by Dan Wells
I stopped, not daring to answer. She was right, about part of it at least—all the people I’d connected with were dead.
“Am I?” she asked again.
“It’s more than that,” I said. “It’s like…” I stopped, trying to put it into words. “Okay, imagine that you wanted to bake a loaf of bread. You’ve baked bread, right?”
“All the time.”
“And you had … I don’t know what kind of resources you had. A market or something where you could buy flour and yeast and all that.”
“What’s yeast?”
“The stuff that makes it rise,” I said. “What’s it called—leaven.”
“Yes.” She nodded. “We bought all of that at the market.”
“So imagine that everyone else in town can just go to the market and get whatever they need and bake bread all … willy-nilly. All the bread they want, all the time. But you can’t. You have to plow your own field, and grow your own wheat, and harvest it, and grind it, and then build your own oven out of stone or clay or whatever you built your ovens with, and then raise your own trees and chop them down for firewood, and then you get you own leaven from … wherever the hell leaven comes from—”
“We’d starve,” said Regina.
“You would,” I said. “You’d spend your whole life making two loaves of bread—just two loaves—and they would mean everything to you. All the effort it took to make them, all the time and the struggle and the thinking it would be impossible, watching everyone around you make bread every day all the time like it was nothing, and you just sit by yourself and wonder how any of it can even make sense, thinking maybe they’re all just lying to you, like it’s some huge joke that the whole world is playing on you, and then one day you finally do it. You make your two loaves. And then…” It was too much, and I trailed off.
Regina nodded and her voice was soft. She stroked Boy Dog’s fur as she spoke. “And then you make another loaf, and it’s easier than the first two, and it feels wrong, and you don’t dare to touch it because the first two were special, and if you treat this one the same it will make the first two seem less special.”
I stared at the sky, watching for stars that never came out. “Yeah.”
She sat in silence for a moment, and we watched the clouds drift slowly overhead, dark shapes against the dark sky.
“Who were your loaves?” she asked.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s fair,” she said. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay. Then what do I want to talk about?”
I looked at her. “You don’t know?”
“Of course I know,” said Regina. “Do you?”
“Your kid, maybe? I don’t know.”
“Then find out.”
I sighed and laid my head back down on my backpack. “Fine. What do you want to talk about?”
“You could be a little less blunt about it.”
“You want me to trick you into telling me what you want to talk about?”
“I want us to have a conversation,” she said. “Not just you talking at me, or me talking at you. We’ll talk with each other.”
“The other girls are never this much trouble.”
“Are the other girls married?” asked Regina.
“Up until you came along I used to think none of them were,” I said. “Nobody was always looking for perfection, for the prettiest girl with the best life.”
“And somehow that means none of them are married?”
“She wanted … boyfriends,” I said. “Nice clothes. Lots of friends. She wanted the dream.”
“Most people’s dream is being married,” said Regina.
“Maybe she didn’t want to be trapped.”
“Maybe she wanted a strong relationship with someone who loved her,” said Regina. “That’s not a trap.”
I thought about my own parents. “Sometimes it is.”
“And sometimes you get a stone in your shoe,” said Regina. “That doesn’t mean all shoes are full of stones.”
“I … guess I hadn’t thought about that.”
She smiled. “It sounds like there are a lot of things you haven’t thought about.”
“Not everyone gets to think about the things they want to think about,” I said.
“Now there’s an interesting topic,” said Regina, leaning forward. “What does John Cleaver think about, when no one is forcing him to think about anything else?”
“Honestly?”
“Girls love to be lied to,” she said.
I glanced at her, narrowing my eyes. “Really?”
“Of course not,” she said with a smirk. “Tell me honestly.”
I shrugged, though laying in the grass it was more of a shoulder flop than anything else. I looked back up at the sky. “I think about the next Withered on our list and how to kill it.”
“That doesn’t count,” said Regina. “The mission you’re on is focusing your thoughts down that path. Get beyond that, to just your own mind: what do you think about, when you have nothing else to think about?”
I thought back to my old life, to my quiet times, to the moments between the terror and the pain and the loss, when I could just be myself, with no one else and nothing else, and … that was really it, wasn’t it? That’s what I thought about. Alone in my room, or in the embalming room, in some quiet corner.
“I think about peace,” I said.
“Is your country at war?”
“Not that kind of peace,” I said. “Peace and quiet. The absence of noise and trouble and problems.”
“You think about happy times you used to have,” said Regina, but I shook my head.
“Happiness is just as bad as sadness,” I said. “For most of my life I didn’t even know what happiness was, or joy, or anything else. Feelings were hard for me, good or bad, and it was better to just not feel anything at all to avoid the complication.”
“Then what else is there?”
“I…” I stopped myself. “I can’t talk about that with you.”
“With me?”
“With Brooke,” I said, “or any of the minds inside of her.”
Regina nodded Brooke’s head and stared at the ground for a moment. After a while she spoke again, and her words were almost too quiet to hear. “That means it’s death.”
“Yeah,” I said. Death was the greatest peace I’d ever seen, the greatest calm I’d ever felt. Dead bodies were quiet and still and perfect. I was never more comfortable, more peaceful, than when everything around me was dead. “You understand why I can’t talk about that with Brooke, right?”
“Because she’ll kill herself,” said Regina.
“She’s killed herself a hundred thousand times,” I said. “It’s as much a part of her as eating.”
Regina nodded again. “I remember when Nobody killed me,” she said. “She was convinced that another girl in our village was better—happier, prettier, that kind of thing. That her baby didn’t cry and her husband talked more.”
“She wanted her life to be perfect,” I said again. “She lived a hundred thousand lives and it never was.”
The sky was almost black now, deep as a bottomless pit above us, and I felt a moment of vertigo, thinking I should clutch the grass to keep from falling up, plummeting away from the Earth and out into that vast expanse of nothing. A part of me wanted to go, bracing for the rush of wind and speed and fear. I didn’t grab anything but I didn’t fall away.
“All of her lives were perfect,” said Regina. “She just never saw it.”
“Perfect until she got there,” I said.
“No,” said Regina. “That’s not what I mean. There were problems in every life before she came into them, and there would have been problems after. What I mean is that life is work and pain and trial, and that’s what makes it worth living. The only thing broken about Nobody was that she didn’t want to admit it.”
“I don’t think anybody wants to admi
t that,” I said.
“Everybody has to eventually,” said Regina. “It’s how we grow up.”
I looked up at the sky again, looking for a light, but all I saw were the lights on the tops of the refinery chimneys, blinking on and off like tiny white eyes. One by one more lights came on, up and down the chimneys, glinting on the pipes, shining from every corner of every frame and lattice and walkway. They shone in the darkness like a city made of stars.
“It’s a fairy castle,” Regina whispered. The thousand tiny lights reflected in Brooke’s eyes, and I looked away.
“Ten minutes ago it was the ugliest thing you’d ever seen,” I said.
“I feel sorry for you,” said Regina, “that you live in a world this beautiful and all you see are the bad parts.”
“It’s an oil refinery.”
“And it’s beautiful,” she insisted. “Things can be more than one thing.”
I turned back to the towers of light, sparkling like jewels—white and yellow, and here and there a red one, spires and balconies and sweeping arches against a background so dark it looked like the metal itself had faded away, and the lights were hovering in the air by magic.
“I wish Marci could be here to see this,” I breathed.
“Who’s Marci?”
“She’s…” I paused, trying to think of how to answer. “One of my loaves.”
“Go ahead and say it,” she said softly. “It’s okay.”
My voice was a whisper. “She was someone I loved.”
13
Regina was gone the next morning, and Brooke woke up, bleary-eyed, asking where we were. I filled her in while Boy Dog sniffed and huffed and walked around our makeshift campsite, chewing on things and peeing on things and making himself at home. We wouldn’t stay long enough for any of it to matter.
“Where to next?” asked Brooke.
“Gartner,” I said. “Rain’s the only one left that we know how to find. Or at least where to start looking.” I checked our money as I packed my things, wincing at the dwindling amount. “I wish we could go back for that stash of supplies.”
“Iowa’s probably watching it,” said Brooke. When I’d told her about the SUV she’d decided it must have been from the FBI, but I wasn’t so sure—we didn’t know what the Withered could do, so it was entirely possible that one of them was tracking us somehow. Besides, if I picked one option I’d be ignoring the other, so I’d rather be afraid of both and ready for everything.
“Tell me about Rain,” I said.
“Run from Rain,” said Brooke, automatically, as if it was an instinctual reaction. It was the same thing she’d said before, and she said it the same way.
“Is Rain that frightening?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Brooke. “I don’t know why, I just know that I’m scared. Like it’s a part of me, deep inside.”
The same way Regina knew she loved me, I thought. The personalities shared emotions and core knowledge better than they shared specific thoughts or discrete information. Maybe I could use that.
“What kind of fear is it?” I asked. “When you think about Rain, do you feel trapped? Do you feel rushed, like someone’s chasing you? Do you feel alone or helpless or … I don’t know, disgusted?”
Brooke thought about it for a moment, tapping her finger on her half-packed backpack. After a while she said, “I feel small.”
“So Rain is big?”
“Or I’m just small.”
“Fair enough.” I looked down at my own pack, refolding the blanket I’d used as a bedroll. We were on the northwest edge of Dallas, if I’d read the map correctly, which meant that hitching a ride down to Gartner would be tricky without going back through the middle of the city again. If they knew where we were coming from, did they know where we were going? Would they be watching the highways to see where we went? We were too conspicuous now—dirty enough to stand out in any crowd, with a recognizable dog and that distinct “all our worldly possessions are in this backpack” kind of look that made truly homeless people so easy to spot. The FBI was looking for us, and the Withered, and probably the local cops as well after I’d caused that car accident the day before. We needed to change our look and our methods.
With fifty-two dollars and fifty-one cents.
“Do you remember that truck stop we passed right before the refinery?” asked Brooke.
I frowned at her. “Do you? You weren’t even you when we passed it.”
“Not really,” she said. “But I know we passed one.” She smiled. “You said something cute about it—what was it?”
“I don’t remember, but I was just thinking—”
“Something about the name,” said Brooke. “It was like a pun, it was really funny. I didn’t get it then, because I didn’t speak English, but I get it now. Was it a TA?”
“It was a Flying J,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“I want to go back there and shower,” I said. “They even have a laundromat, so we won’t have to wash our clothes in the sink.”
“That sounds expensive,” said Brooke.
“Ten bucks apiece,” I said. “Plus two for the washer and two for the dryer. But we have to clean up or we’ll never get anywhere.”
“So that’ll be…” she tilted her eyes back, adding in her head. “About twenty-eight dollars left.” She wiggled her eyebrows, grinning at me.
“How on earth did you know that?”
“You talk in your sleep,” she said. “I was hoping it would be something salacious, or at least something creepy, but apparently you just count money.”
I finished packing my bag and stood up. Boy Dog stood with me. “I’m full of surprises.”
She grinned slyly. “We could save ten bucks by showering together.”
“No.”
“I’m kidding,” she said. “I’m totally kidding. But you get this really funny look on your face when I talk about sex. It’s great.”
“Sex is inextricably linked with violence in the vast majority of serial killers—”
“Ugh,” said Brooke, finishing her own pack and standing up. “Please tell me more about your carefully calibrated psychological profile.”
“I’m trying to keep you safe.”
“I don’t always want ‘safe,’” she said.
“All the more reason for me to protect you.”
“Thanks for keeping me alive,” she said. “You know I really do appreciate it, right? Teasing aside?”
“I do,” I said. “Thank you.” She’d probably appreciate it more if I hadn’t gotten her possessed in the first place, but there you go.
We hiked back to the highway and then six more miles to the truck stop. I didn’t want to spend the money for showers, but we needed it, and it would help us hide. I gave Brooke the first turn, and while she was in the stall I threw all our clothes into the biggest washer they had and then wrote a short letter for Brooke’s other personalities to read if they surfaced while we were apart:
My name is John, and you know me. I’m in the shower right now, and our clothes are in the washer. The basset hound you see roaming around is named Boy Dog, and no I didn’t name him, but he’s ours, and it’s very important for you to stay with him and with the laundry. I’ll be out as soon as I can. You are wonderful, and I’m excited to see you again.
That last bit was a suicide deterrent, just in case; the rest was to keep her from wandering off. She’d only left once in the last year, at a bus station somewhere in Nebraska, and I’d only just managed to find her, hitchhiking out in front. She was about to get into someone’s truck when I ran up to her, half dressed and still soaked from my shower. Showers were the only time we were really apart, and I didn’t want her to get confused and leave again, so I’d started writing her letters. She hadn’t run off again, so I guess they worked.
I thought about her body in the shower, naked and wet and—
No.
She came out of the shower looking fresh scrubbed and satisfied,
though she was dressed in her old dirty clothes again because everything else was in the wash. I talked with her just long enough to make sure she was still Brooke and that she knew what we were doing here, and then I gave her the letter and told her to keep it in her hand no matter what. I slipped into the shower stall I’d paid for and washed as quickly as I could, which turned out to be a solid eight minutes before I was convinced that I’d gotten all the dust and mud out of my hair. It was long, and I needed to cut it again, for ease of maintenance if nothing else. I threw my dirty clothes back on and stepped back into the hall, relieved to see Brooke still waiting for me.
“That was fast,” she said. “Mine was, like, twice that long.”
“We paid for it,” I said. “You may as well get the most you can out of it.”
“But not you?”
I did a quick visual check of the hall, making sure we still had all of our stuff. “I’m fine.”
“The washer’s still going,” she said, pointing toward the laundry room down the hall. “How much longer do you think we have?”
“Ten minutes, maybe,” I said. “Then another hour or so for the dryer.”
“We could eat,” she said.
I shook my head, thinking about our money. “Not in the restaurant.”
“The burger place?”
“The most cost-effective source of nutrients in a truck stop is the snack aisle,” I said. “We’ll get pretzels sticks, sunflower seeds, and some baby carrots from the cooler section if they have them. We can drink out of the drinking fountain.”
“You really know how to show a girl a good time.”
“What?” I said, straightening up in mock offense. “You don’t find thriftiness exciting?”
“Not as exciting as extravagance.”
“Come on, then,” I said. “We can watch some of the rich people eat sandwiches.”
Ten minutes later we were back in the laundry room, spitting out sunflower shells and watching the news on a TV in the corner. I switched the washed clothes into the dryer and dropped in eight quarters. Nineteen dollars and thirty-two cents. The money was going too fast, and if we couldn’t rely on Potash’s depots to replenish it, we’d be completely broke in just a couple of weeks. What would we do after that?
