6
GWEN
This wasn’t my first encounter with the entity.
I’d been a kid the first time I remembered it showing up. Mom had gotten into a fight with her boyfriend at the time. He’d shoved her through a glass partition in our living room. I heard it, and by the time I got there, he was gone. Mom was conscious, but bleeding profusely from her arm and another wound at the back of her head. I’d left my body, and the entity called 911 and applied pressure to both wounds with a dishcloth while we’d waited for the ambulance.
My next encounter with it had been during my first fight with Troy. Couldn’t say what the fight had been about—we’d had so many of them—but he grabbed ahold of my face and squeezed my cheeks so hard that I tasted iron. The moment that blood touched my tongue, the entity took over. It slammed one of my fists into his shoulder, it shoved him off me, and it moved my legs. Moved them so fast I hadn’t realized what was happening until I turned over the car’s engine and tore off down the road.
I didn’t know what it was, not exactly, but I wasn’t crazy. I knew no one else climbed into my body. My brain justsegmented. Thought escaped me, and my body did what it needed to survive.
It did what needed done.
The entity stopped outside the gates of Rhiannon’s Ranch and slid them shut. It returned to the vehicle and took over the wheel. I didn’t know, or care, where we were going.
While it manned the road, images flashed through my mind. First, a river five or so miles from the ranch. An overpass, nestled deep in the mountains, that less than a thousand people probably knew about. Far fewer would drive it at this hour.
That’s where the entity was taking me.
The next image was a big yellow box tucked behind a chain-link fence. Almost like an eighteen-wheeler. But not quite. Yellow taxis drove the cement on the other side of that chain-link fence.
The last images were little white tags plastered all over a vehicle. On the dashboard, driver side door jamb, even the engine block. The front of the frame, under the passenger seat, trunk floor, and inside the engine compartment.
When that overpass became visible, I knew what came next. Where we were going. What that big yellow box was. How to find those yellow taxis. Why those little white tags mattered so much.
It was straight ahead, connecting two mountains. Six streetlights shone against the concrete, illuminating only those two yellow lines, the white ones off to the edges, the small walkway flush with it, and the four foot stone banister.
Every time I’d driven past here, I’d admired the gargoyles lining those light posts. Today, rather than watching them, they watched me.
I shifted the car into park in the center of the bridge, idling between two of the gargoyles. There, I stepped from the vehicle and stood on the asphalt.
It would take at least a minute to yank David from the trunk and toss him over the ledge. But sound carried through these mountains. So long as I listened closely, I would hear a car coming well before they saw me.
Once my ears adjusted, hearing the trickle of the water below, an owl hooting in the distance, but nothing else. I pulled in a deep breath.
Careful, cautious, I walked to the trunk. My head stayed on a swivel. Watching. Anticipating. Prepared for someone or something to throw me off.
Nothing did.
I popped open the trunk, grabbed the burrito by the bigger end, and hoisted it to the ground. The beans tumbled out behind.
With all my might, I grabbed hold of David’s feet and dragged him over the curb and onto the sidewalk. A small stream of blood leaked from the edge.
Adrenaline pumped to my frozen limbs.
Now at the banister, I grabbed the bigger half of the burrito again in a bear hug. The banister came to my belly button. As long as I got him vertical, I couldtip him over it.
I did just that.
It took longer than I expected to hear the splash of his body hitting the water. Only then did I look over the edge.
Gone. He was gone.
In my backpack, the entity had packed me another bottle of bleach. I opened it up, dumped it onto the stream of blood I had left, and watched the red dilute into a barely-there pink. When it looked like nothing more than a spilled bottle of water on the sidewalk, I walked back to the car and hopped into the driver’s seat.
The entity tookover again for the drive. It pulled off on the side of the road, roughly fifty miles from the overpass. It took the pocketknife from the bag it’d packed me and scraped the VIN off the dashboard. Then the door jamb and engine block. It checked the front of the frame, passenger seat, and trunk floor, but no VIN in any of those spots. At the trunk still, it lifted the second tarp, careful to keep the drops of blood inside, and folded it into a perfect square. Back inside the vehicle, it placed the square in my bag, nice and tidy.
It dug inside the glove compartment and center console. Cleared out all the paperwork and laid it carefully in my bag.
