Page 82 of So Thirsty

Would I bite someone’s face? Will I? Will I ever be that thirsty?

Am I that thirsty now, looking at the puddle of blood forming underneath the woman’s head?

Naomi remains in the passenger seat, licking her lips in a stupor of satisfaction.

I run out of the store, past the woman, and get into the car, slamming the door, which wakes Naomi from her bliss coma. She shakes her head, then leans out the window and sees the woman on the ground.

She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t recoil in horror at what she’s done. She just says, “Drive.”

I start the car and hit the gas. There’s oncoming traffic, so I can’t pull out onto the road.

“Go!” Naomi yells.

“I can’t! Someone’s coming! What were you thinking, Nay? You can’t tell me that was self-defense. I saw you attack her.”

“I was too thirsty! You drank all the blood Ilie gave us. What are you waiting for? Just go!”

The woman is up. She stumbles to her car, gets something out of her bag. Her phone? She must be calling the cops. She must be taking a picture of my car, the license plate.

She must be—

There’s a pop.

It sounds like a bottle rocket. It doesn’t sound like a gunshot, but it is. The woman has a gun—so small it looks like a toy—and she’s shooting at us. She’s shooting at the car.

“Goddamn motherfucking shit! Drive, Sloane! Fucking go!”

I take my foot off the brake and lay my hand on the horn, and I go. I don’t look. I just go.

There are headlights, bright as twin suns, and they’re coming toward us. I swerve to narrowly avoid a sedan, but I lose control of the car. The road is covered in black ice, and we’re spinning, and spinning, and there are brakes screeching and horns honking, and Naomi screams, and she’s trying to grab the wheel, and I’m remembering what it felt like to wake up broken and hungover in a hospital bed, what it was like to learn how quickly it all can get so ugly, and I see another set of headlights approaching, and the two white orbs merge into one, and I don’t wonder what this will be like, because I’ve lived through it once before, only this time my body isn’t colliding with the pavement; it’s colliding with an enormous pickup truck. Head-on.

There’s an earsplitting crunch, like we’re between the teeth of a great beast. The pickup truck at the front and a hatchback from the rear. Crunch, crunch. My airbag goes off, punching me square in the face. I hear glass breaking, and then I feel broken glass pelting me like a hailstorm.

The air smells of smoke, and there’s a troubling heat coming from somewhere.

“Naomi?” I blink through the fog and see she’s climbing into the back seat. “Naomi, what are you doing?”

“I need it,” she says, reaching. The trunk is smashed in. There’s broken glass everywhere. She crawls on top of it, but she doesn’t cut herself. Maybe her skin is too thick. I look down at my hands, my arms. I touch my face. I’m not cut either.

Is this immortality? The body surviving horror unscathed, the mind taking all the damage? The heart? The interior to sag and spot, to bruise, to be wounded and wither, while the exterior betrays nothing?

Naomi clambers out through the broken back window.

“Nay!” What is she doing? Where is she going? Why is she leaving me?

26

T he scene comes into focus. The driver of the hatchback has gone through her windshield. She’s alive—she’s moving—but she’s bleeding. The driver of the truck is also bleeding. I don’t need to look, because I can smell it. Smell his blood, and cheap cologne, and whiskey. He’s been drinking. I know the accident wasn’t his fault—it was mine—but part of me wonders if a sip would be justified.

I open my door and drop out onto the road.

The pickup-truck driver is there, already in my face. He’s an older man, probably in his fifties.

“What the hell happened?” he asks. He slurs his words. “Weren’t you paying attention?”

He bleeds from his forehead, from his nose, from his knuckles.

“Hey!” he says. He’s not shouting at me; he’s shouting beyond me.