by Dan Wells
“Dillon is lovely,” said Brooke.
“Thank you,” said Ms. Glassman. “Most visitors complain about how tiny it is, but we love it. What else do we need, anyway?”
“We come from a small town as well,” said Brooke. “Not this small, but still. I couldn’t wait to get out when we were in school, but now I miss it.”
I looked at her while I chewed, trying to guess if she was talking about Clayton or some medieval village lost to time.
“Small towns are the best,” said Ms. Glassman. “Big cities are noisy, they’re dirty, they’re full of crime.” She punctuated each word with a short stab of her fork. “I drove through Tulsa once and thought I was going to get mugged at every stoplight. I can’t even imagine going to a bigger place like New York.”
“It’s not as bad as people say,” said Brooke. “Yes it is.”
I looked at her again, wondering if she had just switched personalities in midsentence.
“Ha!” laughed Ms. Glassman. “I know how you feel, I argue with myself all the time. David, honey, how are those beet greens working out for you?”
“They’re delicious,” I said and I meant it. Either she was an excellent cook, or I was starving. Probably both. I took another bite, feeling even hungrier now that my body remembered what it had been missing, but as I chewed I started preparing some questions. This is why we’d gone to church in the first place, and now it was time to cash in that goodwill we’d earned and get some information.
I swallowed. “Every town is dangerous, though,” I said. “Even Stillson had a crime problem.”
“Not Dillon,” said Ms. Glassman. “Last year I lost the key to the library so I couldn’t lock up, and after freaking out all afternoon I decided to just close the door and pretend I was locking it and hope. Nothing happened. I didn’t find that key again until the carpet cleaner moved my desk three months later—the front door was just unlocked for three whole months—and we didn’t have a single break-in.”
“Do people ever break into libraries?” asked Brooke. “You get the books for free anyway.”
“And most of this town isn’t even interested in that,” said Ms. Glassman, slicing off another bite of ham.
Derek’s heart, parting in two under the blade of my knife.…
“… but I mentioned this story to Bill Taylor, who runs the Terryl’s, and he told me the same thing happened to him the year before.”
“Terryl’s is a … hairdresser?” Brooke asked.
“Grocery store,” said Ms. Glassman. “Same story: not a single thing stolen. Not one grape.”
“Then what about that gunshot we heard?” I asked, using the incident to press her further. There was a Withered in town, or at least there used to be, and though it probably wasn’t Derek I had to get her talking about danger. Something here was dangerous. “Right before we got here? It sounded like a hunting rifle.”
“Oh that happens all the time,” she said. “But folks around here are gun people from way back, and we know what we’re doing. Except for that one time five years ago when Clete Neilson shot himself in the foot there hasn’t been a single gun-related injury since … well since the Old West, I suppose. And Clete was drunk, so it’s his own dumb fault.”
“What about non-gun-related injuries?” asked Brooke.
Ms. Glassman laughed. “My, you two are morbid, aren’t you?”
Brooke laughed, which was perfect, because a laugh was exactly what the situation needed and I could never make it look natural. We needed her to keep talking about this—she was presenting Dillon as some kind of quiet paradise, where nothing ever went wrong, but that couldn’t be true if there was a Withered here. We still didn’t know what Attina could do, or how or why, but even a Withered who didn’t kill—like Yashodh or Elijah—still caused problems. Elijah was an outright good person, and actively tried to help people and avoid problems, but he still couldn’t survive without a constant stream of death. Even if other people caused it, the Withered needed death. They fed on us like parasites, and yet Dillon seemed completely healthy.
We’d come to Dillon because the memories Brooke had gained from Nobody located a Withered here decades ago, but what if it had left? The highway had bypassed the town, just like it had a thousand other little towns across the country, and the population had dwindled. There was no way the tiny population of Dillon could support a drive-in theater today. So the people had left, and the Withered had left with them. Dillon wasn’t a viable food source anymore.
“These rolls are wonderful,” said Brooke. “Did they just come out of the oven?”
“Thank you, dear,” said Ms. Glassman. “That’s so sweet. I mixed the batch this morning and let them rise while I was at church. Then I just threw them in the oven when I got home, easy peasy.”
“But you didn’t know we were coming,” I said. “You didn’t invite us until you were already an hour into church.”
Ms. Glassman smiled. “I’ve been making a fresh batch of my grandmother’s rolls first thing before church every week since she passed. Why do you think I had the ham all ready to go, or the bacon-pecan pie? I trust the Good Lord to put someone deserving in my path, and when he does, I have a lunch all ready for them.”
“Does that happen a lot?” asked Brooke.
“Honey,” said Ms. Glassman, “if you make a pie and ask people if they want to eat it with you, you’re never going to eat alone.”
Was Dillon really this nice? This quiet and peaceful, with nothing under the surface, no evil secrets, no hidden killers?
If it was, then I was the worst person here. Derek and his buddies were awful, but they’d backed down—even three to one, the mere glimpse of a knife had scared them off. They were harmless. I, on the other hand, wasn’t even mad anymore and I still wanted to cut Derek into pieces, nice and slow, until he was in so much pain he couldn’t even scream.
Robberies were one thing, but I needed to know about the real statistics. “How often do people die here?” I asked.
“Don’t,” Brooke hissed.
“That’s a … shocking question,” said Ms. Glassman.
“The last town we visited had a string of cancer deaths that they eventually attributed to nuclear testing,” I said, making up a story as I talked. “They were downwind of a bomb site back in the fifties, and the radiation was still poisoning the water. Every place we’ve visited has had a story to tell, and I think when I get back to college I’d like to write a paper about it.” I looked at Ms. Glassman closely, trying to ascertain if she was hiding any information from us. “So what does Dillon have? Suicides, unexplained illnesses, an abnormally high number of … I don’t know, painting accidents?”
Ms. Glassman raised her hands in a helpless shrug, staring at the table as she tried to remember. “I have no idea. Aside from Clete’s foot, and a boy that fell under a thresher that same year … we don’t have anything. If they didn’t take the ambulance to the elementary school every spring, we’d forget we even had one.”
I looked at Brooke, and she looked back at me.
“Will you be staying long?” asked Ms. Glassman.
“No,” said Brooke. “I think we’re leaving later today.”
10
“G, H, I,” said Brooke, cupping her hand as she held it out over the side of the truck, catching the air as it rushed past. “Highway.”
“You told me you can’t just spell things you see,” I said.
“There was a sign,” said Brooke, pointing over my shoulder. “You gotta turn around, you’re missing half the letters.”
“Technically I don’t have any letters.”
“‘Highway’ has an A in it,” she said, “so you could have started there. Besides, I’m stuck on J now, so you’ve got a chance to catch up.”
Ninety-nine dollars and sixty-one cents. We’d bought another pack of beef jerky before we left Dillon, to keep Boy Dog fed on the road. In a truck bed like this we probably could have fed him actual dog food, but you neve
r know what’s going to pick you up.
“We need a Jeep dealership,” said Brooke. “Or a … jelly-bean factory.”
“A jelly-bean factory?”
“They have to come from somewhere, right? Why not right here, in this empty desert wasteland?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking out at the low, empty hills. “Why not?”
With Attina gone, there was only one other Withered we had a good lead on, but we didn’t know much about him. Brooke called him Ron, or sometimes Rain, but I couldn’t imagine either was his real name. Brooke was also scared of him, intensely so, which made getting information out of her harder than usual. He had some kind of power over … something. I still wasn’t sure. Rain, maybe, but that seemed a little on-the-nose. Brooke had said two things on the subject over the last two years: one was “Ron helps people,” and the other was “‘Run from Rain.” Neither made any sense. The second one might not even be a warning, but rather a description of how one name had changed to another. Maybe his name was Run? Interpreting Brooke’s flashes of insight was sometimes harder than finding the Withered themselves. She hadn’t known much about Attina, either.
How were we supposed to hunt them now? After Ron, assuming that Ron wasn’t just another dead end, where did we go next? Was that all of them? Maybe they were all dead and no one was chasing us, we were just running from shadows. We wouldn’t know until they caught us, and then it would be too late. Maybe we could set a trap—give away our position, just a little bit, enough to draw attention and see who shows up. A demonic duck call, quacking in the marsh.
“Where are we?” asked Brooke.
I looked at her. Another personality shift, but she didn’t seem upset. Someone who knew me, at least, and knew how we traveled. I wanted to ask who she was, but I didn’t want her to feel bad.
“Highway 287,” I said. “We’re going to Dallas.”
“Who’s Dallas?”
One of the older ones, then. “Dallas is a city in America.”
“I know that,” she said softly.
“I know you do.”
She touched Boy Dog’s head, not scratching him but drawing her finger slowly down the center of his muzzle, forehead to nose. “Are we married?”
Lucinda, almost certainly—she asked me that almost every time she showed up. “We’re not,” I said, and tried to remember the details of Lucinda’s life. “Your husband’s name is Gaius, I think. Caius, maybe.”
“Caius,” she said, nodding. “But he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“For thousands of years.”
“And so am I.”
The warning flags went up, and I looked out at the highway, hoping to see something I could use to distract her. “A,” I said. “On that license plate.”
“That’s an N.”
“Are you sure?”
“John,” she said, “your eyes are terrible.”
“There’s another crossroads,” I said, pointing ahead. “Chevron station. Um, so, A.”
She laughed, and I wondered if the moment had passed—snipped off before it could grow too fierce. “What word?”
“Station?” I said.
“Nope,” she said, and laughed again. “You can’t just guess about which words are up there, that’s cheating.”
“Then how about that big building?” I asked. Next to the pumps was a large white building, several times larger than a regular gas station. It was too far off the side of the highway for me to read clearly, but it was obviously a restaurant. I took the gamble that it said so on the sign. “A: Restaurant.”
“That doesn’t say ‘restaurant,’ it says ‘The Armadillo Grill.’”
“I didn’t say it said ‘restaurant,’ I said it was ‘a restaurant.’ Called the Armadillo Grill, which has an A in it.”
“Fine,” said Lucinda. “I’ll give you that one. But no more freebies.”
“What do you mean freebies? I had to fight for that A.”
“J,” she said triumphantly. “Right under the Armadillo Grill—it says ‘Buster and Jackie,’ or ‘Beef and Jerky’ or something like that.”
“Boots and Jackets,” I guessed. “B.”
She peered at the sign. “And K, and L, and M, and N, and O, and … dangit, that’s as far as I can go.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “See how easy it gets once you break past J?”
She seemed fine now, distracted from her momentary flash of darkness, but I didn’t dare to just drop the game completely. If I’d been playing in the first place, she might not have started talking about death. “That same sign had C, D, and E,” I said. Now that we were passed the crossroads, signs were scarce, but I saw a road sign and pointed it out. “‘Ogle Cattle.’ I didn’t realize we were that far removed from civilization.”
“You did not actually see a sign like that.”
“I totally did.”
“It said Montague Jacksboro.”
“Not the one I was looking at.”
She swatted at me lightly, then whooped in terror as the truck bumped and we grabbed the sides, holding on as we caught just a millimeter of air. She laughed. “I missed this.”
“They have a lot of pickup trucks in the Roman Empire?”
“Roman … who do you think I am?”
Had she shifted again? “You’re not Lucinda?”
“Who’s Lucinda?”
“You were, a few minutes ago.”
“That must get really disconcerting,” she said.
“Not as disconcerting as you refusing to tell me who you are.”
“Sorry,” she said. “I just assume you know.”
There were only two personalities, aside from Brooke, who would expect that level of closeness. “Nobody?”
“I guess I was wrong,” she said, and winked. “It’s me again, babe. Marci.”
All the levity drained away.
“Where are we going?” asked Marci. “And don’t say ‘to ogle cattle.’”
“To Dallas,” I said. Marci was back. Would this happen all the time now?
“What’s in Dallas?” she asked. “Another Withered?”
“We’re going to pick up another supply drop.”
She looked incredulous. “Someone’s dropping us supplies?”
Apparently not one of the memories that transferred over. “One of the FBI agents we worked with was a former … something,” I said. “Secret agent, Jason Bourne, man-of-mystery kind of person. He died in Fort Bruce, the night we ran away, and we took his go bag—like, all his fake IDs and passports and things like that. There was a list of other little stashes around the country—I assume not a complete list—with little care packages for himself. We’ve been hitting them when we’re in the neighborhood, and Dallas is on the way to Gartner, where the next Withered is supposed to be, so we’re going to stop and see what’s in the stash.”
Marci nodded, thinking about it. “What’s usually there?”
“More IDs—you have no idea how many different IDs this guy had—and some money. It’s our only real source of income. Usually a change of clothes, which never fit us but we can pawn them, and then a gun and some bullets, and sometimes other stuff. The one in Cincinnati had a whole wilderness survival kit: a shovel, a tent, some waterproof matches, a couple of wool blankets. All in a big duffle bag.”
“What happened to it?”
“We still have some of it,” I said. “We moved what we could to our backpacks, and used the tent a bit, but had to leave it behind one night to make a quick exit.”
“Withered?”
“FBI.”
She thought about that a moment. “So they found the campsite, and they know we were using a secret agent tent.”
“If that was a standard-model tent commonly used by secret agents,” I said. “I don’t know if that’s a thing. It was a pretty good tent, I guess; it folded up really small.” I shrugged. “I don’t know what that would tell them, though.”
“As long as they don’t know where any of your frien
d’s stashes are,” she said, “it doesn’t tell them anything.”
“They might be waiting for us,” I admitted. It was a possibility I hadn’t considered; Potash had always been so careful, I couldn’t imagine even his bosses knew where he kept his supplies.
“Are we really that important?” asked Marci. “Why do they want us so bad—did you commit a crime you haven’t told me about?”
“Only if the law protects ancient demons,” I said. “I guess the car we took from Fort Bruce was technically government property, but we abandoned that in the next town, so they probably got it back.”
“What happened in Fort Bruce?”
“Our war came out of the shadows,” I said. “The only reason it didn’t stay out is that everyone who saw it is dead: dozens of people and a handful of Withered. Brooke and I were the only ones who made it out alive. Well, and you, I guess. And Nobody. The media thinks it was organized crime, some kind of mob war or something, but nobody knows who did it or why.”
“Including the FBI,” said Marci. “You’re the only one who knows what happened.”
“They know what we were doing there and they know what we were planning the night it all went wrong. But then our whole team died, and without anyone to report back in, the FBI has no idea how they died. At least not in any detail. For all I know they think I did it.” I paused. “And I did kill one human, so I guess they’re partly right.”
Marci looked at me for a moment, studying my face. “Was it self-defense?”
“Sort of.” I looked out at the passing hills, brown scrub grass dotted here and there with trees. “If I hadn’t killed him I would have died, so I decided that was close enough. But no, he wasn’t actively threatening our lives at the time.”
Marci paused a moment longer, but I couldn’t tell if she was still looking at me or not. “Was he at least bad?”
“Would that make it better?”
“I don’t know.”
“I needed his heart,” I said, looking back at her. There were parts of my life she knew so well, but she deserved to know everything. “The king of the demons was coming for us, and Nathan had already thrown in with it, so he was holding us until it came. I knew I could kill the Withered if I had a heart I could poison, so I killed Nathan and poisoned his.”
