The fields shone golden-beige as the first rays of sunlight caught the dead stalks of straw, as lovely as the final five minutes of a Bob Ross instructional painting video.

Less picturesque was the scene unravelling on that stark plain.

In the middle of the same field Aaron had woken up in many days ago was a skeletal wooden structure, an empty triangle silhouetted harshly against the pale morning sky. It stood on a makeshift platform built of stacked pallets and sunk into the near-frozen soil. The helpless Bukowskis, guided on all sides by a horde of silent figures, had no choice but to walk toward the horrible contraption, though they each wanted nothing more than to run in the opposite direction.

Aaron couldn’t help thinking it was some kind of gallows. If it wasn’t, then it was something just as bad. These people were probably going to murder the Bukowskis in terrible ways. They were going to make him live out all his darkest nightmares—they’d sacrifice one of his siblings and make him choose which one to save, but then they’d murder that one too, as part of their cruel game. This, the Bukowskis’ first adventure as a band, would end in a legendary horror scene that other bands worldwide would cancel their tours over in fits of last-minute hysteria for years to come.

So why was he so calm?

Aaron couldn’t remember the last time he’d been able to think clearly in an even mildly stressful situation, much less attempt to strategize while walking into near-certain destruction.

In fact, the last time he’d reacted to something with any degree of composure he’d been seventeen or eighteen and their mother had been living at home for a while, and she and Jaymie had been having a fight about something to do with the house, and he hadn’t wanted to be a part of it, except that little Becca was listening from the hall, and he was trying to get them to stop and to calm her down at the same time, and she was upset because she thought she was going to have to move to Las Vegas, and someone had put this idea in her head that the first time you laid eyes on a slot machine it was programmed to hypnotize you into instant addiction, and since the slot machines just wandered the city freely she’d have to go around blindfolded or else become a child-gambler, a sad little wastrel wandering the strip, helplessly feeding every penny she found into the maws of the machines and waiting for those three cherries to line up in a row, and they never would, because Aaron had recently explained to her the concept of “the house always wins,” and after that she couldn’t imagine why anyone would gamble except that they’d been brainwashed by this terrible AI conspiracy of super-computer slot machines, and she was just a kid and didn’t understand that sometimes adults just like to go have fun…

And anyway it turned out that in all the confusion someone had accidentally put the electric kettle to boil on one of the stove burners, and it started on fire, and without thinking he’d very quickly unplugged it and fanned the smoke away with a tea-towel, thus saving their home, like a boss.

Now he racked his brain, thinking of possible ways to distract their captors, trying to remember how far away, somewhere to their left, the highway was, estimating the time it would take them to get there and how soon they might meet a vehicle on the little-used route, and wondering if it was worth risking another, entirely different, dangerous and terrifying prospect: hitchhiking.

***

Jaymie scanned the horizon for an opening between his followers, but he knew there were too many of them to escape. He pictured a dramatic showdown against the rising sun, he and Aaron putting to use the two years of karate they’d been forced into as children (an unsuccessful attempt to exhaust the two of their energy), Jo in berserker-mode cleaving a swath of destruction through the bodies, Rex sprinting like the wind back to the city for help. But even he, for all his optimism, knew that four musicians were no match for two dozen people united by a Greater Purpose.

He was relieved to see the drug was working on Aaron; under their current circumstances he was long past due for a panic attack. On the other hand, he surmised that these freaks would probably just mistake it for an artistic demon possession.

Then he saw what stood on the rickety dais. The wooden triangle was an easel, onto which two people were in the process of laying a large rectangular board. On one side was a bucket of brushes, on the other a low stool.

“Welcome,” said Miranda, the word shattering the long silence like feedback from an amplifier. “We’re pleased that you could join us for today’s ritual. I’m sure this means you’ve solved the hiccough in our creative routine.” It was still too dark to see her face, but he could hear the grim smile in her voice.

“Sure, of course,” Jaymie grinned at her, his heart pounding in his chest. This was no problem, he told himself. He’d get them out of this. He’d spent lots of time with a pounding heart; it was a side-effect of occasionally consuming too much caffeine. Another side-effect was that you came up with a lot of innovative last-minute solutions.

“I have a theory,” he said. “I’ll demonstrate it… No chanting involved. If I don’t get possessed and make a nice picture, you can—you can do whatever. Lock me up in the basement ‘til the end of time.” A hundred ideas jostled their way through his mind, most of them futile. If he could make the painting into a performance the way Jo had done with the song, perhaps the others would have time to slip away and get backup…

“Impossible,” said Steve. “We need the chant to get it started. And you already have Bukowski’s spirit in you. You can’t have two spirits.”

“He’s right, you can’t,” said Miranda. “We’ve tried it.”

“But we must all have at least one spirit in us even before we’re possessed, if our spirits can come back and possess other people later…”

“Then you can’t have three,” Miranda said, in a way that suggested the intricacies of the procedure were not up for debate.

“Fine, who wants to—” Jaymie began.

“Rex would be happy to volunteer,” smiled Miranda. “Since they were so enthusiastic to join our collective. And especially since you’ve made the ritual safe now. Right?”

“Right…” whispered Jaymie, and he understood that he was being punished for failing them.

“Ugh, volun-told,” muttered Rex bravely. They walked the last few steps to the platform and stepped stiffly onto it, boots clunking hollowly against the wood.

Jaymie’s mind went blank. Just as terrifying as if it really were the gallows, the blank white canvas stood, flatly absorbing the light of the sunrise until such a time it would swallow all the light in the world.

***

Jo had just as realistic a view of their odds against the group as Jaymie did, but she knew that if he hadn’t come up with a clever way out of this by now then there much hope for a nonviolent solution. The acoustic guitar she’d saved Juniper with was back at the house, and she was stone-cold sober and she was anxious and she had only one remaining skill to offer, if you could call it a skill. She strode up to Steve, who was closest, and punched him in the face.

Jo hadn’t fought much in her life, because there were few who would think to challenge her. She’d never had opportunity to gauge her own strength in the context of physical conflict, so she erred on the side of destruction and put everything she had into it. Something crunched against her fist. Steve was thrown backward by the blow. Seconds later, a force crashed into her from behind, knocking her onto her stomach.

For a moment there was no sound except the faint tinnitus in her left ear. Her hand throbbed and she hazily wondered if she’d ever be able to finger-pick again. Then she heard yelling—one or both of the twins were calling her name—and she wedged her hands under her chest and heaved up, bucking at least two bodies that had been attempting to restrain her. A boot kicked her arm out from under her, and a sharp pain lanced through her elbow. Several pairs of knees held her down as she struggled, spitting out frozen dirt and kicking against the hard ground.

She turned her head to one side and shook tangled black hair out of her face. She could see two men holding Jaymie’s arms as cried out indecipherably. Another man, whom she remembered had dreams of being a caricaturist, stood menacingly beside a shell-shocked Aaron in case he decided to bolt.

Miranda crouched down beside her head. She spoke the defeatist statement that thirty percent of all people who saw Jo play guitar said to her afterwards.

“I tried to learn guitar once,” she spat in Jo’s ear. “I couldn’t get the hang of it.” She stood and gestured to one of the men, who got out a roll of duct tape. Jo hissed something unrepeatable and decidedly unfeminist at her.

“Stop!” Rex shouted. They sat down at the stool, lifted the bucket of paintbrushes onto their lap, and fished for one. “I’m ready,” they said quietly. They shifted on the stool, pulled it closer to the easel, settled their weight more comfortably, and gripped a large, tapering brush between their fingers.

A cloud, hoping to conceal the horrible scene, wrapped itself around the rising sun and tried to choke it. It was quickly fended off.

Jo was allowed to watch with her hands duct-taped together, kneeling beside a despairing Jaymie, who was closely guarded by the two men, his mouth also taped to prevent his protests from interrupting the group. Beside him, Aaron stood looking terrified but still breathing normally, not yet in full panic mode. Steve loomed from behind, his nose crookedly dripping blood.

Rex leaned toward the easel, dipped the brush in black paint, and shakily drew a large circle that encompassed most of the canvas. Miranda began to chant. Morning light caught the purple streaks in Rex’s hair, which was un-styled and sticking out at all angles, as though trying to escape the young person’s head. Their expression was obscured by the blinding rays.

Jo felt her breath catch in her throat. A protective impulse she hadn’t realized she possessed began to scream within her, and her heart pounded in her chest, and she understood what Aaron had been talking about, when you start to care too much to function.

Rex completed their picture with the addition of polka-dot eyes and a wide sweeping mouth. A wet black splotch dripped goopily from one of the eyes, creeping its way to the bottom of the canvas. The chanting was an incomprehensible frenzied monotone.

It won’t work on Rex, Jo thought desperately. It only affects these talentless creeps, Rex is different—

Aaron sank to his knees. He had a familiar stricken look on his face, and at first Jo thought he was having another panic attack.

“I’m back,” he mumbled. “It’s been…such a long time.” No one had noticed him pull the little synthesizer from the bag on Jaymie’s shoulder. Jaymie reached in anguish to try and shake him out of it, but one of the men blocked him.

"Such a long time," he breathed. "...Since I put the lime...I put the lime in the coco..." He turned on the synthesizer, which contained a small speaker and backup battery for impromptu performances such as this. He activated the arpeggiator. "At last... my final great work..."

Rex dropped the brush. Choking back sobs, they scrambled off the platform and into Jaymie’s arms. No one stopped them. They had all directed their gazes, and their chanting, toward Aaron, and Jo accepted that she and her bandmates were not exempt from the malevolent spell this coven invoked. She watched him in horror, her thoughts rapidly diminishing to a single word, No.