Over Your Dead Body (17 page)

That last bit was a suicide deterrent, just in case; the rest was to keep her from wandering off. She’d only left once in the last year, at a bus station somewhere in Nebraska, and I’d only just managed to find her, hitchhiking out in front. She was about to get into someone’s truck when I ran up to her, half dressed and still soaked from my shower. Showers were the only time we were really apart, and I didn’t want her to get confused and leave again, so I’d started writing her letters. She hadn’t run off again, so I guess they worked.

I thought about her body in the shower, naked and wet and—

No.

She came out of the shower looking fresh scrubbed and satisfied, though she was dressed in her old dirty clothes again because everything else was in the wash. I talked with her just long enough to make sure she was still Brooke and that she knew what we were doing here, and then I gave her the letter and told her to keep it in her hand no matter what. I slipped into the shower stall I’d paid for and washed as quickly as I could, which turned out to be a solid eight minutes before I was convinced that I’d gotten all the dust and mud out of my hair. It was long, and I needed to cut it again, for ease of maintenance if nothing else. I threw my dirty clothes back on and stepped back into the hall, relieved to see Brooke still waiting for me.

“That was fast,” she said. “Mine was, like, twice that long.”

“We paid for it,” I said. “You may as well get the most you can out of it.”

“But not you?”

I did a quick visual check of the hall, making sure we still had all of our stuff. “I’m fine.”

“The washer’s still going,” she said, pointing toward the laundry room down the hall. “How much longer do you think we have?”

“Ten minutes, maybe,” I said. “Then another hour or so for the dryer.”

“We could eat,” she said.

I shook my head, thinking about our money. “Not in the restaurant.”

“The burger place?”

“The most cost-effective source of nutrients in a truck stop is the snack aisle,” I said. “We’ll get pretzels sticks, sunflower seeds, and some baby carrots from the cooler section if they have them. We can drink out of the drinking fountain.”

“You really know how to show a girl a good time.”

“What?” I said, straightening up in mock offense. “You don’t find thriftiness exciting?”

“Not as exciting as extravagance.”

“Come on, then,” I said. “We can watch some of the rich people eat sandwiches.”

Ten minutes later we were back in the laundry room, spitting out sunflower shells and watching the news on a TV in the corner. I switched the washed clothes into the dryer and dropped in eight quarters.
Nineteen dollars and thirty-two cents.
The money was going too fast, and if we couldn’t rely on Potash’s depots to replenish it, we’d be completely broke in just a couple of weeks. What would we do after that?

“Somebody got shot,” said Brooke, jutting her chin toward the TV.

“That happens,” I said, but I wasn’t really paying attention. What if Rain was the last Withered? We didn’t really know how many there were and we thought some were chasing us, but we didn’t know for sure. And Brooke couldn’t find any more in Nobody’s memories. If we could kill Rain inside of four weeks, we could go ahead and run out of money and then just … what? Settle down somewhere? Turn ourselves in? We couldn’t keep this up forever.

“Drug bust,” said Brooke.

“Cities suck,” I said.

“It’s not a city,” she laughed, “it’s like a … village. Look at that place, it’s smaller than Clayton.”

“Little towns suck, too,” I said, looking up at the TV. Something about a tiny community in Kentucky.

“Everywhere sucks,” said Brooke gruffly, crunching on a carrot. “The whole world is garbage.” I looked at her, leery of any depressive language from her, but she was smiling, and laughed again when she saw me looking. “Rah, darkness, pain, rah.” She laughed again.

I rolled my eyes as dramatically as possible and went back to my plans. Would it be so bad to turn ourselves in? Once all the Withered were dead, and we could go back to a normal life—whatever that meant? Could we just let whoever was chasing us catch up? Could we walk into a police station and tell them who we were? Even if there were warrants out for me, which I doubted, I’d just end up back at the FBI. They knew where I came from and they’d understand that I’ve only been doing exactly what they told me to do. After yelling at me a bit for doing it without them they’d calm down and let me get on with my life. Maybe. Or maybe I’d end up in prison for the rest of my life, and Brooke in a nut house. I couldn’t let that happen. She needed me.

And if I was being honest, I think I needed her. Sitting here, talking, joking, I felt more normal than I had in ages. Even with all the running and hiding and stalking and killing, I felt more normal with her than I’d ever felt in my life. That said a lot. She was a friend like I’d never had before, not just a relative or a crush or a convenient acquaintance, but a real friend. Someone I could share everything with, and who shared everything with me. Sitting here, thinking about losing her and all of this ending, I realized that I didn’t want it to. I didn’t like who I was without her.

She made me less afraid of myself.

But was I as good for her as she was for me?

We needed to get back on the road, some way they couldn’t follow us. Hitchhiking wasn’t working, but we couldn’t afford anything else.

“Knife attack,” said Brooke.

“Then somebody’s having more fun than I am,” I said.

“No,” she said, and something in her voice was different. “John, look.”

A new personality? I looked at her, and saw that her brow was deeply furrowed. Something was very wrong. I looked up at the TV and saw nighttime footage of some cops walking in and out of a small house. Brick with wooden siding. A gray pickup truck sat in the driveway.

“It’s Dylan,” she said. “That kid from the … with the gun.”

“Dylan?” I peered at the screen, trying to read the titles along the bottom. “Dillon,” I said, recognizing the shape of the word. “The town we were just in. The kid with the gun was Derek.”

“He’s dead,” said Brooke, and the TV showed another shot—no body, just a room drenched in blood, the floor and the walls and everything else, parts of it covered with a blanket or marked with forensic tags. Whatever had happened had been brutal.

“Derek?” I asked, and then the news showed a picture of his face. It was definitely him.

Brooke nodded, her face pale. “Somebody cut him into pieces. The scroll on the bottom said it was almost a hundred.”

Derek was dead. We’d been convinced that Dillon was clean, that there were no Withered there—but now Derek was dead. The first murder the little town had seen in …

Oh no.

“Somebody followed us,” I said.

Brooke practically leaped off the bench, whirling around to look at the door. “How do we get out?”

“Not here,” I said. “Or at least not yet.” I gestured at the TV. “This happened last night, so whoever did it hasn’t gotten this far.”

“Then it wasn’t Iowa, either,” said Brooke.

I nodded. “Iowa’s probably FBI, like you said. This is a Withered.”

She glanced at the dryer, only a few minutes into its cycle. She swallowed and sat back down. “Which one?”

“You tell me,” I said.

“Why aren’t you terrified?”

“I am,” I said. “I’m just reacting to it differently. We need to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to it before we do anything rash.”

“Rash?” she said, a little too loudly. We were the only two people in the laundry room, and when I glanced at the door I didn’t see anyone looking in. Her voice was high pitched with worry. “What kind of word is ‘rash?’”

Boy Dog was on his feet, aware that we were agitated even if he didn’t know why.

“Stay calm,” I said. The last thing we needed now was another mental-health episode. I put my hand on her arm. “Search your memory. We can do this. Wake up Nobody, if we have to. This Withered just cut a teenage boy into a hundred pieces: who does that sound like? What do we know about them?”

“It sounds like you,” said Brooke.

I faltered a moment. “I’ve never cut anyone into pieces.”

“But you want to,” she said. “You told me.”

“I told you I had dreams about it,” I said. “I don’t actually want to do it.”

“Don’t you?”

“Focus,” I said. “Someone is following us, and we need to figure out who.”

“I know,” she said. “I’m just freaking out; it’s hard to think.”

My stomach roiled at her accusation, not because it offended me but because it felt so accurate: not only had I dreamed about cutting people up, I’d fantasized about cutting up Derek himself. Turning those smug leers into screams while I sliced through muscles and tendons and separated the bones like a butcher. Now someone had actually done it. What had it felt like? How long had it taken?

I was thinking about the wrong things—I needed to focus on the parts of the kill that would help us to figure it out.
Why
had a Withered cut Derek to pieces? They didn’t kill out of annoyance, at least not that we’d ever seen. They killed because they were missing something—because they needed something that only that kill could give them. What had it been this time? Information? If something was tracking us, could it carve memories out of its victims like flesh?

Had this happened in every town we’d visited?

“Turn up the volume,” I said, looking at the TV. “Have they talked about similar attacks? If this has happened before they’ll think it’s a serial killer, cutting its way across America.”

“The story’s already over,” said Brooke.

“Crap,” I said, rubbing my eyes as another realization washed over me. “If the FBI has followed us, then they know where we’ve been—and if there are kills in each place they’ll think the killers were all us.”

“That happened last night,” Brooke reminded me. “You said it yourself. Iowa saw us in Dallas yesterday morning, so they know we didn’t do this.”

“
If
he’s FBI,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re making too many assumptions. We need to
know
. We need to find out how many other times this has happened—there might be more information about the previous kills because they’ve had more time to investigate them.”

“There’s an Internet cafe by the restaurant,” said Brooke.

“Good thinking,” I said, and stood up. “Stay with the—no, come with me.”

“Damn right I’m coming with you.”

We gathered our food and our half-empty backpacks and left our laundry drying; we had another forty minutes, at least, before it was done. I took deep breaths to calm myself down and followed Brooke to the Internet cafe, which turned out to be three old desktop computers on a low counter. Each keyboard had a credit-card reader on it, and I threw back my head in disappointment.

“Crap.”

“Maybe they’re…” Brooke wiggled the nearest mouse and read the screen. “Yeah, cards only.”

“Maybe they have something at the front,” I said. We walked to the checkout counter in the convenience store, which served as the hub of the whole place, and I waited while the guy in front of us paid for his soda. The cashier was a short, stocky man, with a nametag that said Carlos, and he looked puzzled when he saw us holding the half-eaten food we’d bought from him barely ten minutes earlier.

“Is there a problem?”

“Is there any way to use the Internet without a credit card?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Sorry, that’s just how they are.”

“Do you have a credit card?” asked Brooke.

“Everyone has a credit card,” said Carlos.

I could kill him and take his credit card and—

Stop it.

“We just saw a news report about a friend of ours,” said Brooke, and I thought
Don’t connect us to Dillon!—
but she’d apparently already planned for that. “There was a drug bust on the news, and the house next door to it was my friend Rachel’s. I need to find out if she’s okay, but we don’t have a phone or a credit card.”

“There’s pay phones in the hall by the game room,” said Carlos.

“I’ll still have to look up her number,” said Brooke. “How much does an Internet session cost? Five bucks?”

“Four dollars for a half hour of low bandwidth,” said Carlos. “Ten dollars for movies and stuff.”

“If we give you four dollars cash,” said Brooke, “can you use your card to get us online?”

Carlos stared at us through narrowed eyelids. “You’re not going to look up porn or whatever, are you? I get in trouble if that gets traced back to me.”

“News and search engines only,” I said, and I dug out one of my stashes of cash. I counted out four ones and held them up. “Four dollars.”

“Pretty please?” asked Brooke.

Carlos looked at us for a moment, then rolled his eyes and took the cash. He called over his shoulder as he walked to the end of the counter. “Carla, be back in thirty seconds.”

“Carlos and Carla?” asked Brooke.

“It’s not funny,” said Carlos. We followed him to the computers, where he swiped his card and set up a short session. “This’ll kick you off in thirty minutes exactly,” he said. “No warning or nothing, so watch this timer in the bottom corner. And no porn.”

We nodded, and he walked back to the front. I sat down, Brooke pulled over a chair, and we searched for “Dillon murder.”

“Thomas Dillon,” said Brooke, reading the top Wikipedia link. “A serial killer?”

“He hunted men like deer,” I said, remembering him from some crime reenactment show. “He shot five that we know of.” I scrolled past that, looking for current news, but none of the links looked recent enough to be about a murder from last night. I tried a new search for “Dillon murder news” and got another string about Thomas Dillon, and a few more about a murder in Dillon County, but that didn’t look like the same place, and it was at least a year old. I tried again with “Dillon murder Derek,” and got a hit. I clicked it and read the article, but it was just an announcement from the same news show we’d seen on the TV, with no new information. Last night’s kill was too recent for anyone to know much about it.