The mozzarella sticks I bought at the drive-through earlier are almost frozen, so I microwave them until they melt. They’re mealy and mushy and burn my tongue, but I snarf the entire box and drink a can of soda, which makes me shift uncomfortably. That’s the one thing this mini-RV doesn’t have: a bathroom. But I do have a four-pack of toilet paper. I think about breaking into the house and using their facility, if anyone bothered to put in a toilet. But I can see missing windows, and I know other, less responsible people have already broken in. The toilets are probably ruined and already full. So I just pee out back in the weeds, glaring around, feeling both like the only person in the world and like a rabbit waiting to get eaten by something bigger.
Back in the truck, I lie down on the bed, holding an embroidered pillow to my chest and staring at the posters I’ve taped to the ceiling. I wonder what will happen to bands, to music and musicians, now that Valor Savings owns the country and democracy is dead as a doornail. Will life mostly go on as it always has, or will we suddenly have new rules, new standards for living? Will we be like Socialists, or something new, some freaky breed of responsible capitalists in matching Valor uniforms? Or will it be full-on dystopia?
So far, I’ve focused on getting through the next five days and then taking my mom to the oncologist the moment my bonus arrives from Valor. I don’t know how I would live without crafting and music. Without the giddy joy of yarn bombing a cart at the grocery store or slipping embroidered bookmarks into the soulless bestsellers at the bookstore. Without the glory of going to shows, of charging into the pit, of swaying or slam dancing or just singing along with a crowd. But living without art and music would be easier than living without my mom. And a lot better than dying.
I have a brief mental image of my favorite local band chained up in jail for singing anti-Valor songs and shiver. My history teacher once said that wherever there’s oppression, there are going to be people who won’t put up with it. Even my yarn bombing is its own form of protest, although I probably wouldn’t get in too much trouble if I got caught.
Thunder cracks outside, the world gone gray with almost-rain. When I turn over to sleep, all I can see is the list of names I found in the envelope. I’ve already got it memorized. The last two names are the ones that worry me the most; now that I’ve met Max, I know both of them.
But Ashley Cannon is next, and I don’t know if that’s a guy or a girl. I’m going to assume it’s a girl. She lives about five miles from here. With less than twelve hours to go, I should just get it over with. I assume Valor is tamping down the rumors, keeping people from using technology to spread the word that it’s open season on debt and the police aren’t going to be there for protection. The faster I get my list done, the easier it should be. But I’m on the verge of collapse, and I’d rather go unconscious by seeming choice.
The first raindrops rattle on the flat roof of the truck, reminding me all too much of gunshots. I get up to yank the back door down before it can rain inside. The truck is borrowed, but the mementos inside are mine, and they’re more important now than ever. The posters carefully taped to the walls might represent the last shows I ever go to, the last few times that music was completely free to say whatever it wanted to say and that I was innocent and unrestricted enough to enjoy it on my own terms.
The storm smells so good that I leave the door cracked open, maybe a foot up from the floor. Just enough to let in the gray light and the sweet scent of rain on fall leaves. I shuck off my jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt so that all I’ve got on are panties and the white tank I wear instead of a bra. There’s a painful zit coming up on my chin, the kind that hurts like hell, so I dab some white zit cream on it and scrub my teeth with one of those fingertip disposable toothbrushes. If I were on a road trip or a vacation, this might be fun. But I’ve never done that, never even slept in a hotel bed. This is as close as I’m going to get.
With a shiver that’s only half from the cold, I crawl under my favorite blanket, the flowered quilt my mom bought for me off the sale rack at T.J. Maxx when I was nine. I gave an identical one to my best friend for her birthday that year. We embroidered them one afternoon, our initials and BFFS 4EVER in purple thread, and I wonder if she still has hers. I haven’t really had a close female friend since I started high school, and I run fingers over the clumsily stitched letters, remembering what it was like when everything was easy. When I didn’t even know what debt was.
Pulling the gun out from under my pillow, I curl around it, running a finger along the barrel. PROPERTY OF VALOR SAVINGS is stamped on it in gold. Although I know exactly how many bullets there are, I eject the clip and count them. Thirteen bullets left. Eight more lives on the line. That’s all they gave me, but it’s not the only weapon I brought.
With a deep breath, I mutter the prayer my mom used to make me say every night before bed.
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
Watch and guard me through the night
Awake me with the morning light
When I was little, I would follow it up with “God bless” and then list the names of everyone I cared about. Mommy, Daddy, Gramma and Gramps, Aunt Patty, Amber, my other friends, my teachers, my neighbors, the stray cat I sometimes fed but that my mom wouldn’t let me bring inside. Over the years, as I lost the people I cared about most, it ended up with me just asking God to take care of my mom.
But instead of “God bless” and a bunch of names, tonight I say, “Please forgive me for Robert Beard and Eloise Framingham. Amen.”
God doesn’t answer. He never does.
And his silence doesn’t last long this time.
3.
Ashley Cannon
Something heavy lands on my chest, and I jerk awake with the hard bite of metal against my throat. My heart pounds in my ears, nearly drowning out the heavy rain drumming the roof of the truck, and I almost piss myself in terror.
“Why’d you kill my dad?” he says, voice low and fierce.
I knew it was him even before he spoke. Who else could have found me out here? Who else would have cared? Eloise Framingham’s son couldn’t even pull the trigger from thirty feet away; there’s no way he could put a knife to my skin. But Robert Beard’s son can. He’s big, straddling my waist with all his weight, and I can barely breathe.
“I told you to read the card,” I say through clenched teeth. I struggle beneath him, and the knife, or whatever it is, stings my neck and makes me hiss.
“Don’t move,” he says, followed in the same breath by, “Where’s your gun?”
I swallow and roll my eyes. Did he bring friends? I don’t think so—the truck isn’t moving, and I see only one bedheaded hulk with a knife. The red digital clock is reflected in the wetness of his eyes, the seconds draining away.
“It’s under the front seat,” I say. “Can I pull up my blanket now?”
He looks down and realizes that the blanket is puddled on my side and I’m not wearing much. It’s cold out, and the tank’s mostly see-through. I don’t have much, but even in the low light, it’s showing. The knife jerks away like I’m going to cut him instead of the other way around.
But I lied. The gun is in my right hand, still under the blanket, just like it was when I fell asleep. I tighten my grip and find the trigger. Thankfully, much like his old man, Max Beard is a sucker. No one expects a girl as skinny and ridiculous as me to be any kind of a threat. I take a deep breath, letting my boobs stick out inches from his arm.
“Oh God. Sorry.” He fumbles the knife, and it clatters against the metal floor of the mail truck. It’s lost now, in the dark under my bed, and he knows it. I smile.
“No problem,” I say, much cooler than I feel. My heart is beating so loud I’m surprised the sound isn’t filling the truck like something out of a Poe story, and I’ve gone all cold again. My finger is cramped where it holds the trigger, and I make sure
to point the gun away from myself, in case I lose all feeling and do something stupid. He scoots down farther, still straddling me, but not so heavily and around my knees instead of my waist. At least I can breathe.
I pull the blanket up over my chest with an embarrassed smile that’s both real and fake at the same time. But when I go to shove the gun in his face, I find it pinned under his leg. That’s when I look down and notice that the straddling and wiggling had other consequences that he probably didn’t think about when he was trying to intimidate the psycho chick who shot his dad. He’s in flannel pajama pants, and it’s my turn to look away, embarrassed from catching him in a deeply private moment for the second time today.
In that pause, everything changes.
He should have been an easy kill. I should have marked Maxwell Beard off my list and collected my bonus, easy as that. But seeing the confusion and anger and grief and naked, unwelcome desire on his tearstained face crumbles me from the inside out. No one has ever looked at me like that before, like I’m something, and even if the circumstances are impossibly horrible and horribly impossible, I can’t help it. I can’t lift the gun. I’m stunned and weirdly flattered and mortified, and at the base of it all, I don’t want to be the kind of girl who kills a guy with a pajama boner.
The silence spreads out in the dead air of my mail truck, broken only by the steady drip of rain falling from sky to pine tree to government-issued vehicle and our hearts banging like monkeys in a drum. The longer we don’t speak, the more awkward it gets, like the never-ending slow song in the middle school cafeteria at a dance you didn’t want to go to where no one asked you to dance. He’s cuter than the boys who usually ask me out and who I usually turn down, and I can tell by the way he tosses his bangs that he knows he’s cute, but he doesn’t know what to do, either, because I killed his dad this morning and his hormones are overriding his brain. I guess this isn’t a situation you can plan for.
I realize for the first time that what my biology teacher said is actually true: no matter what we think or what we say or what we hope to become, at the root of everything, we’re only animals.
He finally clears his throat and scoots back, shifting his shirt over the telltale bump in his britches. I sit up and scoot back, too, pulling my knees up and clutching the old quilt to my chest for real now, knowing that the cool air, thin shirt, and bizarre rush of closeness are giving me headlights that he can’t help staring at.
“So,” I say.
“So,” he says, and to his credit, his voice doesn’t break.
“Well? You attacked me. You go first.”
“Why’d you do it?” He looks away. “You owe me that much.”
“If you read the card, you know why. That’s why there’s a card.”
I sweep sleep-sweaty bangs away from my forehead. It suddenly occurs to me that I’ve gone to bed with white zit paste speckled across my chin, and I mentally curse myself for being the world’s vainest, most idiotic bounty hunter. That doesn’t stop me from rubbing my chin against the quilt, hoping it will flake off.
But why do I care if I look like a freak? Why am I letting him get to me at all? He’s just an assignment, and an easy one at that. My pity should have fled with his embarrassment. I could still end it, right now. My finger twitches on the gun under the quilt, the one he’s apparently forgotten about. He edges off my legs and sits on the end of the bed, feet firmly on the floor.
“My dad was a dick, and he did a lot of bad things,” he says, his eyes cutting to the ceiling and walls of the truck, where tape and putty hold my favorite band posters to the dinged-up white metal. He smiles, but only for a second, barely a flash of teeth in the cloudy darkness.
“Yeah, and your dad should have read the fine print when he took out credit cards from Valor Savings,” I shoot back, surreptitiously wiping my chin with the back of my hand and frowning at the grit of the zit cream that’s stubbornly left behind.
“Banks don’t kill people,” he says confidently, like he’s not used to being wrong. Something about his pompous surety makes me lash out before I can stop myself.
“You’re right. Banks don’t kill people,” I say. “They make other people do it for them in exchange for not setting their houses on fire, shooting them, and letting their mothers die a long, slow death by cancer.”
He sucks in a breath, and I know immediately that I’ve said too much. It’s more than I’m allowed to say, more than I meant to say.
“Shit,” I mutter under my breath, hoping the camera/mic in my shirt is wadded up tightly enough under the front seat to keep me from getting in serious trouble. The Valor guy didn’t mention that button at all, and the references in the paperwork are random and worded with purposeful confusion. “Constant surveillance” and “limited monitoring” and “unrecorded kills will not satisfy contract requirements.” I have no idea what that button is capable of. Just as they have no idea what I’m capable of.
But Maxwell Beard doesn’t know about the button. He just knows more about me than he should.
“I’m so sorry,” he says, and I’m mad at him, and I’m mad at myself, and it’s all because I can’t fathom how to be angry at my broken mother and the new corporate government that’s shaking me like a rag doll. I’m not used to pity from supposedly rich guys, and I don’t like it.
“Piss off, Max,” I say.
Confusion passes over his face.
“You called me that before. But Max is my brother,” he says. “I’m Wyatt.”
I exhale and let my head fall against the back of the passenger seat, my mouth twitching into a smile that lasts mere seconds. It shouldn’t matter. It’s not going to make things any easier. Today I killed his dad. One day soon, I have to kill his brother. If I live through it, he’s going to hate me even more than he already does. But all I feel is relief that I don’t have to kill this guy, now or later. And I can’t tell him that. And still I’m fighting the smile, and he’s looking at me like he wants to smile too, but can tell that, deep down, he shouldn’t.
We are possibly the two most messed-up people on earth.
“What?” he asks.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?” He swallows hard. “My dad?”
He stands, paces, and slides down to sit on the floor against the far side of the truck. The air is charged, crisp and tinged with pink. I wait until he’s got his pants arranged, and then I turn to face him. Things were happening too fast for me to catalog details after I shot his dad and ran away to keep from puking all over him. He’s about my age and more of a Wyatt than a Max. He’s definitely cute, although he looks and smells like he hasn’t bathed today. Jesus, who would? With your dad lying dead on your doorstep and the police nowhere in sight as you call 911 again and again, praying someone will answer? Knowing that no one is investigating, dusting for fingerprints, promising to find the murderer? Still, he doesn’t look or smell awful. Just raw. Broken. He fills the truck in a way I don’t.
His hair is wheat-gold and straight, falling over puddly brown eyes that are serious and sharp. He’s big, like an athlete, and tall, and I know firsthand that he weighs more than I expected. But what kind of guy is he, really? The clues I would normally get from his style are absent. Plaid pajama pants, bare feet. He’s wearing a faded black T-shirt, probably replacing the band shirt he was wearing before, because I bet he held his dad, hugged him, dragged him inside, got covered in blood. But he has something tattooed on the inside of his arm, near his elbow. There’s not enough light for me to make it out, but it’s black, probably words. He’s giving me the same once-over, and it’s intense.
And somehow, without my noticing it, he got his knife back. It’s clenched in his right hand, against the cold metal of the truck floor. My own hand hasn’t left the gun hidden under the quilt. The moment would be agonizing enough without weapons added to the mix. As it is, I can barely breathe, and
I don’t know whether to talk or run or cry. I want to connect with him, touch him, beg him for absolution, shoot him a dozen times for looking at me that way. Instead I just stare at him, waiting for something to happen.
I wonder what I look like to a stranger. A normal girl. Thin, but I usually wear big sweaters or coats, the sort of clothes that hide my body for the sake of showing off my style. My dark hair is scraggly and asymmetrical on purpose, and I wear red lipstick like a dare. I can tell that I’m not the type of girl his type of guy would go for, not a Snow White fit for his Prince Charming. But I bet the see-through white tank top helps. Right now, startled from sleep, I’m as absent of social signals and pretense as he is. Stripped bare.
In the back of this truck, ripped from my normal life, I could be anyone. I ache for the armor of my belongings, to be more than just a scrubbed-clean, nearly naked murderer in a mail truck. Valor wanted an invisible soldier, of sorts, and I guess they got one. But I’m doing this on my own terms. And whatever Wyatt sees, his eyes don’t seem to accuse me. He looks more wounded and curious, just as tense as I am.
His fingers drum against the truck’s floor. He’s waiting for me to say something.
“Why a knife?” I finally ask.
He holds it up; it’s your basic serrated steak knife, flashing with the red of the clock. “My dad sold all the guns, back when he was still trying to pay the mortgage. This was all I could find.” He puts it down again, like he’s embarrassed. “I didn’t really think it through. I keep it in my glove box in case my car ever goes off a bridge, so I can cut the seat belts. Stupid, right?”
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