“Don’t fucking touch my dog.”
Emma jams electric prongs into Howard Grosvenor Kline’s eye socket and gives him forty thousand volts to the face. Under the stun gun’s popcorn crackle, she can hear the electricity pulsate in the author’s scream: shrill, earsplitting, girlish.
Escape wasn’t the plan.
She didn’t choose the dead man’s vehicle to surprise Howard (although hitting him with a goddamn car was her favorite part of the night thus far). She chose it because of the undelivered parcel inside. And once she’d driven a safe distance away, torn the box open, and inserted the battery, she drove back with Jules’s stun gun in hand.
For Space Dog.
Laika backs away now, frightened but unhurt.
It’s not quite the testicles, as Jules once recommended, but the face still seems plenty painful. Emma keeps her finger on the stun gun’s trigger, sending more and more and more sizzling voltage into Howard’s cheek, his mouth, his throat. She smells burnt neckbeard. His eyes bulge inches from hers. He’s rigidly taut, every muscle and tendon clenched granite-hard under his skin. His blade clatters to the floor.
This is for Deek, she thinks. And the delivery driver.
And Laura Birch.
And everyone else you’ve ever—
The gunshot surprises her.
A thousand-pound sledgehammer strikes her thigh. The blast rattles her teeth, the flash blinds her, but most of all she feels a strange heaviness, as if her leg has instantly turned to stone. And spreading liquid heat. She’s never been shot before. This is what it’s like, apparently.
The electric chitter ceases.
Her stun gun hits the floor.
Howard screams with furious, red-faced power as Emma backpedals, hobbling to catch herself against the kitchen stove. Blood runs down her leg and pools underfoot. Devastating blows exchanged, predator and prey make eye contact.
Raising his gun, he grins.
“I got you.”
He got her.
It’s so tragic—and frustrating, to many readers—that even with thousands of volts seizing his nervous system, Howard Grosvenor Kline still managed to wrench the gun from his coat and shoot Emma at close range. Maybe it was his adrenaline, or the natural insulation of his heavyset physique. No nonlethal solution is a hundred percent effective, and there are numerous documented cases of suspects overpowering their arresting officers with electrode barbs still hanging from their flesh.
Now Howard aimed his Smith & Wesson to finish her.
One cartridge left.
Emma was cornered in the kitchen, wide-eyed and rapidly losing blood. She grasped for the stovetop behind her. She was reaching blindly for the pan she remembered boiling water in hours ago, to splash her killer with a gallon and a half of scalding liquid.
It was clever but futile. He knew the water was already cooled to room temperature, completely harmless to—
Emma swings the entire goddamn pan directly into Howard’s face. The water may be cold, but the pan itself is reinforced aluminum. She feels the man’s nose break with a bludgeoning crunch. He screams in pain.
Attack. Hide. Repeat.
But she staggers only six feet farther—just out of the kitchen—before her body fails her and she crashes down hard to her stomach.
So she crawls.
Down the hallway.
The walls seem to spiral around her. Her leg is dead weight now, so she drags it. Everything below her right hip throbs with bone-deep pain. Blood fills her jeans, soaking the fabric to her skin and leaving a smeared trail on the floor—and behind her she hears a tinny click. She knows the sound.
She pushes open the nearest door and rolls inside before he can fire. She kicks the door shut. Then she locks it.
She scoots away from the door until her backbone hits a bedpost. A flimsy bedroom lock won’t stop Howard. She’s trapped in here, grievously injured and losing blood fast. She can’t run. She has no weapons, nothing to fight back with.
She’s in the teenager’s room.
No. Howard’s room.
A fitting place to die. The bedroom that’s always unsettled her. The dense funk of body odor, the persistent and indescribable sickness that lived here. Time slows and smears, and in her peripheral vision Emma sees the mattress sag. Someone is sitting beside her.
She’s glad he’s here.
She shuts her eyes and smiles. “Hey, Shawn.”
Get up, Em.
“I can’t.”
You can still do this. Get up.
“I’m sorry. I can’t.”
Yes, you can.
She shakes her head dizzily, fading fast.
Don’t give up.
“I’m sorry, Shawn. I’m out of weapons.”
Please, Em, get up. He’s grabbing her shoulders now, shaking her, but still she refuses to look at him. You’re so close. Trust me, okay? You’ve gotten this far. You’ve been so strong for other people tonight. Now, be strong for you.
And then, Em, I’ll meet you there.
Those words always give her a chill.
I’ll meet you there.
Her eyes tear up when she remembers twenty-one-year-old Shawn’s surprised, genuine smile before the ambulance door swung shut. Two transfers. Nine hours in three waiting rooms. When they discharged him, she remembers buying a giant pack of Sour Patch Kids candies because she had to buy him something from the dingy little hospital café but didn’t know what food he liked. Or even his last name.
I’ll meet you there.
And every time she’s stepped out into the lapping Pacific tide, she’s made this same heartsick wish. She’d give anything to go back in time with her husband, to before everything changed. But it’s impossible. She’s always known it, and now it’s time to face it.
I’ll meet you—
“No,” she says. “You won’t.”
Silence.
“I love you, Shawn. So much. You were my soulmate and I miss you more than I can say.” She fights the shiver in her voice. “But you’re not real. You’re just my imagination. I’m not really talking to you. I never was.”
She opens her eyes. Blinking away tears as the empty bedroom sharpens into clarity around her. The itchy carpet. The dusty computer. The fetid air.
On the mattress beside her, no one.
She’s alone.
“It’s only me,” she whispers. “It’s always been me.”
That strength, too, was always hers.
And . . .
I’m not unarmed.
She rolls over, grips the bedpost with bloody knuckles, and pulls herself woozily upright onto the mattress—staring now into feudal Japan. Bamboo glows blue with moonlight. A stoic samurai warrior sharpens his katana.
Behind her the locked doorknob twists and jangles—Howard is at the door now—as she remembers his own admission, that he kept the sword he used to dismember his classmate’s body behind a loose board.
In his bedroom wall.
Above his bed.
She rips the poster down with her fingernails. The samurai tears away to reveal bare wall. The loose board is hidden from the eye, but she finds the gap with her fingertips. She peels it away, revealing a deep orifice inside the wall, and all the secrets spill out onto her, the house’s dark entrails released.
A lock of blond hair.
Dusty eyeglasses.
A clear pillbox rattling with bones and teeth.
And photographs. Dozens of Polaroids of unspeakable horrors, slapping to Howard’s mattress around her. She won’t dare look at them. Reaching deeper inside, she finds what she’s looking for: a small sword. Wrapped in milky plastic, brown with flaked rust—probably Laura Birch’s decade-old blood—but still sharp.
With a splintering crash, Howard kicks down the bedroom door. She whirls to face her killer with her new blade up in defense—but he calmly raises his gun. Emma’s heart plunges. There’s six feet between them, and no way she can cross the room on her bad leg before he fatally shoots her. Sword or no sword, he’s still won. She knows it. So does he.
He aims at her face.
She braces.
She can’t quite process what happens next—from the hallway, a racing white blur latches onto Howard’s forearm. He grunts in pain. It’s not a particularly powerful bite, because Laika is only a golden retriever acting on protective instinct.
But it buys Emma a moment.
By the time the man has wrestled his hand free of Laika’s fangs, Emma has staggered across the bedroom and plunged the blade into his chest.
To the hilt.
“Howard,” Emma says to his fading eyes, “your book really sucked.”