Maybe we all die out and the freaks inherit the world. No one seems to want to suggest that possibility, though.

There’s nothing about a PSF pickup in the handbook, of course, though there’s this: If you feel like you are in imminent danger and the Psi you are pursuing is classified as Red, Orange, or Yellow you can request backup from nearby skip tracers through the network. The Psi Special Forces unit and the United States government are not responsible for any reward disputes that may follow.

So…that’s ruled out, seeing as I still have zero access to the skip tracer network.

I roll off the bed, walking the long way around the freak to get to my food hoard and mini-fridge. As I slather peanut butter on the stale bread, I tell myself, Tomorrow you’ll be eating steak. Pizza. Whatever you want. Right now, though, I just feel exhausted at the thought of having to deal with all this again tomorrow. I can’t even psych myself up with the mental image of throwing the bills in the air as I jump on Phyllis’s crappy-ass bed, letting them shower down around me.

The beer might as well have been NyQuil. Gone are the glory days of high school, when I could down bottle after bottle after the Friday-night football games and then stay up late enough to watch the sun rise from the roof of my buddy Ryan’s house. One and done.

I don’t want to think about Ryan, though, or any of them. They left me behind, vanished into a world of black uniforms and secrets. It’s fine. I swear it is. Sometimes, though, I just wish one of them had fought to take me with them. It’s hard to be the person who gets left behind, and never the person who gets to do the leaving.

I’m just starting to drift off to sleep, the handbook open across my chest, when the game show ends. At some point, I must have dozed off, because the next things I’m aware of are Judy Garland’s unmistakable crooning and her big brown eyes meeting mine as I squint at the screen. It’s that famous song about the rainbow—lemon drops, birds, all those nice things. She’s flanked by her little dog and a sepia-toned Midwest sky. The next time my eyelids flutter open, the house is in the tornado, crashing down.

I pat around the bed, searching for the remote just as Dorothy opens the door of her house to the Technicolor world of Oz.

It’s…somehow nicer than I remembered. My dad forced me to watch it with him when I was a little kid, maybe seven or eight, and all I remember thinking was how stupid the special effects were compared to those in the action movie I’d just seen in the theater the night before. I hated everything, even the way Dorothy’s voice seemed to wobble when she talked.

And I swear, the minute that big pink bubble appears and the good witch, whatever her name is, appears in that froufrou dress, I feel the bed jerk as the freak handcuffed to it twists to get closer to the screen.

I prop myself up on my elbows, peering down at her in the dark. She’s rearranged herself so she’s sitting awkwardly on her knees. I know the handcuff must be digging into her skin, but she doesn’t seem bothered by it. Her face is reflected in the TV’s glass face, and even before the Munchkins start singing and parading around, I see her eyes go wide and her lips part in a silent gasp. She’s riveted, like she’s never seen anything like it before. That seems impossible. Who hasn’t watched The Wizard of Oz?

It keeps her quiet and occupied—and to be honest, I’m too lazy to get the remote from where it’s fallen on the floor. So I leave it on and switch off the light on the nightstand. I try to sleep, but I can’t. And it’s not that the TV is on too loud, or that it’s too bright—I actually want to watch this. My brain wants to puzzle out why my dad was so hell-bent on getting me to sit through the whole thing. Like with everything he else loved, I’m searching for him in it. A line he borrowed, some kind of philosophy he gleaned from it…and really, all I can see is how this candy-colored world must have made him happy on the days he could barely bring himself to get out of bed.

I don’t want to think about this—to bring Dad into it now, when I’m already feeling this low. The virus-disease-whatever hit these kids at a young age, but my dad carried his sickness with him his whole sixty years of life, through the good years and the bad ones, and the terrible ones after he lost his restaurant. Until the weight of it finally sank him.

I want to laugh when all the characters start delivering the moral of the story, that all these things they’re looking for have been inside them all along—that that’s where goodness and strength live. They want you to think that darkness or evil is only something that gets inflicted on you by the outside world, but I know better, and I think the freak does, too. Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

“Now I know I’ve got a heart,” the Tin Man says as I shut my eyes and roll away from the screen, “because it’s breaking.”

The girl has nightmares. It’s the only time I hear her talking, and it scares the shit out of me. I sit straight up in bed, fumbling in the dark for the knife I left on the nightstand. I think a wild dog’s broken in, or one of those feral cats I always see lurking around the motel’s Dumpsters. My brain is still half asleep—well, three-quarters asleep. I don’t remember about the kid sleeping on the floor until I’m basically stepping on her. I don’t even assume the noise is human, because it can’t be. No way. The words that come crawling out of her mouth aren’t words at all, but these gut-wrenching, god-awful moans.

“Nooooo, pleassssssse…nooooooo…”