“Bad?” his father asked, turning around to look at John, who nodded slowly.
“Tell us,” his mother said. She wore a blue flannel nightgown and her hair was crazy from lying in bed, but John didn’t think he’d ever seen anything so comforting. A sudden wave of emotion swept over him, and he began to talk.
He spoke for a long time, pausing occasionally to answer a question from one or another of his parents, and when he was done, he felt as though he’d said everything there was to say. His father slid a mug of coffee in front of him and Tim sipped it as his mother and father processed. More than anything, he wanted to tell them how crazy he knew it all must sound, and once he even started to do just that, but his father raised a hand and waved him off.
“So, if I’m hearing you right,” his father said, “this woman will be coming for you. She’ll be coming here.”
“If I stay,” John said. “Wherever I go, she’ll find me eventually.”
There was a voice from the kitchen door, behind John. “Who will find you?”
John turned and saw Connie. He felt his breath catch for a moment. Connie wore old, faded sweatpants and an oversized t-shirt, one of his father’s, with KENNETT SQUARE MUSHROOM CAPITAL OF THE WORLD stenciled across the front over a flaked off image of one of the fungi for which the region was so well known. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and other than the few wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, she looked exactly as she had last time John saw her, all those years ago.
“Hi,” he said, and stood. She came forward and hugged him.
“You came,” she whispered into the crook of his neck.
“I did,” he replied, “but before long, you might wish I hadn’t.” They sat down at the table and his father poured Connie a cup of coffee.
“This is my fault,” she said, looking distraught. “I asked you to come here, and now…your parents are in danger.” She glanced at John’s mother. “I’m so sorry, Isabel. All you’ve done is show me kindness, and this is what I bring in return.”
John’s mother shook her head. “This has nothing to do with you, sweetheart. This is,” she paused and looked at John’s father, “an old matter. Tim?”
Tim Barron rubbed his eyes and took a sip of his coffee. “Okay,” he said, closed his eyes, and then spoke. “You know that we adopted you?” he asked John, who nodded. “And you know that your birth mother died during delivery?” Another nod. “That’s part of the story, and really, it’s the only part we thought you’d ever need to know. The rest of it doesn’t have to do with you, really, at all.”
“Go on,” John said.
“You birth mother had twins,” his mother said. “For a while, we had foster custody of you both.”
“A sister,” John murmured. “It was a girl, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” his father said. “But from the very beginning, there was something wrong with her. We only had her for a few weeks, but even then we knew that she wasn’t normal.”
John shook his head, not understanding. “I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
This time, his mother answered. “She was always hurting you. We’d walk away from the crib for just the briefest of moments, and when we came back, you would be crying and there would be marks on you. Scratches. We thought it would stop, but it didn’t, and we got scared.” She paused. “And it was more than that. She would scratch us, too, and she never stopped crying. It was more than just a matter of being fussy—that’s normal—it was meanness. Meanness like I wouldn’t have believed was possible in an infant. You were the exact opposite. Sometimes, you were so calm and well-behaved I just couldn’t believe it. What baby doesn’t cry? Ever? Maybe you were sick a little more often than most babies, but that was it.”
After a moment, she added, “Even back then, I remember thinking that it was like the two of you were parts of the same whole, that you’d gotten everything good, and she’d gotten everything bad. It’s a terrible thought, and one I hated myself for having, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe, somehow, it was true.”
Quietly, John asked, “So what happened?”
His father shrugged and said, “It was a difficult process, because DSS prefers to keep siblings together, but when we filed papers for adoption, we just…well, we just kept you.”
“And my sister went back into the foster care system?”
His mother nodded.
“Was she adopted?”
“I don’t know,” his father said. “I tried to check a few times, but that’s not information they give out. Once we gave her up, we surrendered any right to know what was happening with her.”
John gave a rueful little laugh. “Well, I think we know now. She’s coming home.”
* * *
Later, Connie led John to the bedroom that once, what seemed like a thousand years ago now, had been his. As quietly as possible, she cracked the door and John peeked in. Connie’s daughter lay in bed, John’s old quilt pulled up to her chin. It was dark in the room, the only illumination the light spilling in from the hallway, but John could still see that the little girl looked like Connie. High boned cheeks, soft brown hair. But he could also see that she was pale, and that the form of her body beneath the frayed patchwork quilt was too slight, too small.
“She’s beautiful,” he murmured.
“Yeah,” Connie said. “She is. My Katie…” She eased the door shut and they went back downstairs and sat on the couch in the living room. Connie pulled her feet up and tucked them beneath her. John angled himself toward her and rested his arm on the top of the couch. It was late—or early, depending on how one looked at things—and John’s parents had gone back to bed for another hour or so of sleep. The house was quiet, the only sound an occasional crack or creak as the house settled.
“What are you going to do?” Connie asked.
John thought for a moment, then said, “I wish I had a good answer for you. I came to help your daughter, but my being here is…dangerous for all of you. This woman who’s after me—” he snorted a laugh, “my sister, is a killer. I don’t think she’d bat an eye at killing each and every person in this house.”
Connie stared thoughtfully at John for a second, then said, “In the visions and dreams you have, the ones where you see through her eyes, do you ever feel what she’s feeling?”
“In a way. Loneliness, sadness. Frustration. Why?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s just that…I guess it’s just that, when we were together all those years ago, I knew that I loved you, and I knew that you loved me, but…I always felt like there was something missing.”
“Missing,” John mused. “What?”
She shook her head, searching for the word, then finally said, “Abandon, maybe. There was something holding you back, a wall. Even if you didn’t quite understand it, I could see it, and I could see what it was doing to you. And to us.”
John huffed a laugh. “Thanks.”
“I don’t mean that to be insulting. But think about it. Have you ever felt free, whole, like you were fully who you were meant to be? When I think about our time together—” she paused, “it’s like you were always looking over your shoulder, waiting for the sky to fall. That wasn’t it, of course. I know that now. You were waiting for her to show up, and even if you didn’t understand some of the things you were doing, they were all to protect the people around you.”
John thought about his inability to stay in one place for more than a year or two, about the way he had ended things with first Connie and then, years later, with Suzie, and about how coming home, even for a day or two, felt dangerous, not just for him, but for his parents. “What are you getting at?”
She shrugged. “I guess what I’m getting at is that your sister probably feels the same way, like there’s something essential missing from her life. And maybe she feels like the only way she can fill that hole inside of her is by killing you. Maybe…in order to have a normal life, she needs some of the goodness that went
to you when you were born.”
When John didn’t respond immediately, she added, “Maybe the same is true for you, that you’ll never be able to live your life completely until she’s dead, until some of her darkness balances out the light inside of you.”
“We’re twins,” he said, “halves of a whole, like my mother said. Neither one of us can be complete until we’ve…devoured the other. Either way, one of us has to die.”
“Maybe,” Connie said pensively. “But maybe not.”
“What do you mean?” John said, his eyes narrowing.
She shrugged. “It might be nothing—”
“Come on,” he said. “Give.”
And so she did.
Chapter 32
As Phylum drove, the woman talked. She was stronger now and able to sit up front with him, although she rode slumped against the passenger side door. Her wounds, which had been grievous, were healing, the flesh seeming to knit back together at a pace just too slow to see with the naked eye. One of the gashes left by the brutal attack had entered the woman’s chest just below the collar bone; when Phylum first saw it, the wound gaped open and seeped blood, but now he could barely tell where it had been. The first few ounces of blood he’d given her, his own, had kept her alive, but she had only really started to come around after feeding on the woman Phylum had cold-cocked coming out of the gas station a few hours later. If he hadn’t been willing to accept his initial instincts about the true nature of this beautiful, dark woman, he was ready now.
Why he was doing all of this for her was hard to put into words. He just knew that he didn’t want her to die, not now, not at anyone’s hand beside his own. Everything he was doing, he knew, was the result of sloppy thinking and poor judgment. The job he’d been hired to complete was simple—kill John Barron. But after his encounter with this strange and fascinating woman in Barron’s apartment and then the revealing conversation with Mr. It’s Me, wheels had started turning in his mind. Normally, he was very good at ignoring the thoughts that weakened the resolve of lesser men, but now he found that he didn’t want to push these thoughts aside. He was truly conflicted, perhaps for the first time in his life.
That the directive to kill Barron had been handed down by a group affiliated with the church bothered him. That was a large part of the problem. He hated the church, hated what it stood for. As far as Phylum was concerned, the church was nothing more than a money-making machine that granted shitty people carte blanche to do awful things and then, through the magic of “God,” be forgiven for it. His father had been that way, first when he was beating Phylum’s mother and drinking his way through their monthly mortgage payment, and then when he decided Phylum’s mother had had enough—or maybe when she had stopped resisting the way he liked—and started in on Phylum himself.
And then, on top of all the church and daddy issues, there was Mr. It’s Me, as well. To cut right to the point, Phylum had decided that Mr. It’s Me was quite a tremendous lump of cow shit. Here was a man who sat in his chintzy house in Reston, Virginia and made calls, to people like Phylum, that ended lives. Not that the lives mattered to Phylum—no, that wasn’t the issue at all; he was more than happy to kill and kill, right up until the proverbial cattle found their way back to pasture. He liked his job. Killing made him feel good. What he had grown tired of was taking orders from shitsacks like Mr. It’s Me. And that’s why Phylum had a bit of a problem on his hands.
Here he was, driving north toward Pennsylvania with this woman who appeared—it could really no longer be denied—to be an actual, no-shit vampire, and he was seriously considering bailing on the job he’d been hired to do.
What it came down to was whether Phylum was willing to give up his current line of work, and he was beginning to think he just might be. There would always be men who would pay to have other men killed. That was just how the world turned. Leaving Barron alive would mean leaving the United States, but he had enough money to be comfortable for a while. For quite a while, in fact.
A green highway sign came up, telling them they had 55 miles until the merge with I-95.
“We’re getting close,” the woman said. “Just a little while longer.”
* * *
Two hours later the sun was just coming up and they turned onto Route 1, heading toward Philadelphia. The woman was awake now, and although she still appeared to be weak, she was looking at him with perplexity.
“What’s your name?” Phylum asked.
She appeared to consider whether or not to tell him the truth, then said, “Rose.”
“Mine’s Eric. Most people call me Phylum. Your choice, Rose.”
“Okay then, Eric, do you mind if I ask you a question?”
He glanced over at her and grinned. “I’ll save you the trouble. I saved you because you’re like me.”
“Like you? What do you mean?”
“Wolves,” he said. “We’re both wolves.”
After a moment, she nodded. “Yes, I suppose we are.”
“Do you know how many wolves I’ve met in my life?” he said. “I mean, the genuine article. Not the poser CEO pieces of shit who shop from Soldier of Fortune magazine and play war-games in the woods during the weekend. People like us? None. Not one. Until you.”
“And how did you know I was a wolf?”
He was surprised she had asked. “I knew the first time I met you, Rose. In Barron’s apartment. You weren’t afraid. Everyone is afraid of me. They’re all sheep. I could tell that you thought I was a sheep, too. It shook me. I won’t lie about that.”
“So that’s why you’ve done all this for me? Saved me in the woods, brought me a kill, driving me north?”
“That,” he said, then grinned at her, “and strategy. I was hired to kill John Barron, and I’m still deciding whether or not to go through with it. I was told where he would be, but you…you just fucking showed up. I thought maybe you’d know where he’d gone now.”
“But there’s something else, too,” she said. “Another reason you kept me alive.”
He nodded. “Maybe there is,” he said, eyes focused on the road ahead. “But that’s my own business.”
* * *
Using an assumed identity he often utilized while on the job, Phylum checked them into a Super 8 motel at a little after ten o’clock that morning. As the sun had risen higher in the sky, Rose had become less focused and responsive, and then had blacked out altogether.
He parked as close as he could to their door and half-carried Rose inside and lay her on the bed. She showed little sign of stirring, but for good measure—he had to admit that the long night and day had taken their toll on him also—he bound her wrists with duct tape from his trunk, then taped her hands to the headboard. If she woke up, she might be able to escape, but she would make a lot of sound going about it.
When he had finished, he lay down on the other bed and fell fast asleep on top of the covers.
Chapter 33
After breakfast, John took his father aside and asked if they could take a walk. They needed to talk about something.
More out of remembered routine than anything else, John started off toward the cinderblock growing buildings. The morning was cool and the air was clear. By noon it would have warmed significantly, but for now the chilly spring air felt wonderful against John’s face and arms.
“If this is about last night,” his father began, “I understand why you’re angry with—”
John raised a hand and waved it off. “No, it’s not that. I don’t blame either of you for not telling me. It’s not something you could have known would matter. This is about something else, Dad.”
“Okay,” the older man said. They had turned off the gravel driveway now and were making their way across a rolling hill toward the mushroom buildings, about a hundred yards off. “What is it?”
“You know why I came here?”
His father nodded. “For Katie. Connie told us you’d spoken.”
“Right. And you know what it’s goi
ng to do to me if…if whatever this is actually works?”
Now a look of sadness spread across his father’s features. “I guess I have some idea. Does that frighten you?”
“Honestly, no. I mean, I’m not eager to feel that way again, but I have no doubts. You know?”
“I think so.”
John considered his words and then spoke again. “If I’m going to stay here and do this thing, it’s going to put all of you in danger, and I can’t do anything to protect you. If it works and I’m able to—to heal Katie, I might not even be conscious afterward. And this woman, my sister, is coming for me. She might even be close now.”
“We know that,” his father said. “We’re ready.”
John shook his head. “No, Dad, you’re not. Based on what I’ve heard, this woman may have killed dozens, even hundreds of people. She isn’t normal. She’s like—well, she’s like a vampire, Dad. She’ll kill all of you without thinking twice about it, not because she needs to, but because you’re in the way of her getting what she wants.”
“You,” his father said. They had arrived at the cinderblock building and they stopped now and faced each other. In the distance, John saw smoke drifting lazily from the house’s chimney. It all looked so calm and idyllic, and he wondered how he could ever have thought it was okay to bring this kind of trouble to his parents’ front door.
“Me,” John reiterated. “So that’s why, if I’m unconscious afterwards, I want you to give me over to her. No fight. No struggle. Just tell her you’re going to hand me over. Do you understand?”
His father’s face went white and he stepped back. “No,” he whispered. “I can’t believe you’d ask me to do that.” He moved back toward John and grabbed both of his son’s hands. “Your mother and I love you, John. You’re everything to us. When we took you in all those years ago, it was a miracle. We never thought we would be able to have children, and then there you were. And now you ask me to…to just give you up? I ought to hit you.”