“Somebody got shot,” said Brooke, jutting her chin toward the TV.
“That happens,” I said, but I wasn’t really paying attention. What if Rain was the last Withered? We didn’t really know how many there were and we thought some were chasing us, but we didn’t know for sure. And Brooke couldn’t find any more in Nobody’s memories. If we could kill Rain inside of four weeks, we could go ahead and run out of money and then just … what? Settle down somewhere? Turn ourselves in? We couldn’t keep this up forever.
“Drug bust,” said Brooke.
“Cities suck,” I said.
“It’s not a city,” she laughed, “it’s like a … village. Look at that place, it’s smaller than Clayton.”
“Little towns suck, too,” I said, looking up at the TV. Something about a tiny community in Kentucky.
“Everywhere sucks,” said Brooke gruffly, crunching on a carrot. “The whole world is garbage.” I looked at her, leery of any depressive language from her, but she was smiling, and laughed again when she saw me looking. “Rah, darkness, pain, rah.” She laughed again.
I rolled my eyes as dramatically as possible and went back to my plans. Would it be so bad to turn ourselves in? Once all the Withered were dead, and we could go back to a normal life—whatever that meant? Could we just let whoever was chasing us catch up? Could we walk into a police station and tell them who we were? Even if there were warrants out for me, which I doubted, I’d just end up back at the FBI. They knew where I came from and they’d understand that I’ve only been doing exactly what they told me to do. After yelling at me a bit for doing it without them they’d calm down and let me get on with my life. Maybe. Or maybe I’d end up in prison for the rest of my life, and Brooke in a nut house. I couldn’t let that happen. She needed me.
And if I was being honest, I think I needed her. Sitting here, talking, joking, I felt more normal than I had in ages. Even with all the running and hiding and stalking and killing, I felt more normal with her than I’d ever felt in my life. That said a lot. She was a friend like I’d never had before, not just a relative or a crush or a convenient acquaintance, but a real friend. Someone I could share everything with, and who shared everything with me. Sitting here, thinking about losing her and all of this ending, I realized that I didn’t want it to. I didn’t like who I was without her.
She made me less afraid of myself.
But was I as good for her as she was for me?
We needed to get back on the road, some way they couldn’t follow us. Hitchhiking wasn’t working, but we couldn’t afford anything else.
“Knife attack,” said Brooke.
“Then somebody’s having more fun than I am,” I said.
“No,” she said, and something in her voice was different. “John, look.”
A new personality? I looked at her, and saw that her brow was deeply furrowed. Something was very wrong. I looked up at the TV and saw nighttime footage of some cops walking in and out of a small house. Brick with wooden siding. A gray pickup truck sat in the driveway.
“It’s Dylan,” she said. “That kid from the … with the gun.”
“Dylan?” I peered at the screen, trying to read the titles along the bottom. “Dillon,” I said, recognizing the shape of the word. “The town we were just in. The kid with the gun was Derek.”
“He’s dead,” said Brooke, and the TV showed another shot—no body, just a room drenched in blood, the floor and the walls and everything else, parts of it covered with a blanket or marked with forensic tags. Whatever had happened had been brutal.
“Derek?” I asked, and then the news showed a picture of his face. It was definitely him.
Brooke nodded, her face pale. “Somebody cut him into pieces. The scroll on the bottom said it was almost a hundred.”
Derek was dead. We’d been convinced that Dillon was clean, that there were no Withered there—but now Derek was dead. The first murder the little town had seen in …
Oh no.
“Somebody followed us,” I said.
Brooke practically leaped off the bench, whirling around to look at the door. “How do we get out?”
“Not here,” I said. “Or at least not yet.” I gestured at the TV. “This happened last night, so whoever did it hasn’t gotten this far.”
“Then it wasn’t Iowa, either,” said Brooke.
I nodded. “Iowa’s probably FBI, like you said. This is a Withered.”
She glanced at the dryer, only a few minutes into its cycle. She swallowed and sat back down. “Which one?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“Why aren’t you terrified?”
“I am,” I said. “I’m just reacting to it differently. We need to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to it before we do anything rash.”
“Rash?” she said, a little too loudly. We were the only two people in the laundry room, and when I glanced at the door I didn’t see anyone looking in. Her voice was high pitched with worry. “What kind of word is ‘rash?’”
Boy Dog was on his feet, aware that we were agitated even if he didn’t know why.
“Stay calm,” I said. The last thing we needed now was another mental-health episode. I put my hand on her arm. “Search your memory. We can do this. Wake up Nobody, if we have to. This Withered just cut a teenage boy into a hundred pieces: who does that sound like? What do we know about them?”
“It sounds like you,” said Brooke.
I faltered a moment. “I’ve never cut anyone into pieces.”
“But you want to,” she said. “You told me.”
“I told you I had dreams about it,” I said. “I don’t actually want to do it.”
“Don’t you?”
“Focus,” I said. “Someone is following us, and we need to figure out who.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just freaking out; it’s hard to think.”
My stomach roiled at her accusation, not because it offended me but because it felt so accurate: not only had I dreamed about cutting people up, I’d fantasized about cutting up Derek himself. Turning those smug leers into screams while I sliced through muscles and tendons and separated the bones like a butcher. Now someone had actually done it. What had it felt like? How long had it taken?
I was thinking about the wrong things—I needed to focus on the parts of the kill that would help us to figure it out. Why had a Withered cut Derek to pieces? They didn’t kill out of annoyance, at least not that we’d ever seen. They killed because they were missing something—because they needed something that only that kill could give them. What had it been this time? Information? If something was tracking us, could it carve memories out of its victims like flesh?
Had this happened in every town we’d visited?
“Turn up the volume,” I said, looking at the TV. “Have they talked about similar attacks? If this has happened before they’ll think it’s a serial killer, cutting its way across America.”
“The story’s already over,” said Brooke.
“Crap,” I said, rubbing my eyes as another realization washed over me. “If the FBI has followed us, then they know where we’ve been—and if there are kills in each place they’ll think the killers were all us.”
“That happened last night,” Brooke reminded me. “You said it yourself. Iowa saw us in Dallas yesterday morning, so they know we didn’t do this.”
“If he’s FBI,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re making too many assumptions. We need to know. We need to find out how many other times this has happened—there might be more information about the previous kills because they’ve had more time to investigate them.”
“There’s an Internet cafe by the restaurant,” said Brooke.
“Good thinking,” I said, and stood up. “Stay with the—no, come with me.”
“Damn right I’m coming with you.”
We gathered our food and our half-empty backpacks and left our laundry drying; we had another forty minutes, at least, before it was done. I
took deep breaths to calm myself down and followed Brooke to the Internet cafe, which turned out to be three old desktop computers on a low counter. Each keyboard had a credit-card reader on it, and I threw back my head in disappointment.
“Crap.”
“Maybe they’re…” Brooke wiggled the nearest mouse and read the screen. “Yeah, cards only.”
“Maybe they have something at the front,” I said. We walked to the checkout counter in the convenience store, which served as the hub of the whole place, and I waited while the guy in front of us paid for his soda. The cashier was a short, stocky man, with a nametag that said Carlos, and he looked puzzled when he saw us holding the half-eaten food we’d bought from him barely ten minutes earlier.
“Is there a problem?”
“Is there any way to use the Internet without a credit card?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Sorry, that’s just how they are.”
“Do you have a credit card?” asked Brooke.
“Everyone has a credit card,” said Carlos.
I could kill him and take his credit card and—
Stop it.
“We just saw a news report about a friend of ours,” said Brooke, and I thought Don’t connect us to Dillon!—but she’d apparently already planned for that. “There was a drug bust on the news, and the house next door to it was my friend Rachel’s. I need to find out if she’s okay, but we don’t have a phone or a credit card.”
“There’s pay phones in the hall by the game room,” said Carlos.
“I’ll still have to look up her number,” said Brooke. “How much does an Internet session cost? Five bucks?”
“Four dollars for a half hour of low bandwidth,” said Carlos. “Ten dollars for movies and stuff.”
“If we give you four dollars cash,” said Brooke, “can you use your card to get us online?”
Carlos stared at us through narrowed eyelids. “You’re not going to look up porn or whatever, are you? I get in trouble if that gets traced back to me.”
“News and search engines only,” I said, and I dug out one of my stashes of cash. I counted out four ones and held them up. “Four dollars.”
“Pretty please?” asked Brooke.
Carlos looked at us for a moment, then rolled his eyes and took the cash. He called over his shoulder as he walked to the end of the counter. “Carla, be back in thirty seconds.”
“Carlos and Carla?” asked Brooke.
“It’s not funny,” said Carlos. We followed him to the computers, where he swiped his card and set up a short session. “This’ll kick you off in thirty minutes exactly,” he said. “No warning or nothing, so watch this timer in the bottom corner. And no porn.”
We nodded, and he walked back to the front. I sat down, Brooke pulled over a chair, and we searched for “Dillon murder.”
“Thomas Dillon,” said Brooke, reading the top Wikipedia link. “A serial killer?”
“He hunted men like deer,” I said, remembering him from some crime reenactment show. “He shot five that we know of.” I scrolled past that, looking for current news, but none of the links looked recent enough to be about a murder from last night. I tried a new search for “Dillon murder news” and got another string about Thomas Dillon, and a few more about a murder in Dillon County, but that didn’t look like the same place, and it was at least a year old. I tried again with “Dillon murder Derek,” and got a hit. I clicked it and read the article, but it was just an announcement from the same news show we’d seen on the TV, with no new information. Last night’s kill was too recent for anyone to know much about it.
Four minutes gone from our Internet session.
“Derek Stamper,” said Brooke, reading over my shoulder. “I never knew his last name. It says he was their only child.”
The article didn’t say anything about other, similar murders, so I started searching for other towns we’d been in: “Baker murder.” “Baker cut to pieces.” I tried every combination I could think of, for every town we’d visited or traveled through, all the way back to Fort Bruce. “Fort Bruce murder,” unsurprisingly, got a ton of hits, but they were all for the deaths we already knew about. There didn’t seem to be any murders that fit the right profile, or indeed any profile, in any of the places we’d visited. Eighteen minutes gone. I checked the phrase “cut to pieces,” to see if it turned up any similar crimes, but all I got was a quilting blog and a bunch of murders in other countries.
Twenty-two minutes gone.
“There’s nothing,” said Brooke.
“Or nothing people know about,” I said. “Maybe he hides the bodies.”
“Derek was killed in his living room,” said Brooke, shaking her head. “He’d been there for at least an hour when his parents came home and found him. That’s plenty of time to hide the body if the killer had wanted to, but he didn’t.”
I glanced at her, surprised. Brooke didn’t usually talk so crisply about dead bodies.
I looked back at the screen. “Why so many pieces?” I asked. Nearly a hundred, the news had estimated, but the forensics team was still on the site. “Maybe the killer took some.”
“Gross,” said Brooke.
“We won’t know if anything’s gone until they do a full autopsy, and try to … put him back together.”
“Look for missing persons,” said Brooke. “If the other bodies were hidden, the stories we’re looking for will just be about runaways or kidnappings or something.”
I nodded and ran more searches for all the places we’d been, but none of them were reporting missing people, either.
Three minutes left.
“This doesn’t make sense,” said Brooke.
“So we look at what does,” I said. “The town of Dillon has no violent crime, no untimely deaths, and no real problems whatsoever for decades. Some high school kids getting drunk at a bowling alley, some graffiti in the abandoned movie theater, and that’s it. And then two days after we show up someone gets brutally, horrifically murdered.”
“So we’re the inciting factor,” said Brooke.
I shot her another glance; she was speaking more coherently than usual and the terror she’d shown earlier had been replaced with a calm professionalism. Was Brooke gone again? Who’d come in her place? And how long had it taken me to notice?
“Two minutes left,” said Brooke. “Search for … ‘Dillon murder Facebook.’”
“Why?” I asked, though I was already typing. The results loaded, and Brooke took the mouse from my hand and started scrolling.
“Because if the killer didn’t follow us to Dillon,” she said, “but our presence in Dillon precipitated the kill, then the only explanation that makes sense is that the killer was already in town before we got there, lying low. We can’t find evidence of a similar crime because the Withered we’re looking for hasn’t killed anyone in ages.”
“So what are we going to find on Facebook?”
“That,” said Brooke, and she clicked on a link. Corey Diamond—Derek’s friend from the drive-in—had updated his status just after midnight:
It begins.
“No way,” I said.
“We have to go back to Dillon,” said Brooke. “We missed a Withered.”
I nodded slowly, turning to look her in the eyes. “Who are you?”
“Who do you think?” she said, and her eyes showed a sign of hurt. “I’m Brooke.”
14
We didn’t want to be followed again, which meant we didn’t want any friendly drivers who could look at a photo and say, “Yeah, I remember giving them a ride.” Even if they didn’t remember us, they’d remember the dog.
I thought again about getting rid of Boy Dog, just leaving him here or, even better, out in the countryside. He was too recognizable, and that made him a huge liability. But I had rules, and they wouldn’t let me hurt an animal, even by neglect. Those rules kept me who I was. If I lost Boy Dog I lost my soul, so he came along.
We couldn’t steal a car, either, for obv
ious reasons. That would get us more attention instead of less. So we sat in the shade of the truck-stop wall and watched the vehicles as they came in, waiting for just the right one. When it came we gathered our bags of newly washed clothes and got ready to run. An old pickup with a couch in the bed, flipped on its back and tied down with ropes and a tarp. It had come from the direction of the city, which meant it was headed out of the city. We watched the driver carefully; he topped off his tank, left the truck by the pump, and went inside the building, probably to use the restroom. We ran across the open lot, hefted Boy Dog into the bed beside the couch, and climbed in after him, hiding under the tarp as best we could. If the driver saw us, he’d raise a stink and maybe even call the police; if he didn’t, he’d drive us away, and we’d be free.
We waited.
I was pressed almost chest to chest with Brooke, Boy Dog resting on top of us like a hundred-pound stuffed animal. He panted heavily, shifting to find a more comfortable spot, but he didn’t bark. Brooke raised her hand and let him lick it, whispering shhhh, almost silently. I checked our feet again, making sure they were tucked inside of the tarp, and then closed my eyes and listened. The highway roared like the ocean. A brake squealed. An engine growled to life and drove away. A mother called to a child: “Hold my hand, Noah, there are cars here!”
Pressure on my face: lips; the barest hint of a kiss on the side of my nose. I opened my eyes and saw Brooke staring back, her eyes a wet reflection in the half-light under the tarp.
“Sorry,” she said. “I couldn’t help myself.”
I have never considered that a comforting excuse.
I closed my eyes again and listened as the wind whipped at the edges of the tarp, as another engine moved across the lot, as a pair of heavy footsteps clomped on the concrete. Brooke’s body went tense, and I knew she’d heard it too.
“Shhhh,” she whispered, and Boy Dog licked her hand.
The door clicked open. The truck jostled, rolling slightly to the side as the driver climbed in. I looked at Brooke. “Here we go.”
“Where?”
The engine started with a violent stutter, and the truck began to move.