The thumb withdrew, swollen and bloody. Trent’s head hung, his eye socket dripping with syrupy fluids.
His body was lifeless.
Gone.
All because he dared to oppose this goddamned beast.
No way will his death be in vain, Ash vowed.
As badly as she wanted to respond, to kill Snare, she couldn’t move. Her head pounded in a thousand places. Every breath was accompanied by agony. She tasted blood, swallowed it, coughed it up. Only one nostril received air, and not enough of it.
Trent’s body sagged toward their father. Another leak sprang beneath them, threatening to replenish the bend.
“Ashlee.” Dad grunted in pain. “Move toward—”
Snare punched him before he could finish. His head smacked the table, and he slumped against Trent.
“Stop it!” Jake screamed from the center of the clearing. “Stop hitting them!”
The beast turned its head to the sound.
“No…” Ash croaked.
Grunting, she leaned toward Trent, her shoulder bumping his. Water from the leak flushed against her thigh. A little closer and she’d block it. But before she could shift toward him, Snare grabbed her throat.
The pressure was unbearable. The word Deathgrip crossed her mind, and it had nothing to do with the eponymous band she had planned to open for tomorrow. As Snare’s grip tightened, alarms went off in Ash’s brain. She tried to strike her left hand but couldn’t move her arms. Couldn’t move anything below her neck. She sat there, a head waiting to pop.
The beast leaned closer, its breath suffocating. In its eye sockets she saw two pools of flowing darkness. In the left socket she saw the image of her ideal self—that stunning, unbroken woman she first met yesterday. In the right socket she saw Cheeto, alive and laughing. He jumped to the other socket, where he threw his arms around her ideal self. The two of them laughed as if he weren’t dead. As if she weren’t joining him. When they broke their embrace, a guitar magically fell into Ideal-Ash’s arms. She played. Cheeto sang.
None of it was real, but Ash couldn’t stop watching.
Everything became less painful. More peaceful.
“Let go of her!” a voice shouted to her left.
She tore her eyes away from the images in Snare’s empty sockets.
“Let go of her or I’ll hurt you!”
Jake knelt in the middle of the clearing. Whatever he held in his hand gleamed in the lantern light. A knife. He lifted it toward his face and angled the tip toward his eye.
“No…” Ash croaked.
Jake hesitated. He was crying. Breathing rapidly. His shoulders rose and fell as his hand trembled.
“Jake, don’t!”
He flinched as the knife stabbed his eye.
Snare hissed, releasing Ash’s throat to cover its left socket. Thrashing, the beast screamed, the noise torturing her ears. As Snare whipped back and forth, blood gushed, splattering her face and stinging her lips.
Ash wiped the muck away and checked the leak. A thin stream ran between Trent and her, no deeper than the potholes on the main road.
This was it. The last of Snare’s life source.
With the last of her energy, she shifted sideways toward her brother. Her leg settled beside his and blocked the leak.
She sighed with relief.
Then something tickled her left thigh.
More water.
Goddammit.
In plugging one leak she’d opened another. She couldn’t stop them both.
There had to be another way.
Do something great with that hand.
In front of her, Snare thrashed. Its head whipped back and forth between gore-slathered shoulders. Screams erupted from its gaping mouth, the jaws wider after every shriek. The noise reached a glass-shattering pitch before the mouth finally shut, teeth snapping together like a bear trap.
Ash knew what to do.
Her left arm lay numb at her side. She no longer felt pain, only exhaustion. Her vision darkened as her consciousness faded. It shouldn’t have been this hard to lift her hand, but she felt drained to her core, like she’d lost more than blood. Much more.
Snare howled in her face, its tongue flicking like a tortured lizard. Rancid breath poured from its lips as the shrieking went on—louder and harsher, punctuated by the snap of its teeth.
Ash stared into the beast’s mouth.
Then into its uncovered eye.
Within the dark socket, Ideal-Ash raced across a stage, her Gibson slung over her shoulder. She and Cheeto met at the microphone, and the crowd below them erupted in applause. It was a massive crowd. Larger than any she’d seen.
That was how she knew it was a lie.
She thrust her sacrificial hand toward the beast’s open mouth.
Her timing was dead-on. All five ruined fingers slid between the teeth. Ash leaned forward to poke the back of its throat and braced herself.
Snare’s powerful jaws snapped down across her hand with a pain so perfect that Ash forgot to scream. Waves of torment crashed in her body. Her sight went dim, but before total darkness claimed her, she yanked her clamped arm sideways and dragged the beast down.
Snare crashed into the creek bed with a wet slap, blocking the last remaining leak. Water flowed against Snare’s skinless chest, puddling there, with no way around.
Ash and Snare met eyes again. In those watery sockets she saw Hollow Hills. She saw the dead return to life. Saw Dad leaving town. Saw Trent and Jake tossing baseballs. Saw her unbroken left hand. Saw her fingers caressing Cheetos’s face.
In that moment she saw it all.
Everything she wanted.
And she forced her eyes shut.
89
Darkness captured her. Surrounded her. Annihilated her.
Ash blinked, but it made no difference. There was nothing to see but shadow upon shadow. The void of death. The end.
Her end.
End.
End.
A breeze stirred, chilling her, burning through her wet clothes. It directed the stench of dead fish into her nostrils. She coughed, tasting rot. She rolled over to puke.
But something curled against her. Seized her. Tightened its grip. The ground—
No, not the ground.
She heard sobbing above her. The sharp intake of breath.
“Ashlee?”
Something warm splashed her cheek. A teardrop?
“Ashlee?” Dad sniffled. “Please answer me.”
“What…happened?”
“Oh God.” He scooped her into a clumsy, muddy hug. “You’re okay. I thought I’d lost you both.”
“Both? Oh, shit…” She remembered. Trent. He’d fought Snare. Finished the dam. Died when the beast’s bulging red thumb pierced his eye socket. With the memory, nausea flushed through her midsection. She writhed, clutching at her father’s muddy shirt to keep from falling.
A flashlight gleamed above her.
She lifted her forearm to block the light. Pain blitzed through her hand. She seethed, teeth clenched, waiting for the hell to pass. When it did, she saw Dad looking her over, tears filling his eyes. A ripped piece of cloth was knotted around his sliced arm. She noticed that another cloth was wrapped around her ruined palm.
“Thought you were a goner, darling.”
Exhausted, she shook her head.
He stroked mud from her hair then held her, sniffling over her shoulder. His tears trickled down her neck and stung exposed cuts. She groaned.
“Hush now. Relax. You’re in my arms. You’re okay, Ashlee.” He held her tight. “My little girl.”
“What happened?” She checked the bend. Fog hung above an empty creek bed. “Where’s Snare?”
“Gone. Snare’s gone. We did it.”
“We…” She could barely believe it. “We did it.”
He cleared his throat. “We need to help Jake now.”
“Jake?” Images rushed back to her. Snare going for the kill. Jake grabbing the knife
. Stabbing his eye. Stopping the beast.
Saving her.
She rolled free of her father’s arms. Her body ached in places she’d never felt before. Her wet clothes rubbed mercilessly against her ice-burned skin. But she crawled toward her nephew.
He lay in the clearing, a strip of cloth wrapped around his head like a bandanna. He still wore her jacket, the belt fastened around his waist. Some snow had glazed over him. She lifted the cloth.
His eye leaked blood.
Ash threw open the Subaru’s passenger door in a blazing panic. She checked the glove compartment for first-aid supplies as worst-case scenarios—infection, gangrene, death—rolled through her mind. She gathered the supplies as Dad laid Jake across the back seat. The boy whimpered.
They carefully cleaned his eye, then applied gauze and bandaged it with discolored sports tape.
Jake looked like a pirate wearing a fuzzy white eyepatch. The sight made Ash smile for some reason. Maybe because it was oddly cute, maybe because pirates survived stabbed eyes and so would Jake.
With the leftover gauze, she wrapped her ruined hand. It burned like a hundred hells. She couldn’t believe the heat. She couldn’t believe a lot of things.
“Let’s get moving,” Dad said.
“Where?” she said, squinting into the ubiquitous fog.
“We have to find a hospital.” He slid his hands under Jake’s knees and shoulders. With a grunt, he lifted. “Can you ride shotgun with the boy on your lap? Keep him upright?”
“Yeah.” She went to open the passenger door but stopped herself. Instead, she hurried toward the driver door.
“Ashlee? What’re you doing?”
She reached in beside the steering wheel and popped the trunk. It opened with a dull double-thud. Her heart pounded in a similar way as she approached the trunk. The closed lid covered Cheeto and Lauren. Ash curled a finger beneath the lid. The moment she lifted, the stench hit her.
The stench didn’t necessarily mean Cheeto was still dead, she promised herself. Perhaps the trunk just needed to air out. With any luck, Cheeto would leap out and tackle her to the ground with one of his signature hugs. Then they’d laugh, and she’d tell him about all the sacrifices she’d made to bring him back.
He had to be back. It was only fair.
With a nervous breath, she lifted the lid.
Slowly.
Barely enough to peek inside.
The pulse in her neck quickened. The stench grew thicker. She saw his hand. She recognized the bulging purple fingers with a crimp in her heart and a lump in her throat.
“Cheeto…” Her eyes stung, hot and wet. “No… Please, no.”
She took his hand in hers. It was cold. Mangled. Lifeless.
With a heavy heart, she squeezed.
He didn’t squeeze back.
Ash couldn’t bear to ride in the car that stank of Cheeto and Lauren, so they left the Subaru at the banquet hall and drove off in the church van. Dad steered through snowy, foggy streets. Ash rode shotgun, Jake asleep in her grasp, his cheek on her shoulder. The heater threw chilly air in her face as she looked outside. Houses scrolled by, all of them hiding dead residents, dead visitors, dead families. The more bodies Ash saw collapsed on porches and sprawled in driveways, the more helpless she felt.
There had been no mass revival. Killing Snare had ended the beast, not the nightmare. It had brought no one back. Everyone remained dead. All because of her.
Her chest felt compressed, like two trucks were plowing into her from opposite sides. She couldn’t breathe. She inhaled a deep breath and started dry heaving.
No way would she ever get over this. You don’t unleash a death plague and start fresh the next morning. Or any morning.
“Ashlee?” Dad lifted his foot off the gas. The van eased past a crashed sedan, its flashers blinking. He glanced at her. “You okay?”
“They’re still gone,” she said. “Everyone.”
“Darling…”
“They’re dead!”
He nudged the brake. “We did the best we could.”
“Did we? We killed Snare, but Snare could’ve brought everyone back. The bitch said so.”
“Snare always lied. You know that. If we’d left her alive, she’d have killed us, then maybe billions more.” His eyes found hers. “Billions, Ashlee.”
Every car they passed revealed the same story. Battered bumpers, flickering lights, someone dead behind the wheel. Every wreck meant another twist of red guilt in her guts. To think she’d traded her broken hand for this broken world.
“I can’t.” She slumped against the window. “Can’t live with this.”
“Ashlee, look at me.” Dad stopped the van. “Us survivors, we gotta keep on living. We can’t afford to be hopeless. Besides each other, hope’s all we got.” He pointed to the highway entrance ramp. “We’re gonna get on that highway, drive toward Clarks Summit, and hope we make it past Snare’s zone. We’re gonna hope that beyond it, everything’s all right. That someone can help heal our wounds. That we can find a new home and start living again.”
“But, Dad… How am I supposed to live with what I did?”
“By remembering what you have to live for. Who you have to live for. Anytime you need a reminder, look at that boy in your arms. The little fella needs us. Needs you.”
Jake looked about as bad as she felt. Scrapes covered his forehead. Bruises bloomed around his bandages. Bloodstains discolored his nose, cheeks, chin.
Poor kid. It was heartbreaking.
“He stabbed his eye for you, Ashlee. He’s worth it.”
Seeing Jake, knowing what he’d been through—it made her feel even worse.
“He deserves better than this ruined world,” she said.
“You keep saying the world’s ruined,” Dad said. “You’re wrong. The two most important people to me are still around. They’re my world. So stop saying the world’s ruined.”
His words melted through her like hot water through ice.
She clutched Jake tightly. His good eye blinked—one small miracle within a massive disaster.
Maybe Dad has a point.
He put the van in drive. They crossed the bridge, leaving Hollow Hills. The high beams blazed ahead, reflecting off the snow along the I-81 entrance ramp. They took it and merged onto the messy highway.
Because of the throbbing pain, Ash couldn’t tell if her hand was buzzing. Her ribs felt normal. She looked at her father. “Dad? Any buzzing?”
He shook his head.
With a bittersweet smile he pressed the gas.
They rumbled up the highway, pushing through fog, following tire tracks whenever possible. They rounded the curve of a rock wall. Dodged wreck after wreck. The van stalled in deep snow. Rolled free. Stalled again. Rolled free again.
When the van struck a pothole, Jake stirred.
“My head,” Jake moaned. “It hurts.”
“I know.” She hugged him closer. “We’re almost there.”
“Hurts…”
“You’ll make it, tough guy,” she assured him. Then she whispered to herself, “You’ll make it.”
Their car ate up more miles. The Clarks Summit exit loomed in the headlights. Nobody buzzed, nobody burned.
Dad hit the gas.
They held their breaths.
And broke on through to the other side.
Author’s Note
Thank you for reading this book!
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Acknowledgments
This book couldn’t have happened without my great friend and fellow writer Paul Miscavage. He was the first person to read an early draft of Bad Parts, and after finishing the opening chapters, he looked me square in the eyes and said, “I think you have something here.” That was the moment I started believing. Paul’s encouragement carried me through my next draft, and he spent many Sunday afternoons reading updated chapters and telling me what rocked, what sucked, and what made him laugh. Paul helped shape the story in countless ways, and he did a phenomenal job as the producer of the Bad Parts audiobook. I can't thank him enough.
Samantha Zaboski helped me with everything. Literally everything. Line edits, story suggestions, query letters, synopses, publishing world insights—you name it, Sammy helped me with it. Best of all, while critiquing my short story “Ten-Year Photo,” she gave me advice that later led me to create Ash Hudson. Without Sammy, none of this could have happened. She’s a tremendous editor, an invaluable friend, and a shitty Monopoly player.
Natasha Raulerson took a chance on Bad Parts before anyone else did. When she selected me as her 2017 Pitch Wars mentee, I couldn't believe it. In fact, I still can't. Working one-on-one with her helped me change everything from character motivations to writing quality, and it was all for the better. Many thanks to her for committing to my manuscript, even while evacuating her home during Hurricane Irma.
Ellen Brock selected me as her 2018 RevPit mentee and challenged me to revise, tighten, and improve this novel until it was the best it could possibly be. Ellen is an amazing developmental editor, and her sharp, logical insight allowed me to discover tons of new plot and character possibilities. She made Bad Parts a better book, and she made me a better writer.
Chris Bauer read Bad Parts about 3,487 times and never hesitated to provide ruthlessly honest feedback. Out of all my beta readers, he’s the one I trust most. He’s also the one I fear most, because whenever I send him something, my ego takes a (worthwhile) beating.
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