For those that need to catch up, Part I is here, Part II is here. Part IV will be posted Friday.

“What do you boys think you’re doing?” Landis’s stomach tangled into a knot, the way it always did when he heard Beth’s voice.

The twins froze. Landis tensed his legs and then threw himself backwards, twisting out of Terry and Collin’s hands. He skidded on his back through the dirt, rolled onto his side and staggered up like a drunken jack-in-the-box. Beth stood watching them all with her hands on her hips, her strawberry blond hair falling loose around her shoulders. Landis knew he should run, by the way she looked at him. But he couldn’t, he couldn’t play the coward to her again. He wiped at the sweat beading on his forehead and tried to look more cool and casual, and less like he had just escaped being maimed by a pair of cripples.

“Go home Beth,” said Ben, “This don’t concern you.”

“That’s funny, I seem to remember Tommy being MY brother, not yours.” Beth tossed back her hair.

“If you loved him, you’d know how much we need to do th-”

“If I loved him?” she suddenly screamed, “If? Go to hell, Benjamin Baines, you redneck idiot. You don’t know a thing that can’t be found in the bottom of a whiskey bottle.”

Ben sneered and pointed at her with his stump of an arm. “You made me what I am.”

Landis looked between the two of them. Ben, and Beth? Oh no. No.

“Men make themselves,” she said.

“Like him?” Ben said, pointing at Landis, “Running off to college, leaving Tubs to die? You think that makes a man? I’ll make you, you mouthy little princess.” He started toward her.

Landis didn’t know he was going to punch Ben in the face. He just did it, stepping into the swing to increase the momentum, striking Ben where he was weakest, in the bridge of the nose, broken once years before by an errant softball Tubs chucked in a tantrum. The bone gave way with a crunch. Blood streamed down Ben’s face. He turned to Landis, shocked, his eyes wide and wondering, as if the blow had woken him from some twilight fugue. He touched the divot of his upper lip with his fingertips and stared at how they came away crimson.

“You aren’t the law,” said Landis. “You aren’t justice.”

“I’m the only one here who cares about justice.” said Ben flatly.

Landis opened his mouth to retort.

“No!” cried Beth.

Landis was turning to her with a confused look on his face when he felt something hard slam into the back of his head. His knees buckled.

The world went white.

“That’s not true Benny,” said Terry. “Collin and I care about justice plenty.”

Gray.

“Yup,” said Collin, dropping the fallen oak branch he had used to brain Landis with. It lay inches from Landis’s face. His eyes were pulled into the snaking curves and whorls of bark, whorls like a tornado, like a maelstrom, like

Black.