by Dan Wells
I had to act fast, before she borrowed one from me.
I tried the back door again, kicking it a few times, until finally giving up using the rifle to shoot the doorknob. The sound was deafening; I hoped that Attina’s single-minded obsession would keep her from caring. In the depths of depression, Brooke wouldn’t care—it might actually make her worse. Please let Attina be the same.
The stairs to the basement were right inside the back door, long and narrow. The rifle would be useless in those cramped quarters, so I left it by the wall and pulled out my knife, advancing slowly down the stairs with the blade in front of me. It didn’t have the strength of Potash’s old combat knife, but it was sharpened to a razor’s edge, and it might buy me a few precious seconds, if nothing else. I reached the basement with my ears still ringing, the crying women only barely audible, and rounded the corner just in time to see Beth gash herself open again, bleeding copiously. The pool of blood at her feet covered nearly the entire cement floor of the basement, trickling in a steady stream down the drain in the center. How long had she been doing this?
How could I get away from her once this obsession cleared?
Attina ignored me, and I stepped through the sticky red mess to where Brooke was tied to a chair, watching the whole thing and numb with despair.
“Just let me die,” she mumbled. “Just let me die.”
“I will,” I said. I needed to keep her sad, to keep her will for death as strong as possible. “I’m not here to save you—it’s impossible to save you. You’ve been lost for too long.”
“I know,” she sobbed, “just let me die.”
I cut her loose from the chair and helped her stand. She groped for my knife but I held it away in my left hand, holding her tightly to my side with my right. I just had to get her out of here—
—no. I couldn’t think like that. I had to want to kill myself, too, to keep Attina occupied as long as possible.
Or maybe I just had to want to kill Attina.
I walked Brooke slowly to the stairs, searching for anything that might help. How could I kill a Withered who healed that fast? There was an axe leaning against the wall; taking off her head in a single stroke might work, but I didn’t have the skill to pull that off. She’d regenerate so fast, anything less would be ineffective. I looked for more. A shelf full of dusty mason jars. A box of old decorations: Christmas and Thanksgiving and Halloween. Then I noticed the furnace, and had the answer: fire. It was the only way I’d killed Nobody—even the Withered soulstuff was vulnerable to it, and they couldn’t heal fast enough to escape it. What else could I use? Mrs. Butler had said they held barbecues here—there had to be fuel, or at least charcoal.
“We’ll never get out in time,” I said to Brooke, trying to keep her thoughts focused on hopelessness, and I started knocking over boxes as we passed them, spilling their contents onto the floor, searching desperately for something to start a big fire. Finally I found a plastic jug of lighter fluid, but I had no free hands. I had to let go of Brooke or the knife. I dropped my knife and picked up the lighter fluid, popping off the cap and spraying it on the fallen decorations, on the shelves and wooden panels in the walls. I even sprayed some on Attina as she stabbed herself and howled again, ignoring me. Now I needed a flame. I dropped the half-empty bottle on the floor and eased Brooke upstairs, holding her with two hands, taking the steep steps carefully. She tried to throw herself down, pleading with me not to stop her again, not to keep her from her death, but I got her to the top and we stumbled into the kitchen.
“Look for matches,” I said, pushing her toward the cupboards. “For gas lighters, for anything that will burn.”
“Are we going to burn ourselves?”
“We are,” I said, yanking open drawer after drawer. I couldn’t help but feel a bit of eagerness, of excitement for a fire—I had never set one this big before, and it had been far too long since I’d set one at all. “All we need is—this.” I opened the pantry door and found three miniature tanks of propane, dark green and each the size of a melon. I grabbed and shook them, finding them satisfyingly heavy. “Find matches,” I said. “If you want to die, this is how you do it.”
I set the tanks on the counter and ran from room to room, hoping to find a gas grill of some kind to hook them up to. Anything that would let the gas out. There was nothing in the house, and I didn’t have time to search the garage. I found a sheaf of yellowed newspapers and grabbed it, rushing back to the kitchen to find Brooke holding a cardboard box full of matches, fumbling through her tears to light one.
“Is this enough?”
“It’s perfect,” I said, taking them away gently. I looked at her in sudden fear, terrified that my compliment had ruined everything: I needed to insult her, to tell her she had failed, that nothing she did would ever work. I needed her to want to die, or this whole plan could fail. I looked in her eyes …
… and I couldn’t do it. “It’s perfect,” I said again. “We’re going to make the most beautiful fire you’ve ever seen.”
I tucked the matches under my arm and grabbed the propane and walked back to the stairway, back down to the basement. I turned the corner to see Beth standing in front of me, inches away, covered in blood and her eyes practically gleaming. I dropped my armful in shock, stumbling backward into the doorway as the tanks and matches clattered to the ground.
“You’re building a fire,” she said. The propane tanks were still rolling, carving slick pathways through the bloody puddle on the floor.
“Yes,” I said. It was all I could say.
Beth stooped to pick up the newspaper, dropping the pages that had soaked up blood, and holding up the dry pages in her wrinkled fist. “We’re building a fire,” she said. “And I’m finally going to die.” She picked up the fallen jug of lighter fluid and sprayed it on the walls and ceiling, soaking the carpet square that sat in the corner, drenching the rack of old clothes against the back.
I stood in the doorway and watched her build her pyre.
I never had to think about killing the first ones. They were monsters, and I was defending myself and my family and town. Now I was defending this town, doing something no one else could do, in a way no one else could do it, and it was good. It was the right thing to do—the Withered had to die. I knew that, in the same way I knew that stalking was unacceptable, that hurting animals was evil, that killing humans was wrong. That is to say: I knew it was true but I didn’t feel it. I wanted to kill and slice and maim, but this was a cheat. A voluntary death. Tricking Attina into killing herself was … cruel, in a way. I didn’t do this to be cruel. I looked at that frail old demon, trapped for years in a life it couldn’t even recognize as its own, and I felt something I’d never felt before.
I felt pity.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“I don’t want to, either,” said Beth, stopping immediately. She turned to look at me, holding the axe in her hands. Lighter fluid dripped from her hair and her dress, running down her arms and cascading off her elbows in tiny rivulets.
Five people dead and who knew how many more if I didn’t stop her now. She’d held down Brielle and forced drain cleaner down her throat, choking her and burning her and eating her from the inside—not because she wanted to, not because she had to, but because she couldn’t control herself. Because she was the worst of humanity given form. But she was also the best of it. She’d lived for so long here, never hurting a fly, making soup for her neighbors and organizing neighborhood watches. She could be good when the world was good around her. Did she really deserve to die just because I had come and ruined paradise?
But no paradise lasts forever. What would she do tomorrow, when a hundred national guardsmen showed up? They wanted to protect the town, so she’d protect it. They wanted to kill a bad guy, so she’d kill … I didn’t know who. Someone. Unless I killed her now.
The demon king Rack had told me how the Withered began. Human beings, lost in antiquity, had given up their most hated tr
aits to gain unimaginable power. Nobody had hated her body, so she gave it up forever; she gained the ability to take whatever body she wanted, but she’d lost that essential humanity that made it worthwhile. Forman had given up his emotions—why? He must have felt something terrible, guilt or loss or shame, and never wanted to feel it again. Attina had given up her own will, her own choices, I suppose because she’d made too many bad ones and didn’t want the responsibility anymore. She didn’t want the pain of choosing wrong. But choices still get made, whether you’re the one making them or not, and all she had become was a slave.
I had to choose for her. I hated the choice more than I’d ever hated anything, but I had to make it.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said, and summoned all my will. “But I’m going to.”
“We’re going to,” she echoed. Tears rolled down her face, and I wondered how much she really knew, or felt, or understood about what was happening. She couldn’t make her own decisions, but was she aware of them? Was there something inside of her, like Marci inside of Brooke, that looked out and watched her body act, and cried and screamed and begged it to stop?
“We’re going to kill ourselves,” she sobbed. “And then we can start again.” She raised the axe, turned toward the furnace, and shattered the valve on the gas line.
“Start again?” I repeated. That was something Brooke had said—a holdover from Nobody’s old behavior. Possess a girl, live her life, and when you found a better one you kill yourself and take it. Start again. I looked behind me, but Brooke wasn’t there. She was still upstairs.
With the rifle.
I screamed and ran as Beth lit a match, and the basement leapt into horrible, glorious, fiery life.
25
“A,” said Brooke. “American Shipping.”
The pickup jostled us, rolling across the blacktop of an old, flat highway. The wind seemed to speak as it whistled past us, half-formed words rippling past in invisible whorls. We were getting close to the end of our ride, and billboards were starting to appear. I saw a sign for a plumbing company and pointed it out. “B.”
“Good for you!” she said, laughing and clapping her hands. They were still bandaged from the fire; I’d washed her burns as best I could, and stolen an old T-shirt off a clothesline to cover the wounds. She smiled at me. “I knew you’d like this game.”
I looked at her, remembering those laughing lips wrapped around the barrel of a hunting rifle, those clapping hands trying to reach the trigger. I’d saved her just in time. And years too late. I saw a C on a road sign, but instead of pointing it out I distracted her by pointing the other direction.
“C!”
“Where?” She craned her neck trying to spot it, reading the sign as we passed it. “I don’t see a C anywhere on there, but there’s a J! Quick, find all the other letters up to J while we can still see it!”
“On the license plate,” I said, still pointing away from the C sign. “There’s a C, and then on the side of that truck there’s a D, E.… I’m not seeing an F anywhere.”
“Too late,” she said. “The J’s gone.” She smiled at me, peaceful and contented. “We’ll see another one.”
“Yeah.” The C sign was gone as well.
“Tell me where we’re going again?” she asked.
“Nowhere special,” I said, not meeting her eyes. “Just a place to relax for a bit.”
“Rain was south of us,” said Brooke. “We’ve been going north for two days.”
“Agent Mills is still looking for us,” I said. “And so is the FBI. We need to lay low.”
“He still has Boy Dog,” said Brooke.
“I’ll get him back.”
“F,” said Brooke, pointing at a passing license plate. She laughed. “That’s funny.”
The town ahead was close enough to see now, a low mound of trees and buildings, and high above it all, the smokestacks of a wood plant. I looked at Brooke, just looking and looking. I didn’t want to make this choice, and I did. Both at the same time.
“You’re staring at me,” she said.
“You’re nice to stare at.”
Brooke raised her eyebrow. “John Wayne Cleaver, you rogue.”
“Brooke, I…” I took a deep breath, and blew it out slowly. “You’re my best friend.”
“You’re mine.”
“You’re the most important person in my life. You’re the two most important people in my life, all at once, and I want you to … to be safe. To be happy. I want you to grow up and get married and have kids and have a life. I want you to live a thousand years.”
“I’ve already lived ten thousand,” she said, and cocked her head to the side. “Why are you getting so serious all of a sudden?”
“Because I want to do what’s best for you.”
“You always do,” she said. “And I want to do what’s best for you.”
“Those don’t always line up,” I said.
“I love you,” said Brooke.
I sighed. “I think you probably do. And I think I…” I stopped, and closed my eyes, and said the hardest thing I’d ever said—not because it was false, but because it was completely, relentlessly true. “I love you too.”
She moved across the truck to sit next to me, lifting my arm and snuggling in under it. The truck bounced us gently as we rode. The city ahead grew closer.
“Have we been here before?” asked Brooke. “It looks familiar.”
“It’s been a while,” I said. “But yeah.”
The C sign again: WELCOME TO CLAYTON.
Brooke smiled. “I remember this place. I grew up here.” She sat up straighter, looking around, drinking in the familiarity. “Several of me did.”
“This is where we’re from,” I said. “Brooke and John. This is home.” We passed the gas station, the tire place, the old kitschy shoe museum. “You deserve a home.”
“It seems smaller than I remember it,” said Brooke. “Which is weird, because I’m not bigger than I was, I’m just older. But it all seems like it’s … shrunk, maybe. Or maybe I’m just seeing it with new eyes. Like it all used to blend together, and now I’m seeing the gaps between the buildings, and the lines in the paint.” She shook her head. “It’s only been three years? Two years? It feels like it hasn’t changed a bit. Or like it’s aged a whole century.”
The driver leaned out of his window. “The hospital, right?”
I nodded. Brooke didn’t know it, but this was a chartered trip. Fifty-four dollars and ninety-six cents, every last scrap of money we had left plus everything I’d gotten for pawning the rifle, had been slipped through the window with a whispered plea when the truck picked us up.
“Why are we going to the hospital?” asked Brooke. She looked at her hands, and the bandaged burn on her leg. “They’ll ask for ID.”
“Your burns are fine,” I said.
“Then why are we going to the hospital?”
I wished that idiot driver had just kept his mouth shut. This was hard enough without him spilling the whole plan early.
“G,” I said, pointing at the sign for the Friendly Burger.
Brooke looked at me, thinking, her mind racing through the implications of my words, of our destination, of everything that was happening.
“No,” she whispered.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re going to leave me here,” she said, pulling away. I grabbed her hand, holding her back, scared that she would jump straight out of the truck bed, trying to kill herself or simply trying to escape. “If we come back they’ll recognize us, people will know us—we won’t be able to hide anymore or finish our work with the Withered. And I know you’re not going to abandon your war, so that means you’re abandoning me instead! You’re leaving me here!”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I love you!” She cried. “I trusted you! We’re a team—you said you’d never leave me, that we were partners, that you’d walk into hell to get me back!”
“You’ve alre
ady—”
“How could you!” She punched me in the shoulder with her free hand, only once at first, then over and over, pounding her fist into my arm and chest, digging her knuckles into my flesh. I grabbed her hand in mine, wrestling her to a halt.
“You’ve already been to hell,” I said. “I’m the one who took you there. This life we’ve been trying to live, sleeping in alleys and living on stolen corn nuts from highway truck stops: this is hell. Dragging you from one murder to the next, forcing you to remember tragedies that aren’t even yours, dancing along the edge of a suicide cliff and trying to catch you every time you start to go over: that’s hell. If I love you, I can’t put you through that.”
“That’s not your choice to make.”
“I know.”
“This is my life,” she growled. “And if this is how I want to live it, I’m damn well going to live it how I want.”
“You’re ill,” I said. “You need medicine, you need therapy, you need twenty-four-hour care of a kind that I can’t give you—”
“I don’t want care,” she screamed, “I want you!”
“And I want you to be alive,” I said. “And happy. Even if I’m not there to see it.”
The truck stopped in front of the hospital, and Brooke wrenched away from me, leaping out and running.
“There she is!”
“It’s Brooke! Thank God, it’s Brooke!”
Brooke’s parents had been waiting, probably for hours. It’s hard to predict travel times when you’re hitchhiking. I’d spent a dollar on a phone call, telling them the day and the place and hanging up. They streaked across the parking lot now, catching her in their arms, sobbing and lifting her up and holding on to something they thought they’d lost forever.
Brooke looked back at me, pleading, trying to break away. “You can’t leave me!”
“She’s a severe suicide risk,” I called out, standing in the back of the truck. “Clinical depression and dissociative identity disorder. At least one of her personalities is bipolar. She needs a long-term, live-in care facility and intensive therapy, but she can come through.”
