The Killer in Me

by Margot Harrison

  When he needs to cut loose ends, he doesn’t hesitate.

  He may feel a wisp of sadness. He cares about me, and he knows I care about Warren. Remove me from the equation, though, and he’d press the trigger like he crushes a cigarette.

  Flat miles pass too slowly. I take another gulp of coffee that tastes like burnt plastic. Check the odometer. Gun the gas. Repeat: I’m gonna kill my brother.

  Walk straight up and shoot him? He wouldn’t expect that, would he?

  My son. Your brother. Becca’s voice now, and I feel her arms around me, her steady breaths in my ear. Calm down, Nina. No one has to get shot. Make him be his best self, his other half. He won’t hurt anyone in front of his family.

  Maybe that’s true for Becca. Dylan can’t let his mom know he was swamped by the rage and terror that took his father. He might kill her before he showed her the truth.

  Me, though—I’ve seen it all. He knows it.

  Blurred asphalt, mile markers, billboards, distant street grids. Warren’s glassy eyes. At last, the county road.

  Hang on. I’m coming.

  The secret is more important than anything. Dylan has to hide his other life from those he loves. He needs them, and that makes him vulnerable.

  My skin’s an itchy clay shell. The coffee has soured my mouth, and the base of my spine throbs.

  I pass the side road with the numbers. Metal glints in my headlights to the left. There’s a van half-hidden in the pines—Warren’s loaner.

  When the engine dies, the desert silence rushes in. No, not a silence but a rhythm: the booming of my heart.

  A tapestry of stars seethes above me as I open the trunk. The half-moon drowns its corner of sky in milky light, and the pines and sagebrush cast baleful shadows across the sand.

  This isn’t real. I’m not unlocking the box to realize the rifle is gone—surely because Warren broke his promise to me and took it. I’m not unwrapping a heavy, wadded-up bag from Hunger Mountain Co-op to find the Sidekick, the first gun he ever handed me.

  “It’s a semi-antique shitkicker,” Warren said as we stood in the mountain pasture, showing me the name etched on the barrel between straight quotes. “Working-man’s gun, durable. Ugly as sin, but I got it for next to nothing.”

  “Does it have a safety?” My first question about every gun he showed me.

  “Nah, it’s a revolver. You just gotta pull the hammer back. Then forward to cock it.”

  The hammer’s back now. I push in the pin and swing out the cylinder. Everything’s heavy and sticky, like the gun needs oiling, but it’s loaded. Nine rounds.

  I hold the Sidekick at arm’s length, muzzle pointed into the desert. It’s been weeks since I held a gun. Warren spun the cylinder like I would spin a coin, the gun an extension of his hand.

  I practice a stance, feeling Warren’s hands on my arm and the small of my back. “Be ready to absorb the kick,” he warned. “Don’t limp-wrist it, or it could jam.”

  His life shouldn’t depend on me.

  The Sidekick sits beside me in the passenger seat as I backtrack to the gravelly rut of the access road. There’s the Sequoia, snagged in my headlights.

  Like someone flipped a switch, everything changes. The desert glares under the moon. A distant charge in the air makes my ears ring.

  I brake beside the Sequoia, turn off the engine. Breathe. My hands are not okay with this pause. They dart out, grab the Sidekick, and thrust it into the waistband of my shorts. Cover it with my shirt.

  Madras plaid shorts. White smocked shirt. I’m terrifying.

  Should I have cocked the gun first? How much time will I have?

  A tap on the window, and before I can stop myself, I lurch wildly away from it, straining against my seat belt.

  It’s him.

  My brother wears a faded denim shirt. Nothing in his hands. He steps back, his face one big apology, and gives me space to step outside.

  What’s he sorry for?

  My shoulder hurts. I must have banged it when I tried to bolt from the locked car like a startled animal. The Sidekick feels enormous, cold against my bare skin. I’ll never be fast enough to surprise him.

  “Mom said you were going to the Painted Desert,” he says. “How was it?”

  “Where is he?” My voice comes in a croak. “I want to see him.”

  Dylan nods, like he doesn’t need to shift gears from Hi, sis to Here’s my hostage. “In the cabin.”

  We cross the sand together, silent. The cabin is dark and stinks of smoke. When Dylan sets down his flashlight and squats to raise a trapdoor in the floor (I missed that), the light spills across the boards, and everything in me screams now.

  I tug the Sidekick from my waistband and cock the hammer, my hands shaking so hard I almost drop it.

  The noise makes Dylan raise his head, but his face doesn’t change. He nods, acknowledging that I am aiming a gun at him. “I’ll go first.”

  “Don’t pick up anything.” My teeth are clenched so hard, he may not understand the words.

  He nods again and disappears down the stone steps, asking from below, “Can I at least get the flashlight? It’s dark down here.”

  “Right here.” I kick it toward the hole in the floor, and his hand comes up to grab it—a white, spidery hand, unexpectedly vulnerable.

  He lights my way down the stairs, then swings the beam around the cellar room, which smells like chalk and mold. “Shit.”

  Something’s scrabbling on the floor.

  I dart away, pulling the heavy Sidekick close to my chest to stop it wobbling, and retrain it on Dylan, who gazes down, shaking his head.

  It’s Warren, tied to the chair where I saw him in my sleep.

  The chair’s been overturned in the dirt. My breath stops.

  But no. No blood. The flashlight spears him where he twists and flails, his face red with effort. I want to run to him, shield him, peel off the duct tape.

  “Aw, kid,” Dylan says, shaking his head with mild annoyance, like Warren borrowed his car and left the tank empty. He turns to me. “Okay if I pick him up?”

  “What you are going to do”—deep breath—“is untie him.”

  Dylan looks at Warren, disgust growing on his face. Then he turns to me and holds out his hand like he’s done with this charade. “Give it to me.”

  The voice of authority he used on the Gustafssons. Now or never. I aim.

  But the trigger resists, sticky or just heavy, and my index finger is still forcing its way through that friction when his fingers close on the barrel.

  He yanks the gun up and away in one easy motion, jerking me sideways with it. The next instant, I’m sprawled on the earthen floor staring at my empty hands.

  Warren bellows through his gag.

  That easy. That quick.

  My shoulder hurts, my vision turning to watercolor. They must be tears of pain, because I haven’t given up yet.

  Dylan gives the Sidekick a curious glance and aims it at me. He looks embarrassed, almost sheepish—for me or for himself?—but his gun hand is steady. That’s when I notice the long rifle leaning against the wall.

  He thought I’d go for that, mapping my next move before I could. How many points will he earn this time?

  “Okay if I get the stuff in your pockets?” he asks me with that same ridiculously pained expression. “Your phone? I’ll give it all back later.”

  Later when? There’s no later anymore. I hand over my phone, a stick of gum, and a movie ticket stub and turn my pockets inside out. I didn’t even think to bring my Swiss Army Knife.

  All his victims had a moment like this. When they’d exhausted their options and couldn’t face what came next, the end of the story he’d written.

  Warren is still squirming and trying to talk. Not giving up.

  “Thanks, Nina,” Dylan says. “It’s gonna be okay. How about we go outside?”

  He bends to grab something, his eyes and the gun still on me. A metal toolbox. “Just making sure the kid can’t get h
old of anything he’d hurt himself with,” he says.

  It’s gonna be okay. Did he tell the Gustafssons that, too?

  As we leave the cabin, Dylan shines his flashlight back inside and says, “Look.”

  He’s set the Sidekick on top of the woodstove, beside the toolbox and my phone.

  He raises both hands, then his shirt, so I can see he has no weapon. “Neither of us need that.”

  I wonder if he knows I know he has more guns inside the mine. The mine—does it exist after all?

  The sand sinks under my feet with each step; the distance between us keeps increasing. When he turns to look back at me, the moonlight makes his features ghoulish.

  I can’t breathe, can’t count my footsteps. There’s no plan because every second is the last second, or every second of my life at once. The half-moon glares on us as we climb the ridge, the other half of the sky black between the teeming stars.

  He hangs back now and makes me walk first, his flashlight beam guiding me over the jagged rocks. “How’s Mom?”

  “She’s not my mom.”

  “I bet you like Becca, though. Everybody likes her.”

  “I like her.” Where are you, Nina? Come back. Find your way into his head, it’s your last chance. Where are you going? What does he want?

  “I like Warren,” I say, hardly able to get his name out. “I like him a lot.”

  Dylan laughs—not an evil laugh, or even a snarky one. It’s the guffaw of a brother ribbing his kid sister after he sees her making out with her boyfriend, and that’s worse.

  “I know how much a lot,” he says.

  “I wish you hadn’t seen that.” Don’t think of that night. The look in Warren’s eyes as it dawned on him that this was really happening and I wasn’t just kissing him by accident. “I didn’t know you could.”

  “I didn’t know you could see me, either. Not till I saw you on the road, driving to Albuquerque. Dad told me it went one way. He said God arranged things so he could keep an eye on his baby sister.”

  “I used to try to send you messages. But it doesn’t work like that, does it? When you went inside my head, I must’ve been asleep.”

  “Not this week,” he says.

  “No.” We’ve reached the ridge’s highest point, and when I see a flat stretch of rock like a surfboard, gleaming in the moonlight, I know where we are.

  “You came here,” he says. “Did you spend the whole night?”

  I nod, plunking myself down on the too-familiar seat without waiting for his permission. When I extend my right leg, toe pointed, I feel the edge of the ledge that should have been my way into the mine. “I couldn’t find your place.”

  Dylan sits down beside me, and I force myself not to edge away from him. “I hid it.”

  Of course you did.

  “I always wondered,” he goes on. “I mean, the map on your wall. The way you were scared to sleep. And how your left eyelid twitched, just like mine at night. But I didn’t know for sure till one night I went to bed and there you were, driving through freakin’ Oklahoma. Your friend was driving, actually, and scarfing White Castle, and the radio said something about Bernalillo. You said, ‘So that’s how you pronounce Bernalillo,’ and all of a sudden I could see everything, clear as crystal. How you planned to drive out here and explore a cave and catch some…monster. Which was me.”

  Focus. The key is to pretend to see him the way he sees himself. Not a monster, but a boyfriend, a son, a brother who just happens to kill strangers now and then.

  Warren is not a stranger.

  “So you threw me off track,” I say. “You almost convinced me I’d imagined everything.”

  “I wasn’t going to come out here at all. Not at night. Not as long as you were around.” A half chuckle. “I didn’t think you’d steal my car.”

  Pretend you’re giving him what he wants. I try to laugh, too, like we’re reminiscing about a kooky stunt a normal girl might pull on her brother. It won’t come out. “Yeah, I tried everything. That poker face of yours…it worked.”

  Dylan leans back against the ledge, barely nods.

  “But something changed after I went to Arizona. Digging that grave—did you do it for me? So I’d see and tell him? So he’d come out here?” Something bitter lodges in my throat, but I can’t say the words: So you could kill him.

  He shakes his head firmly. “Nah. I wasn’t gonna hurt the kid. But the way he tailed me in that van, it was like he was daring me to. When I went to check on my cache today and it was gone, I knew who had it. After that, I had no choice.”

  My throat closes tighter. “It’s my fault. Everything he knows about you, I told him.”

  I pulled Warren into this. I am his real killer-to-be.

  Something shrieks in the desert, an unearthly sound, and I jerk upright. Dylan pats my back. “Just an owl.”

  It’s all I can do to keep my voice level, a sister talking to a brother. “We can get rid of that bucket. Nobody will ever know.”

  Silence.

  “He won’t talk if I tell him not to.” I press my nails deep into my palm.

  Still no answer. I draw my knees to my chest and look past him toward where the owl cried—willing it to cry again, to rupture this sense of unreality, to shock me into action.

  “So?” I ask at last.

  “Only one of us can leave this place. Me or the kid.”

  I shake my head.

  “You brought him into it. You need to be the one to choose.”

  “Choose?”

  He takes my gun, then pretends to offer me a choice. Remember Kara Ann Messinger writhing in his grip. Remember the old man’s skull cracking. Remember Mrs. Gustafsson.

  My voice starts in a whisper, gets stronger. “I chose a long time ago. You forced my hand. By…doing those things. By being what you are. So if you’re giving me a choice, well, why don’t you just kill yourself? Because that’s what I want.”

  The words come out in a rush—too harsh, too honest, all wrong. I bite my tongue.

  He just looks at me, and when he speaks, his voice is so sad it makes something ache in me, a twin vibration. “I wish it weren’t like that.”

  “Me, too,” I say before I can stop myself.

  “Yeah.” He draws the word out, kicks the ledge with his boot heel.

  Our eyes meet in the darkness, and I remember how he brought me into the adobe house in Sky City and showed me his view of the world. He must remember, too.

  “Maybe it doesn’t have to be this way.” The words catch in my throat, muddy trickle in a drought-year streambed. “I care about him like you care about Eliana. What would you do if she found out? What choice would you give yourself?”

  Dylan shakes his head, and there are too many words in the gesture.

  “You’d kill her.” A word he hasn’t used yet.

  “No.” He sounds so awkward, almost shy. And then he points his index finger at his head, mimes a shot. Bullet No. One for Dylan.

  He’d kill himself before he’d kill Eliana. But can I be sure I know what we’re talking about, even now?

  I’ve wrapped my arms so tight around my chest, my breath comes short. I still feel the Sidekick’s weight and solidity at my hip like a lost lover, and then I feel Warren’s fingers in the same place. Time is a conveyor belt slipping away too swiftly—think think!

  I can’t jump off the ridge; it’s too high. If I run, he’ll catch me. Somewhere below us an underground passage snakes to both the cabin and the mine, but I’ve never been there, not even inside his head.

  “I can keep Warren quiet,” I lie in a whisper. “I swear.”

  Silence. Above us the Milky Way blazes, half drowned in moonlight. Sagebrush and yuccas cast gaunt black shadows. I rub my goose-bumped arms. Hold on, Warren.

  Dylan sighs. “I’m sorry, Nina.”

  He sounds so genuinely sorry that my eyes fill with tears. When he looks at me, moonlight shows me the painful squinch of his eyes. “The joint’s a shitty enough place to visi
t when you’re a kid. I don’t plan on seeing the inside in my lifetime. Or letting it wreck my family.”

  What about the families of those people you killed? Maybe they’re not people to him.

  He covers his face, scrubs his fingers all the way to the hairline. “Look, I told you I never wanted to hurt your friend.”

  “But you’re going to.”

  He was always going to kill Warren, ever since he guessed Warren took the cache, but he needs my blessing. That’s what he means by “choice.”

  To erase a person, don’t you also have to erase the memories? The grin, the narrowed eyes, the ridiculous appetite for junk food, the detective-speak, the fingers tickling under my knees. No, that’s not possible.

  Dizzy fatigue sweeps over me, and I let my legs dangle down to where the mine entrance should be. My heels swing back and forth and find—

  A gap. A slot in the rock, just wide enough for a slim person to slip through.

  The mine entrance. Dylan must have filled it with debris to hide it, then cleared it out again. Warren said he came here the day I went to Arizona. Then, last night, he was in there digging the hole.

  If I wedge myself into that cave, maybe I’ll never get out. But—there are guns in there. An entrance to the tunnel leading all the way to the cabin.

  Dylan wants me to say it’s okay to kill Warren. Those are my words to speak. He must think I’m like him underneath, a cold-headed, coldhearted butterfly struggling to burst free from its chrysalis of normality.

  I remember the dream that terrified me: how he watched approvingly as I picked up the saw to dismember his victims, who’d somehow become mine.

  Those dreams and doubts are an icy weight on my chest, a magnet pulling me toward him. I killed the old man. I strangled Kara Ann Messinger. I saw it. I did it.

  “I’m sorry,” he says now. “Sorry I screwed up your life, Nina. Sorry you saw things you shouldn’t have seen.”

  Even now he won’t confess, won’t name the things I saw. Won’t, can’t. But I know.

  I gaze into the moonlit waste that dwarfs us both. The weight in my chest dislodges itself, and a trancelike lightness replaces it.

  We are not the same. Kara Ann Messinger’s desperate struggles were my struggles. I rooted for Mrs. Gustafsson to escape. I don’t even want to see him in pain.