Through the commotion, she focuses with everything she has on lassoing the world back into focus. She hears JT struggling toward his gun. She wills the walls to stop spinning around her, and slowly, they do. To her relief, she finds that she managed to maintain her grip on her own weapon this time. She holds her gun out toward him, trying to steady herself enough that she can line up and squeeze off an accurate shot, but conceding that she may have to take a less clean shot if she can’t get herself steady in time. As the two images of JT in her vision blur and settle into one, Esther lines up her sight over his shoulder, predicting where his head will bob as soon as he manages to retrieve his firearm.
From outside, Esther hears a series of four thumps: car doors closing. She looks around the room for flashing red and blue lights but finds none; these reinforcements aren’t hers. Seconds later, the clattering of an old door being slammed shut fills the air.
JT perks up. “Guys!” he yells. “I’m up—” Bang.
Three rounds left. Judging by the four car doors closing, there will be at least as many guys—but perhaps not all at once. This time, instead of waiting and watching from the shadows, Esther must act quickly and decisively. She considers grabbing the gun from JT’s corpse, but the thundering steps on the staircase indicate that there’s not enough time for that. Her only immediate option is to pray that they split up so that she can deal with them in a less concentrated manner.
She moves quickly and quietly toward the closet just in time to avoid being visible from the hallway. If she manages to deal with the first one or two quickly, perhaps she can buy herself enough time to pull the gun off of JT. A huge, dark figure steps into the room and Esther puts a round through his head.
A second, slightly smaller figure follows. He’s more alert, but not quite enough; Esther’s next round plunges into his chest, and the light in his eyes dims and dies before he slumps to the ground. She can hear the other two (or three?) in the hallway, afraid to enter.
This is my chance, Esther thinks. She steps over JT’s cooling body and lifts he gun from underneath his left hand. A wedding ring clinks against the metal of the gun as she does so. She feels the weight of the revolver in her hand, but the balance feels off—quickly, she ejects the chamber to inspect it.
It’s empty. Big Bad JT was carrying a gun without any ammunition. He bluffed himself to death. The other two also had guns on them, but she can’t retrieve them without entering the hallway’s field of vision.
One round left, she thinks, What I wouldn’t do for a blade. Or another few rounds.
While she knows that her next move is crucial, she also knows that she doesn’t have much time to calculate it. She holds her own gun, with its one remaining round, in her left hand and JT’s impotent piece in her right. She looks up and takes aim…and hurls JT’s gun at the window with all of her strength.
The glass shatters dramatically and she can still hear shards tinkling to the ground outside when she hears one of the guys say, “Did she just jump?”
Two men run in, but only one has the presence of mind to look in her direction—the other makes a beeline for the window. The former takes a bullet to the chest: her final target. She crosses the room toward the bullheaded one, who turns around in time to see her charging at him, aiming him through the window frame with all her might.
Her shoulder connects with his chest, but with more force than she thought she’d need; the minion sails through the window frame and Esther teeters at its edge for a second, but is unable to reclaim her balance so she, too, goes toppling through.
The sensation of falling felt unusually slow-motion. In that second, Esther sees a driverless four-door sedan with its headlights on; a smattering of glistening glass shards on the ground below; the (hopefully) lifeless body of the man she pushed out the window; and the rapidly approaching ground.
Twenty-Three
Remy
My mind zips all over the Midwest, trying to piece together what happened with my mother while simultaneously fretting about Todd’s and Creed’s safety. I don’t like that we’re apart, but I also can’t see a realistic method of fixing that. This leaves me with nothing to do but either evade or confront the incoming hunting party.
Evading them sounds ideal, but there’s a part of me—call it exhaustion—that just wants it all to be over. The part of me that has, for the past month, been sapping me of purpose and drive and emotion, of the will to be anything other than alive and breathing. It protests my escape plan before it’s even hatched, insisting that in this opportunity I have to drive the final nail into the coffin of this whole ordeal; flight is not an option.
Beyond that, how many more people—how many more kids—would I then allow to fall into harm’s way in my endeavor for self-preservation? I imagine my own childhood, my own desperate longing for some powerful, authoritative adult to swoop into my life and pluck my father from that household.
Indirectly or otherwise, I could be that person for scores of children.
I notice that my walk has escalated to a hurried canter, Odin padding along at my side. At this point, I feel I no longer need to conceal myself; my pursuers are already en route. I’ve been found. On that happy note, I spend the remainder of the morning frequenting the local businesses. I introduce myself to the small-town shopkeepers, in full awareness that it’s not likely I’ll be seeing them again.
First, a bakery—Dunn’s Buns—which turns out to be the source of the delicious cinnamon smell that wafts through town in the mornings. I buy a cinnamon roll and proceed to an antique shop, a tailor, a coffee shop, and a twenty-four-hour diner themed for the town’s ghostly reputation. After a quick bite (pancakes topped with vanilla geistcream), I visit a butcher, where I buy an entire steak for Odin—if either of us deserves it, it’s him.
As I watch Odin wolf down his meal, a breeze sweeps into the quiet street and I take in the scenery, for once not concerned with being invisible. The gust carries with it a wash of melancholy; what a shame I won’t get to know this town more intimately. Simultaneously, my resolve is strengthened with the task of providing protection to the small city and its inhabitants.
Having spent the precious hour that I could afford on visiting and enjoying myself, I must now focus on the incoming figurative storm, thunderheads flexing menacingly in a sea of ozone and danger. The clock at town hall clangs out eleven o’ clock.
Whatever time I have left must be spent carefully, and I reason that my best use of time, right now, is to acquire a more intimate familiarity with the lay of the town. My time here so far has yielded an adequate knowledge of the surrounding geography, but if there are any obscure alleys or useful climb paths, having prior knowledge of them may determine on which side the coin of fate lands.
In the ambiguous, ethereal moments before big events, there are things I think about often; a sort of slow-motion, intensifying drumroll. I think about Todd and his impact on my life. I think about Beth. I think about Odin. Lately, I’ve been thinking about my mother. I feel a strange connection to my body, like my brain exists throughout the whole thing rather than just in my head. I become hyper-aware of my movements and their minute details and angles. I assign importance to otherwise unimportant things, like a baseball cap left abandoned in the road or a neon sign with a couple of letters burnt out. I soak in the quiet and visualize the rotation of the planet, blindingly fast and unbelievably slow all at once, big and awesome and important, but at the same time, quiet and subdued, like a heavy, windless snowfall.
I’ve always thought of this as a curious phenomenon, but one without much use to me. But as it happens now, in the rural streets of Ghost Fork, I understand why I do it.
It’s to remind myself of the things—little and big—that often escape my notice. It’s the important things in my life chiming in before my big moment to say, “Hey. I matter.” Perhaps this serves as a bookmark, so that if the big moment alters my way of thinking or my view of the world, these last memories and musings can draw me b
ack in and tell me, “This is how things were.”
I continue through the streets, trying to balance these meta thoughts with the micro ones. In the latter field, I focus on committing to memory every alley, including the locations of dumpsters, exposed pipes, window ledges, or anything else that I could climb. My inaction during my time spent here has done a disservice to my muscles and lungs, but I figure I still stand a fighting chance, should it come to that. After all, it’s barely been over a month.
Twenty-Four
Creed
Todd and Creed roll into Cheyenne, the windows down and the radio off. They had it turned on, but the mountainous Wyoming roads offered little more than static, and the endeavor of hunting down a clear station proved to be more work than it was worth.
This came at both of their dismay, as the drive itself has been long and dull, and contained awkwardly little conversation. As it turns out, their mutual experiences produce a cocktail that’s hard to talk around. They quickly reminisced through all of their shared memories, and subsequent conversation or small talk seemed even smaller and less relevant; when most of your experience together is quantified by the exploration of an abandoned treatment facility, it saps what little interest is left in small talk.
Creed agreed to meet Ginger at a café in a strip mall downtown, with plenty of outdoor seating. Todd will be taking his place to conduct the interview, but Creed will take post in a Mexican fast food restaurant, which has windows looking out into the plaza. Fortunately, since they’ve never met face-to-face, neither will have to conceal or disguise himself.
Todd parks the car about a block away from their meeting place and gives Creed a minute’s head start; they don’t want to be seen walking in together.
Creed enters the restaurant and makes his order, self-conscious about mispronouncing his entrée. Even though he told himself he wouldn’t, he finds himself looking over his shoulder—toward the windows—while he waits for his food. Afterward, he takes a seat at the window and scans the crowd for Todd. Fortunately, the plaza isn’t as densely populated as they had anticipated, being midday on a workday, and he finds him with ease, striding with a bold confidence into the heart of the court.
Having picked him out, Creed feels more at ease, and pulls out the paperback Todd gave him to help him appear subtler and less aware, a well-loved copy of To Kill a Mockingbird. He opens the volume to a random page and fixes his eyes on a spot near the corner, paying attention only to Todd, whom he can see just out of the corner of his eye.
Within the minute, she appears. Ginger Garrity, the star of the show and, with luck, the key to revealing the truth about just what happened to Willa Frye. She enters the plaza from the far end, looks around for a moment, and spots Todd waving her down.
Creed’s heart rate threatens to pick up, but he wills it back down.
Ginger approaches Todd, who stands to shake her hand. They appear to exchange pleasantries, small talk. If she suspects anything, she masks it well. The two of them walk into the café’s interior.
Twenty-Five
Todd
Ginger has a peculiar air about her, and Todd hasn’t yet figured out whether it’s due to what he already knows about her or something he doesn’t. Her voice is confident and bold one moment, but the next shrinks into a Disney princess. Her eyes flicker with mystery, and every time he thinks he can get a good read on her, she slips into a different dimension and becomes another creature entirely, and the puzzle begins anew.
“I love this place,” says Ginger. “I come here all the time with my friends.” She flashes Todd a quick grin (Is that mischief? Innocence?) before striding to the counter to make her order without a glance at the menu. She has exact change ready before the barista reports her total.
Todd follows, makes his own order, and pays the barista. An unsettling quiet befalls them while they wait for their drinks. He leans against a wall near the counter, doing aloof. Ginger paws absentmindedly at a pendant around her neck, a tarnished brass piece engraved with an intricate design that he can’t quite see while she toys with it.
Though she appears absentminded, her eyes zip all over the place, resting at each stop for only a moment before speeding off to their next destination. He can feel an odd, insubstantial tension intensifying, but before it mounts, their orders are ready.
Ginger grabs a chair and makes to sit down, but Todd interrupts her.
“Actually, do you mind if we sit outside? It’s a bit cramped in here. I don’t do well with tight spaces.” This serves a double purpose, one of which being Todd’s plan to remain in Creed’s line of sight and the other being a trick that Remy taught Todd. When questioning a victim or a witness who might be reluctant to reveal information, it helps to make yourself seem weak. Look, look how vulnerable and broken and relatable and human I am. Now tell me…
He has his doubts about whether this will work with Ginger, but it’s certainly worth a try.
“Oh, sure, no problem.” She flashes him that pixie smile again, pushes the chair back in, and leads the way to the door. She moves with the nuanced fluidity of a snake, sleek and purposeful and graceful, with undertones of power and menace.
Todd shudders.
They return to the table where he sat before. As he’s trying to figure out how to start the interview, Ginger saves him the trouble.
“So,” she says. She takes a sip of coffee and continues, “You wanna know about Willa?”
“Yes, I do,” says Todd. He pulls out his phone. “You don’t mind if I record this, do you?”
“Not at all.” Her eyes sharpen and flick from Todd’s face to his phone and back again.
Todd taps the red button to begin recording and tries to steer himself away from sounding more like a cop than a reporter.
“First off, the details haven’t been very clear with what the living situation was like. Did you have your own bedrooms at the facility?”
“No, we shared. There were two to a bedroom, at the time. I was Willa’s roommate.”
Ginger’s poker face is almost perfect, but she keeps looking up over his shoulder when he tries to meet her gaze. Contrary to what many seem to think, eye contact is not a surefire way to get the truth out of someone, nor does it necessarily mean that they’re lying if they don’t make very much of it. But, to Todd, there is something fishy about the way she won’t meet his gaze at all, especially when five minutes ago she was shooting him all sorts of mischievous smiles.
“Okay. That much was true, then. Can you tell me, in your own words, what happened? I’m sure you’ve told the police several times, but I couldn’t find much that was publicly available.”
Ginger exhales and looks down, gripping her coffee in both hands like her whole being will freeze over without its warmth.
“I’m sorry, it’s just…give me a moment. I try not to think about that day.”
“It’s okay, I understand. Take all the time you need.”
She doesn’t need much time. “Well, we were having a little party on the unit. The staff were helping us do our makeup and costumes. For Halloween, ya know? Willa asked if she could go to her room to get something. After a couple of minutes, I started to worry; she never dawdled. Ever.
“So I asked the staff if I could go to the room, too. I told them I needed to get something, too, but I just wanted to check on her. She had been having a rough time for a while, and I needed to know she wasn’t doing something drastic. But I guess I was too late.”
Ginger doesn’t look up. She sips her coffee and sniffles, and her lip starts to quiver.
Bullshit.
Instead of calling her out right away, Todd decides it’s his turn to play games. He puts on his pensive, perplexed face and waits for her to look up and notice him. Eventually, she does.
“What?” she asks.
“I guess some of my research must be wrong,” Todd says.
Ginger’s right hand flies from her cup to her pendant, which Todd can now see is engraved with a depiction of
Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction and power. She has four arms. Two of her hands hold a sword and a severed head, and even in the tiny engraving, the head looks anguished.
“What research? What did they tell you?”
“My sources told me that you weren’t all that close to Willa. That you hated her, in fact.”
“Well sometimes we didn’t get along, but—”
“They also told me that you were jealous of her.” This one is a lie, of course, but he sees that her labored coolness is coming unraveled, and determines that this is the best way to capitalize on his momentum.
Ginger laughs and it comes out more like a bark or a yelp than anything joyous or mirthful.
“Me? Jealous of her? For what? Her connect-the-dots acne or her rotten pear body shape?”
“Because of Thad.” Todd intended this to reign her back in, but it has the opposite effect.
“Thad? Thad? Please, he never wanted anything to do with that bitch.”
Careful not to reveal his surprise, Todd only tilts his head toward her, inviting her to continue. As he does, he sees the twisted and mangled remnants of humanity leave her; she’s now pure monster.
She grips the sides of the table, as though to keep herself from rocketing into the sky out of pure fury. “Thad was mine, you imbecile. I don’t know how anyone ever believed he’d be into her, but it ended up being a convenient cover. Even she believed it! All because she found a note he gave me. She thought it was meant for her.”
“Dubz,” says Todd.
“I’m Dubz! He called me Double G, for my initials! When he got lazy, he shortened it to Dubz. But like everyone else in the goddamn world, Willa thought it was about her, and she went over the moon about it. I told her over and over that things weren’t the way they seemed, but if I told her how I knew, she would have told on me.
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