Carly screamed for real this time, quickly shedding the boots, shorts and top. Of course David hadn’t even had the decency to let her keep her sports bra. Naked in the warming sun, she scrambled to a patch of sand at the side of the trail and began scrubbing her skin.
Oh god oh god so revolting! She was going to have to shave her entire body, head included, when she got home. She scrubbed furiously; her back was the hardest part because she couldn’t see what progress she was making, if any.
The sun was dangerously hot by the time she finished. Actually, finishing was impossible. There was no point at which she felt honestly clean, only that she couldn’t make herself feel any less repulsive by scrubbing between her toes and at the crack in her ass. She cautiously approached the trail again. David had dropped his blanket when he’d run away, but hadn’t stripped off his Camelbak. God, she was so thirsty.
Carly wrapped the blanket around her and padded barefoot to the corpse of that creature. It had taken—or been dressed in—all her clothes, including her own Camelbak. Everything was covered with more of that revolting ashy peeled skin, no way was she going to touch it. Still, she pulled her phone from the belt holster. The holster itself was ugh, but she just couldn’t live without her phone.
Still no bars.
David had abandoned her. God, what a creep. If she ever saw him again, she was going to… She had no idea what she’d do, honestly, although she felt a twist of regret that she hadn’t cursed him out better. She’d been too flustered even to throw a motherfucker his way.
She was thirsty. Unfortunately, the only water nearby was in the pack on the dead thing’s back. Carly didn’t even have to get near it to see that there were gross curly peels of dehydrated flesh stuck like burned pork rinds to the mouthpiece.
Her stomach did a flip flop. At some point, she knew, she would be so thirsty that she would wipe off that piece of plastic and drink from it, but that hour had not arrived. Not yet.
“David took the car,” she said aloud. Again, her subconscious was racing ahead of her waking mind. David had run off and the creep had been too spooked—and too ashamed, probably—to wait for her. She tried to imagine him waiting for her by the side of the road, but considering his expression when he ran away, the idea was ridiculous. He was gone, and he’d taken her purse with him.
A gleam of metal caught her eye. As the sun rose, it reflected off a solar panel to the west of her. The second path she’d noticed led in that general direction, and it seemed a good bet that “Bill,” whoever he was, might be at the end of that trail. She started down it.
The soles of her feet were soft; by the time she rounded a bend and saw the house, they were bruised and unhappy, but thankfully not yet bleeding.
The house itself was some kind of futuristic rich man’s desert hideaway: all steel, glass, and copper, with solar panels, water tanks, and a smashed satellite dish. No one answered the doorbell—not even for a naked woman—and she could see nothing but darkness and expensive furniture through the windows.
There was a nozzle on the outside of the water tank, and Carly began to drink. It was a law of the desert that a stranded person couldn’t be denied water, right? Even if the water was kind of stale and tasted like rusty spoons? She drank and drank, her mind becoming still and empty.
Unfortunately, the tank ran empty before her thirst was fully slaked.
The next question was whether she should break into the house or not. The sun was already high enough to be dangerous—how had she lost so many morning hours?—and the sunscreen she’d rubbed onto her arms and hands didn’t seem to be doing much. What’s more, she had to admit that this stylish metal house held a powerful appeal. There was a peaceful isolation to be found here, with no wires hooked up to the outside world, and no obligations to family or community.
But Carly didn’t do anything more than try the doorknob to confirm it was locked. This was rural Nevada; if she broke in she was more likely to be shot than offered a sandwich and a robe. Still, in front of the house was a long driveway that led to another gate and a road beyond; at least she wouldn’t have to walk more than an hour back to the place where David had abandoned her.
Shit. Was she really going to have to walk out to the road in nothing but a blanket? She glanced back at the empty water tank. It seemed so.
The gate was locked, of course, but she could push it far enough to slip through the gap. The driveway just beyond had been weirdly vandalized: someone had dug a trench across it, like putting a speed dip between the gate and the rest of the world. Carly stepped carefully across and came to the road.
The asphalt burned her feet, so she had to walk on the shoulder. She had, quite honestly, no idea where she was or even what road this was. She was alone in the middle of nowhere. Anything could happen to her out here. Anything. If the wrong vehicle stopped…
Barely ten minutes ticked by before the first car approached from behind. It was a Volvo station wagon, and it screeched to a halt after it passed her, then slowly began to back up. A woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window and leaned out. “Oh my Lord, honey, are you all right?”
It occurred to Carly that this moment could have been just as dangerous as the moment when the pretend corpse had lunged at her.
“Stop the car!” the woman said. The Volvo jolted to a halt. Little faces appeared above the back seat. They were just little kids seeing yet another inexplicable adult thing in an inexplicable adult world.
Then Carly blinked, and it seemed that everything changed. The woman, the kids in the backseat, even the driver—what she could see of him—suddenly became connected by thick black cords. It was as though someone had taken a filter off her vision and a monstrous web had been revealed. What’s more, the cords were not just inside the car—they extended out from it, through the glass and metal, across the landscape, as though they were miles and miles long.
Those black cords—the web—whatever it was, terrified Carly beyond all reason. They vanished just as suddenly as they appeared, and for a moment she was sure they had been a hallucination. Maybe the pretend dead thing had been a hallucination, too. Maybe David had spiked her Camelbak.
The passenger finished fumbling with her seat belt and stepped out of the car. For a split second, the black cords reappeared, looking wet and weightless as they tracked her movements. They vanished before Carly could look away, but she couldn’t help gasping and stepping back.
“It’s okay,” the woman said. Carly dared another glance. The woman looked to be Japanese and might have been in her early thirties. Her hair was tied up with an old blue rag and her clothes were threadbare and worn. “It’s okay, miss. Are you… Do you have anything on under that blanket? Because I can give you clothes. Don’t run.” It was as though she was reading Carly’s mind, because even though the woman was no longer the center of horrible moving web—like some kind of human spider—Carly almost ran barefoot back the way she’d come. “Please don’t run away.”
“I won’t.” Carly wrapped the blanket tight around herself. The driver opened the door and stood, but he didn’t approach. He was Hispanic, maybe a little younger than the woman, and just as threadbare.
“Have you been hurt?” the passenger said. “We can take you to the hospital, if you need that. If you’ve been assaulted. We can take you anywhere you want, okay? It’s up to you. But just let me get some clothes out of the back of the car for you.”
She offered sweat pants, a loose long-sleeved tshirt and a pair of flip flops. She folded them carefully and set them on the ground as though she was trying to entice a stray dog with a pile of hamburger. The black cords didn’t reappear; Carly must have imagined them. The woman—who introduced herself as Marie—held the blanket while Carly changed. Her husband John kept his distance. No other cars passed by.
“Let us take you somewhere,” Marie said. “Or when we get out of these hills we can make a call. Do you want to speak to the police?”
Well, Carly had just left a d
ead body back on that trail. Who was ever going to find it if she didn’t speak up? But the idea of talking to cops made her feel exhausted. It had all been a stupid prank anyway, right? Was she going to send the cops down that trail in the middle of the day to find a fake version of her? “I don’t need the police. It was… It was just a stupid prank.”
“A prank?” Marie clenched her calloused hands. “Sweet Jesus be praised we found you, because a prank like this in the middle of the desert could get a body killed. It’s going to be over a hundred degrees today, if it isn’t already.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” Carly interrupted. “I think everything just went wrong. I don’t want to make a big deal out of it.”
Carly thought Marie was about to call her honey but she stopped herself. “If that’s what you want we won’t make a big deal. I hope you don’t mind that I’m fuming anyway. Will you let us take you home?”
A battered Dodge Sprinter passed them on the road. The driver was a white guy—good-looking with an icy expression and a little knife scar on his cheek—and he glanced at her briefly. The way he seemed to size her up in one chilly glance gave her goosebumps. She did not want to be alone on the road if that guy passed again.
“Yes, please,” Carly said, although she was ashamed that she couldn’t even pitch in for gas. All she had was her phone and an empty bank account. With her few shifts at the bakery, she could barely cover her rent.
Once back in her little studio apartment, she stripped down, threw out the borrowed clothes, and gave herself a scalding hot shower. She had no idea what the greasy, ashy grit on her skin was, but she lathered and scrubbed and then did it again. In between, she let the hot water run into her mouth and down her throat. August in the desert makes people thirsty, obviously. Finally, she felt clean enough to turn off the water, and to talk herself out of shaving her head or any of her other parts. The Fernandez’s, the building’s owners, would have been scandalized to discover she’d used so much water, but it was still the middle of the day and they were not here.
Her phone rang. For a moment, the old-fashioned ringtone she liked so much made her skin crawl just like the web around Marie and her family, but god, it was her phone. She had to answer it.
It was Shelly, her best friend, and her first words were: “So? How was your date?”
For the first time that day, Carly let herself break down and cry.
* * *
The next-door neighbors’ dog was better than a doorbell. Anytime one of her friends came up the walk, it would bark loud and long, straining at its canvas leash.
So Carly had ample warning when her friends arrived: Shelly was first, with a big box of cheap red wine, followed by Karen and Ilse, who had good jobs at a casino and showed up with an armload of Indian food. Then Esperanza arrived, late as always, with another bottle of wine that was much too fancy to drink in the middle of the day.
Carly told the story of the prank several times, leaving out only the switch in clothes, because she wasn’t sure how that part made sense, and if the others heard it they would be sure she’d been roofied or something and god, what if she had been?
She glanced at the dish on the end table. A folded piece of paper with Marie and John’s phone number lay on it. English names for non-English Americans. If Carly changed her mind and wanted to call the cops, Marie would be happy—happy, she’d said—to support her story.
Her friends could. Not. Believe. David had pulled that shit. They called him a dickhead, a dillweed, a creep, a coward, an asshole, a walking glory hole, a human fart, a waste of skin, a shitheel, a pissant, a punk bitch, a sad little limp dick shit streak, a blight on the universe, a germ, a slime mold, a dogfucker, an over-cooked noodle, a flesh-eating bacteria with legs, a turd-gobbling moron, a vat of toxic waste, and much, much more.
It started as support for Carly, but their outrage took on a life of its own. Carly, for her part, stared into her bowl of Roghan Josh and let them do their thing.
“Sweetie, are you okay?”
It was Shel who asked. Shelly, who was practically a sister and who had a huge circle of friends and family that she looked after. Never alone, never silent, Shelly reached out to person after person to connect with them. As soon as she’d heard Carly start crying, she’d been on her way over like that, moving faster than even an ambulance would. But Carly couldn’t look at her.
The web had returned, black cords springing out from each of her friends, some connecting each other right here in the apartment and some passing through the walls like ghosts. Shelly was the worst of all. She bristled with dark, thick, wet connections, like an overused pin cushion.
Even worse, Carly had them, too. Not as many as her friends, but they were there, visible but untouchable. She and her friends were tied together by these repulsive… She shuddered to think of it.
If that wasn’t bad enough, she suddenly realized that one of the black strands anchored in her stomach led though the wall, across the city to David. She knew it was true as if his name was written on it. God, bad enough that she was attached this way to her friends, but to that shitstain David, too?
“Carly?” Shel asked, trying to break through her silence. Carly shut her eyes tightly, then rubbed the heels of her hands against the until she saw spots. When she opened them again, the cords were gone.
This was no hallucination. Something had happened to her. She had been changed.
Carly stood from her chair so suddenly the Roghan Josh spilled out of her lap onto the carpet. Her friends gasped, but she’d already turned her back and yanked open her cutlery drawer. There wasn’t room for much in a studio apartment, but she couldn’t do without a good sharp knife. She yanked it from the bottom of the drawer, a yard-sale special—cheap metal, cheaper plastic handle—but it was nine inches long and sharp as hell.
Her friends gaped at her as though she might use it on them.
“I have to see David.” With that, she left, marching out into the scorching day.
As she descended the creaking wooden steps that connected her apartment to the outside world—the compulsion to jump up and down on one until it broke was tremendous—she could hear her friends calling her name and scrambling to come after her. Let them come for now, dragged along behind by those invisible cords.
The yellow mutt next door barked at her, furious and terrified at once. The neighbor’s house had just barely been grandfathered in by city ordinance, so he had been allowed to keep his little front lawn. It was a massive waste of water, but he thought green grass was part of his American dream, so he chained his dog on it in all temperatures and slapped the poor little pup when his piss made a bare spot.
For the first time in her life, Carly was not afraid of the dog. She stalked toward it, knife in hand, and as she came within a few feet, its ears went flat, its tail curled between its legs, and it cringed.
Before she could think about what she wanted to do with the knife, she leaned down and sawed through the mutt’s thick canvas leash. She would have cut the collar but it was made of metal and was locked with a key. The canvas split in hardly any time at all—how sharp was this knife that it could cut so quickly?—but once the dog was free, it fled up the street as fast as its legs would take it.
She threw the knife onto the bark mulch at the base of the Fernandez’s big willow. She’d pick it up again when she came back, maybe.
Or maybe she would never come back. Maybe she would walk away from all of this and run off to a cabin in the Yukon. She could find someplace near a river so she could drink whenever she wanted. For the rest of the time, she could sleep like the dead.
Her friends stood close together at the bottom of the stairs, staring at her like frightened prairie dogs. Shelly pushed through them and approached cautiously. “Sweetie? You don’t have a gun, do you?”
Carly stared at them. The web was invisible now, and she was glad of it, but she needed to figure out how to cut those connections. How do you destroy a figment of your
imagination? “No, there’s no gun.”
Shelly spoke slowly. “You know, it sounds to me as if this prank was played on you and David both. He was all scared, right? And ran away? I mean, it was amazingly shitty of him to ditch you, but it was probably the guy who lived there that arranged it all.”
Carly stared at her, trying to decide if it mattered who had set up the whole thing with the pretend corpse. Was that even important now? Carly’s main concern was that she was trapped inside a web and she didn’t know how to cut herself free.
“I just want to talk to him. Thank you for coming over, but… Goodbye.”
“Carly!” Esperanza stepped forward, standing close to Shelly’s shoulder. “I don’t think you should be alone right now.”
It occurred to Carly that she was still feeling the effects of a hallucinogen, and that maybe it would be dangerous to get behind the wheel of her car. She looked from the face of one friend after another, remembering the history they shared: The parties in college, the books Karen loaned her, the hours spent at Shelly’s binging entire seasons of television shows, the time she’d made out with Ilse, the four months Esperanza had let her sleep on her couch because her stupid communications degree couldn’t get her any kind of job at all. There was a give-and-take between them, a friendship, and once she had valued those relationships above everything in her life.
Once.
“I understand,” Carly said. Then she got in her car and drove through the wide streets, through block after block of white houses with terra cotta roofs, to the Whole Foods where David worked.
His car was right there in the parking lot, so she peeked into the back seat. There was her purse, just sitting on the floor. She tried the doors but they were locked. Fine. She marched out of the burning desert heat into the cool of the grocery store.
This was where she’d met him two weeks before. Returning from a matinee across town, she’d stopped in for a salad and he’d flirted with her. It was so surprising and fun that she went out of her way to drop in again three times until he asked her for coffee.
Bad Little Girls Die Horrible Deaths: And Other Tales of Dark Fantasy Page 18
