We Live Inside You (7 page)

You hobble-dragged yourself three miles before realizing you couldn’t go further. Dawn would come and you were far too savaged for your runner’s ruse to help you.

You made it to a house which looked unoccupied. You memorized the street address, crawled to the backyard to keep from being spotted street-side.

You drained the water from your CamelBak, still felt Death Valley thirsty.

There
was
one stroke of luck in all of this. Ava left you with your cell phone.

Call it an oversight.

Your first phone call was to Uncle Joshua. He slurred a groggy “Hello?” but was alert after hearing your voice. You gave him the address. Said to come to the backyard of the house. Don’t ask why.

He didn’t. You’d run with him as best you could this last Thursday, knowing it might be your last time together. He’d started to ask you questions about late nights, your hitchy right leg. You’d cut him off.

“Things are just kind of crazy right now. I met this girl…”

Uncle Joshua had laughed and let out a slow, knowing “Oh.” You’d worked hard to ignore your leg, picked up the pace. He got the message.

You hoped he’d pick up his pace now. You’d lost a lot of blood. How long did you have before Stump figured out he’d been jacked? How long before Ava’s friends would have the cops scanning Forest Park for a body they’d never find?

A light turned on over the patio at the rear of the house. Could be on a timer—you weren’t taking any chances. You crawled across the grass, spotting a large and thankfully empty dog house.

You crept in, found it surprisingly plush. Call it delirium, but you swore the west wall had an on-switch for a tiny A/C unit. Even the
dogs
up in the hills were living easy.

You leaned against the rear wall, set your CamelBak on your belly. Unzipped the pack. Pulled out your accidental insurance policy.

You’d broken in to Ava’s place on Thursday night, knowing she was working at Devil’s Point, to bring her underwear back. Ever since you’d stolen them you’d felt weird about it. They turned you on, but you wanted to move past connecting to people through their things. You had a chance to be with the flesh-and-blood girl. Starting out psychotic felt wrong.

But once you were in her place you couldn’t help exploring. You rifled the bag she’d packed, wanting to see what kind of swimsuits she’d be wearing to the beach.

You’d been living with compulsion so long you didn’t even question it when you pocketed the thing. She was going to need it with her. This way you’d be certain she wouldn’t forget it.

But you could have left it in the bag. It was already packed. She wasn’t going to forget it. Maybe, deep down in the recesses of your memory, you were thinking of Mary Ashford and Sarah Miller, and that twinge of pain kept her passport in your pocket.

Your second call was to Information. They automatically connected you through to a Customs agent at PDX.

You noticed silver sparkles in your vision that couldn’t mean anything good. Zoning on the passport photo helped you focus.

God, she
was
easy on the eyes. Too bad she was murder on the rest of you.

You told the man on the phone what she looked like, what kind of uniquely marketable baby she was carrying. You told him that the woman’s birth name was Jean Christenson, but that she preferred to be called Ava, which was short for Avarice.

He noted that the name seemed appropriate.

“More than you’ll ever know, pal.” You closed the cell, thinking of her last words to you.

Good luck.

Your chest began to shake.

You were still laughing when your Uncle Joshua arrived and spotted your running shoes sticking out of the tiny house in the stranger’s yard.

He crouched down, looked you over.

“Jesus! Are you okay?”

In between gusts of mad laughter you managed to say, “Nope. I’m in a bad place. I’m going to have to run.”

“Okay, we’ll get to that. First let’s get you out of that fucking dog house.”

He managed to get you upright, with your arm around his shoulder and as much weight as you could bear on your dog-mauled leg.

Once he started the car he looked over at you, seemingly relieved that you’d stopped laughing. The pain of moving had killed the chuckles.

Your Uncle had a hundred questions on his face. He asked one.

“The girl?”

You nodded in the affirmative then, over and over, guessing he would understand: Yes I was a sucker I thought it was love and yes I’m still remembering her kiss and the worst part is that if you ask me if I am still in love with Ava gorgeous terrible amazing vicious Ava I might say yes despite it all Yes.

You began to shake, nodding, mumbling, “OhGodohGodohGod….”

“Okay, okay. Take it easy. Trust me, you’ve just hit the wall. You know that’s as bad as it gets. I’m with you. You’re gonna get fixed up. You’ve got to tell me enough to keep you safe, but that’s it. We’ll go where we need to. And soon as you can foot it, soon as you get past this wall, the morning runs are back. And this time there’s no dropping it. No goddamn way. Whatever’s got itself inside of you, kiddo, we’re going to hit the streets and clear it the fuck out.”

He twisted his grip on the steering wheel, gunned his car down slender curving roads on the way to the hospital. Dawn was approaching. It was likely to be another beautiful grey-green morning in Portland. Could your Uncle really be willing to leave his home behind just to protect your mangled carcass?

You wondered at your luck, knowing this man.

He approached a red light, started to hesitate, took one look at you, and then pushed right through.

And you, you love-sick bastard, you finally let shock take hold.

Dale believed in both Christ and karma. But no matter how many prayers fell desperate from his lips, or how often he reminded himself of the reparations he’d made, he couldn’t shake the guilt. It seethed through him, the heat-wired electricity of niacin flush. It wracked his stomach, left him with cramps that ran the length of his twisting guts.

Whoever killed Mark, Pete, and Steve, they’re coming for me next.

The pistol was new to Dale, heavy and alien to his touch. Never had much affinity for guns. Tried to run his life quiet, calm. Tried to be a peaceful person.

That’s why New Orleans never should have happened.

But it did, and now his friend’s houses were sectioned off by yellow police tape, and he was cowering around his cold apartment clutching an oily gun.

Cops had asked Dale questions he couldn’t answer.

“Do you know if your friends were involved in any sort of cult?”

“Maybe something to do with rituals?”

“Can you think of anyone who would want them dead?”

This last question was accompanied by long, sunlamp stares.

They think I did this. Want me to crack. But
I
didn’t do anything.

And Dale couldn’t help feeling that his friends got their just desserts. Not an easy thought, but it felt true.

He’d hid the news clipping in a cupboard three days ago, after getting the call about Pete’s death. But Dale knew the picture was there. Meghan Farrington, her face newsprint gray, smiling from the obituary page. Twenty-eight years old.

She was twenty-seven when we met her in New Orleans. Told us charming stories about her father, Earl, a “Nawlins gris-gris man” who supposedly sold fake mojo to tourists and real hoodoo to locals.

She wasn’t looking when Mark slipped the roofie in her bourbon. He promised we wouldn’t hurt her; said she wouldn’t even remember. But how could she not remember them? Pushing her down. Taking their turns. Steve, rotten on tequila, calling her by his ex’s name, punching her kidneys. How could she not remember, with those bruises?

But I didn’t do anything. I just held the camera and filmed them and pretended to laugh while they played with their rag-doll. I’m not like them. Never touched her.

And afterwards, when that evening’s ugliness had cancer-crawled its way through the men’s friendship and set them adrift from each other, Dale had tried to set things right.

He’d seen Meghan’s driver’s license that night and knew her name. Took him less than a day to find her on the internet.

Dale forged a friendship with her, posing online as a woman named Susan Jessup. He learned how fragile Meghan had become. That night at Mardi Gras now kept the girl isolated, house-bound.

Trust had become impossible, but somehow she’d opened up to “Susan Jessup,” who claimed to have been a victim of similar abuse.

Dale felt crooked as hell, but couldn’t let himself abandon Meghan after he’d helped to bring her to this state. He could fix things…

And when she revealed that she was pregnant, Dale mailed her cash. He skimped on his own groceries, settling for ramen every night so he could mail Meghan money for the child his old friends had raped into her.

Even these things didn’t assuage Dale’s guilt.

He burned the New Orleans tape; took it to the landfill and blazed it to lighter-fluid vapors. Green-black smoke in the moonlight. Dale prayed to Christ that what had been done might be undone, might be smashed to ashes like the burning tape.

But now Meghan was dead. Her un-named child had passed with her. Dale had been scanning the Announcements page, expecting news of Meghan’s baby, when he saw her picture looking out from the opposing section.

“Complications during delivery.” God, obituaries were always so sanitary. She and the child had been dead four days, their murderers hidden nine months back behind a rohypnol haze.

And those murderers were dead now, too. The karmic ocean had pulled them down to darker currents.

But
I
tried to make things right. Whoever killed my friends has to know that.

Dale dead-bolted the front door and slid the chain-latch into place. Whoever was coming would have to get past that first. He’d have them at gunpoint.

He settled into his bed, pistol on the night-stand with the safety switched off, sheets soaking up sweat.

3:14AM. No one knocking on his door. Maybe he had set things right. Maybe whoever was seeking revenge for Meghan knew that Dale wasn’t like the others. Maybe…

“Dale…”

A woman’s whisper.

A shape at the foot of the bed.

It was her. Hospital robe wet against her skin, stained dark. Arms cradling a child, tiny, still trailing its umbilical.

She moved quickly, skittering on slightly bowed legs to the right edge of his bed, where Dale lay paralyzed, his gun an abstraction of metal he’d never understood.

“Hold your child, Dale.”

She laid the newborn on his chest. Its head lifted, wide new eyes staring into Dale’s. The New Orleans video footage was playing on a frantic loop in its all-black pupils. And the child began to cry, the wail of something lost knowing it won’t find home.

Dale looked to Meghan’s eyes, pleading.

“But, please, Meghan… I didn’t do anything!”

“
No. You didn’t.”

The infant’s hands reached up, covering Dale’s sight. They smelled heavily of gun oil. Tiny fingers curled in like talons and began to pull with the strength of a grown man’s hands.

And as Dale felt his eyes being torn loose he knew that something terrible had been done and was, at last, being undone.