Читать книгу Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions - Melissa Marr - Страница 6
Оглавлениеhere should we go next?” Margie sets the large atlas on the table, smoothing her hand over the worn cover. Her younger sister, Sally, shifts to her knees on the bench to get a better view.
“Mississippi?” Sally asks, tucking dirty-blond hair behind her ears.
Margie shrugs and fiddles with pages, swollen after getting wet in the rain. “Too hot right now. Besides, we’ll be coming from the west here, under Canada. That’s where we left off planning yesterday.”
“Page fifty-seven, then,” Sally says, leaning her elbows on the table.
Margie rolls her eyes as she flips through, letting the atlas open almost on its own volition. “You know, I really don’t get your fascination with West Virginia.”
“It looks pretty,” Sally says, tracing her small fingers around the counties.
Neither girl has been there. Neither knows anything about it other than the contours on the map and the teaser entries from the guidebooks stacked along the front wall under the window.
Margie pulls the light closer and checks over her shoulder outside. It’s full dusk, the summer days stretching late and dying slow. Greasy smoke chokes up from the lantern—almost all their oil is dirty, and dark patches stain the ceiling over the kitchen table from their evenings cramped over the atlas.
“So maybe we come in on the interstate here,” Sally says, “but I think it would be more fun if we did the smaller roads after that. More scenic and probably less crowded.”
Margie pushes a notebook across the table, sifting through the pages until she finds where they’d left off the night before. “You start writing it all down, Sal. I’m just going to check outside real quick.”
Sally looks up at her sister then. It’s almost silent in the cabin, just the sputter of the flame and the two girls breathing. “Why?”
“One last sweep before bed.” Margie tries to keep her voice from fluttering.
“You already did the last sweep,” Sally points out. A sliver of hair hangs limp and heavy across the side of her face, throwing her eyes into shadow.
Margie doesn’t want to tell her that something outside keeps making her look up. It’s the feeling on the back of her neck, like the tension before a thunderstorm—that quality of light spreading a sense of dread somewhere in your body left over from before humanity knew such things as language and science.
“Here.” Margie squats by the small stack of books against the wall and flips through for the right one. “You figure out where you want to stop for dinner and if there’s any sightseeing you want to do. Plan it all out, and I’ll be right back.” Margie sets the Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia on the table and picks up the shotgun before stepping outside.
When she looks back, her little sister still kneels on the bench by the table. Her finger’s stuck on that map, pointing at something too far away, which probably doesn’t exist anymore anyway.
Margie never mentions to Sally that sometimes she just has to get away from the tightness of it all. In the beginning, just after the change time, she’d hated the outside, hated to leave the comfort of four walls and a roof, but now it makes her feel trapped. She’s always judging the escape routes, figuring distance and the time it would take to cover it.
Their newest cabin sits on top of a mountain that’s steep enough to keep the monsters away. There’s a deep well, a gun cabinet stashed with crates of ammunition, a cistern of fuel oil, and a pantry brimming with canned food—enough to make Margie think that perhaps they have a shot at surviving all of this so long as it’s just the two of them. They’ve lived here for most of the summer, so that now the fear’s just a low humming noise in the background, like the sound of bees around a blackberry patch.
The first thing she did after Sally and she moved in, other than tossing the bodies over the cliff, was cut down all the rhododendron and laurel. She piled it in a circle partway down the mountain and in the gaps she strung old cans and bottles on twine to rattle if anyone—living or dead—came near.
That’s why it doesn’t make sense that something could be moving around outside. That’s why she’s jittery and pre-lightning-strike aware. If someone’s on their mountain, it’s not one of the monsters, and too often it’s the living that end up being worse than the dead. She’s seen it before when the bandits have come claiming supplies and people and shelter as their own. There’s not enough safety in this new world, and too many people are willing to take what little they can find at any cost.
“I know you’re out there,” she calls, her fingers curled around the gun, holding it tight to her shoulder. She’s lying—she doesn’t know that anyone’s really out there at all. She figures that if it’s somehow a monster, he’s already smelled her, so shouting won’t give her away, and if it isn’t a monster then she may as well have been shouting at the stars.
No one answers, which doesn’t surprise her.
“I’ve got the place trapped,” she calls out again. “You try coming inside and you might as well go blow your own head off.”
Another lie—but nothing whoever or whatever is out there needs to know.
“Find anything?” Sally asks when Margie gets back inside.
“Skunk,” Margie mutters. “Don’t go out there stumbling around until I find him,” Margie warns. “We don’t need to smell things up again.”
Sally crinkles her nose. Dirt mingles indistinguishably with freckles along the bridge. She yawns, long and loud.
“Bedtime,” Margie says, pushing Sally toward the rope ladder up to the loft.
Once they’re both curled up on the wide bed with just a sheet pulled over them, Margie says, “Tell me about this trip we’re taking through West Virginia.”
“There’s this place there called the Paw Paw Tunnel—it took them more than a decade to dig,” Sally starts to tell her. “First we’ll have to stop by the town and eat at this place on a hill called Panorama at the Peak. It’ll be a long walk from there to the tunnel, but the travel book says it’s a must if you’re visiting the area.”
Margie closes her eyes. Her little sister smells like sweat and unwashed hair, but it’s a sweet smell, familiar and steadying. Margie tries to sleep—she wants to sleep—but instead she just counts heartbeats. Outside it begins to rain, thunder tripping through the valleys around them. Sally’s breathing falls into a steady rhythm, and in between lightning strikes all Margie can think about is someone being outside. Right now. Watching their little cabin.
She sneaks back down the ladder and crouches by the window, looking out at the clearing surrounding the house. Rain courses from the sky—a curtain of water blocking the outside world.
The storm rolls closer, lightning and thunder wrapping around each other and pummeling the mountain. In the bare seconds of light, Margie scours the clearing around the cabin, terrified of seeing something out there that doesn’t belong.
Eventually, when her legs fall numb, she moves to the table, where the flashes of lightning illuminate the atlas and tattered notebook. The change time came when Sally was in third grade and Margie in tenth. Her sister’s handwriting is stiff and careful, the letters showing the unsteadiness of her little hand as if she’s still stuck in the before time that happened years ago.
Margie flips through the book: page after page of adventures and plans. Details of a path across the entire continent, as far as their maps can take them. It’s to be the grandest road trip ever, according to Sally.
Margie wonders when Sally will figure it all out. Figure out the truth of their life.
Because it’s the end of summer, another big thunderstorm rolls into the valley the next afternoon. The sky glows a sickening green, and nothing feels right to Margie. Heat settles thick and humid, the wind holding its breath before the storm pushes in hard. Sally seems oblivious, sorting through the guidebooks, flipping through the pages with an almost manic intensity.
“Whatcha looking for?” Margie asks. She crouches next to her sister but keeps glancing out the window. The air’s so saturated it’s hard to see much farther than the porch.
“West Virginia.” Her voice comes out almost breathless, that kind of sound you get on the edge of panic. “I can’t find West Virginia. We haven’t finished the route through, and I need to find someplace where we can stay the second night or we’ll be trapped outside.”
She looks up at her older sister with eyes wide and wet. “We can’t be outside, Margie,” she whispers harshly. “We have to be inside where it’s safe, and I can’t find the book of inns and hotels.”
“It’s okay.” Margie lays a hand on her sister’s shoulder, but she shrugs it away. “We had it last night. It’s here.”
“It’s not here!” Sally cries, shaking her head. “It’s not here,” she says again.
“We’ll keep looking,” Margie reassures her. Beyond the window the storm finally hits, wind hissing and rain bending trees to the ground.
Margie convinces Sally to skip West Virginia for now and figure out where they should stop in Maryland. “I’ve always heard they have great crab cakes there,” Margie says. She finds the Maryland guidebook and sets it on the table.
The picture on the cover shows a faded blue bay and white sails, with a red crab bursting from the text. It makes Margie ache for something she’s tried to give up. It makes her feel lonely in a way she hasn’t before—an intense desire to share something as simple as a chair by the water with someone who understands.
Sally keeps her head bowed low over the map, stringy tips of her hair brushing the crinkled pages. “After that we’ll go to Maine. It’ll be safer up north in the winter,” she says without looking up. “They don’t move as much in the cold.”
Margie presses her lips together tight. She remembers planning vacations that didn’t revolve around monsters. When snow meant sledding and snowmobiles and fun. The aching part inside her wells deep, spreading fast and hard through her—pounding in her blood.
“Right,” she finally says. “That’s right.”
She leaves Sally sitting at the table and steps out onto the porch, where the rain beats against the ground as if to punish it. In two steps Margie’s deluged, letting the heavy drops sting her skin and mix with her tears. She feels helpless under this weight of water. The world’s too big for her to survive in, much less for her to keep another being safe.
She knows a day will come when it’s too much. When she’ll trip up and miss a sign or signal, and that will be the end of that. She feels like a windup clock—and now she’s winding down and doesn’t know what to do next, how to twist herself back up again to keep on going.
The storm shifts and the wind howls like the dead. They’re out there, she knows, climbing the mountain, pushing at the circle of laurel, tripping over strings of tins cans that beat and rattle in the storm.
Eventually this tiny fortress will no longer keep them safe. She’ll have to tell Sally to plan the next trip, and they’ll move on, and the clock will keep ticking until the gears wind down to nothing.
Margie climbs back onto the porch, every bit of her body soaked and cold with rain. Just as she reaches for the door, the glint of light off water makes her pause.
There’s a puddle at the end of the porch with two ovals of mud dissolving in the middle, the edges blurring and washing away. A strip of damp leads up the wall, as if someone in dirty shoes recently stood there, leaning against the cabin.
Margie’s throat closes. Her body jerks rigid. Behind her the storm menaces—howling and beating and breaking. It’s as if the entire world’s turning inside out, the cacophony of the mountain splitting apart.
She turns around. The sky’s dark, everything that color of deep dusk, when shapes bleed into each other and your eyes play tricks. Movement hums around her but always out of sight. Her teeth chatter as she forces air into her lungs, willing everything to just shut up a moment so she can figure out what’s going on.
She waits for someone to burst out of the rain. To throw her against the wall and attack her in the way of men or monsters or both. A thin thread of light from inside cuts across the porch, dissolving into the storm. Through it she watches individual drops of rain plummet and splatter, running together over and around the cabin.
Every muscle in her body tight and trembling, she slips into the cabin and wraps her hands around the shotgun, its weight a comfort. She carries the lantern from room to room, listening for a sound out of place under the beating of the storm. Everywhere’s empty just the way it should be, but she leaves the lantern burning on the table because she can’t bear the dark.
Tucking the gun under her arm, she climbs up to the loft and pulls the rope ladder after her. Sally’s gone to bed long enough before that she already sleeps deep and even, her breathing a syncopated hiss mixing with the storm. Margie spends the night pressed against the wall, staring out the windows to the clearing around the cabin. Tiny squares of light spill from downstairs, flickering like fire against the darkness.
The storm clears before dawn and, exhausted, Margie sneaks back onto the porch. She’s almost convinced herself she dreamed the puddles—of course no one had been there, of course it was just the rain collecting under the eaves. The cabin’s old, the gutters unrepaired.
There are a million explanations for what she saw the night before. Margie’s just about convinced herself of all of them as birds wake up around her and start calling to the day.
But then she sees the book. It lies on its spine, flipped open to the middle, pages fluttering in the remnant wind. When she picks it up, the cover curls a bit and wet fingerprints smudge some of the corners.
It’s the Visitor’s Guide to West Virginia.
“Found your book.” Margie tosses it onto the table, causing one of the chipped plates to rattle. “You should be more careful with it—if it hadn’t been tucked behind one of the planters on the porch, it would have gotten soaked,” Margie adds.
Sally looks up at her, lips stained dark with juice. “I didn’t take it outside, duh.”
Margie stands at the sink and looks out the window. She loves her sister, knows she’s probably right. But she has to believe Sally’s lying because otherwise someone came into the cabin and took the book. Someone stood leaning against the wall, flipping through pages while Sally and Margie sat inside, oblivious.
Her fingernails scratch against the old dingy grout of the tiled kitchen counter. This cabin’s the safest they’ve found since the change time. They’ve built a quasi-life here perched on the tip of a steep mountain. Margie’s garden is coming in, she has supplies enough to can and pickle, and the well has a hand pump so they don’t have to worry about water.
Though she lets Sally plan road trips in the evenings, Margie’s indulged herself with the idea of staying for a while. Settling in further. Spending the winter beside the fire quilting. Simple things you don’t dare dream about while the dead rumble around you.
Margie’s shoulders sag. Whoever’s out there hasn’t hurt them. Not yet. But if there’s anything Margie’s learned about the world since it changed, it’s that it’s only a matter of time.
She’s learned that lesson well.
“I’m going to check on the laurel walls.” Margie shoves a water bottle into a ragged backpack with extra shells and a plastic yellow flashlight. “It might take me a while. You going to be okay without me here?”
Sally lies on her back on the leather couch, an old paperback romance held above her head.
“I’m not a baby anymore, you know.” She says it slow and even. “I can tell there’s something going on. You’re not as good at hiding it from me as you think.”
Margie looks at the baby fat still visible under the smooth planes of her sister’s face. “It’s nothing,” she says.
Sally rolls her eyes. “Whatever.”
Margie isn’t lying about checking the perimeter, but that only takes an hour and then she finds a thick copse of weeds where she has a clear view of the cabin. Bugs swirl around her, creeping along her neck and tangling in her lashes, but she sits calm and still through dusk and into the late evening.
Through the window she watches her sister fix something to eat and flip through the atlas listlessly before selecting another novel and carrying it up to the loft. The lantern burns inside, beckoning to Margie, but she keeps to the weeds, waiting while stars begin to catch fire overhead.
He comes a few hours after nightfall, just as the moon burns a bright halo on the horizon. He creeps up the steps and eases into the swing, gripping the rusted chain to keep it from creaking. The ax he’d been carrying lies forgotten against the railing as if he’s not afraid of anyone or anything out here.
None of her traps signaled his approach, and Margie wonders just how many times he’s circumvented their defenses. She watches him a moment; it’s been so long since she’s seen a living human being other than her sister that she’s fascinated, even if this guy’s some sort of creeper who’s been in their cabin and touched their things. He hunches over himself so that most of him’s hidden in shadows, and she can’t get a good look at him except to tell that his hair’s tattered and his clothes ragged along the edges.
He jumps up as she steps from the weeds, but he doesn’t move for his ax. His body’s pole-bean thin, but even so she notices coiled muscles twined around his bare arms and knows he’s strong. She figures he’s her age or a little older.
“Just in case you can’t see out here,” she says, even and strong, “I’ve got a shotgun aimed at your gut. I wouldn’t reach for that ax.” Margie walks into the clearing, toes hitting the ground before she rocks onto her heels. She listens for movement just in case the boy isn’t alone, but she hears nothing but the night bugs screaming.
The boy raises his hands. “I’m not planning on doing anything stupid,” he says.
Margie swallows. She feels off balance inside, not really knowing what to do next. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“My name’s Calvin. I’m here because . . .” He looks down at his feet. He wears old yellow boots with knots in the laces holding them together. He shrugs. “I saw the light and I just . . .” He twists his face like it hurts him to say it. Then he looks up like he can see her in the darkness.
“I was lonely, okay?” He sounds defensive, his shoulders hitched forward.
The words cut into Margie—she doesn’t know what to do with them. “Where’d you come from?” she finally asks.
He shrugs. “Around. Here and there.”
Margie watches him, the slow rise and fall of his chest. He doesn’t seem as scared as he should with a gun pointed at him. “You know I don’t trust you, right? And I’m not going to trust you?”
He nods.
“Kick your ax off the porch,” she tells him. “And if you’ve got any other weapons, toss them too.”
Calvin reaches out with his toe and nudges the ax until it slips under the railing into the overgrown bushes. From his pockets he pulls two knives and a bag of bullets but no gun— they’ve become too scarce in the past years.
Margie keeps the shotgun on him as she climbs the steps. For a while they stare at each other, her trying to put the piece of his existence into the puzzle of her life up here.
“What’s it like back down the mountain?” Margie finally asks.
Calvin doesn’t hesitate. “Horrible.” He slumps into the swing. “There aren’t a lot of safe places left, and finding food’s impossible.” He stares at his hands, his elbows propped on his knees. There’s dirt under his nails and filling the cracks of his skin.
They sit like that for a bit, nothing of the world between them that’s the same except for the monsters. Margie thinks about what it was like before the big change, when you could talk about things like movies or television or some funny joke from the internet. She grapples for some sort of bridge she could pull between them so that the gap across the porch wouldn’t seem so big and wide.
“I can’t let you leave,” she finally says. “You know that, right? I don’t want you sneaking around out here and, even if you left, I can’t have you mention to someone out there that we’ve found a safe place.”
He nods his head. “I was hoping maybe if I promised not to tell anyone . . .” He looks at her and sees that she’s not the kind to offer false hopes to strangers. His face falls. “I understand.”
“I can tie you up on the porch or inside—I’ll give you that option.”
He looks through the window at the lantern spilling over the atlas and guidebooks. “Why West Virginia?” he finally asks.
Margie rubs her fingers along the stock of the shotgun, tracing the edge of the trigger. She still has the safety on, but he doesn’t know that. “My sister gets to choose where we go and she remembered some show about West Virginia.”
“It’s a nice place,” he says. “Prettier than you’d think.”
“You’ve been?”
“Yeah. Before. My family used to go camping up on the Cacapon in the spring.” He no longer looks at his hands but at her. She’s tucked into the darkness, but still there’s something about the way he sees her that makes her feel a sort of intimacy.
“I’ll get the rope,” she says, because she doesn’t want to talk about families or vacations or the time before.
“There’s a guy tied to the porch swing,” Sally says when Margie comes down from the loft in the morning. Margie watches as Calvin slowly rocks outside, his wrists still lashed to the chains.
“You know you’re terrible at knots, right?” Sally says, flipping through one of the guidebooks spread around her. “He could have gotten out easy if he’d wanted.”
She traces an interstate across the mountains on the map, cross-referencing a set of directions in her notebook. “Don’t know why he wouldn’t just escape if he had the chance,” she mumbles without looking up at her older sister.
Margie stares at Calvin. “Me neither.”
Margie pats him down to make sure there aren’t any more weapons tucked in his clothes, and then all three of them go to pick berries. Sally pesters Calvin about where he’s been and what the mountains out West are like compared to those in the East. Calvin’s patient and kind and always aware of the fact that Margie has a gun and is willing to blow some part of his body off at the slightest provocation.
Days pass one after the other: gardening and taking care of the cabin in the day, Calvin tied up at night, time rolling after time as the great clock unwinds.
“She knows the trip is a lie,” Calvin finally says one night as Margie wraps rope around his arm and the swing.
She hesitates.
“She knows more than you think. About the world. About what your chances of survival are.” He pauses. Her face isn’t far from his, and she smells the berry sweetness of his breath.
“Our chances of survival,” he says softly.
Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.
“What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”
Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.
“I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My father yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”
She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”
Calvin strips the ropes from his arms and pulls her against him. More than anything else in the world Margie wants to sob and grab hold. Just to know that there’s someone out there to help her survive so that she doesn’t have to carry it all.
He holds her so tight she feels like she might snap, and she pushes against him because she needs to hear his heart and feel every inhalation. “Sally doesn’t know,” she says against his shoulder. “She doesn’t know what it takes to survive.”
He presses his lips against the crown of her head and whispers, “Hush,” into her ear with his hot breath. Around them night peepers scream to each other, tree frogs wailing for the darkness.
Margie doesn’t tie Calvin up but instead lets him help her inside, where they lie on the couch and she thinks that maybe there is such a thing as survival in this world.
When the two men charge into the cabin, Calvin’s the first to reach for the gun. Margie falls from the couch to her knees and wants to scream for Sally but presses her lips tight, hoping that maybe the strangers won’t know there’s someone else inside.
Calvin flips off the safety and raises the gun to his shoulder. The strangers are tall and broad, one of them with a tangled beard and the other with black hair slicked back behind his ears. It’s almost too easy to see the family resemblance to Calvin, and Margie goes numb as she notices.
“How quaint,” the bearded man says. He strolls inside as if there isn’t a shotgun pointed to his chest. He glances around— at the map on the table, at Margie’s face that’s still rubbed a little raw from Calvin’s unshaven cheeks.
He turns to face Calvin while the slick-headed man leans against the door frame. “Nicely done, little brother,” he says. “You checked there’s food enough for winter and the other guns are secured?”
Calvin nods, eyes downcast.
Margie chokes. Her body flames a deep burning red as shame churns inside. It feels like the moment her family was ambushed on the road, when time seemed to slow down and she noticed the most pointless details. Now she feels the grit of the hardwood floor biting into her knees and realizes how badly she needs to pee.
Slick Hair moves toward the loft. “Where’s the other one?”
Margie tries to block his way and she’s shoved to the ground, her head hitting the corner of a chair as she falls. She paws at the man, hooking her fingers in his clothes, but he bats her away, crushing her hand until she feels something pop and give.
“Sally!” she screams, loud and raw and filled with rage. The bearded one grabs her, lifting and twisting until her arm’s behind her back, his knife against her throat. She struggles, not caring at the bite of the blade into her skin.
“Margie,” Calvin says. It’s his voice that stops her. He’s still holding the gun. Her gun. She wants to close her eyes, but she doesn’t because she deserves this. To see what she’s brought down on her sister.
Her lips still vibrate from when Calvin kissed her, and she spits at him, hating the taste of him still in her mouth. He blanches and sidesteps her attempt at outrage, and his two brothers laugh, Slick Head reaching out and slapping his shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. Calvin’s cheeks flare a bright embarrassed pink, and his eyes leap to Margie’s and then away again, a shuttered mortification flashing through them.
“Tell her to drop the ladder,” Beard says into Margie’s ear.
She shakes her head. Already she can feel the sobs coming, and they taste like failure. She swallows and chokes trying to get the words out: “Don’t do it, Sally. You stay where you are!”
“Drop the ladder or I start carving your sister!” Beard shouts up toward the loft. He slides the blade along her collarbone and then digs it into Margie’s shoulder. Even though she bites her lips, she can’t stop the scream. The pain’s nothing like she’s ever known before, an explosion of fire as her body realizes how deeply the knife has sunk.
Margie’s knees give out, her legs limp and useless. As she slides toward the floor she looks to Calvin for help, but he just stands there, his hands tight around her gun and his eyes on the blood curling down from the gash in her shoulder.
He kissed that exact spot the night before. Traced his lips over that stretch of skin as she gasped and pulled him closer with a type of need he’d said he’d never been a part of before. Now the flesh is torn, the edges ragged from the unsharpened knife, and he looks like he can’t stop trying to figure out how something once so whole and perfect can become that broken so easily.
Margie braces her uninjured arm against the floor, fingers splayed to hold her weight before she collapses. She’s wheezing— loud and gagging from the pain. Beard grabs her hair and drags her out into the middle of the room to make sure Sally can see what he’s doing.
He pushes Margie to her knees, yanks her head back until her spine arches. Presses the knife against her throat, sweat glistening along the ridges of her tendons. “I don’t like asking twice,” he growls up at Sally, who huddles behind the banister, eyes wide and hands pressed over her mouth as her shoulders shake.
“Stop it!” Sally shouts. “Okay, I’m coming down. Just stop hurting her!”
She unfurls the ladder as Margie begs, “No, Sally, stay up there,” but Sally ignores her.
She’s halfway down, her bare toes wrapping over the wooden rungs, when Slick Head grabs her around the waist with a thick arm. Sally’s already anticipated the move because she pushes herself back, twisting the rope of the ladder around his neck and hauling his feet from the ground.
He kicks out, the rope tightening, and his mouth wrenches open—a black, choking maw ringed by yellowed teeth.
“Jeffrey!” Beard shouts as his brother starts to scratch wildly at his throat, his face flaring red.
“The knife!” Slick Head wheezes out, and Beard throws Margie to the ground. He jumps toward his brother, but Margie kicks at his feet, throwing him off balance so that he trips and falls, the knife skittering from his hand as his fists slam against the hardwood floor.
Sally’s there in the middle of it, swooping in for the knife as it slides past her. Everything stills as the pieces of the moment reorder and shift back together again: Margie struggling to her knees, Slick Head choking and pawing madly at the noose, Beard pushing himself up with his hands out in front of him as Sally crouches, knife held steady.
Calvin’s still in the corner by the door, shotgun clutched in his fingers.
“Shoot her,” Beard orders him, never taking his eyes off Sally or her knife.
Calvin jumps toward Margie, lowering the gun. She’s kneeling on the floor, one arm useless. She looks up at Calvin standing over her, the shotgun pressed against her temple in the same spot he kissed the night before. She doesn’t close her eyes. She won’t make it easy.
“You said you understood what it takes to survive,” Calvin says to Margie. “How hard it is to find somewhere safe.” He’s sweating, his lips pale. “You’ve got Sally to take care of like I have my brothers.”
Margie just stares at him. He knows what she’s done for her sister. What she would do if their situations were reversed. Behind them, Slick Head’s chokes become high-pitched wheezes.
Margie winces, and Calvin’s finger jumps on the trigger before slipping away. “Cut him down,” Calvin orders Sally without taking his eyes off Margie.
“You have to understand this.” He speaks like he needs Margie’s absolution.
She feels the perfect roundness of the barrel of the shotgun pressed hard enough against her skin to leave an indentation. One flick of his finger and she’s done worrying. Done planning and patrolling and constantly fighting against the incessant fear.
She’s failed Sally. She always knew that she would. In the same way her father failed her and she failed her mother. In the world with the dead, her failure was always inevitable.
Slick Head’s gags become desperate—wet, smacking sounds that fill the cabin as streaks of blood tear along his neck from his nails scratching for air.
Sally’s breathing hard and fast as she steps toward Slick Head, his face puffy, with busted blood vessels in his eyes turning them red. She draws the hand holding the knife over her shoulder as if preparing to hack at the rope. He claws at her, trying to get his fingers around the blade, but she just swings her arm hard, knuckles cracking against his jaw but the hilt of the knife keeping her fist solid like a brick.
Blood dribbles from his mouth and she pulls back to strike again as the hanging man chokes on broken teeth.
Beard roars and leaps for her, but he’s too late. She’s already sliced the knife across Slick Hair’s throat, a ragged gurgling gash of frothing blood that drips from his neck as his mouth gapes open and closed, open and closed.
Sally spins toward Beard, holding the bloody blade between them, but that doesn’t stop him. He crashes into her, dragging her to the ground. His fingers rake at her, claw at her face, and pummel her throat.
She tries to hold him off but she’s a young girl and he’s a massive man—it’s like a fawn beating back a bear, and Beard howls and spits with his rage as blood from his brother’s neck twines down his arms and drips to the floor.
Margie’s eyes flare and she drags her broken body across the room to her sister’s defense, not caring that the barrel of the shotgun traces her movement. “Stop it!” she screams, reaching for her sister’s tiny hands, trying to drag her away from the mauling monster.
Beard roars up, rising tall on his knees as he swipes at Margie, hand slapping at her busted shoulder, which causes a surge of pain bright and intense to shatter across her mind, shutting her down.
Sally pulls into a ball, pressing her face against Margie’s side, trying to protect them both. Beard huffs, his mouth foaming as he stares at them huddled under his brother’s mangled body.
He holds out his hand. “Give me the gun,” he demands of Calvin, but Calvin doesn’t move. He stares at the two girls. Two broken bodies that moments before had been whole.
He did this. He helped break the world.
Beard spins toward him, his fingers clawed in a fervent fury. “Shoot them, Calvin. Stop acting like any of this means something and just do it!”
Margie’s senses clear bit by bit and she watches as something clicks in Calvin’s eyes. He aims the shotgun at her, and she takes a deep breath, waiting for him to pull the trigger. She always thought she’d be relieved in that moment but instead she feels the most intense regret.
She’s spent too much time scared. She should have gone to West Virginia with Sally. She shouldn’t have locked them in a cabin she knew would one day fail to protect them.
She thinks of all the notebooks filled with her sister’s handwriting. The trips had always been a lie.
Calvin stares at Margie. “You care about me?”
She doesn’t answer, just clenches her jaw as her cheeks burn with her own stupidity for trusting a stranger.
He steps closer to her, urgent. “Would you kill me for her?” He says it like they’re the only two people in the room. As if one brother isn’t dead and the other asking for her and her sister’s murder.
Margie doesn’t have to think before answering. “Yes.”
Calvin pulls the trigger. Outside a few birds scream and scatter into the trees.
“They wouldn’t have,” Calvin finally chokes out. “I’ve never meant enough to them. Ever.” Smoke twines around him, pungent and sweet. “Jeremy was wrong. It should mean something. Killing someone—I need it to still mean something. Or else everything in the world falls apart.”
Next to Margie, Sally rolls to her hands and knees and beats at Beard’s shot-shredded chest, blood splattering her fists and arms, caking her hair. It’s not enough she’s given up the world because of the dead, but to have been asked to give up this place, and the dreams it held, because of the living is too much.
Margie stares at Calvin. He pushes the gun into her hands, guiding the barrel until it’s wedged into the hollow of his collarbone. She doesn’t understand how everything’s changed again. How one minute she was death and then she was life and now she holds death in her hands again.
“I understand,” he says. “I know you’ll never trust me now. I understand that, and maybe that’s the way it goes. My death can mean something too.”
He pushes her finger onto the trigger. Behind her Sally finally sags against the wall, sobbing as her fingers curl on themselves, slick and bright.
Margie climbs to her feet, shoulder screaming as torn muscle protests the movement. Clutching the gun, she walks to the table where the maps are spread out, blood now spattered along the mountains and towns. She tries to wipe it away, but only ends up smearing them red.
She’d wanted to keep her sister safe. She’d wanted to keep a part of the world the way it was, before the change time, for Sally.
But she knows, now, there’s no escape from the monsters. They’ll always be there; you just choose to live with them or not. Sometimes you have to plan for another day—sometimes that’s all you have. “You said you’ve been to West Virginia,” she says. “You’ll show it to us?”
