Free Beneath the Bones by Tim Waggoner

began sliding down the slides of his face, trickling down his neck. He
hated
sweating, couldn’t stand the way it made his clothes cling cold and damp against his body. He wanted nothing more than to drop the camera onto the ground and start scratching, raking fingernails over his flesh to dislodge the maddening biting things that he knew couldn’t be real, but which he felt nevertheless.
    But instead he gritted his teeth harder until his fillings started to ache, and he forced himself to breathe evenly as he struggled to concentrate on taking the next photograph. Sheriff Talon was depending on him to do this job, and Ronnie had never let her down before, and he sure as hell didn’t intend to now.
    “Something wrong, Ronnie?” Marshall asked. Underneath the man’s tone of cool detachment, Ronnie thought he heard dark amusement. “You seem a trifle uncomfortable.”
    The burning sensation increased, and Ronnie ground his teeth together so hard one of the fillings in his back molars cracked. A tiny lance of pain shot through his tooth, but it was nothing compared to agonizing fire blazing across his skin. The camera shook in his trembling hands, making the world seen through the viewfinder appear as if it were caught in the throes of an earthquake. His breath now came in ragged gasps. It felt as if he’d been coated head to toe in liquid flame.
    “I can make it go away.”
    Ronnie heard Marshall’s words as if they came from a great distance, and though he had no rational reason to believe them, he did. Ronnie’s family had moved to Cross County when he was eleven. He was a clean boy even then. An
especially
clean boy. But he hadn’t yet taken to washing his hands so many times a day that the skin became red, chapped, and fissured with cracks. Hadn’t yet started wearing the surgical mask when he went outside, the mask that would become his second — and in some ways truest — face. After he started school, it wasn’t long before the other children began telling him stories about the Crosses with ghoulish enthusiasm. They lived in a castle outside town, their kids were all home-schooled, they didn’t attend any of the churches in town, and some folks said they had a family chapel of some sort in their fortress home. But to whom — or what — they prayed to, no one knew. Warnings came with the tales as well, passed along with none of the mischievous glee of the stories. The kids turned dead serious, and their hushed tones and furtive glances around as they spoke — as if they feared someone, the
wrong
someone — might overhear, frightened young Ronnie more than all the lurid rumors about the Crosses combined.
    When a Cross asks you to do something, you should. But when a Cross
tells
you to do something, you’ve got to
.
    There would be a pause then, and the advice-giver’s voice always fell to a whisper.
    They can
make
you
.
    And so now, over forty years later, Ronnie believed Marshall could do as he said, believed from the top of his flaming scalp to the bottoms of his fire-seared feet.
    “Something’s happening, Ronnie. Something that involves Family business.”
    Though it was difficult for Ronnie to make out Marshall’s voice through the red haze of pain that enshrouded his mind, he was still able to hear the way Marshall stressed the word
Family
.
    “Joanne’s good at what she does, and normally we’re content to let her go about her job without any interference on our part. But whatever’s going on is too important for us to stand by and wait for the wheels of justice to turn on their own. Joanne won’t like us taking an active hand in her investigation, and because of this, she will no doubt be reluctant to share whatever information she discovers. That’s where you come in, Ronnie.”
    Ronnie’s breath was coming in ragged bursts now —
huh-huh-huh-huh-huh! —
and a far-off corner of his mind that wasn’t consumed by pain and terror wondered if he were on the verge of