I'm so cozy in my New York sweatshirt hehehe :D But I need to take a shower so that won't last long

The call had come from Josh Abrams, an attorney in Oriental, North Carolina, who informed him that Joe Solomon had passed away. "There are arrangements best handled in person," Josh explained. Zach's first instinct after hanging up was to book his flight and a room at a local bed-and-breakfast, then call a florist and arrange for a delivery.

The following morning, after locking the front door to the trailer, Zach walked around back, toward the tin shed where he kept his car. It was Thursday, June 18th, 2009, and he carried with him the only suit he owned and a duffle bag he'd packed in the middle of the night when he hadn't been able to sleep. He unlocked the padlock and rolled up the door, watching sunlight stream onto the car he'd been restoring and repairing ever since high school. It was a 1969 fastback, the kind of car that turned heads when Nixon was president and still turned heads today. It looked as if it had just rolled off the assembly line, and over the years countless strangers had offered to buy it from him. Zach had always turned them down. "It's more than just a car," he told them, without further explanation. Joe would have understood exactly what he meant.

Zach tossed the duffle bag onto the passenger seat and laid the suit on top of it before sliding in behind the wheel. When he turned the key, the engine came to life with a loud rumble, and he eased the car onto the gravel before hopping out to lock the shed. As he did, he ran through a mental checklist, making sure he had everything. Two minutes later, he was on the main road and a half hour after that he was parking in the long-term lot at the New Orleans airport. He hated leaving the car but had no choice. He collected his things before starting toward the terminal, where a ticket was waiting for him at the airline counter.

The airport was crowded. Men and women walking arm in arm, families off to visit grandparents or Disney World, students shuttling between home and school. Business travelers rolled their carry-ons behind them, jabbering on cell phones. He stood in the slow-moving line and waited until a spot opened at the counter. He showed his identification and answered the basic security questions before being handed his boarding pass. There was a single layover in Charlotte, a little more than an hour. Not bad. Once he had another forty minutes on the road. Assuming there weren't any delays, he'd be in Oriental by late afternoon.

Until he took his seat on the plane, Zach hadn't realized how tired he was. He wasn't sure what time he'd finally fallen asleep – the last time he'd checked, it had been almost four – but he figured he'd sleep on the plane. Besides, it wasn't as though he had much to do once he got to town. He was an only child, is mom had run off when he was three, and his dad had done the world a favor by drinking himself to death. Zach hadn't talked to anyone in his family in years, nor did he intend to renew their acquaintance now.

Quick trip, in and out. He'd do what he had to do and didn't plan on hanging around any longer than he had to. He might have been raised in Oriental, but he'd never really belonged there. The Oriental he knew was nothing like the cheery image advertised by the area Visitors' Bureau. For most people who spent an afternoon there, Oriental came across as a quirky little town, popular with artists and poets and retirees who wanted nothing more than to spent their twilight years sailing on te Neuse River. It had the requisite quaint downtown, complete with antiques stores, art galleries, and coffee shops, and the place had more weekly festivals than seemed possible for a town of fewer than a thousand people. But the real Oriental, the one he'd know as a child and young man, was the one inhabited by families with ancestors who had resided in the area since colonial times. People like Judge Dillon and Sheriff Steve, Abby Cameron, and the Morgan and Mosckowitz families. They were the ones who'd always owned the land and farmed the crops and sold the timber and established the businesses; they were the powerful, invisible undercurrent in a town that had always been theirs. And they kept it the way they wanted.

Zach found that out firsthand when he was eighteen, and then again at twenty-three, when he finally left for good. It wasn't easy being a Goode anywhere in Pamlico County, Oriental in particular. As far as he knew, every Goode in the family tree going back as far as his great-grandfather had spent time in prison. Various members of the family had been convicted of everything from assault and battery to arson, attempted murder, and murder itself, and the rocky, wooded homestead that housed the extended family was like a country with its own rules. A handful of ramshackle cabins, single-wide trailers, and junk barns dotted the property that his family called home, and unless he had no choice, even the Sherriff avoided the place. Hunters gave the land a wide-berth, rightly assuming that the TRESSPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT sign wasn't simply a warning but a promise. The Goodes were moonshiners and drug dealers, alcoholics, wife beaters, abusive fathers and mothers, thieves and pimps, and above all, pathologically violent. According to an article that had been published in a now defunct magazine, they were at one point regarded as the most vicious, revenge-driven family east of Raleigh. Zach's father was no exception. He'd spent most of his twenties and early thirties in prison for various offenses that included stabbing a man with an ice pick after the man had cut him off in traffic. He been tried and acquitted twice for murder after witnesses had vanished, and even the rest of his family knew enough not to rile him up. How or why his mom had ever married him was a question that Zach couldn't begin to answer. He didn't blame his mom for running off. For most of his childhood, he'd wanted to run off, too. Nor did he blame her for not taking him. Men in the Goode family were strangely proprietary about their offspring, and he had no doubt his father would have hunted his mom down and taken him back anyway. He'd told Zach as much more than once, and Zach had known better than to ask his dad what he would have done had his mom refused to give him up. Zach already knew the answer.

He wondered how many members of his family were still living on the land. When he'd finally left, in addition to his father, there'd been a grandfather, four uncles, three aunts, and sixteen cousins. By now, with the cousins grown up and having kids of their own, there were probably more, but e had no desire to find out. That might have been the world he'd grown up in, but like Oriental, he'd never really belonged to them, either. Maybe his mom, whoever she was, had something to do with it, but he wasn't like them. Alone among his cousins, he never got in fights at school and he pulled down decent grades. He stayed away from the drugs and the booze, and as a teenager he avoided his cousins when they cruised into town looking for trouble, usually telling them that he had to check on the still or help disassemble a car that someone in the family had stolen. He kept his head down and did his best to maintain as low a profile as he could.

It was a balancing act. The Goodes might have been a band of criminals, but that didn't man they were stupid, and Zach knew instinctively that he had to hide his differences as best he could. He was probably the only kid in his school's history who studied hard enough to fail a test on purpose, and he taught himself how to doctor his report cards so they appeared worse than they really were. He learned how to secretly empty a can of beer the moment someone had turned his back by poking it with a knife, and when he used to work as an excuse to avoid his cousins, he often toiled until the middle of the night. That was successful for a while, but over time, cracks appeared in the façade. One of his teachers mentioned to a drinking buddy of dad's that he was the best student in his class; aunts and uncles began to notice that he alone among the cousins was staying within the bounds of the law. In a family that prized loyalty and conformity above all else, he was different, and there was no worse sin.

It infuriated his father. Though he'd been beaten regularly since he was a toddler – his father favored belts and straps – by the time he was twelve the beatings became personal. His father would beat him until Zach's back and chest were black and blue, then return an hour later, turning his attention to the boy's face and legs. Teachers knew what was happening, but afraid for their own families, they ignored it. The sheriff pretended that he couldn't see the bruises and welts as Zach walked home from school. The rest of the family had no problem with it. Grant and Crazy Jonas, his older cousins, jumped him more than once, beating him as bad as his father – Grant because he thought Zach had it coming. Crazy Jonas, just for the hell of it. Grant, tall and broad with fists the size of ham bones, was violent and short-tempered but smarter than he let on. Crazy Jonas, on the other hand, was born mean. In kindergarten, he stabbed a classmate with a pencil in a fight over a Twinkie, and before he was finally expelled in the fifth grade he'd sent another classmate to the hospital. Rumor had it that he'd killed a junkie while still a teenager. Zach soon figured out it was best not to fight back. Instead, he learned to cover up while absorbing the blows, until his cousins finally grew bored or tired or both.

He didn't, however, follow in the family business and grew more resolute than he never would. Over time, he learned that the more he screamed, the more his father beat him, so he kept his mouth shut. As violent as his father was, he was also a bully, and Zach knew instinctively that bullies fought only the battles they knew they could win. He knew there would come a time when he'd be strong enough to fight back, when he would no longer be afraid of his father. As the blows rained down on him, he tried to imagine the courage his mom had shown by cutting all ties to the family.

He did his best to hasten the process. He tied a sack filled with rags to a tree and punched it for hours a day. He hefted rocks and engine parts as often as he could. He did pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups throughout the day. He put on ten pounds of muscle before turning thirteen, and another twenty by fourteen. He was growing taller as well. By fifteen, he was nearly as tall as his father. One night, a month after he turned sixteen, his father came at him with a belt after a night of drinking, and Zach reared up and ripped it from his father's grasp. He told his father that if he ever touched him again. He'd kill him.

That night, with nowhere else to go, he took refuge in Joe's garage. When Joe found him the next morning, Zach asked him for a job. There was no reason for him to help Zach, who was not only a stranger but a Goode as well. Joe wiped his hands on the bandana he kept in his back pocket, trying to read him before reaching for his cigarettes. At the time, he was sixty-one years old, a widower for two years. When he spoke, Zach could smell the alcohol on his breath, and his voice was raspy with the residue of the unfiltered Camels he'd been smoking since he was a child. His accent, like Zach's was pure country.

"I figure you can strip 'em, but you know anythin' about puttin' 'em back again?"

"Yes, sir," Zach had answered.

"You got schoolin' today?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then you be back here right afterwards and I'll see how you do."

So apparently one of the long-standing characters is supposed to die in the 6th book, and IM CRYING WHAT IF ITS ZACH. NONONO. MY BABY NO. Oh and, GUYS "MADLY IN LOVE, SORT OF" HIT 101.4 THOUSAND VIEWS. IM. CRYING. This has been the best week of my life and it's ALL BECAUSE YOU GUYS ARE AMAZING THANK YOUUUU!