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LAST DAY OF AUGUST
NIGHT RUNNERS
Night hath a thousand eyes.
—JOHN LYLY
74
GUTSY SAT AT THE EMPTY kitchen table. Sombra sat with his head on her thigh, eyes closed as she scratched his neck.
Night had fallen, but Gutsy didn’t think Captain Collins and her Rat Catchers would come for her this early. Urrea and Ford both urged her to sleep in their guest rooms, and Alethea said she could sneak Gutsy into the Cuddlys’ place. Gutsy thanked them and said no.
“I’ll take my bedroll and bed down in the school library,” she said. “I doubt the soldiers will look for me there.” None of them liked it, but she could not be budged. Spider and Alethea had left minutes after the Chess Players. Each of them had gone home, with a loose agreement to meet again tomorrow to decide what to do.
Now the house was quiet as a tomb, as still as death, as cold as her own heart. The weight of everything was too much. The Night Army. The Raggedy Man. The lab and the base. All of it. Too much to bear, and Gutsy felt like she was cracking and crumbling beneath it.
They are still connected to all five senses. They hear, smell, taste, feel, and see everything, but they are unable to exert any control over the physical body.
That was what Karen had said. It had been hard to hear at the time, but there was so much coming at her that the edge of it was blunted. Now, here, in the absolute, unbearable quiet of her empty house, the truth of it cut her and left her to bleed.
“Mama . . . ,” she breathed.
She almost couldn’t bear to close her eyes for fear of being back in her bedroom, with Mama lumbering toward her, clawing at her with dead hands, snapping at her. Gutsy had looked into those empty eyes and seen nothing.
Or had she?
Had there been the tiniest flicker?
Was that Mama in there, screaming for her daughter to run? To fight? To forgive her? To release her?
Gutsy suddenly caved forward, clutching her stomach as if actually stabbed. Was that Mama in there? Screaming? Terrified? Aware that she was dead? Feeling herself begin to decompose?
Oh God.
Please, don’t let that be true.
Karen said it, though. The Rat Catchers and the doctors believed it. Sending Mama back had been part of an experiment of some obscene kind.
Before they left, Spider and Alethea had clung to her, weeping, trying to tell her that it wasn’t true. Alethea could usually tell a good lie, but not tonight. Spider was never able to manage it. So Gutsy had to comfort them, help them lift their own pain and carry it out of the house.
Everyone was gone now but Gutsy and the coydog. No one had been able to suggest a plan. Mr. Ford said that they needed time to digest, to consider.
Sure. Whatever. She was glad they’d left.
And yet the house was so empty without them. The windup clock on the wall sounded wrong and Gutsy glanced at it, seeing the second hand tick, pause, tick, tremble, stop. She knew that it was only because she hadn’t wound the spring, but it felt like a message. It was the universe telling her that there was no time left. Or, maybe, that her own time had run out. That wasn’t exactly the same thing, but maybe both things were happening at the same time.
Gutsy looked slowly around the kitchen, down the hall, out through the window into the yard. This was the only place she had ever lived; it was home. Her home. Mama’s home.
Past tense.
“Mama,” begged Gutsy as she slid from her chair onto the floor, “help me.”
But Mama was gone and Gutsy could not smell her, feel her, sense her. She couldn’t even sense her own energy here. It made the house feel like those old dead batteries in all those rusting cars. Empty.
As useless as a stopped clock.
75
