At the center, the rock pulses. When you touch it, you see everything—past, future, all timelines at once. Becky touches it. She sees her baby: not a child, but a thing that will grow up to be a monster. She sees Ross Humboldt, the boy’s father, arriving. She sees herself killing Cal. She sees the grass as it truly is: a single organism that exists outside of time, a green god that has been swallowing travelers since the plains were formed.

He sets the baby on the roadside. Then he returns. He cannot leave the grass. No one can. But he can send things out . The baby crawls to the road. A car stops. The baby is saved. The grass hums.

Ross kills Cal. Not out of malice, but because the grass wants Cal’s blood to fertilize the soil. Then Ross finds Becky. She is in labor. The grass delivers the baby—a screaming, root-tangled thing that does not cry but hum . The grass accepts the offering.

A high, thin voice from the field of grass that borders the road: "Help me. Please, help me."

Becky, after an hour of silence, enters. She finds Cal within ten feet—but they cannot touch. The grass has a secret: it is not a field. It is a digestive system. The stalks are cilia. The soil is stomach acid. The rock in the center of the field—a black, porous stone the size of a tombstone—is the brain.

Here is the deepest horror: time is not linear inside the grass. Tobin, the boy who called for help at the beginning, is also the grown man Ross kills at the end. The baby Becky delivers is Tobin. The voice that calls from the grass is its own echo. The field is a ouroboros—a snake eating its tail, forever.

But here is the final turn of the knife: that baby, adopted and raised far from Kansas, will grow up. And one day, driving a 1983 Camaro across the country, he will hear a small voice from a field of green grass. And he will stop.