spot to hide from the cops. Should we call them in on him so they catch him, or do you think they’re going to get him?”

“He’s not getting away from the police. Not like this.”

“But if there’s some sort of secret, if he has a hiding place–”

“Sarah.”

Michael walked over to her, standing in her way and pointing down the street. “He’s not going anywhere special.”

She looked down the length of his arm, taking in where he was pointing. The street was normal, and familiar. Very familiar. She rarely ever went down this way, but she had been down here several times before.

Only a few houses away, at the terminus of a cold gaze and a bloody path, Brad’s house stood. From the front, there was no indication that anything was different at all. It betrayed no signs of being the site where a night of chaos began, or the harbor of a terrible notion.

It was just Brad’s house. And he was crawling towards it purely because it was his home.

Sarah blinked and took another deep, shaky breath, trying to hold her composure together. Part of her hadn’t expected to be faced with all of this tonight. Imminent death, being treated as some blasphemous tool merely for wanting to not fear for her life constantly, how close she came to becoming like them, and now the fact that those very people were just as human as her. Brad knew he had lost and he just wanted to go somewhere safe. She sympathized, but it was so much; the depths that this town dragged people to rearing itself up.

Even more reason for her to wish to leave.

Michael’s hand fell to his side, resting on the knife sheath. “Do you still want to kill him?”

She flinched in shock. “Wh–what? Right here? Now?”

“We tried to talk him down. It didn’t work. This is the opportunity to finish him off.”

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“But he’s unarmed.”

He shrugged. “He still tried to kill you. You have the right to, and nobody would bat an eye.”

Brad had stopped crawling now, trying to twist his neck around to see them behind him. Every one of his breaths came out shallow and pained. Sarah looked at him, and only saw a hurt boy barely older than her.

“Do you want to?” She asked.

“I don’t care either way,” Michael said. “None of his friends are going to try and get either of us back. They’re all either dead or arrested. He’s not going to squeal on us to the cops, since we’re not on the same side. Jane will have covered your tracks, and I keep mine clean. I really don’t care either way.”

“I guess that’s better,” she sighed. “I was going to say no either way. We don’t need to. There’s no point to killing him.”

Michael let out a noise that almost sounded like he was laughing to himself. Sarah looked at him, but he gave no indication that he had done anything at all, just looking at her with a calm expression.“So what do we do instead?”

“Give me your phone.” She held out her hand. “I’m going to call the cops about a car crash. Sit him up somewhere so he stops crawling.”

He obliged, reaching into his pocket and placing his phone in her hand before walking over to where Brad was lying. Brad blinked at him as he reached down and grabbed him by the collar, pulling him along the pavement towards the closest still-standing light. He hissed in pain as his twisted leg scraped on the ground, every bump and movement sending a fresh bolt of pain lancing through his expression. Michael ignored him, one hand fisted in his shirt and the other holding the shovel with a firm grip. He’d had hopes of this being something unique, but instead it was just another plot to try and gain reputation. Sarah’s initial retelling had brought up fascinatingly disturbing images that had led him down the wrong path, but most of all, he was annoyed that Brad was just more of the same, like some smaller, less confident version of Ken. And he disliked Ken for good reason.

He dropped Brad at the base of the streetlight and stepped back, folding his hands over the handle of the shovel and resting it in front of him. Sarah was still behind him, and he looked down at Brad with an unfocused, disinterested gaze. The cut on his chest was dully throbbing, the blood not yet clotting but only slowly oozing blood, and he spared a glance down at the twisted leg with some satisfaction. He was unused to using shovels as a weapon, given that he mostly employed knives. The success with a novel approach was vindicating. He didn’t really care that he had beaten him so soundly, mostly just that he had been effective.

Sarah walked up alongside him, holding out his phone. He took it and replaced it back into his pocket as she squatted down in front of Brad, something eager back in her expression.

“Okay, Brad, I’m not going to hurt you. I just want some answers to these questions. Why did you do it? What made you want to try this?” She leaned in, trying to capture Brad’s slowly wandering gaze. “I just want to know. You had to get this idea from somewhere, right? What gave you the idea?”

Brad rolled his eyes and winced in pain, but didn’t answer. Just groaned and reached up to try and wipe some blood off of his face.

“Brad, please.” She pleaded. “I just want to know why. You don’t–you don’t get these ideas for no reason, do you? Something made you want to do this? Did you get some message, or did you just decipher some hint from a teacher?”

He just groaned in pain again.

“Okay, so, no answer there. Was it one of your friends, then? Did they find something out, or–”

Michael rested a hand on her shoulder. She sprung up to look at him, but he slowly shook his head and moved her out of the way before dropping the shovel into Brad’s lap. He let out a sharp yelp, the handle landing right on his twisted knee, and Michael turned around, trying to lead Sarah away.

“You’re not going to get anything out of him,” he said wistfully. “There are no answers. He probably just came up with the idea himself, or one of his groupies did. Maybe Ken suggested it, but he didn’t get it from anywhere. They’re all making it up, Sarah. I know for a fact they did.”

“But you don’t just–get these ideas from nowhere! They had to have an origin point, some sort of inspiration. This is so far outside of what you’re supposed to do, by their rules, so it had to come from somewhere.”

“The rules are just a faint regimen for payback and an understanding to not rat each other out. They are covers for violence. They place no limit on the execution of violence.” He looked down the street, watching the sirens illuminate houses from around the corner. “There’s no answers.”

He began to lift his arm from her shoulder, but she grabbed it and held on, her legs wobbling from exhaustion. She looked to him, a silent plea to help her make it back, and he gave her a single nod before looping her other arm around his shoulder and propping her up as they went across the street, into the spaces between houses and away from the crash.

The police pulled up as they vanished into the darkness, red and blue flashing around the street and painting the houses a myriad of color-tinged shadows. An ambulance followed moments later as officers exited their cars and examined the scene, taking in the injured Brad. He was barely lucid, the pain making his head swim, and he didn’t see the disappearing shapes across the street.

Nobody noticed when they left, two fading shadows subsumed into the night. They didn’t claim credit, didn’t intimidate or even stand to watch. They simply left, limping towards the safest refuge, leaving the carnage of the night behind and long out of their reach.

There was nothing to claim credit for. There was nothing to gain.

They just survived, and left. No vindication of violence or sudden cathartic comedown. Just the quiet aftermath of hours of chaos.

Nobody noticed them at all.