18

“I think someone’s reading my mind,” I whispered.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Marci.

I looked around the police station, as if expecting to see a clawed, hairy monster peeking out from around a corner. “It’s the only explanation.”

The entire police station was buzzing with noise, cops and civilians and even suspects in their interrogation rooms, shouting and whispering and arguing and praying. What was going on? Who was behind it? Why were they doing it? Even Boy Dog was barking, little yips and growls of agitation. I felt a pain in my hands and looked down, realizing that I was gripping the armrests so tightly that the skin of my knuckles, chapped from wind and sun, was splitting open across the bones. Someone was reading my mind.

“We need to get out of here,” said Marci again, grabbing my arm.

I felt a sudden burst of anger—how dare she touch my arm!—and pulled away, feeling furious and terrified and guilty all at once. I shouldn’t react like that; Marci was my girlfriend, I loved her, of course she could touch my arm. Then I remembered it wasn’t even her fingers that had touched me but Brooke’s, and I felt another surge of anger, followed just as quickly by another surge of guilt. I shouldn’t feel like this. I couldn’t allow myself to feel like this.

I needed to burn something.

“Close that door!” shouted Officer Davis. “Let’s keep some semblance of propriety in this station!” The cop with the message stepped into Davis’s office and closed the door behind him, and the noise from the waiting room only got louder.

Marci stood up and grabbed my hand with Brooke’s fingers, trying to pull me out of my seat. I clenched my teeth and gripped the armrests tighter, willing my skin to split open, relishing the sharp, tearing pain of it. “John,” she whispered, and I closed my eyes and tightened the muscles in my neck, flexing them so hard my head began to shake. Get out of my head, I thought, get out of my head! I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. Whoever you are, I thought, I’m going to find you and tear you apart with my bare hands. Do you hear me? I’m coming for you!

Marci tugged on me again and I stood, feeling nauseated at the sudden change in position. Or the anger. Or the helplessness. How could we fight this thing? Whoever it was had pinned us as Withered hunters the moment we’d stepped into town, had been reading our minds and taunting us with body after body, death after death. What other explanation could there be? The people we met, the people I wanted to hurt, were killed in exactly the way I wanted to kill them. And now our only suspect was gone—

I stopped at the front desk. “What happened to the body?” I asked.

The cop at the desk looked up with a frown, both annoyed by my question and confused by it. “What?”

“Corey Diamond’s body,” I said, “what happened to it? Is it still there?”

“You can’t see the body—”

“But can you?” I asked. “Can anybody? Does the body still exist?”

“The hell are you talking about?” asked the cop. “We’re not going to hide the body, no matter how many pieces it’s in. What are you trying to say about us?”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Marci, “come on.”

I let her lead me toward the front door. “It didn’t disappear,” I said. “It’s not a Withered.”

“He’s not a Withered,” said Marci, though her voice had no passion.

“That’s what I said.”

She pushed the door half open, her wrist limp, and stared out through the glass at the crowd of police in the front of the building. They were buzzing like a hive, talking and arguing as much as the people inside were. Some were running toward their cars, others held back townspeople. Was one of them the killer? A cop or a civilian or the driver of that truck passing by? It had to be someone. What did they say the population was, nine hundred? Add in the state police and whatever other drifters and delivery drivers happened to be in town and we could round it off to an even thousand. How many had Attina killed? How many more would he kill if we didn’t catch him? If we just burned the whole city to the ground and took all of them out, was it worth it if we killed the Withered with them? Was there some formula for acceptable collateral damage? Was there enough math in morality to sacrifice a whole town of people?

I needed to burn something. I needed to scream and cry and hack a piece of meat into hamburger.

Marci wasn’t even pushing on the door anymore. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

Don’t say it.

“It’s gonna kill us too,” she said.

I screamed in my mind, a long, inaudible howl of frustration, and then I swallowed all my rage, all my tension, all my pent-up emotions, choking them down like an owl in reverse, a ragged little bundle of bones and claws and bile, forcing it back down my gullet and pasting a broad, fake smile across my face. Her problems were more important than mine. “You want some ice cream?”

“I just want it to stop,” said Marci.

“It will,” I said, not even knowing what “it” she was referring to. I put my hand next to hers and pushed the door open, hoping that she would push with me, drawing strength from mine, but instead she just let her hand drop to her side. The summer sun beat down like a furnace, and I pulled her gently out into it, one hand on her arm and the other in front of my face trying to shield my eyes from the brightness. Boy Dog shoved past our legs, barking at the sun and heat and noise and everything else, like a tiny personification of the whole town’s restless anger. Marci resisted and I tugged again, whispering gently. “It’s all going to be just fine,” I said. “We’re going to figure out what’s going on—you and me. And we’re going to solve it.” Then, remembering her rage after we killed Yashodh, her indignant fury at the thought that being a good killer was something to be happy about, I changed my tactics. “We’re going to save everybody,” I said. “Three people are gone, but they’re the only ones.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do, because we’re amazing,” I said, leading her down the steps. The cops weren’t even paying attention to us; they were too occupied with other concerns. “I know it because we’re good at this, we’re the best at this; we’re going to save the lives of every single person in this town. All 997 of them, including the cops and the drivers. Everyone. Do you hear me, Marci?”

She started crying.

“Marci, do you hear me? I need you to talk to me. We’re going to save everyone, can you say that? Say it with me: We’re going to save everyone.”

“I’m not Marci,” she sobbed, and she broke away from me and ran.

I bolted after her, forgetting the cops, forgetting Boy Dog, forgetting everything in the world but that one girl, skinny and dirty and afraid. My feet pounded on the pavement, leaping off the curb and onto the dusty asphalt, arms pumping at my sides. Just one girl. I didn’t even know who she was—maybe Brooke, maybe Regina, maybe Lucinda or Kveta or a hundred thousand others I’d never even met. It didn’t matter. She needed my help. She ran toward a car, trying to throw herself in front of it, but it passed too quickly; she ran toward the cinder block wall on the far side of the road, head down like a bull, and screamed a wordless cry as she plowed herself into it, skull first, my fingers just inches too far away to pull her back. She hit the wall with an audible smack and bounced off, reeling and falling. I only just managed to grab her shirt as she fell to the sidewalk, catching her before she hit her head again. She threw up, and I rolled her over to keep the vomit from choking her. Seconds later I was grabbed from behind, half a dozen rough hands yanking me away, pulling me back.

“Don’t take her away!” I screamed.

“Get off her!” shouted one of the cops, and suddenly cops were everywhere, appearing like magic as they caught up to us and surrounded us, misinterpreting Brooke’s sprint and my chase as some kind of abusive scenario.

“She’s a suicide risk!” I shouted.

“Keep your mouth shut!”

“She just tried to kill herself,” I said, grunting as they slammed me to the ground and cuffed me. “If you try to separate us she will kill herself, you have to trust me—I was trying to help her!”

Brooke’s body was still rolling around on the sidewalk, twisting either in pain or a seizure, I couldn’t tell which. She’d hit her head so hard I was amazed she was even conscious. The cops tried to help her, but weren’t sure what to do. I heard one call for an ambulance, and others knelt next to her, speaking in calm, businesslike phrases:

“Are you okay?”

“Was this boy chasing you?”

“Did he hurt you?”

I took another deep breath, trying to calm myself as much as possible. “Please believe me,” I said. I stuck with the name everyone in Dillon knew her by. “Her name is Marci, though she has some mental problems and doesn’t always answer to it. I’m her friend and I was only trying to keep her safe. Part of her mental illness makes her highly prone to suicide.”

I saw someone step out of the shop she’d crashed into, an old man in an apron, and I shouted out to him. “You—you from the store. You’re my witness, okay? This girl is a severe suicide risk, and I have to stay with her, and you just heard me warn these cops, okay? If they separate us, and she kills herself, you can testify it was their fault, okay? Sir, did you hear me?”

“Shut up,” said the cop holding me down.

“Is there anything I can do?” the old man asked the police.

“Just stay back,” said the nearest officer, “we have an ambulance on the way.”

“Bring her some water,” I said, “And all the ice in your store; she probably has a concussion.” The man nodded and went back inside. The cop on my back shoved me against the ground again, frisking me with his free hand.

“He’s got a weapon,” said the cop, pulling Potash’s combat knife from the sheath on my leg. Dammit. “You want to explain this, kid?”

“Officer,” I said, talking to the cop who was trying to help Brooke. “You see her hand? Yes, you—you see her hand? It looks like it’s flailing randomly, but she’s reaching for your gun. Just—just step away, that’s right, and try to hold her down.”

“What’s your name?” asked the cop I’d warned, glancing at me as he grabbed at Brooke’s flailing arms.

“David,” I said. “I’m only trying to help her, you have to believe me.”

“Why’s she trying to kill herself?”

“That’s a very long story.”

“You’ve got time,” said the cop on my back. There were at least six other police officers swarming around us; if Brooke had gotten hold of a gun, she’d be dead. I tried to look her in the eyes, to see how lucid she was, but she was squeezing them shut.

“Just let me die,” she whimpered. “Just please let me die. It’ll all be over and I can start again.”

The cop holding her arms looked at her in surprise, then back at me. “Start again?”

“She’s mentally ill,” I said. “Most of the time she’s fine, but when she gets like this you just have to ride it out. She’ll be okay again soon.”

“She can ride it out in the hospital,” said the cop. “And you in the station, explaining all this.”

The store owner came back outside with a glass of water and a bowl of ice. “Did you hear that?” I asked him. “They’re going to separate us. Remember this when she dies in their custody—you have to testify that I warned them first.”

“Fine,” said the cop, “we’ll take you with us to the hospital.”

*   *   *

It’s sad, when you think about it, how precarious our lives are. Our ways of living. Everything I’d tried to accomplish over the last year, all the secrecy and the hiding and the coping strategies to try to keep Brooke healthy, it was pointless now, everything lost forever in ten seconds sprinting across an empty street. If we’d been somewhere else, the cops wouldn’t have seen us; if I’d been able to grab her more quickly, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. If I’d had a better plan, or better reflexes, or been a better person.

Now we were in small, regional hospital, locked in a room with the cops keeping watch outside, waiting for the results of an MRI. I was surprised a hospital this small even had an MRI machine, but I wasn’t complaining. Brooke’s unconscious body lay in a bed, her head bandaged and hooked up to softly beeping monitors. Boy Dog was being held in a kennel in Dillon. And somewhere a state police officer was trying to figure out who we were, and then the FBI would come, and they’d take Brooke away, and I’d go to prison or worse. And Attina would keep killing.

Or maybe, as soon as I was gone, he’d stop. Maybe I was the reason he was killing at all.

The hospital was in Crosby, the next town over, larger than Dillon but still rural, still nowhere near big enough that you’d call it a city. The hospital was barely a clinic, with an emergency room and a maternity ward and a handful of other medical services, though it was new enough to have a tiny radiology department. Five or six rooms for patients. It was clean, though. And it was one story, so we could slip out the window and run if it came to that. Maybe it already had, and I was too stubborn to see it. Where could we even go? Dillon was crawling with cops, and everybody would recognize us, so we couldn’t hide there. But I didn’t want to abandon the town, either. If I was the only one who could stop Attina, then everyone he killed before I stopped him was my fault.

My only hope was to convince the FBI, when they finally showed up, to let me go back for another try. My one last wish before … whatever they did to me.

I spent the morning with the door closed. I lit a match, thrilling at the little spark of flame, but the smoke alarm went off almost immediately and the nurse came in to take my matchbook away. So even that was gone.

Somewhere in the afternoon—about six hours into our stay at the hospital—I heard a knock on the door. Whoever it was didn’t wait for an answer, but opened it just a second later.

“Iowa,” I said, recognizing him immediately.

The man who’d followed us through Dallas paused in the doorway, taken aback at the statement. “Iowa?”

“The plate on your car,” I said. “That sneaky black SUV that didn’t look remotely like an FBI vehicle.”

“Technically it wasn’t,” he said, closing the door behind himself and sitting in the room’s other chair. “It was a rental. But I’m stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska, so an Iowa plate isn’t all that surprising.”

“Wow,” I said. “What do you have to do wrong to get stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska?”

“Specialize in serial killers, apparently,” said Iowa. He stood up again and stepped toward me, holding out his hand. “Agent Mills. Big fan of your work.”

I let his hand hang there, unshaken. “What kind of work are we talking about?”

He held his hand out another moment or two, then shrugged and went back to his seat. “John Wayne Cleaver, special advisor to Agent Linda Ostler, and a key member of Task Force Goshawk, charged with a mission so secret I’m not even allowed to state it out loud in this room—though I assure you I’m very familiar with its particulars.”

“Goshawk?”

“Some kind of a bird,” said Mills. “I didn’t name it.”

“It’s better than Boy Dog,” I said.

“Your record with Agent Ostler was sketchy but acceptable,” said Mills. “You talked back to your superiors, you pushed every button and boundary and envelope you ever came across, and you actively antagonized some members of your team, including and most problematically the therapist assigned to your unit, but you always got the job done. You enabled more … how can I put this without spilling state secrets … more ‘apprehensions of nonstandard targets’ than the entire US government had managed to achieve in the several decades prior to your term of service. You were on track for a commendation and a hefty pay bump before Fort Bruce.”

“How much of a pay bump?”

“You keep focusing on the least important part of every sentence I say.”

“My therapist used to say the same thing.”

“I’m beginning to understand a lot of the personnel reports I’ve read.”

“Do I want to know why you’re here?” I asked.

He shrugged again. “Probably. Your personnel reports suggest that you want to know everything.”

“Do I get to?”

“How much time do you have?” asked Mills. “The reasons I’m here are a very long list.”

“Well I’m not going anywhere, as far as I know,” I said. “Start with where I’m going next.”

“I’m afraid we have to start several months before that,” said Mills. “Tell me about Fort Bruce.”

“Nice place,” I said. “Kind of big for my tastes, though. And pretty dangerous now that the entire police force has been slaughtered by a supernatural monster.”

“Can we do this without the sass?” asked Mills.

“I guess so,” I said. “But it’s really the only part I enjoy.”

“The last anyone heard of your team in Fort Bruce was Dr. Trujillo calling to say that a combined operation with local police had gone wrong, and a Withered army was running wild through the city. When we arrived on the scene ten hours later there were more than thirty dead humans and what we surmised to be the remains of two dead Withered. You and Brooke were the only survivors.”

“How did you know we’d survived?” I asked. “Maybe we’d just been eaten by the monsters.”

“Most of the team assumed as much,” said Mills. “I was the one who noticed that one of the human bodies had received a makeshift ‘embalming’ with eighty-seven-octane gasoline. That didn’t prove anything, but it sure suggested a lot of really wild possibilities.”

“The most lurid of which,” I said, extrapolating the likely story, “was that I had gone full psycho, betrayed my team, and left a gruesome calling card to announce the beginning of my serial-killer career.”

“Now it sounds like you’ve been reading my personnel reports.”

“How true do you think that version is?” I asked. “Measured in the number of armed marines waiting in the hall to ‘apprehend’ me?”

“Three,” said Mills simply. “Plus two more outside. Which is not nearly as many as there could have been.”

Brooke groaned, and we looked at her in unison. She moved her hand—more of a twitch than a conscious movement—and moments later the nurse bustled into the room.

“The MRI results are looking really clean,” he said, studying the monitors and tapping a pen against his cheek. “It’s practically a miracle. Now it looks like your girl is waking up.”

“Woman,” I said. Mostly just to bug him.

Brooke took her time regaining consciousness, and with the nurse in the room Mills and I couldn’t talk freely. Mills caught my eye at one point, nodding toward the door, but I ignored him and looked back at Brooke. If they were going to separate us, they were going to have to do it by force.

“Hey there,” said the nurse, shining a small penlight in Brooke’s eyes. “Are you waking up now? Can you hear me?”

“Where am I?” asked Brooke. Her voice was raw and ragged.

“You’re in a hospital,” said the nurse. “You hit your head pretty hard. Do you remember that?”

“My head,” said Brooke, and she tried to touch her bandage with her palm. A thick leather restraint stopped her hand just a few inches above the bed railing, and she rolled her head to the side to look at it, squinting her eyes in the bright light. She tugged on the restraint again, as if not comprehending its purpose, then tested her other arm and found it was restrained as well. She sighed and closed her eyes again. “Severe suicide risk,” she said. “Yeah, I remember.”

“I’m right here with you,” I said, raising my voice a bit to make sure she could hear me.

She smiled. “John.”

“His name is David,” said the nurse. “Do you remember Da—”

“She’s always called me John,” I said. “It’s okay.”

The nurse nodded, glancing at Agent Mills as if he was trying to put us all together, like a puzzle. He looked back at Brooke. “Okay, sweetie, we’re going to do a few more quick memory tests if that’s all right. You hit your head pretty hard and we want to make sure you didn’t scramble your noodles. You recognized John’s voice and that’s great—can you tell me your name?”

“No.”

“Your name is…” the nurse began, but he stopped talking as a wide, wicked grin spread across Brooke’s face. Her eyes were still closed. The nurse nodded. “I get it, sweetie, you’re just playing with me. Let me rephrase the question: do you know your name?”

“Some of them.”

“Start with the first one.”

“Uh uh uh,” said Brooke, her voice somewhere between playful and taunting. “That’s a secret.”

“You can tell me, honey, I’m a nurse.”

“You’re not going to get anywhere with this,” I said. I’d seen this side of Brooke before, and it wasn’t Brooke at all.

The nurse shot me a glance. “I have to test for brain damage.”

“Physical damage is not her problem,” said Mills. “Put in terms you’re familiar with, she has dissociative identity disorder. Ask her name, her age, where she’s from, any of the standard questions, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Sometimes more.” He pulled out his badge and held it up, establishing his absolute authority over the situation. “You’re going to go out in the hall and mark this test as done, and you’re going to mark the results as positive.”

“Negative,” I said.

Mills frowned. “Whichever one means she’s healthy and doesn’t have any memory loss.”

“So, negative,” said the nurse.

“This is why I didn’t go into medicine,” said Mills. “You make no sense at all.” He opened the door. “Thanks for your service to the United States government.” The nurse left, and Mills closed the door.

“Would my pay bump have included a badge?” I asked. “Because what you just did looks super fun.”

He slipped his badge back into his suit coat and walked to the side of Brooke’s bed. “So,” he said. “Are you going to tell us who you really are?”

“I’m an innocent little girl,” said Brooke.

“He knows everything,” I said softly. “You don’t have to hide.”

“In that case,” said Brooke, opening her eyes and flashing another toothy grin, “he knows exactly who I am.”

Mills stared at her, trying to think, and then stepped back in shock as the realization hit him.

Nobody laughed.

“You’re…” said Mills. “I … didn’t think I’d ever get to meet one.”

“I can’t hurt you,” said Nobody, and her grin faded slowly away. “I’ve been dead for two years.”

Mills shuffled backward another half step, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of satisfaction at his discomfort.

“You wanted to know what happened in Fort Bruce,” I said. “Now that you’ve met Nobody, you might actually be ready to hear it: the cannibal we were chasing turned out to be a sort of Withered king named Rack. He didn’t have a face or a chest or a heart, but he could use hearts to talk to us the same way Nobody used bodies to get around. They’re like parasites on the rest of the world, using humans as food and tools and even hiding places. He recruited one of our team to his side with the promise of money and power, but I was able to kill him by stabbing that teammate in the chest, filling his heart with gasoline, and then poisoning Rack with it when he tried to recruit me.”

“That’s…” said Mills. He seemed too squeamish to finish his sentence, so I continued.

“We left without telling anyone where we were going because we didn’t want anything like Fort Bruce to ever happen again. We lost that many people because our methods were too obvious: you can’t wage a war against someone without that someone noticing. The Withered noticed us and they fought back. I’d been telling Ostler since the beginning that I needed to do this alone, my way, and then all of a sudden I was the only one left alive so I took my chance and ran with it. Nobody and I have killed just as many without the help of Task Force Goshawk as we ever killed with it, and we’ve done it without anything like another Fort Bruce. You have to see that this is the best way to do it.”

“That’s not the way our government does things,” said Mills.

“Effectively?”

“Unsupervised,” said Mills. “We can’t just have you running around killing people.”

Nobody snorted. “So you’d rather have the Withered running around killing people?”

“A trained agent with decades of experience might earn the kind of autonomy you’re asking for,” said Mills. “Agent Potash might have gotten it. But you’re an eighteen-year-old serial killer and his dead demon girlfriend. Are you crazy?”

“Technically,” I said.

“You light fires everywhere you go,” said Mills. “How do you think we’ve been tracking you? And even if you don’t cause anything on the scale of Fort Bruce, you still cause problems and you still cause deaths. What are we supposed to tell the people of Dillon? ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about the deaths and the arson, our best teenage sociopath is on the job.’”

“Wait,” I said. “What arson?” I’d been desperate to light a fire all day, but hadn’t lit so much as a match my entire time in Dillon. Oh no.

“What do you mean, ‘what arson?’” asked Mills. “The fire you lit this morning. The one that helped me find you so fast—I was already halfway from Dallas when the state police called me.”

“I didn’t light any fires,” I said. “It has to be Attina.”

“Who?”

“The Withered we’re hunting,” I said. “He’s reading my mind somehow.”

“What did he burn?” asked Nobody.

“The church,” said Mills. “Burned it right down to the ground.”