II. THE GIRL WHO
CRAWLED OUT

THE July heat didn't just sit on Dixie Ward, it clung— it threaded itself through her hair and settled at the notch of her throat, stuck beneath the thin gold chains she never took off. By closing, the Hollow Saloon had sweated straight through its own walls, the ceiling fans turning like they were tired of trying. Bottles sweated in the low light, as did the men. Dixie moved through it all as if the heat were a second skin.

She locked the till, slid the last stool under the bar with the heel of her boot, and listened. The jukebox hummed without music— old wiring and old ghosts. Out on Main, a motorcycle coughed and died. Cicadas screamed from the treeline like a power line about to snap. Hollow Creek never got quiet, not really. It just traded one noise for another.

Dixie tugged her hair loose. The knot fell apart, dark strands falling damp against her neck. Small gold hoops climbed the curve of her left ear— her first, seconds, and thirds— then a helix and a conch that caught the light when she turned. A tiny stud glinted in her nose. The barbell at her navel flashed when she reached for the broom. People stared at all of it; let 'em. Better for them to watch the shine than whatever lived behind her ribs.

Hank kept a cot in the back office for nights the bourbon beat him. He was on it now, boots still on, and his radio muttering the late forecast. There was a heat advisory through tomorrow with a chance of storms. He'd always been good to her— good in the easy and unasked way that didn't want anything back. When she was sixteen and the mine swallowed what remained of her family, he'd handed her a rag, pointed at the bar, and said, "If your hands are busy, your head won't eat you alive." She believed him enough to keep coming back.

She swept because it gave her something to count besides the days.

Twenty-three. She didn't say the number out loud— she never did, but it moved through her anyway, a quiet, relentless tide. Twenty-three men in the ground and one girl who crawled out. In July, leading into August, the number got teeth. It gnawed at the edges of everything— at the laughter that got too loud, at the gossip that turned mean, and at the way mothers pulled their children close when she walked by the church steps.

"Cave rat," someone had said earlier, soft as a prayer and sharp as a blade.

She'd smiled back, sweet as poisoned honey, and the room had laughed, they always laughed. That was the trick— to make them laugh before they made you bleed.

She finished the floor and killed the neon signs. The door gave its usual groan when she pushed through, and the night hit her full in the face— honeysuckle, hot asphalt, and a storm thinking about it. The sky over the ridge was black enough to feel like weight. Hollow Creek sagged beneath it, roofs and porches and the single streetlight outside the bait shop holding on like teeth in an old jaw.

Dixie lit a cigarette, but this time, she didn't smoke it. She held it between her fingers, watched the ember crawl, and listened to the town breathe. The anniversary sat two weeks ahead of her like the edge of a pit.

Disappearances had already begun. Hollow Creek knew patterns the way coal knew lungs.

She told herself she didn't believe the stories. The boots in the night, the coughing downwind, and the way the mine mouth sometimes exhaled a draft colder than the creek in January. She told herself luck was luck and bad ground was bad ground and that the only thing hungry out there was the kind of emptiness people brought with them when they didn't have the language for grief.

But July made liars of everybody.

She took the long way home without meaning to— moving past the dead hardware store, past the church with its doors propped for airflow, and past Mrs. Kettle's hydrangeas sagging under their own blooms. Her boots found the ruts on County 9 like they always did when the air felt wrong. The mine road wasn't lit; it didn't want to be. Kudzu had eaten the fence years ago— the warning signs rusted into unreadable tongues. The mouth of Hollow Creek Mine lay blacker than the trees themselves, a hole punched in the earth and left to remember.

She stopped where the gravel turned to dirt. No farther— never at night.

Her skin prickled anyway; the kind of prickle that didn't belong to heat. She told herself it was memory. She was good at that—naming a thing something smaller than it was until it fit in a pocket. She rolled her lips and stared into the dark that stared back.

She had been in there for two whole days— the town had kept saying it like an accusation. As if time itself were proof she'd made some trade. She remembered almost nothing of it— just breath gone wrong, the choke of dust, and the way sound turned into pressure. A flashlight beam like a blade, once. The slide of gravel under her palms. Her brother's voice and then not. The last thing clear as glass— daylight finally coming like a flood, blinding, cruel, and far too bright to bear.

Everything after that was noise— Hands pulling, questions, a woman crossing herself and not meeting her eyes, and the weight of someone else's jacket because they'd thrown it over her shoulders even though it was August.

She tried to imagine a world where she hadn't crawled out. Sometimes she did it as punishment, others as a relief. In that world, the town might've had one less story to tell. In that world, maybe the mine stayed shut, but then the picture always collapsed under its own weight because the truth was simpler and meaner than speculation— stone falls where it wants and so do people. There's no math that makes grief even.

A whip-poor-will called from the treeline, close enough to be inside her ear. She blinked, the cigarette ash long enough to burn her, and shook it off. Somehow, the wind shifted and brought something that wasn't honeysuckle.

Coal dust smelled like a penny rubbed between fingers. She tasted it at the back of her throat, where the old fear lived— not the kind that makes you run, but the kind that makes you hold perfectly still. She stood there long enough to feel stupid about it— long enough to prove to herself that it was only a memory, that she was only a woman on a county road in Kentucky with sweat running down her spine, and July pressing fingers into the small of her back.

"Get a grip," she said, low. Her voice always sounded smaller outdoors.

A pair of headlights crested the hill far behind her— a truck crawling home, nothing more. She let the mine keep its silence and turned away.

Back in the same home she'd lived since she was born, haunted with ghosts, she showered with the water as cold as the pipes could manage, and leaned her forehead on tile. Steam climbed anyway— July didn't care what you wanted— it hadn't in a decade. She traced the old scar along her ribs without looking at it.

In bed, the fan rattled on its chain like it had a grievance. She left the window open because the night never felt less wrong than the air inside. Hollow Creek breathed through the screen. Somewhere, a dog barked once and stopped. Somewhere, a mother sat on a couch and watched the door like it was supposed to apologize.

Dixie lay on top of the covers and counted in her head. She never meant to— the numbers always came on their own.

One through twenty-three for a decade's worth of disappearances and the men under the mountain whose names she used to be able to list without stopping for breath.

She reached the end and started again, soft as a psalm, but it wasn't prayer, she didn't do those anymore. It was an inventory. It was the balance sheet of a place that kept taking.

When sleep came, it came mean— like it always did this close to the date. She dreamed of her father's boots on the porch. She dreamed of the draft that moved through the mine without air. She dreamed of a hand catching her wrist in the dark and pushing, not pulling, because the only way out was forward and the earth didn't negotiate.

She woke to her phone buzzing on the nightstand. Three missed calls. Hank, then the sheriff, and then Hank again. No messages, because men like that didn't leave messages when there was a name in their mouth they didn't want to say out loud.

Dixie sat up in the hot room and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, pulled the curls weighing on her shoulders into a ponytail, and told herself the same thing she always did when the air turned heavy and the mine road waited like a threat— Keep moving. Keep your hands busy. Don't let your head eat you alive.

Out in the street, the cicadas started up again— always faithful and relentless. The day would be worse than the night. The town would come to her for drinks, for stories, and for the comfort of blaming someone they could see. She would give them what she had to offer, cold bottles, sharp answers, and a smile sharp enough to remind them they were still here.

And underneath it— beneath the heat and the laugh she could summon on command after a decade of perfecting it— she would keep counting.

________

hellooo!!!

qotd: least favorite character
in supernatural?