Over Your Dead Body (8 page)

I looked at Corey, standing so quietly in the back, and realized that he had a backpack I hadn’t seen, hidden in the silhouette of his jacket. He stood a moment, watching us, then slowly shrugged the pack off and handed it to Derek. Was he looking at me or at Marci? Whichever it was, his eyes didn’t leave us for a second.

“Beer!” shouted Derek, and he cracked one open, sucking the suds off the top of the can when it foamed. Paul took another can from the pack and offered it to Marci, but she declined. He held it out to me, and I shook my head.

“Suit yourself,” he said, and he cracked it open.

Derek was chugging his entire can, which was now sticking straight up in the air above his mouth. He gulped it down loudly, then tilted his head down to look at us, smiling broadly. He belched and threw the can to the side, then went immediately for another.

I kept having to remind myself, over and over, that they didn’t mean us harm, that they were just three dumb guys out looking for fun in a small town. I’d grown up in a small town and I knew how boring they could get. Drinking stolen beer at the old drive-in might literally be the most interesting part of their entire week—or least it would have been, if we weren’t here. We were a novelty. Given the opportunity, they’d hang out with us all night. I couldn’t allow that, but I didn’t know how to stop it without starting a fight.

“It’s no fun unless you drink with us,” said Paul, sipping his beer more moderately.

“But they’re not with us,” said Corey. He didn’t seem to speak often, but when he did it was simple and to the point. “They’re just here, purely by chance, and tomorrow they’ll be somewhere else.”

“All the more reason to drink right now,” said Derek, opening his second can. “Man, I wish I was like you guys—free to go anywhere, do anything, just screw all the responsibilities and jobs and whatever the hell other stuff the rest of us are stuck with.” He took a long pull on his beer, then pointed to me with his fingers wrapped around the can. “I bet you just steal stuff all the time, right? Like, whatever you need—pies off windowsills and Doritos off the shelf at a truck stop—because who’s gonna find you? They look up and you’re gone, and you’re never going to see those idiots again.”

“And no one ever sees him again,” said Corey. “Or her.”

They’re not here to hurt us
, I told myself again.

“That’s a good point,” said Paul, his speech slightly slurred. Either he’d already been drinking or he didn’t hold his liquor well. “How does this work, like, mechanically? Do you choose where you go? Darcy said she picked this place on purpose—”

“Marci,” said Derek.

“Marci,” Paul corrected himself. “Why come here instead of just going where the cars take you? Like, how does hitchhiking work? Do you ask them to take you somewhere?”

“Have a beer,” said Derek, handing another can to Marci.

“No thank you,” she said again. Her voice was thin and even; she was as uncomfortable as I was.

“Come on,” said Derek, “a hot girl like you needs to loosen up.” He stepped toward her. “Let me help you take that backpack off, it looks way heavy.”

I stepped forward quickly, inserting myself between them, and Derek backed off, holding up his hands in innocence.

“Sorry, wow, touched a nerve there. Didn’t mean to move in on your girlfriend.”

“Please,” Marci whispered, and I knew she was talking to me.
Don’t start anything.

“Do you coordinate with somebody?” asked Paul, oblivious to the mounting tension. “Like, does somebody know what route you’re taking? Or is it literally just ‘go where the wind takes you’? Like, does anyone even know where you are?”

“I doubt it,” said Corey.

“Then what the hell is your problem?” demanded Derek, suddenly angry. Hadn’t she gotten him on our side? Weren’t they trying to impress her? Or had they already given up impressing her, and now it was time to punish her for not being interested?

Derek waved his hand at us, taking in our backpacks, our clothes, everything we had in the world. “A couple of homeless nobodies,” he said, “sleeping in the friggin’ Movie Time Theater, and you think you’re better than us? Can’t have a drink with us, can’t even talk to us? You act like you can’t wait for us to leave.”

“Can you blame him?” asked Corey, and this time I knew he was looking at Marci.

Paul giggled, and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, as alert to the sudden danger as I would be to a cold breeze.

“Abso-damn-lutely!” shouted Derek, wagging his finger at me before taking another swig from his can. “You’re not an a-hole, you’re just trying to get lucky. You were hoping to tap this chick right here in the theater, while your friggin’ dog watches, and now you can’t because we’re all up in your love nest.” He threw the second beer can and opened a third.

“What’ll you give us if we leave?” asked Paul.

Derek looked at Brooke’s body. “What’ll
you
give us?”

“I think it’s time for you to go,” said Marci.

“Oh man,” said Derek. “She wants it too. Can’t wait to be alone. Maybe we’ll hang around and listen.”

“Or watch,” said Paul.

Corey was simply smiling, saying nothing.

I could feel my anger growing as they talked, incensed at the way they looked at the Marci, the way they leered and suggested and filled the air with filth. I wanted to hurt them, to make them scream in pain and terror, but then suddenly all my anger was gone, replaced by a cold, clinical calm. I had killed several Withered in the past few years, but only one human. I’d dreamed about it my whole life, or at least since the first time I made the connection between death and the dead. We don’t always think about that connection, as obvious as it sounds, because death is so common in movies and games and stuff, and so sterilized, but it’s like meat: there comes a time when you realize that bacon, for example, is literally the sliced up flesh of a living thing, an animal that used to walk around and do things and enjoy things, and now it’s dead and you cut it into pieces. The body in the casket at your grandfather’s funeral used to be your grandfather, not because of magic but because he died, because something—maybe old age or cancer or a car wreck or a murderer—killed him. I’m fascinated by that moment, that act of turning a live body into a dead one, and eight months ago I got to do it, and it was … nothing and everything all at once. Disappointing and amazing. Not what I thought it would be, but I couldn’t wait to try again. They say your first time having sex is the same way, but I can’t imagine it would have that level of intensity. People have sex all the time, but killing is … rare. Beautiful, in a way, and I know how that sounds, but think about it. It’s like alchemy, a magic transmutation—not just of physical matter but of something ethereal. A spirit or a soul, turned from … something, into something else. I didn’t know what that something was, but I wanted to. I lay awake some nights, most nights really, thinking about it, about how to do it, about how to slow down and do it right, and now here I had three people practically begging for it. What would it be like to shove my knife into Derek’s chest? To cut out Paul’s heart? To peel back Corey’s skin and watch the muscles move underneath it, stretching and contracting and glistening in the starlight—

“Pay attention when I’m talking to you,” said Derek, and I focused my eyes and saw him right in my face, so close I could feel the flecks of spit when he shouted. “There’s three of us and one of you,” he said. His voice came at me through a cloud of beer and halitosis. “How you gonna stop us from taking whatever we want from your little girl here?”

Which one should I start on? I bent down and pulled out my knife, and all three of them backed up in a rush.

I felt a hand on my arm, and looked down to see Brooke’s fingers, travel stained and fragile. “You’re not Potash,” she said. Or was it Marci? Or was it one of the others? The thought made me angry, not being able to tell the difference, and I took a step forward, longing to finish the kill.

“He’s friggin’ nuts,” said Derek.

Brooke’s finger’s tightened on my arm, and I heard her whisper: “You’re not trained.”

Corey’s eyes were wide. “Trained?”

That’s what she’d meant about Potash—not that I wasn’t a killer, but that I wasn’t a trained fighter. This was Potash’s knife and he could have handled three teenage jerks without even breaking a sweat, but I couldn’t. I had no combat training, no hope for a direct confrontation. My style was slow and methodical: to wait, to find a weakness, and then to exploit it with no warning and no chance for a counterattack. I couldn’t win this fight with a knife, and if I used a gun it wouldn’t … I felt my cold rage fading. A gun wouldn’t have the same satisfaction, the visceral thrill that I needed this to have. I felt my emotions receding, backing out of the calm, passing down through the anger, returning to normal. I wasn’t going to hurt them. She had said exactly what I needed, in exactly the way that worked—not protesting, not appealing to rightness or honor, but a simple, pragmatic statement of ability.

“Thank you,” I said. I looked up at the three. “You can go now.”

“What’s wrong with you?” asked Paul.

“Let’s go,” said Corey, and the other two followed like obedient dogs. I’d assumed that Paul was the leader and Derek was the loudmouth buddy, but now I could see that Corey had been in charge all along, quietly manipulating everything the other two had done. It concerned me that I hadn’t seen it. We watched them go, first backing away, then turning and muttering among themselves as they walked the rest of the way to the fence. Derek turned around and shouted a final insult, cussing us out as the others went through the fence, then he followed them out.

“Come over here,” I whispered to Marci, and we walked away from the building, away from the closed wooden gate we’d been standing near. Sure enough, one last beer can came sailing over the fence, then another, then a whole barrage of cans and rocks and gravel, all targeting the spot we’d been standing. After a moment the volley stopped, and I heard them snicker as they ran away.

“Put the knife away,” said Marci. I realized I was still holding it, my knuckles white around the grip.

I looked at it, not knowing what to say. “I wanted to kill them.”

“I know.”

“They were going to hurt you, and then I was going to kill them,” I said, though I knew it wasn’t true. Protecting her had been the impetus, but then the sheer love of death had taken over and Brooke or Marci or whoever it was had stopped being a reason and become an excuse. I wanted to kill them because I wanted to kill. I wanted to stab and slice and destroy.

“We can’t stay here,” said Marci.

“We have to find Attina.”

“I mean here,” she said, gesturing around us, “in this theater. They might come back when we’re asleep, or they might even go to the police.”

“Drunk teenagers don’t go to the police,” I said, still feeling some kind of weird buzz from the experience. An adrenaline high I was only slowly coming down from, and which a part of me didn’t want to let go.

I had them right here.…

I needed to light a fire.

“But the police might find them,” said Marci. “If they get picked up for drunk and disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace or whatever thing they don’t want to get in trouble for, the first thing they’ll do is use us as a distraction, and it will work, because two out-of-town squatters with a big scary knife are exactly the kind of thing that a cop is going to pursue immediately.”

“If he believes them,” I said, though I knew she was right.

“We’re not the kind of story three drunk teens would make up,” said Marci, and I nodded.

“I know.” I put the knife away and started walking toward the hole in the fence. “Let’s see what else we can find to sleep under. Another tree.”

“Another?”

“We slept under a tree last night.”

Marci nodded Brooke’s head. “I remember,” she said, but I couldn’t tell if she did or not. Brooke tried to cover her gaps in memory; maybe Marci did the same. I crawled through the hole, and in the few brief seconds before she followed me, I put my face against the wood of the fence, closing my eyes, trying to know what to do. As if
knowing
were an act of will. I couldn’t understand her, I couldn’t help her, and now I couldn’t even protect her—and if I ever did, that protection might cause more problems than whatever danger I was trying to save her from.

She deserved more than I could give her.

“John?”

I turned around, and she was standing there, ready to go. I started walking, and she hurried to catch up, reaching for my hand as we walked. I pulled it away, and we walked in silence. After a few blocks we saw a low chain-link fence around a big backyard and what looked like a vegetable garden. I climbed over it as quietly as I could, keeping Marci and Boy Dog in sight, and crept through the furrows looking for food. I stole a pair of tomatoes and three fat summer squash, and we ate them as we walked farther, looking for a safe hiding place to spend the night. We ended up in the narrow space between a sagging fence and an old wooden shed—not a dead end, because I hated being trapped, but the ground was full of undisturbed weeds so I was pretty sure no one would come blundering through in the morning. There didn’t seem to be any animal tracks or droppings, so I figured the owners didn’t have a pet, either. I set up my backpack as an armrest and sat with my back against the shed. I wasn’t sleepy but I was exhausted—my body bone weary, my mind too frantic to relax. Would we be safe here? Would we be safe in the town at all? Where was Attina, and how would we find him, and how would we get to know him well enough to kill him? How long would Marci stay, and which would hurt me more: Marci leaving, or Brooke never coming back? I had to take care of—

Marci sat down next to me—not just sat, but snuggled, pressing her thigh against mine, her side to my side, pulling up my arm so she could rest her shoulder in the crook of it and her head on my chest. “I missed you,” she murmured.

“I missed you too,” I said. I could feel the warmth of her body on mine, acutely aware of the exact location of every part: her left hand on my leg, just inside the knee, her right arm on my wrist, the perfect curve of her hip pressing close to my leg. She turned her head, and her breast brushed my chest, her mouth was just inches from mine.