by Chuck Wendig
Oh, right. “It’s the Ambien,” Atlanta says. She neglects to mention the side effects of this particular zombie miracle drug. “He’s . . . half-asleep, sorta. Sleepwalking. Or talking, anyway.”
“Somniloquy,” Shane says. “Cool.” When everyone gives him that standard Shane what the sweet hot hell are you talking about look, he says: “The technical term for sleep-talking. What, don’t any of you read books?”
Steven shakes his head, not realizing it was rhetorical. “I don’t read.”
“I swear to God,” Mahoney says. “One of you better pull the car around right now. If you don’t . . .” He bites down, teeth against teeth, and makes a hungry sound on the back of his throat.
Atlanta reaches in her bag, pulls out the baton.
With a snap of her wrist, it extends.
Josie gently grabs her wrist. “Hold on.” Then she kneels down in front of Mahoney and says: “Hey, we’ll get you the keys, but we have a question first.”
“Lottery ticket,” he says, petulant, like a child.
“Question first.”
“What.” A statement more than a question.
Josie looks to Atlanta, gives a head-tilt. “Ask him.” Then she whispers: “Think of it like a truth serum.”
CIA spy shit.
Could it be this easy?
Atlanta steps up, gripping the baton tighter. Realizes she’s aching to use it—and so, she sets it down. “You’ve been doing some driving for Ty Carrizo.”
“Yeah.” Mahoney stares off at nothing. Like he’s half in a trance.
“Driving girls. Young girls.”
“Teenage pieces of ass.”
She kneels down, feels around the grass for the baton—but she sees now that Josie picked it up. Josie offers a small, sympathetic smile.
That girl really is a good friend.
“Over the summer, you drove a girl away from Samantha Gwynn-Rudin’s party. A pretty girl, long brown hair, white girl. Doped up.”
“I’ve driven a lot of girls like that.”
To hell with being a good friend. Atlanta snaps to Josie: “Gimme the baton.”
“Atlanta,” Josie cautions. “Think of the endgame here.” She lowers her voice: “He’s not gonna talk if you smash all his teeth down his throat.”
She’s got a point.
Deep breath. In, out. Atlanta says finally, “This girl, her name was Becky. Bee. She got pregnant and—”
“Ah, yeah, her,” Mahoney says, nodding, his mushy lips twisting into some boozy, crooked smile. “The one got knocked up. We been watching her.”
“Who’s watching?”
“Me. Carrizo’s people.”
“Why?”
“See if she talks.” His head drifts in lazy circles. “No cops so far.”
“Who was the father?”
Without a beat: “Carrizo.”
“Ty Carrizo is the father.”
“We took her to his house. He helped her druggy ass walk inside. I picked her up, took her back to the other little bitch’s house. Dumped her on the lawn.”
“Carrizo is the father,” she says.
He repeats it: “Carrizo is the father.”
They all stand around, looking at each other, dumbfounded. It’s not exactly surprising news, but something about the reality of it all—confirmed here and now, spoken aloud by this doped-up monster—hits them all collectively.
“Jesus,” Josie says.
“Isn’t that Damon’s dad?” Steven asks. “The new kid?”
Shane says: “Guys. We should go.”
“I want my goddamn lottery ticket,” Mahoney says, belligerent.
“Do we just leave him here?” Josie asks.
“We don’t have to,” Atlanta says, cold as a Canada winter. “We let him go, he could talk. Or come back to haunt us.”
“He has no way to know who we are,” Shane says.
Atlanta purses her lips. “Redheaded firecracker with a Southern accent. I’m like Bigfoot up in these parts. He can find me.”
“So what do we do?” Steven asks.
That question, heavy as a piano hanging above their heads, tied there with a fraying rope. Atlanta knows the answer, and she hates the answer—or, maybe, she hates that it’s the only one she has. This is not who she is. But at the same time, she knows: Part of her wants this. Or at least understands it. Her mind wanders, suddenly. She tries to imagine how she’d do it. Choke him, maybe. Or use his own gun on him. Even the thought makes her queasy. But that’s the answer, isn’t it? Even though nobody is saying it out loud?
Then, Shane says: “We pull a Spider-Man.”
“Lottery ticket,” Mahoney growls.
Atlanta looks to Shane. “Now maybe isn’t the time to play superhero.”
“Now is exactly the time,” he says. “Listen. If you watch Arrow, right, the character of Oliver Queen on the show—”
Josie interrupts: “I thought we were talking about Spider-Man.”
“I know, DC versus Marvel, I’m crossing the streams, but hold on, I’ll get there. So, season one of Arrow, Oliver Queen is like this scary vigilante. He totally kills people who get in his way. He’s a murderer, and by season two, he realizes it—and that’s when he changes how he does things. He goes from being a vigilante to being a real hero. So it’s not about vengeance, but about justice.”
“Still don’t get the Spider-Man reference.”
“Spider-Man is a hero. He doesn’t kill. He finds the bad guys, he . . . he just strings them up. Leaves them dangling for the cops. So, we play Spider-Man.”
Josie gets it. “We leave Mahoney dangling.”
Atlanta whistles. “I dunno about this.”
“You said he just got out of jail,” Shane says.
“The gun,” Steven offers. “He has a gun.”
Shane snaps his fingers. “Bingo. Guy gets out of jail, he can’t be found with a piece. That probably means he gets sent right back up the stream.”
“Up the river,” Atlanta corrects. “Not stream.”
“The point remains.”
It does remain.
And it’s a good one, too.
She worries, of course. The cops aren’t exactly trustworthy. But Holger seems to be. Which means somebody else on the force has to be, too.
“Fine,” she says. “But I have one more question for him.”
She takes his gun, sticks it back in his holster—has to pry up some of the tape to get to it. Then she grabs the duct tape from in the grass, and pulls a long strip of it off with a vbbbbbbt.
“Hey. Mahoney.”
He stares at her. Or past her. “I know that voice. You little tease.”
“You kill her?”
“Killed lots of hers.”
“You kill Samantha Gwynn-Rudin?”
He laughs. “Nah. Word out there is Carrizo did her in. Or had her done.”
“Fine,” she says. Then she sticks the tape over his mouth.
There’s a moment where she thinks: Wouldn’t be anything to take the tape, put a little bit of it over his nose. Just a little. Maybe the others wouldn’t even see. He wouldn’t be able to breathe out of his mouth or his nose and this . . . killing, raping monster would die. He’d just die here and that’d be that.
But maybe Shane’s right.
Maybe she needs to figure who she really is.
A hero or a vigilante.
Wrath or justice.
Maybe there’s a line between those things. Maybe there isn’t.
She puts down the tape. “Let’s go make the call.”
Pay phones are going extinct, dying off like honeybees, but up here in the deep wide-open middle-of-nowhere Pennsyltucky, there’s still a few around, like the one outside of the Sawickis’ kielbasa stand.
It’s there that they make the anonymous tip.
Let the cops go pick up Mahoney. Find his gun. Send him away.
On the way back to Atlanta’s house, nobody says much of anything.
To them
, though, Atlanta says, “Thanks. You’re a stand-up crew. You make me a better person.”
And she leaves it at that.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
She’s not yet ready to tell Bee.
It’s been a hard day. Every part of her feels tired. And scared. And tense. And right now having to tell Bee what she learned is just too much.
Instead, she vegges for a while. Throws a ball for Whitey. Watches bad television. Eats garbage food: little microwave pizza bagels that are past their expiration date, but they’re frozen, and even though they’re rimed with a glittering crust of Arctic freezer burn she can’t muster enough feeling to care. So she cooks them and they taste weird and she eats three and throws the rest away.
Eventually, Paul comes in. “Can I?” he asks, gesturing to the couch, and she says sure. He drops down next to her.
It hits her, then: She trusts him. Because her first thought as he sat wasn’t what he was going to do to her. Not even after today.
“It’s nice having you around,” she says.
“It’s nice being around,” he answers.
“Mom at work?”
He says she is. “Have a good day?”
A part of her flirts with telling him the truth, but even she’s not that crazy. She says: “Fine. Just hung around mostly. You go to work or something?”
“Oh. Ah. Yeah.” Something strange in his voice. A hesitation—but why? Problems at work? Problems with Mom? She thinks to pick that scab but then decides she’s out of gas. People are weird. She decides to just leave it at that.
At some point in the middle of them watching a real bad movie about a small town menaced by both a robotic shark and killer bees, Arlene comes home and sits down with them. Says work sucked, and Paul asks her how much she pulled in, and Arlene empties her pockets of bundles of ones, says that everyone was a shit tipper tonight. “I should go back to being a stripper.”
Paul and Atlanta both give her a look, and she offers a genuine laugh: “Goldurn, y’all. I’m just playing. Look at your faces.”
They all have a good laugh at that.
And eventually, Atlanta decides to go to bed.
No Ambien tonight.
Probably never again. She thinks about it. Right now, the nicest thing would be to pop one and flip the switch. Power down like the good guys did that robot shark—go dark for eight hours.
But waking up with ice cream was her first warning.
Then on the couch was her second.
Seeing what it did to Owen Mahoney was her third, and her last. And all along this is why she hasn’t asked her mother about the money missing from her shoe box. Because she fears that’s where it went: gone because she got goofy on sleeping pills. Gone with her mind and spent or buried or eaten on top of strawberry ice cream.
Thing is, Atlanta knows that once again she’s been jabbing snakes with sticks, and if she’s not careful, they’re gonna slither out of the tall grass and take a bite. When they do, what happens if she’s doped up? That thought gives her the shivers, like spiders dancing on the inside of her ears.
So, no Ambien.
Which means no sleep.
She goes through the motions. Turns out the lights. Lies there on the bed while Whitey snores like a John Deere tractor: chug chug chug chug. (And the dog snores plus the occasional bunker buster bomb gas attacks from the dog’s ass-end make her wonder if she should put the pooch back in the garage.)
She tries to sleep.
Doesn’t. Can’t. Ugh.
Not sleeping is weird.
She enters into these periods where she’s almost asleep. Like, it feels as if she just dreamt something—but it’s hard to grab, hard to be sure if it’s the real thing. And time has a way of walking away from her. She glances at the clock and each time she does, the read-out has advanced by an hour or more.
Sometimes her heart beats like she’s a coke addict in a race car.
Sometimes she hears a ringing in her ears.
Or smells gunpowder.
Or funeral flowers.
Or hears Chris Coyne somewhere laughing, crying, blaming her.
Then there’s the standard-issue scary shit. The constant fear that someone is in the house, here to kill her. Or Arlene. Or Whitey, or Paul. Masked men. Or a cop. Or now, a new name and new face in the darkness: Owen Mahoney.
Footsteps. Floorboards creaking. Pipes tinking. The arthritic bones of the old house settling together, clacking and bumping, because all the cartilage and fat has gone out of the place, no cushion, no softness. Everything cracking like the ice on a lake as you walk across it.
Then, Whitey starts to growl.
Real low. A thunderous rumble.
A sleep-growl, she thinks. It happens. Then he’ll make these sleep-bark sounds, and they sound like woob woob woob. Like he’s one of the three guys from that old black-and-white show where they all beat the hell out of each other.
But the growl never changes.
And she hears her door open.
And she hears footsteps.
It’s all an illusion. She knows that.
It’s happened how many times before? And each time she’s jumped out, flipped on the light, only to startle the poor dog so hard he cuts a fart.
The dog’s growl stops.
See. There. Everything’s fine.
Another squeak. Another footstep.
Your brain is messing with you.
That, she always thinks.
Then comes the next expected thought, the same one that always lines up in the queue, in the same order.
What if this time you’re wrong?
What if someone really is in here?
What if you don’t look, and the one time you don’t—you’re dead?
A long, loud creak of the floorboards. Something sliding . . .
Suddenly—Whitey is flipping his shit. A furious barking, claws scrambling on the floorboards, and a man is yelling, crying out—
Atlanta scrambles, fumbling at the nightstand for the lamp there—
Click.
Bright light. Her eyes start to adjust—there’s someone in here, oh, goddang, there’s really someone here, and Whitey’s standing there with his hackles up and his head low. Atlanta flings open her drawer, reaches for the bear mace—
“Wait! Wait, wait—”
It’s Paul.
It’s Paul.
She thinks: He’s here to hurt me. He’s like all the others. Here in her room to take advantage of a sleeping girl. He stands there in his underwear, one hand clutched in the other, blood squeezing through his fingers like juice from a crushed orange.
But already she backpedals. She trusts Paul. He’s not a bad guy.
Then she gets it.
There, on the ground.
Her shoe box.
The lid, off.
“You,” she says. “You took my money.”
“Atlanta, it’s not like that,” he starts to say. Whitey snaps at him.
“Dog’s a pretty good lie detector,” she seethes.
“Get the dog away, please, call him off. My hand.”
Then the door behind him flies open.
Arlene enters, a candlestick in her hands—so clearly she thought someone was breaking in, too. “What the . . .”
It happens almost in slow motion, the way Mama registers everything. Whitey. Paul. The bloody hand. Atlanta in her bed with the bear mace.
Mama goes into grizzly bear mode.
She starts whipping up on Paul with that candlestick. Cracking him across the shoulders and arms, shrieking. Calling him names. Him yelping that it’s not what she thinks, not at all—Atlanta thinks to say something, thinks to interrupt, but she lets Mama think what she wants to think. That makes her a bad person, she’s pretty sure, but she can’t quite make herself do better.
Mama chases Paul down the steps with that candlestick. Him howling. Whitey chasing after, too. Snapping at his heels all the way.
The front door slams.
&
nbsp; Atlanta sits in the kitchen while Arlene and Paul stand outside for twenty, thirty minutes, her yelling at him, him yelling back. Once in a while Atlanta thinks to step out there, but turns out, her mother’s handling it just fine.
Which surprises her more than a little.
Mama of the past would’ve just rolled over. Asked questions. Tested Atlanta to see if it was her just being some silly, paranoid, dumb girl.
But this time, it’s different. The woman went right to entering in launch codes and dropping the nuke. Way Mama looked at Paul, her eyes were columns of fire—tornadoes of flame ready to boil his blood, burn him up to a roasty-toasty char.
Eventually, Atlanta hears his truck pull away. Arlene never lets him come back in to get his stuff, so he has to drive off in his underwear.
Mama comes back in a few minutes after Paul drives away. She’s still mad. Atlanta’s maybe never seen her this mad—even when her last boyfriend did what he did, she came to it too late to realize, and the look on her face was one of horror more than anything else.
But it’s not all anger. Her eyes are rimmed with pink, the whites shot through with blood. Cheeks puffy, a little wet.
Mama sits. A cloud of cigarette smell comes off her. “Well, shit,” she says.
“Sorry,” Atlanta says.
“Don’t you sorry me, baby girl. This isn’t on you. This is on him.”
“You thought something was happening that wasn’t.”
Arlene sniffs, then shrugs. “He still lied to me. Gambling. Stealing your money. It’s me that needs to say sorry to you. I keep bringing these men—”
“Mama, don’t.”
Mama stops there. But the feeling hangs between them.
“I liked him,” Atlanta says eventually.
“I liked him, too.”
Mama slides her hand across the table. Atlanta takes it.
They both give each other’s a little squeeze.
Whitey stands up, puts his paws on the table, because he wants to be a part of it, too, it seems.
CHAPTER TWENTY
It’s Wednesday now, over four days since she and the others drugged and kidnapped Owen Mahoney.
She still hasn’t told Bee.
Atlanta doesn’t really know why. Maybe she just doesn’t want to deal with it. Like, if she doesn’t tell Bee, doesn’t get that ball rolling, then it’ll all just evaporate. Same way an injury sometimes heals, same way winter comes and winter goes and brings spring in its wake, same way shit happens but sometimes, most of the time even, shit washes off.
