by Dan Wells
“What if there’s no Withered at all?” she asked softly.
“This town is where Brooke said to go.”
“And is there always a Withered everywhere she says?”
I shook my head. “Her information is old. Some of them haven’t had contact with each other in decades. Even if Attina was here once, he might have left.”
“So then what do we do?”
I watched the people walking into church. Was it one of them?
“We leave,” I whispered.
“And go where?”
“I don’t know.”
Soon the crowd thinned out, and I figured the meeting was either starting soon or had already started and these were the last few stragglers. An old woman pulled up in a wide sedan, her head tilted up so she could see over the dashboard. Marci pulled me out of the shadows.
“Here we go,” she said. “Don’t do anything creepy.”
“Give me a little credit.”
“I’m teasing.” She walked toward the old woman, reaching her just as she was getting out of her car. “Let me help you.” Marci held out her hand, and the old woman smiled and grasped it delicately, pulling herself out of the seat with a grunt.
“Thank you, young lady.” The woman was short and plump, her hair mostly white, flecked here and there with gray. She turned back to reach for her purse, and Marci held the car door open.
“I’m sorry to bother you, ma’am,” said Marci, “but we just got into town, and we don’t really know anybody.”
The woman smiled. “Well, dear, you’ve come at a beautiful time. Dillon in June is absolutely lovely.” She closed the car door and faced us directly, getting her first really good look at our faces and clothes. I braced myself for a judgmental stare followed by a lecture or a curt dismissal, but instead she smiled again. “My,” she said, “you’re so young! It’s nice to meet you, dear, what’s your name?”
“Marci,” said Marci, smiling back.
“Everyone in there will call me Mrs. Potter,” said the woman, “but please just call me Ingrid. It’s not my name, but I like it so much.”
“I … okay,” said Marci, apparently as surprised as I was by the comment. The old woman laughed.
“Of course it’s my name, it’s just a joke I like to tell because so many people don’t. I’ve always loved it, but then, I got it from my grandmother, and I always loved her—and I figured any man who didn’t like my name wasn’t worth chasing anyway, no matter how good he looked in his uniform.” She laughed again and looked at me. “And you, young man, what’s your name?”
“David,” I said, sticking to the same fake name I’d used the night before. I watched the woman in awe, wondering how Marci had managed to pick exactly the right person to talk to: she was kind, she was accepting or somehow ignorant of how filthy we were, and with the last few churchgoers streaming into the building, we were practically alone. If Ingrid was willing to talk, we could get all kinds of information out of her without raising any alarms or red flags.
“Like I said before,” said Marci, “we’re new here and we don’t know anyone. Do you mind if we sit with you at church today?”
“No,” I said, “we can’t—”
“He’s a little embarrassed that we haven’t had a chance to clean up,” said Marci, shushing me with a finger on my lips. I backed away from the contact but stayed silent. “Normally we’d never go to church without dressing up—he looks so handsome in a shirt and tie—but I think if we were sitting with someone nice, it might help us feel a little less self-conscious.”
“Oh, for crying out loud,” said Ingrid, “is that all you’re worried about? Half the boys in there can’t be bothered to cut their hair, let alone comb it. You’ll be fine.” She grabbed Marci’s arm and started walking toward the door. “Stick with me, and if anyone starts anything, I’ll fight them off with a cane.”
“You don’t have a cane,” said Marci, looking back at the car. “Should we go back and get it?”
“Oh, I don’t use a cane,” said Ingrid. “But we’re going to sit next to Beth and hers has a great big handle on the end. It fell on my foot once and I limped all day.”
“We can’t go inside,” I said, as firmly as possible. “We have a dog.”
“So does Pastor Nash,” said Ingrid. “Come on!”
I clenched my teeth, following them with Boy Dog at my heels. This was stupid—this was reckless and dangerous and completely unnecessary. We could have asked all the questions we needed right there in the parking lot, then disappeared into a back street and never seen Ingrid again. Why expose ourselves like this? Ingrid walked to a bench near the back, where a skinny, wrinkled woman with a blue dress and a matching hat sat. There was even a flower on it. She had a cane, so I assumed this was Beth; she moved it for us and Ingrid sat down, pulling Marci with her. I sat on the end of the pew, shrugging off my backpack, and Boy Dog flopped gratefully to the floor.
I leaned close to Marci and whispered: “What are you doing?”
“We’re going to be in Dillon for a while, right? I’m establishing connections.”
“They don’t want to connect with us,” I said. “We’re dirty and weird and we’re here to kill someone.” I said the last part so softly even I could barely hear it. “Don’t think I haven’t tried churches before—you ask them for information, and they give it because they’re polite, but then they call their friends, and their friends call their friends, and soon everyone is going to know about the creepy vagrants slinking around town.”
The man in the pew in front of us turned and glared; the pastor was droning on in the front of the room. I lowered my voice again, making sure absolutely no one could understand a word we were saying. “Getting shunned is a best-case scenario now—worst case: someone files a report or looks us up on a missing-persons database.”
“So don’t slink around town,” Marci whispered back, “and people won’t have anything to warn each other about. And if all you do is ask a bunch of questions and leave, it’s no wonder people get suspicious. Church is about community: if you take from it, they resent you, but if you participate they protect you. We’re part of the group now—”
“Shhhh!” We looked over and saw Beth raising a shaky finger to her lips. Several other people were glaring at us as well; they couldn’t hear what we were saying, but they didn’t want us whispering. I nodded and closed my mouth, staring at the pastor but ignoring his words while I analyzed our situation. Marci might be right—if we had to stay in Dillon for a while, being part of the community might make a lot of things easier, even if it did expose us. In the past we’d always stayed on the edges, studying things from the outside, trying to make sure that no one saw or heard us enough to think twice about us. But that strategy meant that when they did think about us it was always bad. This way we’d stay more visible, more present in people’s minds, but they’d be more likely to think well about us, as friends or neighbors instead of suspicious travelers. It made me nervous, but these days everything made me nervous. I couldn’t hunt demons and run from more demons and keep a low profile and pump people for information and find food and take care of a dog and a crazy girl all at the same time without something starting to crack. Even just sitting here, in an air-conditioned building, felt like a luxury, and that only made me more nervous. I couldn’t afford to relax; I had to stay focused. For all I knew the demon was right here in this room, and more demons were converging on the building. I had to be alert and ready.
I closed my eyes, forcing myself to surrender, just for a moment, and relax. I didn’t have to do everything, all the time, completely by myself. Marci was showing herself to be just as competent as I remembered, maybe even more so, and even Brooke had surprised me with her cleverness in Yashodh’s farmhouse. I needed to treat them … or her … like a partner and not a burden. I had to let go.
I opened my eyes, checking the windows and the doors with one quick sweep of my head. Letting go sounded good in theory, right up
until we were captured or killed. I could relax when our enemies were dead.
The sermon went on for about a half an hour, interspersed with hymns that sounded every bit as dirgelike as the ones we’d sung in the mortuary. When the meeting ended we split into groups, the kids going to a basement room and the adults breaking out into groups for Sunday school. I even saw Corey, but if he saw us he didn’t say anything. We stayed with Ingrid, and she introduced us to her friends, most of them as old as she was. The pastor walked over to shake our hands as well, and we lied our way through a minute or two of small talk while our dogs sniffed each other’s butts. I mostly stayed quiet, speaking only to answer direct questions, letting Marci charm the crowd with her easy wit and Brooke’s clear smile. Most of the questions were simple—where were we from, why were we in town—and we answered them with the same vague story about taking a year off from college. Then the pastor asked the question I’d been dreading:
“Do you have a place to stay?”
It meant he’d seen how dirty we were and guessed we’d slept outside last night. It meant he knew we were homeless, and despite our stories, he was worried for our well-being. He might even be wondering if someone missed us, if our parents knew where we were, if we’d run away from something terrible and needed help, or even from something good because we were too young and foolish to see it for the blessing it was. Adults who were scared of me made my job harder, but adults who tried to help could make my job impossible.
Before we’d gone to Baker, we’d spent two months in a town called Bunnell, close enough to a state park that it had a campground right outside of town. We’d gotten a tent from one of Potash’s depots, so we’d set it up in the campground and explained our long-term presence that way, which had been enough for most people to ignore us. Dillon didn’t have anything like that, and it was much smaller than most of the town’s we’d visited, so I didn’t think I could fall back on my “staying with a cousin” excuse. Everyone in this town was likely to know everyone else.
“We’re just passing through,” I said. “We’re doing fine.”
“You don’t have a place to stay?” asked a woman on the edge of the circle. “Does that mean you don’t have anything to eat?”
“We’re fine,” I said, feeling like a noose was tightening around our necks. “Thank you, but we’re actually totally set up, and you don’t need to worry about us at all—”
“Ridiculous,” said the woman. She was younger than the others, with black hair that had only just started to gray, strands of wispy silver floating above the rest like a halo. “You’re eating at my house today. I made a bacon-pecan pie last night, and it’d be a downright shame if I had to eat it all myself.”
“I’m vegetarian,” I said quickly.
“All the more for me,” said Marci, and she turned to the woman. “Thank you, that’s incredibly kind.”
“It’s the least I can do for a fellow child of God,” said the woman, putting out her hand. “Sara Glassman, it’s nice to meet you.”
“She’s the librarian,” said Ingrid. “Used to run the bookstore, but nobody in this town buys books, so they closed it five years ago.”
“That was when the new highway bypassed us,” said Beth. “We used to be right on—”
“That was fifty years, not five,” said Ingrid. “She gets lost in the past sometimes.”
“I know how she feels,” said Marci, and she looked at me with wide, helpless eyes. She looked scared, and I knew in an instant that she had flipped again—Marci had gone and a new personality had taken over, completely unaware of where we were or what we were doing.
Marci was gone.
I’d lost her again.
8
Marci was gone.
I struggled for words, sad and broken, furious that I had to go through this again and feeling more guilty than I could stand over the fact that I would even dare to think about myself instead of the girl standing in front me. She was lost and scared and she needed a friend, she needed some kind of stability, and here I was too gutted by a surge of emotions to even figure out who she was. I hated emotions so much—all they ever did was get in the way—and now look at me, thinking about myself again. I had to help her.
She was someone who recognized me, that much seemed clear. Was it Brooke? I almost said her name, but stopped. The people in the church knew her as Marci, and I didn’t want to make them suspicious.
“Marci, dear,” said Ingrid, “are you all right?”
“Marci,” said Brooke, and her eyes never left me, melting slowly from confusion to pity. “Oh, John, I’m so sorry.”
So much for quelling suspicion, but at least now I knew it was Brooke—she was the only other personality who knew about Marci.
“Who’s John?” asked Ingrid. I shook my head.
“She needs medicine,” I said, grabbing Brooke’s arm. Medicine was a great excuse because nobody wanted to argue with it and few people knew enough about medicine to ask probing questions. It would explain her confusion, I hoped, but mostly it would get us out of there—and I had to get out of there fast. “Thank you for letting us sit with you,” I mumbled. “Have a good day.” I didn’t want to make a scene but I couldn’t stay there for another minute. I needed air. Brooke followed without argument.
“Is something wrong?” asked the pastor.
“She just needs her medicine,” I said again. “We’re fine, thank you.”
“Number 42 Beck Street,” Ms. Glassman called out after us. “Lunch’ll be ready at noon.”
I picked up my pace once we got outside, turning away from the main road to try to lose myself in the side streets, to get as far away from everyone as I could. Paul was in the parking lot, leaning against a car. He stared at us in shock as we walked past.
“Hey, Marci,” he managed, just as we rounded the fence and hurried out of sight.
“How long was I gone?” asked Brooke. “Does the whole town know us?”
“Yes,” I growled. “It was stupid to go in there, it was stupid to meet everyone, it was stupid to…” I walked faster, nervous and scared and angry all at once. “Everything is stupid. Everything is wrong and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m—” I stopped, closing my eyes, freezing in place on the sidewalk. I couldn’t talk like this; I was talking like Brooke did before a suicide attempt. I had to help her, not set her off.
I took a deep breath and turned, finding her standing behind me with deep concern etched into her face.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “everything’s fine.”
“You’re not fine.”
“I’m just a little frazzled, but we’re okay. You’re okay.”
“How long was I Marci?”
“Just last night and this morning,” I said, trying to slow my breathing. My hands were shaking, and I clenched them into fists. “We’ve only been in town for thirteen hours at the most. You’re fine.”
“But you’re not,” she said again, and she stepped toward me, reaching for my face. “I’ve always known Marci might come out and I knew that it would be hard for you—”
“Don’t touch me,” I said, shying away from her hand. “Why do you all keep trying to touch me?”
“Because that’s what humans do when we’re sad,” said Brooke. “We comfort each other.”
I folded my arms tightly across my chest. “Just stop … touching me, I can’t handle this right now, okay?”
“You hold me when I need it,” she said softly, stepping toward me again. “You know that it helps with my episodes to have a hug or a touch or some kind of physical contact.” She put her hand on my arm. “Let me do the same for you—”
“I’m not having an episode,” I said, wrenching away from her, “I’m just trying to—I don’t know!”
“What do you think an episode is if not this?”
“She was supposed to be dead,” I said.
Brooke watched me for a moment, parsing this sudden change in direction. “Most people would beg fo
r a chance to talk to their dead.”
“Most people haven’t done it,” I said.
“I thought you loved her.”
“Stop using that word!” I shouted. I looked around, worried that people would hear us, that people would look out their windows and watch us, that Paul would come around the corner and start talking to us again. I needed to run, not toward anything, but just run, as fast as I could. I squeezed my arms tighter around my chest.
“You’re having a panic attack,” said Brooke. “Dr. Trujillo taught me about them. Take a deep breath or you’ll hyperventilate.”
“An hour ago you didn’t even remember Dr. Trujillo.”
“Is that supposed to hurt me?”
“Of course not,” I said, closing my eyes and crouching on the sidewalk. “I never want to hurt you, I’m sorry, but I can’t…” I didn’t know what to say.
I heard Brooke’s shoes scraping on the pavement, felt the soft puff of her breath as she crouched next to me. “You can’t what?”
“Nothing you can help me with.”
“Just saying it out loud can help.”
I shook my head. “Marci was the most important thing in my life.”
“I know.”
“Now you are,” I whispered.
She paused a moment. “I know.”
“And I can’t have one without losing the other.”
I heard footsteps and opened my eyes to see the pastor walking toward us with my backpack in one hand and Brooke’s in the other. We’d left them in the church. I stood up, grateful that I hadn’t been crying—and then a part of me grew disturbed that I hadn’t been crying and filed it away as another inhuman fault. “Thank you,” I said, trying to keep my voice from trembling. “We’d just noticed we’d forgotten them.” It wasn’t true; it was another knee-jerk lie. Why did I do that?
“Are you okay?” he asked again. “Is there something I can do?”
“No thank you,” I said, taking the pack. What if he’d looked through it? What if he’d found the gun, or my notes about the Withered? What if he’d found something that could link us to our real identities?
