Beth Gleason. She stayed in the background, she did what she was told. She went to church because everyone went to church, and when Marci and I had talked during the sermon she’d shushed us, not because she wanted to but because everyone else wanted to. They were all looking at us, but Beth was the one who said it. In today’s town meeting everyone had been angry, but it was Beth who’d said it. She was the personification of the community as a whole—and ever since Brook and I had arrived, that community had been tearing itself apart.
Everyone thinks dark thoughts sometimes. Did mine finally set her off because … they were more intense? More single-minded? Other people thought about hurting each other, but Attina didn’t absorb thoughts, she absorbed intentions. The will to act. I was the only one in town with the true, unmitigated desire to kill someone, and the clarity of purpose to actually go through with it. Brooke or Marci or whoever it was at the time would always calm me down, but Attina didn’t have that. She had all my rage and nothing to hold her back.
I had to hurry.
The town was quiet, already on lockdown, but without the large influx of troops coming the next day, it was still relatively empty. They couldn’t be everywhere at once. I walked softly down the side of the Butler house, just far enough to peek out at the street. A cop car drove by, and I ducked behind the Butler’s garbage can. The car was moving south, away from where I wanted to go, but I couldn’t risk going right out in the road. I slinked back into the yard and started hopping fences.
The yard north of the Butler house was well-groomed, the lawn cut short and clear of any toys or benches or trees. With no cover to hide in I ran to the next fence without stopping, dumped my knife and rifle over the top and hauled myself over after them. This yard offered more concealment and I was able to crouch behind a small garden shed to get my bearings. Most of the people, I hoped, would be looking out their front doors rather than the back—this made it easy to jump from yard to yard, but my next fence vault would take me to a north-facing home and I would have to run out the driveway and across the street directly toward another row of houses. Anyone looking out would be certain to see me. But what would they do about it?
Most of the people in the town were armed—the unlocked truck with the gun rack I’d found was proof enough of that. If someone saw me running toward his house with a butcher knife and a rifle, would he see me as a threat or as another concerned, armed citizen? My best chance at avoiding trouble was to act like the latter, and walk slowly across the street as if I belonged there. It was a strategy that had always worked in the hallways at school: look like you have a hall pass and most people won’t ask you for one. Would it work here as well? Not with the cops, but maybe with the locals. Most of them were furious about the lockdown as it was; they might even see me as a vigilante hero.
Or, you know, shoot me.
I made another sprint to the next fence, threw myself over, and lowered to a crouch. Here was a driveway leading straight out to the road, but I had to check for police first. I crept forward, peering out and looking both ways. No cops. I slipped the knife into my leg sheath—a poor fit, but better than nothing—and then composed myself, carrying the rifle like a soldier on patrol and walking across the street like it was my job to be there. Halfway across I noticed an old man watching me through the open curtains of a house to my right. I saluted him and then immediately regretted it, wondering if it was too much. A wave would have been better. He did nothing, and I reached the next driveway and went back into hiding.
I crossed the rest of the town this way, jumping fences and hiding from cops. On the last street I had to wait almost ten minutes, crouched behind an old truck, while a police officer talked to a homeowner barely ten feet away. He asked if the man had seen anything and told him to stay inside. When the man left I held my breath, not daring to make even the tiniest sound. The cop got in his car and I moved around the side of the truck, out of sight from the street. He drove away, and I watched. The instant he disappeared around the corner I set out across the street.
“Not supposed to be out here,” said a voice. I turned and saw the man the cop had been talking to, standing in his open doorway.
“Just watching for trouble,” I said, gesturing with the rifle. “You really trust them to keep you safe?”
“Not at all,” said the man, and he showed me a rifle of his own, just inside the door frame. I nodded, and he nodded, and I crossed the street.
Two yards later I was in a field of corn that was nearly shoulder high.
I stayed in the field for a ways, counting my steps and trying to calculate how many of them would make a mile. My steps were about two feet, maybe two and a half, which meant … twenty-six-hundred-something steps? I counted out two thousand, figured it was far enough, and then cut west to the main road, following it the rest of the way to Barkwood. There were no cops out here, and no traffic; I wondered if the police had barricaded the roads into Dillon as well as out. I realized Mrs. Butler hadn’t told me which way to turn on Barkwood, right or left, but when I reached it I saw that left was the only choice. I turned and walked a few more miles, passing a couple of farmhouses. The sun was still high, but both houses had lights on. I’d come back to them later if I didn’t find Beth in the rooster house.
And then I reached the rooster house—an old abandoned-looking farmhouse with patched shingles and a dead, sun-scorched lawn. The rooster on the mailbox looked like an old weather vane, rusted and bent and bolted to the top of the mailbox by a stick of old wood. It was at least a half a mile to the nearest neighbor.
I listened and heard crying.
I gripped the rifle tighter. I still didn’t know how to kill this thing. Did it regenerate? Could it sense me coming? Would my own determination to kill it make it, in turn, determined to kill me?
Two voices crying now. Why two?
Because Attina had no will of her own and only wanted what the people around her wanted. And the only person around her now was Brooke, and there was one thing Brooke wanted more than anything in the world.
I almost started crying with them.
I crept forward, the dead grass crunching softly under my feet. The front windows were closed, the blinds drawn, but I found an unblocked window on the side. I stood on my tiptoes to peer inside, but the room and what little I could see of the hall beyond were empty. Not even much furniture, just a folding table and some old napkins. An old family house they only used for parties. I moved to the next window, listening to the wails as they varied in pitch—now softer, now louder, and suddenly a cry of pain and a whoop of terror. The second window I looked in revealed a view as empty as the first, so I moved to the back of the house. The door was locked. I went to the next window but stopped, seeing a glow by the stump of a dried-out tree. A basement window. I laid down on the dry grass to look inside, and there she was: Beth Gleason, eighty years old if she were a day, in the same old blue dress I’d always seen her in. Her hands, arms, chest, and entire lower body were covered with blood. I almost cried out, terrified that it was Brooke’s blood, that I was too late to save her—but no. The inside of Beth’s forearm held a long, deep gash, from elbow to wrist, sloughing out blood like a shaken trough. And then the gash healed, and the blood dried, and Beth wailed in despair and grabbed a pair of garden shears and slashed it open again. She bled, and screamed, and healed. Over and over.
She was trying to kill herself.
It was all Brooke wanted—the bottomless pit at the base of her mind, the horrifying legacy of Nobody. The Withered wretch who’d killed herself a hundred thousand times. Every setback seemed to trigger a new despair, and I’d pulled her back from the brink of more suicides that I could remember. When Attina had captured her, when she’d been separated from me, when it seemed that all was lost, she’d gone right back to it again, like the comfort of an old blanket, and Attina had been powerless to resist. She had no will but what she borrowed from others.
I had to act fast, before she borrowed one from me.
I tried the back door again, kicking it a few times, until finally giving up using the rifle to shoot the doorknob. The sound was deafening; I hoped that Attina’s single-minded obsession would keep her from caring. In the depths of depression, Brooke wouldn’t care—it might actually make her worse. Please let Attina be the same.
The stairs to the basement were right inside the back door, long and narrow. The rifle would be useless in those cramped quarters, so I left it by the wall and pulled out my knife, advancing slowly down the stairs with the blade in front of me. It didn’t have the strength of Potash’s old combat knife, but it was sharpened to a razor’s edge, and it might buy me a few precious seconds, if nothing else. I reached the basement with my ears still ringing, the crying women only barely audible, and rounded the corner just in time to see Beth gash herself open again, bleeding copiously. The pool of blood at her feet covered nearly the entire cement floor of the basement, trickling in a steady stream down the drain in the center. How long had she been doing this?
How could I get away from her once this obsession cleared?
Attina ignored me, and I stepped through the sticky red mess to where Brooke was tied to a chair, watching the whole thing and numb with despair.
“Just let me die,” she mumbled. “Just let me die.”
“I will,” I said. I needed to keep her sad, to keep her will for death as strong as possible. “I’m not here to save you—it’s impossible to save you. You’ve been lost for too long.”
“I know,” she sobbed, “just let me die.”
I cut her loose from the chair and helped her stand. She groped for my knife but I held it away in my left hand, holding her tightly to my side with my right. I just had to get her out of here—
—no. I couldn’t think like that. I had to want to kill myself, too, to keep Attina occupied as long as possible.
Or maybe I just had to want to kill Attina.
I walked Brooke slowly to the stairs, searching for anything that might help. How could I kill a Withered who healed that fast? There was an axe leaning against the wall; taking off her head in a single stroke might work, but I didn’t have the skill to pull that off. She’d regenerate so fast, anything less would be ineffective. I looked for more. A shelf full of dusty mason jars. A box of old decorations: Christmas and Thanksgiving and Halloween. Then I noticed the furnace, and had the answer: fire. It was the only way I’d killed Nobody—even the Withered soulstuff was vulnerable to it, and they couldn’t heal fast enough to escape it. What else could I use? Mrs. Butler had said they held barbecues here—there had to be fuel, or at least charcoal.
“We’ll never get out in time,” I said to Brooke, trying to keep her thoughts focused on hopelessness, and I started knocking over boxes as we passed them, spilling their contents onto the floor, searching desperately for something to start a big fire. Finally I found a plastic jug of lighter fluid, but I had no free hands. I had to let go of Brooke or the knife. I dropped my knife and picked up the lighter fluid, popping off the cap and spraying it on the fallen decorations, on the shelves and wooden panels in the walls. I even sprayed some on Attina as she stabbed herself and howled again, ignoring me. Now I needed a flame. I dropped the half-empty bottle on the floor and eased Brooke upstairs, holding her with two hands, taking the steep steps carefully. She tried to throw herself down, pleading with me not to stop her again, not to keep her from her death, but I got her to the top and we stumbled into the kitchen.
“Look for matches,” I said, pushing her toward the cupboards. “For gas lighters, for anything that will burn.”
“Are we going to burn ourselves?”
“We are,” I said, yanking open drawer after drawer. I couldn’t help but feel a bit of eagerness, of excitement for a fire—I had never set one this big before, and it had been far too long since I’d set one at all. “All we need is—this.” I opened the pantry door and found three miniature tanks of propane, dark green and each the size of a melon. I grabbed and shook them, finding them satisfyingly heavy. “Find matches,” I said. “If you want to die, this is how you do it.”
I set the tanks on the counter and ran from room to room, hoping to find a gas grill of some kind to hook them up to. Anything that would let the gas out. There was nothing in the house, and I didn’t have time to search the garage. I found a sheaf of yellowed newspapers and grabbed it, rushing back to the kitchen to find Brooke holding a cardboard box full of matches, fumbling through her tears to light one.
“Is this enough?”
“It’s perfect,” I said, taking them away gently. I looked at her in sudden fear, terrified that my compliment had ruined everything: I needed to insult her, to tell her she had failed, that nothing she did would ever work. I needed her to want to die, or this whole plan could fail. I looked in her eyes …
… and I couldn’t do it. “It’s perfect,” I said again. “We’re going to make the most beautiful fire you’ve ever seen.”
I tucked the matches under my arm and grabbed the propane and walked back to the stairway, back down to the basement. I turned the corner to see Beth standing in front of me, inches away, covered in blood and her eyes practically gleaming. I dropped my armful in shock, stumbling backward into the doorway as the tanks and matches clattered to the ground.
“You’re building a fire,” she said. The propane tanks were still rolling, carving slick pathways through the bloody puddle on the floor.
“Yes,” I said. It was all I could say.
Beth stooped to pick up the newspaper, dropping the pages that had soaked up blood, and holding up the dry pages in her wrinkled fist. “We’re building a fire,” she said. “And I’m finally going to die.” She picked up the fallen jug of lighter fluid and sprayed it on the walls and ceiling, soaking the carpet square that sat in the corner, drenching the rack of old clothes against the back.
I stood in the doorway and watched her build her pyre.
I never had to think about killing the first ones. They were monsters, and I was defending myself and my family and town. Now I was defending this town, doing something no one else could do, in a way no one else could do it, and it was good. It was the right thing to do—the Withered had to die. I knew that, in the same way I knew that stalking was unacceptable, that hurting animals was evil, that killing humans was wrong. That is to say: I knew it was true but I didn’t feel it. I wanted to kill and slice and maim, but this was a cheat. A voluntary death. Tricking Attina into killing herself was … cruel, in a way. I didn’t do this to be cruel. I looked at that frail old demon, trapped for years in a life it couldn’t even recognize as its own, and I felt something I’d never felt before.
I felt pity.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said.
“I don’t want to, either,” said Beth, stopping immediately. She turned to look at me, holding the axe in her hands. Lighter fluid dripped from her hair and her dress, running down her arms and cascading off her elbows in tiny rivulets.
Five people dead and who knew how many more if I didn’t stop her now. She’d held down Brielle and forced drain cleaner down her throat, choking her and burning her and eating her from the inside—not because she wanted to, not because she had to, but because she couldn’t control herself. Because she was the worst of humanity given form. But she was also the best of it. She’d lived for so long here, never hurting a fly, making soup for her neighbors and organizing neighborhood watches. She could be good when the world was good around her. Did she really deserve to die just because I had come and ruined paradise?
But no paradise lasts forever. What would she do tomorrow, when a hundred national guardsmen showed up? They wanted to protect the town, so she’d protect it. They wanted to kill a bad guy, so she’d kill … I didn’t know who. Someone. Unless I killed her now.
The demon king Rack had told me how the Withered began. Human beings, lost in antiquity, had given up their most hated traits to gain unimaginable power. Nobody had hated her body, so she gave it up forever; she gained the ability to take whatever body she wanted, but she’d lost that essential humanity that made it worthwhile. Forman had given up his emotions—why? He must have felt something terrible, guilt or loss or shame, and never wanted to feel it again. Attina had given up her own will, her own choices, I suppose because she’d made too many bad ones and didn’t want the responsibility anymore. She didn’t want the pain of choosing wrong. But choices still get made, whether you’re the one making them or not, and all she had become was a slave.
I had to choose for her. I hated the choice more than I’d ever hated anything, but I had to make it.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said, and summoned all my will. “But I’m going to.”
“We’re going to,” she echoed. Tears rolled down her face, and I wondered how much she really knew, or felt, or understood about what was happening. She couldn’t make her own decisions, but was she aware of them? Was there something inside of her, like Marci inside of Brooke, that looked out and watched her body act, and cried and screamed and begged it to stop?
“We’re going to kill ourselves,” she sobbed. “And then we can start again.” She raised the axe, turned toward the furnace, and shattered the valve on the gas line.
“Start again?” I repeated. That was something Brooke had said—a holdover from Nobody’s old behavior. Possess a girl, live her life, and when you found a better one you kill yourself and take it. Start again. I looked behind me, but Brooke wasn’t there. She was still upstairs.
With the rifle.
I screamed and ran as Beth lit a match, and the basement leapt into horrible, glorious, fiery life.