“What’s your favorite song?” asked Brooke. We’d found State Road 27 but hadn’t managed to catch a ride yet so we were just walking along—slowly, so Boy Dog could keep up.
I answered without thinking. “‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ by Foreigner.”
Brooke laughed. “No it’s not.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “Why not?”
“The question isn’t why not,” she said. “It’s why. What on earth about that song makes you like it?”
“You say that like it’s impossible to like,” I said. “That’s one of the most popular songs of all time.”
“Is that why you picked it?”
I glanced at her. “I picked it because I like it.”
“So sing it.”
“What, right now?”
She spun slowly in the empty country road, looking at the wide fields and dusty trees that surrounded us. “Are you shy? We could sing at the top of our lungs and no one would even hear us. So prove it, big guy: if ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ is your favorite song, sing it.”
“I don’t really sing.”
Her eyes gleamed with mischief. “Then recite the words.”
I sighed. “Fine, I don’t actually know the words.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said proudly. “You didn’t even know who sang it—it’s Journey, not Foreigner, and I should know because I went to their concerts. Several of me did.”
“They’re the same band,” I said, and then frowned. “Aren’t they?”
“They’re not the same band, they’re super different.”
“No, seriously,” I said, “isn’t it just, like, they changed their name? Like how Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship.”
“Wow,” said Brooke, “you’re going all in on classic rock, aren’t you?”
“What else am I going to listen to, modern stuff? Have you heard modern stuff?”
“More than you have,” said Brooke, “which is my whole point. You don’t listen to anything, classic or modern or anything else. I’m going to guess that somebody, probably your mom, listened to classic rock all the time, so you picked the most popular one as your ‘look how normal I am’ answer if anyone ever asked.”
I sighed again and shrugged. “Fine, you got me. And it was my dad, actually—huge classic rock fan. I don’t know if you remember him very well.”
“He left when we were little, right?” Brooke had lived two doors down from me since elementary school. “I liked him.”
“Most people did,” I said. “People who didn’t live with him at least.” I heard a car behind us and turned to face it, sticking out my thumb to try to hitch a ride. The car ignored us, not even slowing down. I faced forward again, but Boy Dog had flopped down in the dirt by the side of the road, taking our brief pause as an excuse to rest. I gave him a moment.
“I don’t know why I bother keeping up the pretense with you,” I said softly. “You know everything about me.”
“I don’t think anyone knows everything about you,” said Brooke.
“But you know that I’m … different,” I said. I don’t know why it was so hard to say; I used to wear it as a badge of honor. “I’m sociopathic. I don’t feel things the way you do, the way anybody does. Everything I do is fake, to make people think I’m normal. This morning I lied to the motel clerk, trying to convince him we came to town on a bus. He doesn’t care how we came to town. Some of the lies were to put him at ease and get info out of him, but even after he gave us the info I didn’t want him to know we were drifters. I wanted him to think we were normal.”
“You just want to fit in,” said Brooke. “Everybody wants that.”
“I never used to.”
She shrugged and started walking again. Boy Dog heaved himself to his feet and started following. “People change,” said Brooke. I caught up with her in a few long strides. “And circumstances change. When you were a kid you lived in a nice little house full of nice little people, and it was all nice and little and normal, and you wanted to stand out.”
“I lived in an apartment over a mortuary,” I said. “My dad beat us and then left.”
“So why you’d pick his favorite music?”
I thought about it then shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Either way,” she said, “your old life was pretty friggin’ normal compared to your current social circle: a possessed girl and a dog with the dumbest name in the history of dog names.”
“A demon named him,” I said. “So to be fair, that name is not the worst thing it’s ever done.”
Brooke laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile at the sound. We walked for a while longer, listening to the wind rustle through the trees. After a minute or two Brooke spoke again. “What do you think my favorite song is?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know? We lived next door to each other for sixteen years.”
“Since we’re being so open and honest,” I said, “let’s get this out of the way and say that I did, in fact, stalk you for several months—”
“That’s creepy.”
“Compared to what aspect of our current situation?”
“Fair point,” said Brooke. She took a few more steps, then asked, “Because you liked me?”
“I told myself I was protecting you.”
“Were you?”
“Well, you’re not dead.”
“I did get kidnapped because of you, though.”
“And rescued.”
“And possessed.”
“Are you going to hold that against me forever?”
“I’m just teasing,” said Brooke. “There’s, like, a million girls in here, and you only ruined one of their lives.”
“Listen,” I said, “I am doing everything I can to—”
Brooke burst into laughter. “I’m just teasing!” she insisted. “Come on, John, you know I love you.”
“And we know that that’s, like, the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“You’re my best friend,” said Brooke. “You’re literally the only person who knows me—the real, current me, I mean. My family just remembers Mary.”
“You mean Brooke.”
“I mean all of them,” said Brooke. “Mary and Brooke and Katherine … honestly, like at least a hundred Katherines. They’re all gone—even Brooke—but whatever I am now, some kind of messed-up, emotional Voltron made out of old, discarded daughters, you’re the only one who knows that me. This me. And I know you don’t love me, but you like me. And … that means a lot.”
“Well,” I said, not knowing how to respond. “There you go.”
She raised her eyebrow. “Very romantic.”
“But my point is,” I said, “that despite stalking you, I never paid attention to the music you listened to.” I paused. “I remember hearing a Pink song once.”
“How can a song be pink?”
“Pink was a singer,” I said. “Well, still is, I guess. Sometimes I feel like we’ve left the world, but we’re still in it, just … on the fringes.”
“What was the name of the song?” she asked.
“I don’t really know music,” I said, feeling guilty that I couldn’t tell her. “Sorry.”
“It would be nice to have a favorite song,” she said. A moment later she pointed ahead. “Is that it?”
I peered down the road; the distance was blurry, but there was definitely something there. People, and a large dark shape that could be the produce stand. “Did we walk the entire way?”
“Poor little Boy Dog,” said Brooke, bending down to scratch his ears. “His legs are, like, eight inches long. He’s taken ten times as many steps as we have.”
“We have to be careful,” I said, watching the dark shape slowly come into focus as we walked closer. “Yashodh can control minds, and we don’t know how to kill him yet—we’re going to have to find some way of staying close to him long enough to figure him out without getting brainwashed, and that’s not going to be easy.”
“What was the old trick you used to use?” asked Brooke. “When we had the whole team?”
The first year Brooke and I were on the road we’d been in the employment of the FBI and we’d managed to kill eight Withered before they’d starting fighting back. That whole team was dead now, except for the two of us, but we’d learned a lot before the end. One of the simplest tricks was the speed-bump test: most of the Withered had incredible regeneration powers, but not all, so step two, after we’d found one, was to find a way to hit them with truck. If they regenerated we buckled down for a long game of cat and mouse, figuring out exactly how to kill them and then planning the perfect way to do it. I was really good at that part. If the truck worked, though, then it was over—the Withered was dead, and we moved on to the next one.
“I don’t know if we can arrange a speed-bump test,” I said. “At least not one we can get away with afterward. Potash was a military-trained assassin; I’m just a creepy kid with a knife.”
“And a gun,” said Brooke.
“And a gun,” I said. She knew where it was in my pack, but I always kept the bullets hidden. A gun wasn’t a great thing to have handy during one of her suicidal mood swings.
“Hello, travelers!” One of the people at the stand was waving to us, and we waved back. I think I’d been expecting them to be dressed in white robes or something, but instead they looked like they’d stepped out of a western movie: homemade dresses of colorful gingham, linen shirts, hats they must have purchased from a store somewhere. They weren’t dour, they weren’t otherworldly, they were just … people. They greeted us with smiles, and I slowed my pace for the last several yards, trying to gauge the danger. Boy Dog walked straight to the shady triangle by the wall of the food stand and plopped down, panting in exhaustion. One of the cultists picked up a ceramic plate of zucchini, dumped them into a box of yellow squash, and set the empty plate in front of Boy Dog, filling it with water from a plastic jug. Boy Dog eagerly lapped it up.
“You’re a long way out from the city,” said a woman.
I nodded, shielding my eyes from the sun. “Yep. Haven’t been able to hitch a ride all morning.”
“Where were you headed?” asked a man.
“Here,” said Brooke. She was never very good at deception.
“We were looking for the Spirit of Light,” I said, trying to spin Brooke’s up-front confession into the same cover story I’d given the clerk. “My sister was down here a few months ago,” I said. “We thought maybe she’d joined your commune.”
The woman tilted her head. “Sister Kara, maybe?”
“Her name is Lauren,” said Brooke, before I had a chance to say yes. I bit my tongue, wondering how I could talk to them without her spoiling all my lies, but the man laughed.
“We all get new names when we join with the Light,” he said. “I don’t remember Sister Kara’s old name, but she joined us two months ago, so it might be her.”
“She won’t want to leave with you,” said the woman. “Sister Kara is happy here—we all are.” Her face softened and she peered into my face with concern. “You don’t look happy at all.”
“He never does,” said Brooke, and looked at me with an expression almost identical to the woman’s. “He’s happy sometimes, though. More often than you think.”
“How can you tell?” the woman asked.
Brooke nodded sagely. “The dog’s still alive.”
It disturbed me how close Brooke seemed to the cultists—how eerily her attitude of cheerful innocence matched their vibe of brainwashed emptiness. I’d grown so accustomed to her over the last few months that I’d forgotten how damaged she really was.
“That’s good to hear,” said the man. “Isn’t it great to be alive?”
“We were hoping we might have a chance to go back to your farm with you,” I said. “Just to look for her? We don’t want to try to take her away, so don’t worry—we just want to make sure it’s really her, make sure she’s safe.”
“I assure you that everyone in the Light is completely safe,” said the woman firmly. “Christopher makes sure of it.”
“Is that the leader?” I asked.
“The Vessel of the Light,” said the woman. “If you’d like to meet him, you’re welcome to join us for dinner.”
“Thank you,” said Brooke. “That’s very kind.”
“Pull up an apple crate,” said the man. “It’s a long day until then. Have some tomatoes—fresh off the vine this morning.”
I nodded my head in thanks, still leery of the emptiness behind their eyes—or was I just imagining it?—but Brooke smiled brightly and shrugged off her backpack, sitting in the shade and accepting a tomato happily. After a moment I took off my pack as well, though I told them I preferred to stand, and watched as they went about their business with the vegetables. There were five of them at the stand: Sister Debbie and Brother Stan, the two who’d greeted us, and behind them were Sister Tracy, Sister Molly, and Brother Zeke. The names seemed strange to me—not really biblical, and not from any other religious tradition I could think of, either. They were just names, and the only benefit to getting a new one seemed to be the loss of the old one, a clean break from your former life, which tied you to this new community only in the sense that you weren’t tied to anything else anymore.
We spent the day with them, most of it talking, because the stand did very little business. I planned out how to kill each one of them if I needed to: a stab here, a slash there, the entire group gone before they could fight back. But I couldn’t just kill people. The road had some traffic, but not much, and the few customers who came seemed to be regulars—locals who knew the cultists by name and bought a bushel of carrots or potatoes without bothering to ask the price. They looked nervously at Brooke and me, perhaps wondering if they could save us from whatever indoctrination lay in store. But they didn’t do anything and drove away, and we watched the sun arc lazily across the sky, pulling us slowly toward evening.
I was not, I decided, imagining the emptiness. Sister Debbie and the others were friendly, but there was nothing behind it—no real concern for us or for anything else, just a rote recitation of meaningless small talk. Sometime in the afternoon they started over, repeating the same pleasantries, the same jokes, the same cheerful affirmations that had filled the morning, and my sense of unease grew deeper. Brooke chattered along as if nothing were out of the ordinary, and I wondered how many personalities had come and gone during the day, holding the same conversations one after the other without ever realizing it. It made me angry—it made me furious—to think that these hollow shells of former people might be the perfect match for my only friend left in the world. I closed my eyes and counted, running through number sequences and old recipes, estimating how many pots of vegetable soup I could make with the ingredients here in the stand. Anything to take my mind off of Brooke and the hell I had put her through. She didn’t deserve this—brain-dead small talk in the middle of nowhere. She deserved a house. A bed she could sleep in more than two nights in a row. An education in math and English and science, instead of just How to Wash Your Clothes in a Truck Stop Bathroom, How To Hide From The Demon Army Chasing Us. She deserved a boyfriend that loved her back. I was trying my best to give her what I could, but John Cleaver and Boy Dog are a sorry excuse for a family.
After we kill the Withered, I thought. A normal life can wait—don’t get distracted. Don’t lose track of why we’re really here. The Withered were killers, they were torturers, they were supernatural monsters; everything we’d never wanted to believe was real. Yashodh, whatever his methods, had stolen these five people’s lives so completely they didn’t even realize it—five walking corpses, physically alive but mentally gone. People who did that to other people had to be stopped. Brooke was the best possible reminder of why, and her memory, faulty as it was, was my only way to find them. I wouldn’t let them hurt anyone else like they’d hurt her.
But how much was I hurting her in the meantime?
It wasn’t quite dusk yet when a flatbed truck pulled to a stop beside us, and a man stepped out and introduced himself as Brother Lance. The six of them started packing up the vegetables, and Brooke and I pitched in, leaving the old wooden stand empty until tomorrow. They climbed into the back with the crates of food, and I lifted Boy Dog up after them. We held tight to the metal handrails as the truck rocked gently back and forth through a three-point turn and then rattled back down the road where it had come from. I looked at Brooke, and she looked at me, and we watched each other quietly as the sun dropped out of sight and the bright blue sky turned yellow, then orange, then a blue so deep that all the other colors of the world seemed to fall into it and disappear. Brother Lance turned on his headlights, and we pulled off onto a dirt road, passing through a nondescript gate and driving toward an old white farmhouse that seemed to shine as the light beams hit it.
“Home again,” said Sister Debbie, smiling with the same mellow emptiness she’d used earlier to point out a bird flying over the vegetable stand.
The truck stopped, and I jumped out before lifting Boy Dog down with a grunt. He explored the dirt driveway, sniffing the tire tracks and the tufts of night-black grass. I turned back to help Brooke, but she was already down, and put a hand on my arm, pressing close to whisper in my ear.
“I’m sad.”
Instantly I worried about another suicide attempt, but before I could even start the process of changing her mind, she shook her head, pressing closer and forcing me a few steps to the side, out of earshot of the cultists. “Not for me,” she said. “For them.”
I glanced at the six farmers unloading the truck, listless and cheerful all at once. “You think they’re sad?”
“I don’t think they can be sad,” said Brooke. “So I’m being sad for them.”
Brother Stan nodded toward us, his arms full of vegetable boxes. “Would you mind grabbing a crate each and following me up to the house? I can introduce you to Christopher.”
“This is it,” I whispered to Brooke. “I don’t want you to freak out, but I want you to be ready to run if we have to. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We don’t know what we’re going to find in there, and we don’t know what this Withered can do, so just … be ready for anything.”
“I’m not going to freak out,” she said, stooping to pick up a crate.
I picked up one of my own and followed her, ten or twenty steps behind Brother Stan. “I just don’t want to take you by surprise, okay? We’re partners in this.”
“I’ll take care of you,” said Brooke.
Brother Stan waited for us by the door, propping it open with his foot. After a moment of terrified hesitation, I went in. It scared me to be here, so far from help, so far from anything, but the lights were on, and I could hear happy voices murmuring in a nearby room. The door led in to a kitchen, and we set the wooden crates on the floor where Brother Stan pointed.
“I’ll go get Christopher,” said Brother Stan, and I realized it was unsettling to hear him talk about someone, especially a fellow cultist, without “Brother” at the beginning. Christopher lived here, but he was fundamentally different from the others. I didn’t know what to expect. Brother Stan left us alone in the kitchen, and I felt for the gun in the back of my waistband, hidden by my shirt. The magazine was hidden in one of my backpack straps, in a pocket I’d made by digging out the padding. There was no way we could kill a Withered with something as simple as a gun, but it might buy us enough time to get out.
“The dirt road was a straight shot in from the gate,” I said. “Maybe a hundred yards at the most. If I say go, you go, okay? Don’t wait for me, just get out, and I promise I’ll be right behind you.”
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I’ll protect you.”
“He can control people’s minds,” I said. “We don’t know how, but we don’t want to give him a chance to try it. Just—”
“Calm down,” said Brooke. “I told you, I’ve got this.”
Her assurance only made me more nervous. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to stop him from controlling our minds,” said Brooke.
“You don’t have … powers,” I said. “You remember that, right?”
“Of course I know that,” Brooke whispered. “But he doesn’t.”
“Brooke—”
Footsteps clomped toward us down the hall, and I ran through my story again, looking for any last minute ways to polish it, to craft the perfect lie that would help ingratiate us into his community, to give us the time to get to know him, to find his weaknesses, to stay under his radar until the perfect time to strike.
A short, dark man walked into the room. He was balding on top, with a wispy gray mullet behind his ears. Mid fifties, I guessed, with skin and features that suggested Middle Eastern heritage. He smiled when he saw us, not like the cultists did, but a broad, genuine smile that seemed almost shocking after a day full of pale imitations. “My name is Christopher,” he said, and his voice was thin but firm. “Welcome to the Spirit of Light. I understand you’re looking for Sister Kara?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but Brooke spoke first. “Actually we’re looking for you,” she said. “It’s been a long time, Yashodh.”
I tensed, moving my hand closer to the gun magazine. What was she doing?
Christopher blinked in surprise, then took a step back and eyed us suspiciously. “Who are you?”
“That’s the trouble with these bodies,” said Brooke. “No one ever recognizes me.” She dropped her backpack to the floor, and spread her arms slightly, presenting herself like an old friend. “It’s me: Hulla. I’m Nobody.”