Dying Breath

by Kory M. Shrum

  I slide the car from reverse to drive and slam on the brakes lest I run over the guy blocking my path.

  “Freeze!” a man shouts. Not one voice, but at least three blat at me. Two cops in front have their guns raised, pointed through the windshield at my head. Another cop steps into my periphery, ready to yank open the driver’s side door and drag me into the dirt.

  I only have a second to suck in a sharp breath before I hear the door click open and the hot desert air rushes in.

  Chapter 7

  Maisie

  Jesse?

  Maisie, where are you?

  Jesse’s voice blows through my head like a creepy poltergeist.

  “Jesse?” I say her name. “Jesse, is that you?” I’m talking to an empty living room. Dad’s stretched out, dead at my feet. His feet beneath a coffee table made of fake polished wood.

  Jesse doesn’t respond, and the voice I felt blow through me is gone. Whatever that was, it’s over.

  She wants to find you, Azrael says.

  Azrael is my height with shoulder length black hair. It’s fluffy like a shampoo commercial. Voluminous. Her eyes are gray like Lake Michigan in January. They’re practically silver with the weird moonlight that flickers through them.

  She looks the way I remember her. Shiny breastplate. Big sword. Her wings are dove gray and white underneath. Some have blue at the tips.

  Azrael’s eyes fix on Dad. On his bloody clothes and brutalized neck. Then she flicks up her eyes to meet mine. “Do you want her to find you?”

  I’m about to blurt, Duh. I totally want her to find me. It’s not as if I went with Mom willingly. I want Winnie Pug. I want to know our friends are okay. I’d even like to see Gideon’s stupid face and maybe pull out one of those little hairs growing on his chin.

  I want to hug the hell out of Jess.

  She could use a hug. She saw the love of her life get murdered by her best friend. Then watched her best friend get killed. I brought Ally back, but I couldn’t save Rachel.

  I recall Jesse’s hands reaching out to me, begging me to escape Mom. “Jump! I’ll catch you!”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to see her?” I ask

  “You are protecting your mother,” Azrael says.

  My shoulders slump. “You think I’m a moron.”

  She blinks at me.

  “You think Jesse should kill her.”

  Azrael lowers her sword. Its tip brushes Dad’s boot, and for a second, I wonder if she’s going to lop it off at the ankle.

  “I felt someone die,” I whisper. I can’t look at his jagged neck any more. The sight of all that muscle and junk makes me feel sick. I cross the living room, giving the angel, coffee table, and dead dad a wide berth. I plop down into a high back chair with a fuzzy blanket thrown over one arm.

  The blanket is itchy and an ugly lemon yellow. I push it off the chair. It hits the floor without a sound.

  “Who died?” I ask Azrael.

  She doesn’t answer. I’m not sure if it’s because she doesn’t want to or if it’s because I’m supposed to be able to discern that for myself.

  It’s lame, but I don’t know much about my superpower or how to use it.

  “I can feel them die, but not how,” I say. “Am I supposed to know how they die too?”

  I feel death for a reason. So I can save the person if I want to. And I’ve used my gift that way a few times. If I can get to them soon enough after the death, then my three-breath trick is all it takes to bring them back.

  “I did not hide you from her,” Azrael says, bringing me back to the moment, and the corpse on the floor. “She will find you.”

  I can’t decide how I feel about it. I want Jesse to find me. But I don’t want her to find Mom. What if I run out of the house right now? What if I run into the desert until I find Jesse? Can I call out to her the way she did me?

  I stand up from the armchair and stare at the back door. I can run, I tell myself. I can run right out of here and never look back.

  “You are safer with your sister,” Azrael says. “She will not harm you, unlike him.”

  Him. My eyes slide over the corpse on the floor before returning to the desert. Hurt me. That’s one way to put it. My fingers instinctively fall to my thighs, scratching at the denim. The fabric is too thick to feel them, but the scars are there, underneath.

  The front door pops open, and I jump. Mom bursts in with an armful of plastic bandages. Azrael is gone, forced out by my Mom’s aura or polarity or whatever we’re calling the weird mojo following the partis around. But I don’t need to know what Azrael was going to say.

  Him. My dad.

  I’m safer with Jesse than with Dad because Dad will hurt me. Again.

  It’s only a matter of time.

  “I ditched the truck.” Mom kicks the front door closed with her foot. “She won’t be able to track it.”

  Jesse’s following me, not the car, I want to say. More lame stupidity. But I want to warn her. I want her to let me go.

  “So are we leaving now?” I don’t want to be in Sam’s house. The urge to leave is like an itch on my back I can’t reach.

  “I want to sew him up first. He can’t heal with his neck like that.”

  Instead, I blurt out. “What’ve you got?”

  “Bandages.”

  She drops to her knees beside Dad’s body and starts ripping open plastic packages. Her cherry red fingernails shred everything. The right index nail is broken off, jagged along the top instead round like the others. She doesn’t seem to notice.

  Ace bandages and cottony clumps tumble onto the carpet. One bounces off Dad’s pale face. Mom frowns at him. She brings up a hand and touches his cheek before leaning in to kiss him.

  I look away, heat burning in my cheeks. It’s too weird to watch.

  “I’m right here, Eric,” she whispers. Her voice trembles. It makes all the muscles in my stomach knot up. These weird tender moments between them always make me feel that way. But my parents being into each other doesn’t even make it to the Top Five Problems I Have Right Now list.

  My eyes stay focused on the checkered recliner and the big wooden handle at its side. I imagine if I pull it, the footrest will pop up. Someone likes to come home and plop into this chair, yank the handle, and then spend the rest of the night watching television.

  God, what a life!

  I don’t look up until I hear cabinets opening and closing. Wood slamming against wood.

  Mom pauses in the doorway reading the label on a big brown bottle of peroxide.

  “Help me.” She drops to her knees beside dad, twisting off the cap of the peroxide.

  I join her beside him, but I hate being this close. For one, the smell. The A/C is on full blast which seems to minimize the grossness, but when I’m this close to a rapidly putrefying corpse, cold can only do so much.

  I turn my head away, and Mom clucks her tongue. “Don’t go wimpy on me now, Maisie. I need your help.”

  She slides one towel under dad’s head and another over her shoulder, to wipe her hands on as she goes. Then she pours the peroxide over dad’s sliced throat. The open wound bubbles and hisses. It’s like a mouth full of Pop Rocks.

  The bloody pink foam and the rot of roadkill make me turn my head away. I suck in a breath and try not to vomit on Dad. Mom would be pissed if I did.

  “I want you to hold his head in place while I sew.” Mom opens a black canvas sewing kit on the floor beside Dad’s skull. She unzips it, flipping the cover open. It falls flat. A dozen bright needles shine in the lamplight. Along with threads of all kinds. Mom’s fingers pass over the thin sewing threads, red, green, gold, and white. And she grabs a thick piece of twine instead. It could be burlap maybe. Then she selects a large hooked needle.

  “Jesus.” I pinch my eyes closed, but I was too slow. The crazy needle flashes on the back of my eyelids. “Is that what you’re going to use?”

  “I need to get through the muscle too.” Her voice is muffled as she pinches the
twine between her teeth and tries to thread it through the hooked gold needle.

  The muscle too. God, why are bodies so gross? My stomach turns. I look away, fixating on the clock on the wall. My eyes trace the octagon frame. I should be in school. Or if not in school, at least on the computer watching my favorite TV shows or texting my friends. I should not be holding a head to a neck so my mom can sew it on.

  I thought looking away would help, but it doesn’t. Not looking at the head makes it heavier in my hands.

  “Maisie,” Mom scolds. “Watch what you’re doing.”

  I put a knee on either side of Dad’s temple and take his head in my hands again. It’s cold and slick with—oh, I don’t know and don’t want to know. Juice? Dead body juice? I push the head down onto the stump of his neck as Mom bends over with the needle. When the needlepoint pricks the flesh above his sliced throat, I pinch my eyes closed.

  Parties. I tell myself. Some girl crying over a stupid boy who doesn’t love her enough. Getting into trouble for drinking with my friends. When my beloved dog dies after a long and happy life. Getting a B on a test I studied hard for. That should be the worst of it. Not this.

  Jeanne d'Arc was but a child when she was called, Azrael whispers.

  She was nineteen when she was burned at the stake. She had three years on me.

  She had a life of poverty, hardship, and war, Azrael argues. Child warriors fill this world.

  She’s right, of course. I shouldn’t whine. There are people in the world that have it way worse than me right now. As horrible as holding a head between my hands is, it’s a guarantee that right now someone somewhere is going through worse. Kids even younger than me.

  “Maisie! Come on!” The head slides away from the neck. I readjust, connecting flesh with flesh and add more pressure.

  When I close my eyes again, I can still see the puckered flesh pulled tight between the thick twine. And gristle. White gristle protruding through—

  I inhale, but it smells like a corpse.

  I turn and vomit onto my shoe. And it’s like breaking a dam. Once I puke, puking a second time is much easier. If Mom is bitching about it, I can’t hear her. Not over the wet sounds coming from my throat.

  My nose burns and I groan. A third convulsion tightens my stomach, but only hot bile comes out on the third heave, stinging my nose. On the fourth, only air.

  One benefit, oddly enough, is now the air smells like vomit—acrid and sour—instead of a corpse. Small mercies.

  On the downside, my sneaker is warm and soggy, chunks of vomit caked into my laces. Awesome.

  “Better?” Mom asks.

  I nod and resume holding his head in place. It goes on and on. The sewing. The pressure. Dad’s head wobbling in my grip when Mom tugs the twine tight.

  “Help me turn him over,” Mom says. “Prop his head on your knee. Just like that. Perfect.”

  Mom starts on the side of his neck, working her way toward the spine.

  “You’re doing great,” she whispers. Her eyes cut up to mine. “Very brave.”

  I snort. “The puking was extraordinarily brave.”

  Mom spares a half smile. “I’m sure you haven’t slept well. That always upsets my stomach. Add a few adrenaline spikes, everything else that’s happened, and the smell…”

  She pulls the string tighter with her teeth as if it hasn’t just been through Dad’s corpse flesh.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” she finishes, once the needle is out of her mouth. “That’s all I’m saying.”

  I nod. Thanks doesn’t quite make it out of my mouth.

  “There,” she says, rolling Dad back onto his back. She lifts the opposite side to add a few more stitches, and Dad’s head comes to rest on my other knee. “All done.”

  I slide back from the body. “I’d kill someone for a shower.”

  As soon as I say it, a strange feeling rolls over my skin. I can’t say things like that. Not in this family. Someone might take me seriously.

  Mom points toward the dark bedroom where she’d emerged with the sewing kit. “There’s a shower through there. I’ll look around for some clothes that might fit you.”

  My heart throbs. “Thanks, Mom.”

  She smiles and for the first time I get a good look at her face. She’s sweaty and dirty and puffy purple circles droop beneath her baby blue eyes. Her ponytail has come undone. She seems to realize this the same time I do. She reaches up and pulls the hair tie out, letting her hair fall to her shoulders. It’s the same golden hue as mine.

  The urge to hug her wells up inside me. It does that sometimes, even when I’m mad.

  “Go on,” she says, using the arm of the recliner to pull herself up. “We won’t be here long.”

  I limp into the bathroom on my swollen ankle and find a shower stall adjacent to the bedroom. The en suite bathroom is tiny. The stall and the toilet sit in a closet-sized room, with two vanity sinks outside, a stone’s throw from the bed itself.

  I step into the shower stall before I strip out of the grubby clothes. I throw the clothes on the bathroom rug. I keep the shoes in the stall with me.

  Naked, I turn on the hot tap. Cold water hits my back, and I hiss. Slowly it warms, and my shoulder blades stop trying to grab on to one another.

  I start with my shoes. No point in cleaning myself and then tackling the vomit. I squat in the stall and pull out the laces. I use bar soap on the canvas and then on the laces themselves. I rinse them until no soapy suds ooze out.

  Then I tackle my hair.

  I’m moving slow. On purpose. If Mom wants to hit the road, I’ve got to slow her down.

  Dad can’t wake up. He can’t. And yet, I didn’t do a damn thing to stop Mom from sewing him up, did I? And why not? It isn’t like Dad doesn’t have it coming.

  I look down at my thighs. Scars crisscross the flesh from mid-thigh to knee.

  What happened to the carnival glass bowl, Maisie?

  I don’t know, Daddy, I don’t.

  Liar liar pants on fire. Do you know what I do to liars, Maisie? I hurt them.

  I angle the shower head, turning it toward my face. I push Dad out of my thoughts with each scrub, each scrape under my nails until there’s nothing left for me to do but let the water run cold.

  Mom put clothes on the double bed while I showered. Jeans and a belt. A T-shirt and socks.

  Everything’s a little big. And the style says boy. That’s probably what the belt is all about. I dress, detangle my hair, and brush my teeth with an unopened toothbrush from a spare drawer. The only deodorant I find is this musky male deodorant that smells like someone’s grandpa. I skip it. I’m done with strong smells for the day, thanks.

  I also find a bandage I can wrap my swollen ankle in. I do, and the pressure feels great. It gives me a peg-leg kind of walk, but the tender muscles stop throbbing.

  I’m pulling a comb through my hair when I step into the living room, wet sneakers in hand. “Mom?”

  “In here,” she says.

  The vomit and the blood’s gone from the carpet. The carpet’s soaked, and a bowl of soapy water sits by the coffee table, off to one side.

  “I’m in here,” Mom says again.

  I step over the wet spot and follow her voice into another bedroom. This one has only a twin-sized bed pushed up against a wall. It’s Sun Devils everything. Posters, bedding, yellow curtains, and a team flag.

  This is Sam’s room, the sweet boy from town, probably wondering where I ran off to before he could return with the soda. It’s probably a local thing, this whole ASU Sun Devil fandom. Like the Cubs in Chicago. On certain days, a sea of red and blue floods the subway.

  Dad’s on the twin bed, Sam’s bed, his hands laced over his chest, looking more like a corpse than ever.

  “I want you to sit with him while I shower,” Mom says. She’s frowning at her nails.

  I’m about to argue sitting with a corpse is not my idea of a good time, but she’s out the door before I can speak up.

  “I
f you get the urge to wake him up that would be great.” She’s mad again.

  I stand in the middle of Sam’s room, my dead father lying on top of an old comforter until I hear the shower turn on.

  What happened to the carnival glass bowl, Maisie?

  I don’t know, Daddy, I don’t.

  I take a seat at the desk beside the bed. The chair wobbles when I sit down, and my arms shoot out to balance me. The desk doesn’t look super sturdy either.

  There’s a copy of Never Quit: The Michael Jordan Story on the desk beside a laptop. But the laptop is password protected. Bummer. I could totally lose myself in some cat memes or a good internet spiral right now.

  “I’m not waking you up.” I spin the chair toward Dad. I fall back against the chair and prop my bum ankle on the bed. The elevation is supposed to be good for swelling, and I should probably do all I can to get fighting fit as soon as possible. If I thought the fighting was over, I’d be a moron.

  “Jesse’s coming,” I whisper to him. “She’s coming, and she’s going to kill you.”

  Dad doesn’t open his eyes. He doesn’t even blink. The gross sheen of unknown fluids gives his skin a waxy look.

  “She’ll kill you and then we’re going to be okay. Me, Mom, and Jesse. We’re going to be fine without you. Better than fine. Freaking great. Enjoy your nap because I’m not waking you up.”

  If I keep saying it, it might come true.

  Chapter 8

  Jesse

  “What did I do?” I try to sound innocent and surprised. This is a small town. They might recognize Donnie’s truck and think I’m a common thief. Or I’m a suspicious person who isn’t from around here, hovering outside a crime scene.

  I let the officer who tore open the door pull me out of the cab. Innocent people don’t struggle, so I keep my hands up and eyes wide until I’m sure I can’t sweet talk my way out of this.

  “Jesse Sullivan, you are under arrest. Anything you say can…”

  Jesse Sullivan.

  Well, there goes my innocence.

  If they know my name, they aren’t arresting me for killing the people at this hotel. Or if they are, those deaths are simply part of a long list of crimes already laid against me, thanks to Caldwell. When we managed to rescue Maisie from his crazy ass, and Caldwell couldn’t find us, he used his mind control mojo to manipulate half the world. Damn the news and all its cameras. You can’t believe anything you see on television these days.