CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Pretty Little Girlies

 

A thunderous drum of horse’s hooves, the world trembling under their trampling gallop, cups rattling in the cabinets, tickets burning hot in his pocket, plates clattering together louder and louder until—

Whack.

Kayla slapped him awake.

“Wake up, dummy,” she said.

Coburn blinked, tried to catch her hand before she slapped him again, but somehow his coordination wasn’t working—her open palm connected again and left him reeling. In his nose: the smell of sour booze. Like Southern Comfort. Mixed with bad bile.

Two hazy frames of vision merged together until they formed a single picture, and there he saw Kayla standing over him—he was, after all, laying across a kitchen table—and she had her hair pulled behind her in a pony tail and sported a dress as blue as a robin’s egg, as blue as—

—corpse-flesh—

He shook his head and stood up off the table.

“We’re late,” she said.

“Let me guess, for a very important date.” It occurred to him then that it was his mouth that tasted like sweet liquor and bile. Jesus Christ on an ice cream cake, was he hungry. He staggered past the girl and went to the kitchen—appliances all in avocado green or mustard yellow (harvest gold, they called it, wasn’t that right?) and he threw open the fridge to see if there was any blood in there and there wasn’t—it was empty but for a pair of roaches wrestling with one another over a crusted marble of old food, food that looked like a dung ball.

“Hey, vampire,” Kayla said again, this time louder, meaner. “Those roaches are fighting over you, you dumb piece of crap, you dried-up nugget of somebody else’s shit. Look at me when I’m talking to you—”

Coburn did look, and he wished he hadn’t.

Blood trickled from her eyes and from her nose, and when she opened her mouth to speak once more, all that came out was a bubbling slurry of blood and—bits of lung? Swatches of esophageal tissue? The mess poured down the front of her dress, and he felt around on the countertop to find a towel but nothing was there and he couldn’t take his eyes off of her, and then a handful of words came bubbling up through that black blood:

“You couldn’t protect me,” she said, each word framed by a muddy burp of gore, and then he saw her: Kayla standing in the kitchen doorway behind herself, two Kaylas, one with the pony tail and the bloody dress and the other girl with the dirty white t-shirt and torn-up jeans from the RV.

That Kayla, the second Kayla, looked over at her blood-drooling doppelganger and then met Coburn’s eyes and asked:

“What’s happening? What does this mean?”

And then again with the rumbling, the vibrating, the thunderous tumble of horse hooves, a stampede, the cabinet doors juddering against the wood, a glass tumbling out and shattering, a hard and sudden crack across the windowpane looking out over a gravel driveway—