4

Yashodh watched us warily.

My hand itched to lunge for the gun.

“Brother Stan,” said Yashodh. “Can you help get the rest of the truck unloaded?”

“Of course,” said Brother Stan, walking past him toward the door. I stepped to the side, circling slightly so that he never blocked my view of Yashodh. I don’t know what prompted Brooke to spill our secrets like that, but I wanted to be ready if it all went to hell. Brother Stan walked outside and off the porch, and the door banged closed behind him.

“Who are you with?” asked Yashodh softly.

“With each other,” said Nobody.

“I mean which side,” said Yashodh. “Rack’s trying to raise an army. Are you here to press me into it?”

“No,” I said quickly. If he used the word “press,” then he didn’t want to join the Withered army at all; we needed to seem like allies. “We’re trying to stay out of the whole thing, like you.”

Yashodh studied me a moment, then looked back at Nobody. “Who’s he?”

“He’s mine,” said Nobody, “and you don’t touch him.”

“Fair enough,” said Yashodh. “And you won’t touch any of mine? We haven’t had a death here in decades; I don’t want to have to explain one of your suicides the next time the police come through for an inspection.”

“No fuss from either side,” said Nobody. “We just want to talk.”

Yashodh paused again, watching us, until at last he nodded. “I have a private room. We can talk in there.”

He led us through the house, past a sitting room full of a dozen or so cultists singing quietly to themselves. They beamed when they saw him, whispering his name in a sibilant chorus: “Christopher Christopher Christopher Christopher.” He slowed and gestured to them but didn’t stop, leading us up the stairs to a small office with an old kitchen table for a desk. The wooden chairs were mismatched, and the carpet was a spiral pattern woven from old scraps and rags. He closed the door behind us and sat with a heavy sigh.

“I knew it was only a matter of time,” he said. “It was bad enough before Fort Bruce, but after…” He shook his head. “It’s a horrible thing, to look at a massacre like that and not be able to tell who won.”

“Twenty-three humans dead,” I said.

“And not a word from Rack since,” said Yashodh. “If that was a victory for the Withered, their recruitment efforts would have stepped up, not down.”

“Did he come to you?” asked Nobody.

“Not yet,” said Yashodh. “But I have friends who’ve sent me word of his plans. Though even them I haven’t heard from lately.”

“Nashuja,” I said, venturing a guess. Nashuja we had killed last month, she was a grizzled woman who made her living as a long-haul trucker. She picked up hitchhikers and killed them in empty rest stops, cracking open their bones and sucking out the marrow, crying for the mothers who would never see their children again.

Yashodh shook his head. “Dag,” he said. We had killed Dag four months earlier. “I haven’t heard from Nashuja in … hundreds of years at least. I didn’t know she kept in contact with anyone.”

“Kanta found her a few years ago,” said Nobody. “I worked with him before he died.”

“Kanta was on Rack’s side,” said Yashodh, and his voice sounded tired. “He wanted to get us all together, like the old days—the god emperors come back at last.” He gestured around his office. “This is where we are today. This is what we are. Not gods anymore, just…” He shook his head. “They want to recruit me? They want this for their kingdom? Forty-six walking coma patients, smart enough to pull weeds and sew a few shirts and…” he gestured in the air, searching for words, “… wave at each other in the room downstairs? I’d be useless in a war.”

Yashodh hates himself, I thought. It wasn’t much of a weakness, but it was a start.

“Rack’s plan is what put us here in the first place,” said Nobody. “We’d been fine for millennia, hidden and surviving, and then he tried to get back into power and the humans noticed us. They fought back. Rack killed twenty-three of them in Fort Bruce, but they killed five of us, and we can’t survive those odds. We have to go back into hiding.”

“So why are you here?” asked Yashodh. “You can go anywhere and be anyone, but I’m always me. I always have a cult. I can’t survive anywhere else, or any way else. They’ll find me, Rack or the humans or both. And if you’re with me they’ll find you, too.”

Interesting. He’d said, “I’m always me.” Did that mean he couldn’t change his shape the way so many Withered could? The FBI suspected that the Withered’s ancient origins were in neolithic Turkey; what I had seen as a vaguely Middle Eastern appearance could easily be Turkish. Was this really the same body Yashodh had had for ten thousand years? What else did that suggest about him? I needed him to keep talking about himself, hoping it could suggest something useful about the way his powers worked. I thought of a new tactic and started talking.

“Strength in numbers,” I said. “Rack’s plan failed because he started poking the bear, causing trouble and getting noticed. But if we stay quiet, if we stay low, then we can survive in the shadows and help defend each other from Rack’s recruiters. Whatever powers you have to fight back, two Withered are still better than one, right?”

Yashodh stared at me a moment, then turned back to Nobody. “What’s with him, anyway? He knows an awful lot.”

“We’re partners,” said Nobody.

“But that’s not like you,” said Yashodh. “You attach yourself to women because you want what they have, and sometimes that includes their men. But once you’ve got whatever it is, you’re never satisfied with it. How long have you been with this kid, without another suicide?”

“People change,” said Nobody.

“Not us,” said Yashodh, shaking his head. “Certainly not you and me. We’re the worst of them—the lowest, the weakest, the most repulsive—”

“But even a weak Withered is strong,” I said. “You have to have something. Hulla’s killed more girls than we can count, but they’ve all been herself. If Rack’s army is still out there, and if they come for us, we can’t fight back. We need your help.”

Yashodh kept his eyes on Nobody, studying her as I talked. After a moment he pursed his lips. “Is that what it is?” he asked. “You’ve stopped killing altogether, so now you’re weak and you think I can help you? Well let me tell you something, human.” He turned to face me. “I’m even more worthless than she is. I can’t fight, I can’t kill, I can’t do anything. I can make people love me, and if it works then life is tolerable; if it doesn’t then no one loves me at all and I have nothing, and what is the point of living? I’ll kill myself, just like she does. Except I won’t come back.” He opened his hands in a sudden burst. “Poof. I’m gone. You want me to fight a war, but it’s all I can do to stay one step ahead of oblivion. You’re better off without me, because at least you’re alive—all I am is not dead yet.”

I felt my hands trembling. Does this mean what I think it does? “You have to have something,” I said. “How fast can you heal?”

He pulled back the sleeve of his shirt, exposing a dull red welt on his arm. “I got this scratch pruning pyracantha bushes last week.” He covered it again. “I don’t heal any faster than you do. And when the armies finally come, they’ll hurt a lot more than a pyracantha.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Nobody. “I didn’t know.” She’d realized the same thing I had. A tear rolled down her face. “I’m so, so sorry.”

I reached into the dug-out pocket in my backpack strap, extracted the loaded magazine, and then pulled the gun from the back of my belt.

“Wait,” said Yashodh, “what’s going on?”

I couldn’t just kill people. Except for when I could. I slid the magazine into the gun, clicked it into place, and shot him in the chest. The gunshot rang in my ears, and Nobody covered hers, turning away and crying. Boy Dog howled, backing into the corner. Yashodh looked down at the bullet hole, moving his mouth, but no sound came out. He looked up, staring at me as if searching my face for answers, and then his body crumbled into thick, ashy sludge. Soulstuff, they called it. In ten seconds he was gone, with nothing but dark, acrid muck sizzling holes in the chair and the rug.

The door opened, and Sister Debbie looked in. “What was that sound?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I thought I saw a bug.”

Nobody was still crying.

Sister Debbie looked at the sludge, then all around the room. “Where is Christopher?”

“He left,” I said. I pulled the magazine clear of the gun, popped the extra bullet out of the chamber, and put them all away. I’d have to find a new hiding place now that Nobody had seen this one. “Who’s in charge here when he’s gone?”

“He’s never gone,” said Sister Debbie.

“But if he steps out for a bit,” I said. “Like, if he goes into town for the day? Who’s in charge?”

“He’s always in charge,” said Sister Debbie. “Always and everywhere, over everything there is. I love him so much.” She smiled. “Isn’t it great to be alive?”

“You’re asking the wrong people,” I said, pulling Nobody to her feet. “It’s time for us to go.”

We picked up our packs and left the house. No one followed us. We left the farm and followed the road until we could no longer see to walk, then curled up together against the trunk of a tree, my arm around Brooke’s shoulders.

“I didn’t like that,” she whispered.

“Neither did I.” I wanted to like it. Killing was an important thing to do; killing was necessary. Killing demons made the world a better place, and the actual act of killing, well … I knew I wasn’t supposed to enjoy it, but I did. Usually. The sharp thrill of it, of watching a living person turn into a dead one. I’d grown up in a mortuary, surrounded by my parents’ work, more at home with the dead than the living, but Withered didn’t turn into dead bodies, they just melted into ash. Everything I wanted, except none of it at all.

I wanted to light a fire.

Had it really been that easy? Was Yashodh really gone forever? All he’d wanted was for someone to love him because he couldn’t love himself. Ten thousand years staving off death one whispered adulation at a time, only to end here. Shot in his own home by a stranger he thought was a friend.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” said Brooke.

“Only a few left,” I said.

“There will always be a few more left.”

“Attina,” I said. “And then … whoever’s chasing us.”

“The FBI is chasing us,” said Brooke. “Please don’t kill them.”

“Of course I’m not going to kill them,” I said. “I’ve never killed a human.” Well, never a good one.

“But you want to,” she said.

“That’s how you know I’ll never do it.”

She started crying again. “Is this all there is? Dirt on old roads, secret pockets full of bullets…”

“I want to give you a real life—”

“Because I can’t handle this one,” she said, and all the alarms in my head went off.

“You were a superstar back there,” I told her, trying to feed her self-worth. “That could have taken us weeks, maybe months to figure out, but you got him talking in five minutes. In two. I never would have just told him who we were—you’re brilliant, Brooke.”

She growled her answer through clenched teeth. “My name is Nobody.”

“You are brilliant,” I said again. “You said you’d protect me and you did. Partners to the end. I could never do this alone.”

“Do you think that’s going to make me happy?” she asked. She wrenched away from me, and I could see her silhouette in the starlight, sitting in the dirt a foot away. “I just told you that I hate this, that I never want to do it again, that I don’t want to be a killer and watch anybody die, human or demon or anything else, not a bird or a bug or germ in my blood, and all you can think of to tell me is how good I am at it, how responsible I am for all the blood on all our hands—”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said, “and you know it. You know how good this is. You saw those people, without … without a brain between them, and you know that if Yashodh had lived he’d have done it to more of them, that he’d already done it to tens, if not hundreds of thousands, of people, a giant parade of brainwashed nobodies stretching back to the beginning of time, and it ended tonight.”

“That’s not funny.”

“I’m not trying to be f— What does funny have to do with it?”

“You called them brainwashed Nobodies,” said Brooke. “I am not brainwashed.”

“I wasn’t talking about you—”

“Then don’t use my name!” she shouted. She stood up, and I rose with her, terrified of what she might do. There were no trucks to jump in front of on this empty road, but the area might hold a dozen other ways to kill yourself. “I am Nobody!” she screamed. “It’s my name and my job and my entire wasted life! I can’t be you, John, I can’t just … turn off my heart whenever it hurts.”

“Neither can I.”

“Then why don’t you love me?”

I thought she would run, but she grabbed my arms, squeezing with her fingers and shaking us both. “Why am I so horrible that you won’t even love me when I’m the only one around, the only friend you have, the last girl in your entire world and you still won’t love me!”

I wrapped her in a hug, hoping the physical contact might help to bring her back and calm her down. I pressed my cheek against hers, felt her trembling and sobbing, felt cold tears on her skin. I held her and shushed her and calmed her, rocking her slowly, sitting us down again, trying to think of something I could do to make her happy again. I wanted to love her—I wanted it more than anything—but I couldn’t tell her that. It would only make it worse that I didn’t.

“I suck at loving people,” I said at last. “I did it once, and she’s dead now.”

“That’s why you can’t give her up,” Brooke croaked. “A corpse is your perfect woman.”

“I’m the most screwed up loser you’ve ever met,” I said. “My perfect woman is the last thing you want to be.”

“One day I’m going to do it,” she whispered. “I’m going to kill myself, and you won’t be around to stop me.”

“Then I’ll go into Hell,” I said, “and I’ll bring you back.”

We leaned against that tree for another hour before she finally fell asleep. I stared at the empty sky above us. She’d said couldn’t do it anymore, and I honestly didn’t know if I could, either. I needed to light a fire. I shifted her gently, inch by inch, until I was out from underneath her, and I laid her down with her head on my backpack. She moved in her sleep, finding a better position, but she didn’t wake up. I crawled through the dirt on my knees, gathering twigs and pinecones fallen from the branches above us, finding them all by touch in the darkness. I piled them up in a tent shape, barely the size of my fists, and pulled a matchbook from the pocket of my jeans. I lit a match and it flared to life, brilliant in the blackness. I tried it in the kindling but it didn’t catch so I dropped it in the center of my pile and lit another, bright and orange, like a beacon of life in a sea of nothing. I shielded the flame with my hand and put it in the heart of the kindling, and this time it worked, spreading slowly from match to dead grass to stick. I tended the flame carefully, feeding it more fuel, watching the wood turn black and the grass curl up. It caught in the heart of a pinecone and burned it from the inside out, bits of wood and sap snapping and crackling in the heat. It wasn’t a big fire, but I didn’t need it for warmth. I just needed it. I watched it burn and listened to its voice, and when it went to sleep I did too, curled up on the ground next to Brooke and Boy Dog, my messed up little family in the middle of nowhere.

When I woke up Brooke was still there, breathing softly. We’d made it through another night. I watched the sky grow lighter, the black mass of the horizon slowly resolving into a row of trees on the edge of a field. A crow hopped on a fencepost, watching us from the other side of the road, then cawed roughly and flapped away. I let Brooke sleep as long as I could, and when she stirred she looked at me blearily.

“Where to next?”

“Attina,” I said.

She nodded. “No one’s heard from him in decades, but the last contact was in a town called Dillon.”

“What do you remember about him?” I asked.

“Nothing.” Brooke watched the sky, though there wasn’t anything in it. “Attina doesn’t come from my past, just my memories of Kanta’s notes—all I remember is one line: ‘Last seen in Dillon, Oklahoma. Probably useless.’ I don’t know what he can do, how he can do it, or anything.”

“That’s not much to work with,” I said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said quickly. “We have a location, so we go there and start looking.”

We walked along the back road for an hour before we reached a two-lane highway, and then walked another hour before a car picked us up. We told the driver we didn’t care where he was going, we just needed a town, and he dropped us at a gas station on the edge of a town called Forest Dell. We cleaned up in the restroom, changed into our cleanest-looking clothes, and I spent some of our precious money on two bags of peanuts and bottle of vitamins. We drank from the hose before the owner drove us off, and while we waited for another ride I studied the worn map I kept in my bag. Dillon was close, relatively speaking. A few hundred miles, but a mostly straight shot. We found a trucker willing to take us to the highway junction, and hitched another ride from there to just outside of town. Brooke was quiet all day—not depressed but simply solemn, lost in thought. I fed Boy Dog beef jerky from my pack and watched the wide, flat country roll by.

When we reached Dillon it was night again, the sky black and the stars half-shrouded in wisps of cloud. The light from the moon turned the clouds a pale gray, and they were so transparent they seemed to hang behind the moon instead of in front of it, like the cold, slate wall of a closed universe. The driver asked if we had a place to stay, and I assured her we did, because the last thing we needed was a Good Samaritan calling Child Protective Services, trying to “help” us. We were eighteen years old and legally independent, but we didn’t look it and we had no ID to prove it. The woman drove away, and I looked around at the nearest buildings: a low barn, a closed barbershop, an old drive-in movie theater. There was a high wooden wall around it, but the wooden screen was even higher; it loomed above the rest of the area like a pale giant. There was no movie playing on it, and white paper hung from it in wrinkled tears.

“We can stay there.”

Brooke stood still, looking at her arms as if she’d never seen them before.

“There’s probably an old concession stand inside,” I said. “Or a ticket booth at the very least. If we can’t get inside we can sleep in the lee of it—it’ll block the wind.”

“John,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“John Cleaver?”

I looked at her more closely. “Who are you now?”

She smiled, more widely than I’d seen in weeks. “John, it’s me. I mean, it doesn’t look like me, and I don’t know exactly what’s going on, but … it’s me inside.” She ran toward me, and wrapped me in a hug. “You’re back,” she murmured. “Or I am.”

I felt a cold fear wash through me. “Who are you?”

“This body has everyone Nobody ever killed. Every memory, every personality, right up until she left Brooke’s body. This is Brooke’s body, isn’t it? I totally recognize it now.”

I shook my head, seeing the truth, not knowing if I should shout for joy or turn and run away forever.

Not this. This was too much.

“It’s me, John,” said Brooke. “It’s Marci.”