“I’m starving,” I said, cutting her off instantly at the mention of death. I had one of her hands clasped in mine, and brought up the other quickly, looking closely at her eyes, not talking her out of it because that never worked, but talking around it. Distracting her from it. “My favorite pizza topping is mushrooms,” I said. “I know a lot of people don’t like them, but I think they’re delicious—soft, savory, full of this incredible flavor. When you put them on a pizza they get roasted right there in the oven, hot and fresh, and they go perfectly with the tomato sauce. Do you like mushrooms?”
“I threw myself off of that horse,” said Pearl. “I … don’t even remember his name. He’s not the one that killed me, anyway, it was the ones behind me. No one could swerve in time, and they trampled me right there in front of everybody.”
“What about pepperoni?” I asked. “Everybody likes pepperoni. And that red pepper stuff you can shake on top—you think this place has that? Let’s go check it out.”
“Will you stop it!” she yelled. “I know what you’re doing, and I hate it! You always treat me like this!”
I took a deep breath, trying not to look too worried—this wasn’t exactly a bustling street, but if she attracted too much attention it could be disastrous. Even without a suicide attempt, there were people looking for us—people and things. Things we desperately didn’t want to be found by. If she started fighting me, the police would get involved and we might be trapped for good. I spoke softly, rubbing her fingers with my thumb.
“You’re tired,” I said. “You’re probably exhausted, and starving, and uncomfortable, and that’s all my fault, and I’m sorry.”
“Shut up!” She tried to yank her hands away, but I held tight.
“You need to rest,” I continued, “and get some food, and change your clothes. And maybe we can sleep in a real motel tonight. Does that sound good?”
“You don’t want to stay with me,” she said, swinging in half a heartbeat from hating me to blaming herself. “I’m horrible. I screw everything up. You could be doing this so much better without me—”
“I couldn’t be doing this at all without you,” I said. “We’re a team, remember? You’re the brains and I’m the hands. Partners to the end. The only deadweight is Boy Dog.” I cringed immediately after saying it, cursing whatever neural pathway had brought out the word “deadweight,” but she didn’t react. She stayed still, looking at the ground, and I looked up as a semi rumbled past, spitting gravel at us from under the tires. Boy Dog barked again, a short, halfhearted yelp. I changed tactics, and pointed at the receding truck. “Weller Shipping; there’s your W. All we need now is an X, and there’s bound to be a … saxophone shop around here somewhere, right? Axle repair? A pet store that specializes in oxes and foxes?”
I stepped toward the sidewalk, trying to pull her toward somewhere, anywhere, that she could sit down and eat and get some water, but she slipped out of my hand and ran toward the middle of the street—
—straight into the path of another semi. I spun on my heel and reached for her, missing her trailing fingers by half an inch. The truck blared its horn in angry warning, slamming on its brakes, and Brooke planted herself in front of it, spreading her arms and closing her eyes. I ran toward her, watching from the corner of my eye as the truck swerved, hoping I could get Brooke out of its way without even knowing what its new way was. I collided with her in a football tackle, pushing her toward the side of the road, stumbling and scrambling to stay on my feet, until finally we collapsed in the gutter on the far side, bouncing off a rusted fender as we fell between two cars. The semi roared past, correcting its course, avoiding a crash by the width of an eyelash. Brooke was sobbing, and I checked her quickly for injuries—scrapes on her arms, a tear in her jeans, but no broken bones or cuts that I could see. My own right arm was a mass of blood and gravel, which I brushed away gingerly.
“You okay?” asked a passing pedestrian. He looked down at us from over an armload of brown cardboard boxes.
“We’re fine,” I said, though my arm felt like it was on fire.
“You ought to get that looked at,” he added, then hesitated, and continued walking.
Somebody else’s problem.
Brooke was still crying, curled up in the gutter. I rested my hand on her arm, looking around to see who else, if anyone, had noticed our near miss. If anyone had, they weren’t coming out of their shops to mention it. I wanted to scream at them, to rage against the entire world for allowing this scrawny, broken girl to be so coldly forgotten and ignored. I wanted to kill them all. But being ignored was the best thing we could hope for, and I couldn’t risk making a scene. I turned back to Brooke. “It’s okay,” I said softly. “It’s okay.”
“You saved me,” said Brooke.
“Every time,” I said. “You know I always will.”
“You shouldn’t,” she said. “I’m not worth it.”
“Don’t say that.” The sky was growing darker; we needed to find shelter and a shower, now more than ever, and probably some antiseptic for my arm. I couldn’t risk the clinic, though—they’d ask too many questions, and try to pry out information we couldn’t give. A pharmacy, maybe. Even a little town like this ought to have one somewhere. And the sign will have an RX on it, I thought. Maybe that will cheer her up. I stood slowly, reaching for her with my good arm, but she caught me and pulled me back down to the curb, clutching me in a sad, desperate hug.
She sat up, wiping the tears and dirt from her face. “I love you, John,” she said.
“I know you do.” I tried to say it back—I always tried to say it back—but I couldn’t make the words come out. I’d only ever loved one person, but Nobody had possessed Marci and killed her before moving on to Brooke, now almost two years ago. The monster had come for her, and I was one victim too late to save her. At least I’d saved Brooke.
And guessed I was going to keep saving her until the day I died.
2
I woke up with Boy Dog’s back in my face, warm and itchy. His body expanded slowly as he breathed in, pressing against my nose, driving the little hairs into my skin. I rolled over, feeling a stiff ache in my muscles and a sudden sense of disorientation at the hard, flat ground beneath me. Where were the bumps and the roots and the…? I opened my eyes wider. I was shrouded in darkness with, somehow, a perfectly vertical line of bright light off to the side. I focused on it and remembered the curtains. We were in a motel. The curtains were closed. I sat up and Boy Dog twitched, his stubby legs moving three times and then falling still again. We were on the floor.
I looked at the bed and saw Brooke, the covers kicked off her body but twisted around one leg. Her chest rose and fell, just like Boy Dog’s. How much nicer, I thought, to have woken up with that pressed against me instead?
I corrected myself immediately: with her pressed against me. And then I corrected myself again: I couldn’t touch her at all. She thought she loved me, but I couldn’t love her back. I had broken her before, by failing to catch the demon called Nobody, and now it was all I could do to keep her from breaking again. She was my responsibility, not my girlfriend.
I saw the shape of her body under her clothes, the hint of pale skin at her waist.
I went to the bathroom, keeping the light off, and washed my face in the dark. The towels were thin, like dishrags. I stared at my silhouette in the mirror, a dark outline barely separate from the dark room behind it. The corner of the glass was cracked and the mirrored surface was flaking away.
Brooke and I had been on the road for seven months now, hunting monsters. I had always called them demons, but they called themselves Withered or Gifted, depending on whether they saw their lives as a curse or a blessing. I’d killed the first one on my own, almost four years ago now. And while I’d tried to keep the rest of the world out of it, this dark, hidden underworld had started pulling others in, killing or corrupting everyone I knew. Everything I touched. My mother had died, and Marci, and Brooke had been saved but only
by the barest definition. I sometimes wondered if she would have been better off dead.
I saw the shape of her body again like an afterimage in my mind, so still and silent in the bed.
I sat down on the old chair in the corner of the room, pulling on my shoes as the wood creaked softly with each tiny movement. I’d been sleeping in front of the door—Brooke sometimes walked in her sleep—so Boy Dog was there now as well, blocking me from opening it more than a foot. I undid the chain and tried to slip through, but Boy Dog woke up and scrambled to his feet, shaking and rattling his collar. I hushed him, putting my hand on his neck, and he followed me outside. The light seemed blinding, but as my eyes adjusted I saw that it was still early morning, the whole world bathed in predawn blue. I stretched and rubbed my arms. Across the parking lot someone was throwing a fat white bag in a garbage can. The garbage can, I supposed. That’s how they thought of it, the people who lived here: it was their garbage can. Their home. To me it was just another place, just another parking lot, just another stop on the highway that was taking us … somewhere, I guess. We had no specific plans. We were hunting Withered and we went where they did, and whoever—or whatever—was hunting us came after. We had to stay one step ahead, or more if we could manage it. I honestly had no idea how many steps behind us they might be; if you run fast enough, you’re so far ahead you have no idea who’s chasing you.
I looked at the door to our room; I probably had a few minutes before Brooke woke up. I made sure it was locked, then walked toward the front desk to ask for information on the commune—motel clerks didn’t freak out about drifters, or anything else it seemed. We were some of the most normal people they saw.
The man at the garbage can went back in through the rear door of whatever business he was opening for the day. A pawn shop, maybe. It was too early to be a bar. The town was quiet, only just waking up, and I wondered what it would be like to live here, to put down roots and stay here forever. Not much different than in Clayton, I supposed. What brought people here, instead of there—or there instead of here? Did they choose to live here, or were they just born here and never moved away?
The front office had a bell on the door that dinged as I walked in.
“Good morning, sir.” He called me sir even though I was only eighteen and looked even younger. I’d tried growing a beard, hoping it would make me look like an adult, but it just came in wispy and thin—I was so obviously trying to look like an adult that I gave up and shaved it off. He glanced down at Boy Dog, who followed me in. “That room working out for you?”
“It’s been great,” I said. “Thanks for letting us keep the dog; a lot of places get picky about pets.”
“No problem. What can I do for you?”
I needed information, and I was caught by the sudden urge to torture it out of him—to tie him down and cut him in strategic places, just a bit at first, then more and more until he told me everything I wanted—
No. I wasn’t allowed to hurt people. I took a breath and spooled out the story I’d concocted instead. “Well, I’m looking for my sister—”
“That’s the girl you were with last night?”
Did he suspect we were runaways? More to the point, had he turned us in? I fed him some more of my made-up backstory, hoping some extra information would cool his suspicions. “No, that’s my wife—we’re taking a semester off of college to try to find my sister, who last I heard was hanging around this part of the state. Kind of drifting, you know?” I grimaced, as if the thought was painful. “My sister’s a little younger, still in high school; she ran away from home last year.”
“That’s too bad,” said the clerk. He leaned on the counter; a good sign that I’d caught his attention with the story. He might take it seriously enough to actually help me. “You think she’s in Baker, specifically? You have family around here?”
“We don’t,” I said, “but I’d heard…” I trailed off, like I was too embarrassed to say it, and when he nodded I knew that I had him. Suddenly I wasn’t a suspicious outsider asking about the local cult, I was a concerned family man, one of the normals, someone he could gossip with about those weirdos on the farm. I looked out the window, checking for Brooke, but our door was still closed.
“The cult,” said the clerk, nodding again. “Spirit of Light? You think she’s fallen in with them?”
“I hope not,” I said, and paused just a moment before saying, “So it’s real, then? They’re actually here?”
“Sad to say,” said the clerk. “A friend of mine joined up with them a few years back; local boy. We figured he was smarter than that but I guess nobody ever got rich overestimating the intelligence of rednecks. Them Light-Brights come into town for groceries and medicine and stuff like that, whatever they can’t make on the farm I guess, toilet paper and whatnot, and so Nick he starts chatting with this one girl every time he sees her, bagging her things in the checkout aisle and whatever. We all told him them folks was nothing but trouble, and he insisted, right hand to God, he was just trying to talk her out of the cult, not himself into it. Inviting her to the Dairy Keen and asking her to movies and such. She keeps saying maybe and then saying no, and then finally one day the big man comes in: the High Chief Light-Bright or whatever they call him. The Messiah. You don’t see him often, but he comes in now and then looking for this or that, and every time someone follows him back out. This time it was Nick. Didn’t even finish his shift. Now he’s the one comes into town buying toilet paper, and we talk to him sometimes and he says hi but he’s gone—nothing in his head but songs and stories and ain’t-it-great-to-be-alives. He smiles and nods and I’m not even sure he recognizes us anymore. Which I guess is just a long, depressing way of saying that if your sister’s in there, you’ve got a long, empty road ahead getting her back out, and that road don’t even lead out, so you’d best not take it in the first place.”
“Has anyone ever left the cult?” I asked. “Voluntarily, I mean?”
“Not that I recall.”
I asked the next question carefully, trying to sound awed by the mystery instead of desperate for concrete details. “Does anybody ever disappear?” If the cult leader was really a Withered, like Brooke’s memories said he was, he had to be killing them somehow. Learning how could be the first step to finding Yashodh’s weak points.
The clerk squinted. “From Baker, you mean? Sometimes, but they always show up as Light-Brights sooner or later.”
“But from the commune, I mean,” I said quickly. “The Light-Brights themselves, they’re not being … killed or anything?” I glanced outside again. Brooke was still in the room.
The clerk shook his head. “Trust me, kid, there’s not a person in this town doesn’t know somebody out on that farm. If they was disappearing we’d be out there with torches and pitchforks, but this ain’t the kind of cult that people disappear from. Every single one of them’s still there, growing their own food and sewing their own clothes and praising whatever non-Christian whosit they’ve decided to worship. They don’t die, they don’t leave, they don’t … do anything.”
I realized I was frowning, confused by the lack of deaths, so I changed my expression to what I thought was hope. “Thank you,” I said. “At least that means she’s still alive.”
“If she’s there at all,” said the clerk.
“How would we get out there?” I asked.
“You don’t.”
“But obviously people do,” I said. “Which road is it? Which farm?”
“You’re not listening to me,” said the clerk. “People who go there don’t come back. The city, sometimes, or the police, but folks like you? Just Light-Brights waiting to happen.”
This was interesting. “They’re that persuasive?”
“They persuaded Nick, and he grew up more afraid of them than the boogeyman under his bed.”
“Thanks,” I said again. “We’ll be careful.” I took a step toward the door, but I still didn’t know where to find them. I looked outside, but still
no Brooke. I turned back to the clerk. “How about a roadside stand? A lot of these places sell cheese or vegetables or whatever—does Spirit of Light? Maybe I could ask there, see if anyone knows my sister?”
“Head out on State Road 27,” said the clerk. “Plenty of folks buy produce from them—it’s safe enough. You don’t have a car, though, right?”
“Just the bus.”
“Bus don’t run that way, but you can try hitching.”
I tried to look serious, eager to convince him we were as normal as could be. “Isn’t that dangerous?”
“You’re heading out to the most dangerous part of Baker there is. Someone kidnaps you on the way there, it’ll be a kindness.”
I thanked him and left, trudging toward our room. It was good to have information, but most of it made me uneasy. Where were the deaths? Was Yashodh using some kind of mind control? Most of the Withered were too dangerous to confront head on; we had to lurk in the fringes, learning everything we could until we found a weakness we could exploit. This Withered sounded like he might be too dangerous to even meet.
I paused in front of our door, thinking. What if we just left? He wasn’t killing anybody, apparently. We didn’t have to kill him. Maybe we shouldn’t. But I couldn’t shake the sound of the clerk’s voice as he warned us away, too scared to—
The door opened, and Brooke started in surprise to find me standing silently in front of it. “Sranje! Šta radiš ovdje?”
“English,” I said softly.
She stared at me, confused, and then tilted her head to the side as her surprise turned to curiosity. “What language was I speaking?”
I stepped past her into the room and closed the door carefully behind me. “No idea. Something you’ve used before, I think, but I didn’t recognize the words.”
She walked back and sat on the bed. “I asked what you were doing there. Guarding me?”