Good Girls

by Glen Hirshberg

  As she swung the spade over her head, Rebecca saw Sophie register her, too, from inside the Sombrero-Man’s head. Her eyes were sticking out the side of his skull like extra eyes, one creature’s eyes, filmed over with red. There was nothing in them but hunger.

  At least, that was all Rebecca saw. That’s what she would tell herself, later. And even if it wasn’t. Even if that twitch in Sophie’s eyes really had been … a wink … which was what it had looked like … there really was no other choice.

  With a shriek, Rebecca slammed down the spade. When she lifted it, the singing started again immediately, only it was mostly whistling, this time, like a teakettle gone mad. She slammed down again, onto—into—both faces. The one on top splintered, with nothing left to support it. The one beneath gave way. Rebecca kept smashing until all the screaming and singing and whistling stopped, until the spade seemed to be smashing dirt, not bone, not skin.

  Then she slammed some more.

  When she stopped, staggered back, and looked up, she found Joel and Jess standing together by the fire pit. They were leaning into each other, staring at her in amazement.

  “I’ve got to go find Trudi and Kaylene,” Rebecca said. Without so much as a glance at the mess she’d made, she dropped the spade and started into the woods to do just that.

  * * *

  “Sit still,” Jess said, leaning in again with her gauze and washcloths while Rebecca slumped back against Amanda’s worktable. Gently, Jess probed, pressed, wiped away. Beyond her, Rebecca could see Joel and Benny seated on the stairs, Joel holding Trudi, Benny rocking Eddie.

  “And you,” Jess snapped, not even looking at Kaylene but sensing Kaylene’s bandaged, still-bloodied head drooping again toward the tabletop. “I told you. You can’t sleep.”

  “Isn’t that just in case you have a concussion?” Kaylene murmured, shaking herself. Jess had gone at her, first. Most of the blood had been wiped away, though there was still a dried, crusted trickle on her forehead.

  “Honey, you have a concussion.”

  “Right. So now we know. So I might as well sleep.” A guttural moan spilled from her throat. Rebecca started to her feet, and Jess shoved her back again.

  “Sit.”

  “Jess, I told you. He never even touched me.”

  “There are scratches all over you.”

  “From branches. From running.”

  And then, abruptly, Rebecca was crying again. She looked at Jess, who raised a cloth to mop the tears but didn’t use it. Instead, she held Rebecca’s gaze. After a while, she cupped Rebecca’s chin in her hand. They stayed that way a long time. Their sorrows were shared, familiar, instantly recognizable to one another, though their losses were their own.

  At some point, Rebecca glanced across the room and saw Joel and Benny leaning together, too. Jess followed her gaze. The sight seemed to brace her. She straightened, and Rebecca watched her fight for—and almost get—control of her face. But that just brought the sight of Sophie’s face—Sophie’s last wink—swimming up into Rebecca’s vision. Instantly, that song went off again in her ears, the one the Sombrero-Man had unleashed on her at the moment she’d smashed the life completely out of him.

  “She sucks all … the sweet flowers…”

  Then Jess grabbed her hand and tugged her to her feet. They stood in Amanda’s kitchen among their remaining loved ones: Kaylene at the end of the table with Trudi’s sock puppet pulled down over one of her hands, Joel and Trudi on the stairs, Benny and Eddie on the stair below them.

  “Look at us,” Jess said, wiping, uselessly at her own tears.

  They looked together, Rebecca and Jess. They held on to each other. It would be a long time, Rebecca thought, before she let go of this woman.

  “Jess,” she said, after a long, merciful silence while just holding Jess’s hand, leaning into her, while Jess leaned back. “What … I mean. What do we do now?”

  And Jess stirred, looked around the room. Then she was looking only at Rebecca. The faintest, ghostliest smile flickered, just once, on her mouth. “I don’t know, hon. I think … I guess we eat.”

  So they got up together, and set about making that happen.

  * * *

  From underneath—from the protective tortoiseshell she’d somehow made from the Whistler’s shattered skull, the bike helmet she’d created, in the instant, out of what had been his brainpan, while Jess’s new substitute-daughter rained down blow after blow with her shovel—Sophie listened and waited, lying still, until long after everyone had gone. Her own head buzzed with aches, rang with the blows that hadn’t quite broken it and might or might not have been meant to.

  You had to give it to that girl, Sophie thought. She had made her decision. And then she’d followed through on it.

  Like Natalie would have.

  Except that Natalie would have checked, afterward, to see if Sophie was still under there or not. Then she would have faced that murderous decision, and made that one, too, one way or the other.

  Pushing Whistler-bits aside, crying out as the wrist Rebecca had apparently broken bent all the way back on its joint, Sophie pulled herself free. She kept having to spit, over and over, gag and spit, even though it didn’t help. At least she had now confirmed for herself what Natalie had learned, on the night Natalie had indeed tried to kill her: we taste like shit, she thought.

  She spit again, coughed, and at least dislodged a gob of Whistler-brain from the back of her throat, vomiting that onto the dirt like a cat with a hairball. When she was all the way out of the Whistler’s body, standing on her stumps in the dirt in the center of the clearing, in dark that had gone moonless, now, in woods that were small-hour quiet, Sophie put her hands on her hips and gazed around, taking stock. She’d discovered one advantage of being a stump tonight, anyway: there was less of her to break.

  But her face ached. And her wrist … that was going to take days to heal, even the way she healed, now. She was sure her eyes were black, her nose pummeled. Also, her teeth ached from sawing through so much skull to all that cold, sloshy Whistler-pudding.

  Which was Whistler no longer, because she really had done it. She’d avenged Natalie, and herself, for whatever that was worth, to anyone.

  Bad guys, 1,000, she thought. Good girls, 1.

  Dragging herself to the other side of the fire pit, through wet spots in the dirt—some of which were dew—she collected the little speaker she’d set up. The tiny black box where Natalie lived, now. In her pocket, Sophie found her phone, still intact. She couldn’t resist hitting Send, setting off the Bluetooth speaker one last time.

  “HEY bay-beee…” said the speaker, in Natalie’s voice.

  “Hey baby,” Sophie said. She started to hum, but a different song, an older one. One of Natalie’s all-time faves. “We’re walkin’. Yes indeed.”

  Then the speaker was in her hand, the phone in her pocket. She was all but out of the clearing when she heard the moan.

  At another time—in another life—Sophie might have mistaken the sound for an owl, or the soughing of wind. But not this time. Spinning on her stumps, crying out each time she had to lean on her broken wrist, she swung around and across the ground; she reached the side of the whimpering girl in no time.

  “Oh, sugar,” she said, gazing down at the blond, broken thing, bent backward, splayed against the fire pit. Some of her spine poked through the back of her shredded shirt, propping her against the side of the pit like a kickstand. “My goodness. Look what he did to you.”

  Danni gazed helplessly up, eyes wild with terror, unless that was pain. Mostly terror, Sophie suspected. She doubted this girl was feeling pain or anything else, at this point. She could still cry, though, apparently. And she looked furious. Good for her.

  “It’s okay,” Sophie said. If she’d still had a lap, she would have laid the girl’s head in it. As it was, she simply settled herself against her. She stroked the long blond hair. Presumably, the girl could still feel that; at least, it seemed she could. She stopped m
oaning. Her panic didn’t so much abate as level.

  “It’s okay,” Sophie said again, stroking the girl’s hair. She thought of Natalie, safely in her pocket, now, and then of Jess, who had probably loved Sophie once. Certainly, Jess would never love her again. “It’s okay.” She looked down at this new girl. This fierce, fighting thing. Oh, yes. Sophie could still see the fight in there. “Look at you,” she said.

  Then she struck, so fast and hard that she was sure the girl never saw—never even imagined—what was coming.

  And that’s something, Sophie thought as she drank. And I’m sorry.

  But after all. A girl had to eat.

  28

  Almost until the very last moment, Caribou attributed his unease, his sense of dislocation, to the strangeness of this entire day: Aunt Sally’s break with Policy, and the discovery of Ju in the woods, and the drive back to camp with her and the laughing Spider-kids and his loving Ann; the impulse to run, for the first time in his life or afterlife, and then the calliope and the bouncy castle, the circus tent and the games, the screaming and spatters of color as the Party started in earnest, while Aunt Sally sat outside in the dust in the Delta moonlight with Ju on her lap, just stroking the child’s hair. Instead of creating that giddiness, that rush of heightened reality that Aunt Sally’s Parties usually did, this one had left Caribou … actually, he didn’t even know what. He wasn’t sad, whatever that was, and he wasn’t bored, either. He just … wasn’t here. Even as he sucked the last meat off the few fingers he had dutifully salvaged from the fray—the Spider-girl’s, he suspected, judging by their length, their surprising tenderness—he marveled, distantly, at the lack of any taste.

  And then, right as the tent walls erupted in flame, the flames shooting across the floor and up the legs of all the feasting monsters, setting them dancing all over again, screaming and dancing, Caribou rocked to his feet and realized exactly what had happened. The detachment he’d been feeling—like everything he had ever felt—wasn’t actually his own. And it wasn’t really detachment. It was absence. Aunt Sally’s absence. Her detachment, from all of them. Because she had reached a crossroads, and chosen.

  As for the meat’s lack of taste, that wasn’t any emotional side effect, but a physical one, the result of the kerosene—or turpentine, or whatever concoction Aunt Sally had soaked every shred of this tent with before erecting it while the monsters were out fetching supplies—that now filled his nostrils, burning out his sense of smell. That’s what that odor was.

  Or rather, had been. Now, the only odor was flesh, burning. The reek of that seared away all others.

  The reek of his own flesh, burning.

  In disbelief, Caribou stared down at his pants legs. Vines of twisting white-red light shot up them, entwining at his waist, engulfing him. Fire-kudzu, he thought, swaying, unable, even now, to drag himself all the way back inside his own body.

  Then, with a shriek—as the others collided, careened, bellowed like alligators, squealed like pigs, exploded, melted into each other—he hurled himself at the tiny gap between canvas and earth at the bottom of the nearest tent wall, the little thread of night just visible there. It was like diving through a waterfall of fire, or into fire’s mouth; the heat somehow intensified as he hit the dirt and rolled, screaming. The giant tent behind him billowed, spitting plumes of eerily transparent smoke skyward, and there were shapes in that smoke, souls shredding. Caribou rolled and screamed, felt his legs flare, his shoulders, his chest, but he just kept rolling, listening to his skin hissing and whispering, as though everyone he’d ever known—or eaten—was pouring through his pores, escaping up the smoke toward oblivion.

  He rolled to a stop, let himself sizzle. For a while, he had no idea how long, he lay there in the wet and loamy Delta earth. Behind him, the screaming reached a crescendo. Then it stopped, and in its place came a crackling, a hissing and sighing as the fire—Aunt Sally’s surprise guest, the one she’d told no one was coming—subsided out of its frenzy, settled down to feasting.

  Caribou opened his eyes.

  Aunt Sally stood over him, holding a hose, her white dress streaked with ash. There was a single streaked handprint, right at her hip, where one of the monsters must have tried to grab hold of her to pull himself free of the flames. Before she’d pushed him back in.

  He tried lifting a hand, found he didn’t dare. He thought he might not have enough hand left, might just melt away into the ground if he so much as stirred. He wanted to look elsewhere, too, didn’t want to be staring into Aunt Sally’s face. But he was no longer sure he had eyelids. And anyway, she didn’t seem to want him to look away. She seemed to want him to ask.

  So he did, as best he could, by lying there and looking up at her face as his flesh blackened and his bones flaked toward ash.

  “You’re wondering why?” she said. “Oh, ’Bou. Poor, poor ’Bou.”

  She glanced over her shoulder in the direction of her car, where Ju, Caribou realized, must already be strapped in, might even be sleeping, all tucked up and ready to go.

  To go! Despite the horrific pain, and the even more devastating hurt—because she’d left him with them, with the other monsters, had in fact ordered him to join them—his blackened body filled with longing. He looked up at Aunt Sally, hoped she understood.

  And she did, he thought. She might even have reconsidered, briefly. But after a while, she said, “No. I think not. I’m sorry. I did mull that, ’Bou. You were the only one I thought about taking. But sometimes, it’s best just to clean house, you know? I believe in a clean house. Actually, I believe in no house. A cataclysmic burn, then a new road. It’s just”—very slowly, even regretfully, Aunt Sally smiled—“Policy.”

  She waved the hose at something. At the night. The liquid at the end caught the moonlight, flashed purple. Aunt Sally was still talking, but not to him, anymore, or even to herself; she was talking to the stars, the Delta, all the years she had survived before Mother, with Mother, after Mother but with Caribou. She was talking to the years coming.

  “We are all creatures of cataclysm,” she was saying. “Accidental aftermath, ignited into darkness with nowhere near enough light or oxygen or love to sustain us…”

  Caribou watched Aunt Sally murmur, her voice trailing away, her mouth still moving as she gazed over her shoulder toward the LeSabre. And abruptly—despite the pain, despite what she’d done—amazement flashed through him. And not just amazement. If he could have gotten up, if he’d been sure his skin and skeleton wouldn’t stick to the ground when he rose, he would have risen. He would have approached, carefully. He would have put his arms around Aunt Sally and held her. Because he understood, and he was amazed.

  Aunt Sally was afraid. She was afraid, because she wanted a companion, a permanent one. A daughter: Ju. And she did not know—any more than any of them ever had—how to make that happen, how to make Ju one of them instead of dead when the moment came and Aunt Sally, inevitably, struck. Whether the impossible, flickering, miraculous something that was Ju would just wink out and bleed away, or else rise up—like Mother had; like he had—and ignite in the dark.

  And Caribou realized that he wanted to see what happened, too. He wanted to know. Desperately, he wanted that, so desperately that actual tears swelled in his singed ducts, sliding out of his eyes and down the char of his face. How astounding to understand, at the last, how much life—any life, even the one he’d lived—matters to the living.

  Of course, Aunt Sally noticed. She always did. She raised the hose, put her hand on the nozzle to douse him, purify him, baptize him. Droplets hung at the hose’s mouth, slick, purple-black. Not water, Caribou saw. Too late, he saw that. Not that seeing or knowing would have mattered.

  “A clean burn,” Aunt Sally said. “A new start. A little more cleaning up to do. A bit more erasing. And then my little girl and I, we’ll just…”

  She did finish that sentence. But Caribou couldn’t hear her over the spray of the hose. He couldn’t scream, didn’t even want t
o, as she slipped a match from her pocket, lit it against the pack, and dropped it on him.

  About the Author

  GLEN HIRSHBERG received his B.A. from Columbia University, where he won the Bennett Cerf Prize for Best Fiction, and his M.A. and M.F.A. from the University of Montana. His first novel, The Snowman’s Children, was a Literary Guild Featured Selection. A story collection, The Two Sams, won two International Horror Guild Awards and was named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly. Hirshberg has won the Shirley Jackson Award and has been a finalist for the World Fantasy Award and the Bram Stoker Award.

  Glen Hirshberg teaches English and creative writing at a high school in the Los Angeles area, where he lives with his wife and children. He is also one of the founders, along with Dennis Etchison, of the Rolling Darkness Revue, an annual event (now in its tenth year) celebrating the dark delights of horror fiction.

  Visit him on the Web at www.glenhirshberg.com. Or sign up for email updates here.

  BOOKS BY GLEN HIRSHBERG

  The Book of Bunk

  The Snowman’s Children

  American Morons

  The Two Sams

  Motherless Child*

  The Janus Tree

  Good Girls*

  *A Tor Book

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