“What I was trying to say was,” he continued, not really answering my question, “the whole world is propped up by stories, and some of them are exaggerations or just plain lies, but some . . .” He paused for a long time, swilling coffee around his mouth. “I mean, look at us.”
I shut down the computer and take out the trash, and when I’m standing on the curb, I can almost convince myself not to be afraid.
I drive too fast all the way to work, with the GPS on at top volume even though I don’t need it, the Nokia plugged into my car charger and the windows down to keep my senses full of the smell of air and sand. To keep my mind off Uncle Bill and what I’m going to do next.
I know what I want to do next. I want to shut my eyes and wake up in my bed, with Uncle Bill calling me. I want to box up the terror that started to press in on me back at the house and put it away and never have to look at it again. I want none of this to be real. Maybe the next best thing is pretending that it isn’t.
Except I can’t do that, because we need blood.
That doesn’t mean I know what to do. The loneliness is the worst part. I can’t ask my mom, and no one else will understand.
Maybe the knife-sharp creature inside me will have an answer. It’s the worst of me, but it’s also the only part of me that doesn’t know how to lie. I wait until I hit an arterial, where I can keep driving without paying too much attention, and part my lungs and reach my awareness toward the iron bars.
“What would you do?” I ask it.
The answer comes not as a word but as an impulse—a lunge forward, legs outstretched, ears pinned back.
Run.
The windshield blurs into a screen of pure red, like I’ve run through a car wash, only it’s not water, it’s blood. The rancid smell of carrion gags me. I hit the brakes and someone honks, very far away, as a message worms its way into my mind again, just like it did at the party.
Not long now.
“Turn left,” the GPS burbles in her clipped, inhuman voice. I snap back to myself just in time to catch a middle finger from the driver passing me. My windshield is clear.
I dig my nails into the steering wheel and turn. What else can I do? But that single syllable,run, echoes in my ears like a drumbeat until I pull into the hospital parking lot.
10
BY THE TIME I PULL INTO THE HOSPITAL PARKING LOT, Uncle Bill’s burner phone has enough of a charge to turn on. It only has one number saved: a northern Nevada area code under the contact name Brian. I try calling, but he doesn’t answer. I tuck it into my pocket, just in case.
I don’t even think about Veer until she finds me in the break room.
She and Rodriguez roll in along with another pair—the loud, bossy one is Temple, I think, and the stone-faced one is Ying—as I’m finishing my lunch break. Coffee and crackers. Eleven at night isn’t really lunchtime anyway.
“We picked up Oscar again,” Temple drawls, slamming her way through the cabinets in search of K-Cups. “Come on, how hard is it not to smoke when you’re already on oxygen?”
Ying grunts.
“He’s lonely,” Rodriguez says in his soft, measured tone. “People do messed-up things, sometimes, when they get old and don’t have anyone left to care.”
“We’re not babysitters,” Temple grumbles, but quieter.
I smell Veer’s distinctive mix of sweat and skin and hair gel, but she doesn’t say anything. Not to them, or to me. The back of my neck itches.
Temple scrapes one of the chairs toward herself. “Is this seat taken?”
She sits before I answer, legs splayed wide. She smells like drive-through hash browns and whitening strips. EMTs and medics see a lot, not just the body stuff but having to come to people wherever they are, in whatever state they’re in. Sometimes it shrinks them down, makes them melancholy and reflective like Rodriguez or expressionless and guarded like Ying. Sometimes it makes them like Temple, confident that she’s seen the worst of life already. Sometimes it makes them like Veer, quick to anger and quicker to remorse. Is that what she meant by having been through some shit?
“It’s yours,” I say. I don’t have it in me to be around people right now. “I was just finishing up.”
I toss my coffee and head for the door, but a hand on my arm stops me.
“Hey,” Veer says. “I’ll walk with you.”
Temple tips back in her chair. “Hands to yourself, Zawadski.”
“Fuck off,” Veer calls, half joking, as the door slams behind us. She grimaces. “Sorry.”
