I don’t catch myself in time. My chin hits first, and my vision flashes in and out like an old film reel. I finally manage to push to my hands and knees, and the stains on the carpeting gradually take shape. A musty smell pushes into my mouth next to the tin-red tint. I know I’m indoors . . . am I alone?
I lift my head slower this time, and though the world lists to the side, the space finally finds its shape around me and gradually stills.
I’m in a motel room. I’ve never been here before, but everything about it is familiar. Dingy, spackled walls adorned in landscape photos with zero sense of place. A beat-up particleboard dresser beneath a mirror framed in the same. Through it, I spot a single ceramic lamp. Its white shade flares before a window with curtains thrown alarmingly wide.
I stagger to my feet and manage to remain upright with the help of the battered dresser. It wobbles beneath my weight, and I lunge to brace against the wall instead. My palms are streaking red across the wall, and the marks I leave are brighter and more evocative than any of the framed art.
I do a quick body check. Just because I don’t feel pain doesn’t mean I’m not injured. I once saw a man walk into the ER, calmly taking a seat so that we could finish up what we were doing before attending to the jousting sword that was harpooning his stomach to his spine.
It isn’t only my hands that are blood-caked. There’s a red hole in the middle of my shirt, so blood-saturated that it’s as if the center of my body has been pried open. Air wheezes from me as I lift the ruined cashmere, and I am actually surprised to see the skin on my stomach still smoothed in place, right where it’s supposed to be. Relief floods me, even though the sweater is plastered to my back as well. My awareness is strengthened by the iron-bright scent pricking my nose. I study the dark, burgundy circle staining my middle and wonder, Whose blood is it?
I turn back to the bed and feel my hip crack into the dresser’s side. I back-palm it, bracing it, bracing myself, but the sight jolts my irises from their sockets. They jitter in my skull, and for a moment I think, Maybe the sheets have always been that red. Maybe that dirty mattress has always sagged with blood. It’s just a shitty motel with exceptionally bad housekeeping, and it really has nothing at all to do with me.
It has everything to do with me. I was placed there while passed out, a fledgling in a nest of blood. Atop the rim of the crimson cradle is a cotton pillow, so white in comparison that it almost glows, and it’s piled with a mound of long black hair.
The dizziness wanes, even as I whirl back to the mirror. The fog from the drug lifts as I catch my reflection, evaporating as slowly and invisibly as steam, yet the room gives one last shake, causing what’s left of my hair to skitter across my cheeks. The jagged ends whisper against my earlobes, individual strands shushing, telling me who did this. Unfortunately, I am distracted by the knife lying perpendicular to the mirror, clean and bright, and pointed directly at my image. One long strand of hair trails from the bone handle.
My legs wobble, but I fight the slump. My skin starts to itch again, buzzing in the sticky places, all plastered with blood. A vision flashes: me picking up the blade and running it across all the places that tingle, peeling away that humming skin. I reach down and lift the cashmere tank over my head instead. I am not one to self-injure. I have always had plenty of other people for that.
My ruined shirt crackles in some places, the blood dry as tissue paper, but sags in others, and I shudder as I toss it to the floor. At least I don’t have to worry about bedhead. A laugh zigzags from my open mouth, jagged and high like my mother’s was at the end, and I clamp my hands over it to stem the sound, but that just brings back the scent of blood, and my belly finally revolts. I’m retching before I reach the toilet.
My head throbs as I empty out raw bile and ginger tea. I am hot, so hot, inside, and the dirty tile floor feels cool and solid beneath my palms. The toilet seat is an ice cube beneath my burning cheek, and I leave it pressed there while my bowels twist back into place. When I am cool enough, and able, I stand.
And there it is. I face the sink, wonder flooding me. Who knew I had room for one last shock?
A loose red scrawl has been drawn just above the swell of my stained bra, numerals and one word staining my skin, thoughtfully placed backward for easy reading through a mirrored image.
13 HOURS
Crystal’s tea has cost me six whole hours.
Without looking at the bed or in the mirror, I wobble back into the bedroom. Clothed only in my shorts and bra, I open the front door enough to peer out into the deep night. The air is cool, but dry, which means I’m still in the high desert. I squint past the unpaved lot of the motel and make out signage glaring at me in a hard orange scrawl.
Then, blinking, I mentally flip the landscape around. I place myself directly in front of the opposing building. In my mind, I stand right next to the giant plastic boy and his oversize hamburger. Behind that mental me is a thermometer that soars upward to prick the night sky. It now reads 89 degrees.
I am back in Baker. I am in the same room Henry disappeared into while I changed a tire . . . and my DNA now mingles beautifully with his blood. I lean my forehead against the doorframe, slump, and close my eyes.
Behind me, the phone rings.
I begin a slow search.
I track the sound of twenties jazz and locate Daniel’s phone tucked beneath that pristine pillow. I have to push aside the mound of my shorn hair to answer it, but I back up and close the curtains on the window first. Malthus is near.
“You called me an animal.” It’s the first thing he says, and he does it in a voice that is so normal—outside of its mechanized buzz—that I reply before thinking.
“What?”
“Crystal told me,” he goes on, as if it’s natural to have a conversation at 4:30 a.m. with a woman you’ve been chasing through the desert. Maybe it is normal for him. Maybe he’s done this thousands of times before. “She said you called me an animal. I find that offensive.”
I look at the bed straining under the weight of gallons of blood.
“Animals are not mentally adaptive, Kristine,” he goes on as if he knows what I’m thinking. “They’re beasts of habit and instinct. They’re concerned only with survival, not evolution. Most of them only exist to satisfy the predatory longings of stronger, more noble creatures.”
“Like yourself, you mean.”
He chuckles at that. “Admit it. I am one flexible predator.”
I sink into the chair in the corner, an olive green weave that scratches the back of my bare thighs. “You kill innocent people. Those men did nothing to you. That guard was innocent, just doing his job, and Henry was just looking for a bit of fun. You stole their lives.”
That brings the crazy in his mechanized voice back to life. “Give me a break. That guard didn’t have a life. He had a status update. An existence summed up in one hundred and forty characters or less. His being on this earth changed nothing for the better. His leaving won’t make it worse.”
I set my jaw. “And Henry?”
“Yes. Our friendly neighborhood ghost hunter.” A note of wonder, like he’d just remembered. “You should know by now that I’m all for some fun”—like hilltop crucifixions, nails in the side—“but there has to be a reason for it. Henry talked only of escapism from the mundane, and so I gave it to him. He had no real purpose on his own, and without purpose, Kris, there’s no evolution.”
It’s strange. I have no idea what Malthus looks like beneath his trucker’s cap and blue jumpsuit, yet I can still picture him now, nodding to himself, so sure.
“No,” Malthus continues, “Henry was yet one more redundant voice, and if allowed to procreate, he’d have spawned creatures even dumber than he was. Don’t you see? It’s natural selection, Kristine. It’s survival of the fittest. Small things must die for a more evolved class to thrive.”
“So you j
ust kill them?”
“I remove the superfluous, the unnecessary, from this earth. In that way, the strong are preserved, the weak destroyed, and a new species evolves. Perfection,” he says, voice gone honed, “is my purpose.”
Hurting is what I do.
I blink. I think. This guy believes he’s some sort of evolutionary theorist. A man of the ages putting grand theories into practice. Daniel always said that he couldn’t be happy if he wasn’t growing and learning, and I feel the same way to a degree, but this psycho has taken Darwinism to a new level.
The smile re-enters his voice. “Are you waking up yet, Kristine?”
No . . . there’s no fish-shaped bumper sticker that can neatly sum up these beliefs.
“I want my fiancé back,” I tell Darwin’s twisted devotee.
“And I want you to get him.” His voice is artificial sweetener, an engineered approximation of something pleasant. “But remember, defective creatures have no place in my world, Kristine. So if you want to see Daniel again . . .”
He waits for me to finish the sentence. He’s testing to see if I’m evolved enough to keep up with him.
“I’ll have to be perfect,” I answer, swallowing hard.
“See, and now you actually have a shot at it, because I’ve given you a purpose too.” He says it like he’s presenting me with a gift. Then his voice swings wildly, a gavel cracking in a courtroom. “You have thirty minutes. Starting now. Then I call the police.”
And, with that, the phone goes dead.
Two minutes later I am still sitting there, a silent phone in my hand, my heartbeat pulsing through my ears. I know I am acting just like one of Malthus’s small, dumb animals, but I can’t seem to make myself think and move at the same time. The cool-headedness that I’m so well known for in the OR—my flow—has fled me after twelve hard hours of being chased, and I sit rigid while my options fan before me like playing cards.
Clean the room? Impossible in thirty minutes. Just get rid of my hair? It’s in the shower drain, in the sink. I know it. I’d bet money that investigators will fish something out later, and with only twenty-eight minutes left to me, I can’t even imagine what that might be. So I just sit there, and eventually I realize that I’m waiting for the police to arrive.
They will take me out of the desert. No one else will have to die. Abby will have to visit me in prison, but let’s face it, wouldn’t she be better off without a mother who carts home tragedy like it’s something she picked up off the sales rack? I scoff at that, and my gaze floats over to the knife on the dresser. Maybe I’ll just put it to my wrists. My mother, I think, would approve.
You’re just tired, says a saner part of my brain, and I close my eyes.
Yes, I’ve been tired ever since I heard the horses scr—
A noise skitters through the room. The scratchy chair claws at my back as I jolt. I listen again for the sound, a shushing of weight against carpet, a whisper of willful movement. All is still.
I rise and retrieve the knife. Then I begin a slow search. The only thing under the bed is more blood caught on the haunches of dust bunnies. I straighten again. I’ve already been in the bathroom, but I didn’t check the shower. I’m heading back there when I realize I also didn’t check the closet.
The one with the spot of blood on its handle.
I take it slowly, palm on the door’s center, ready to push back at whatever might be in there. The door squeaks open to reveal a space that’s narrow, but deep, and totally dark. The lamplight from across the room seeps in enough to reveal a clean, cream T-shirt draped on a hanger, along with khaki shorts which, in another life, I’d packed for this trip. The tee looks like a white flag announcing surrender, and I quickly look away. Then I squint my eyes.
I’m sorry . . . but he’ll kill me too.
The words hiss at me from the closet floor.
I moan back and sag against the wall, and the question pops out of me. How?
How did Crystal think she could deal with a man like Malthus and just walk away? How did she get messed up with him to begin with? And how the hell could she believe he’d allow her to return to her daughters, to her life, unscathed?
How could she not know that Malthus has secret compartments too, all of them tucked deep inside of his sick, sick brain?
One person bumps into another, and off they go, their lives spinning in totally different directions.
But how could Crystal really know? How could I?
She has been discarded, her head pushed forward by her forced slump. Her dark hair is matted with blood and obscures her face so that it seems her skull was removed and put on backward, and for a moment I believe that’s what Malthus has done.
What wouldn’t that man do?
But maybe not. Maybe she’s still alive. Because I heard something move.
I straddle her body, the scent of blood and bowel matter reaching out to me as I grab for the string swaying overhead. I yank at it, the bare fluorescent bulb blazes to life, and I go cold as I sag against the mildewed wall.
Crystal’s midsection, the part that birthed the girls she wanted so desperately to return to, has been carved out of her. The uterus is atop her chest now, fully intact, and her arms have been wrapped around the blackly bloodied organ like she’s cradling it. I can’t make sense of the rest. It’s both concave and mounding, the coil of her intestines looping like ribbon along her left hip, the rest piled back inside, enormous worms in a bucket.
This is Malthus, evolved. This is him pursuing his purpose.
Stretching into a lunge, I reach out and ease back Crystal’s head. I know she’s dead, but I’m beginning to think like Malthus now, and I know he has left her here for a reason. He’s left her for me.
Crystal does her best to ignore my ministrations, her milky gaze staring right through me, but her mouth still has a message for me. It’s stretched wide with words and with the world . . . or at least the greater Mojave. Grimacing, I work the map from her throat. It’s absent of blood or saliva, inserted post-mortem then, but when I unfold it, I am met with another surprise. Words scrawled like fire across the middle.
THERE’S AN ANIMAL INSIDE US ALL.
And the noise sounds again, accompanied by a twitch of that bloodied belly.
“Oh my God.”
I am in the resuscitation bay. That’s what I have to tell myself in order to bend, just so I can steel myself against the odor and slick wobble of the cold entrails. This is just another gangbanger, a car crash victim, a failed suicide attempt. I push the coiled bowels aside. And I see a little black body buried inside Crystal’s swollen core. I see another face covered in blood and two little brown eyes gazing up at me in unblinking shock.
My wail smothers the dog’s dazed whimper, and I lift it from inside Crystal in one smooth motion. Even once it’s against my chest, I can’t tell if it’s okay. There’s too much blood. So much of it.
I race back to the bathroom, slipping on viscera, causing the dog to whimper. I fling back the curtain and start the shower, and I step inside, shoes and all, murmuring assurances to the dog, or maybe to myself. Yet every time I shift, more blood circles the drain. I find a white washcloth and gingerly rinse the dog’s face clean, avoiding its misshapen jaw as I work my way down its body. Its front left shoulder is slashed where the missed bullet scraped and burned, but the water soon runs pink.
I make a bed of wet, dingy towels at the shower’s far end and set the dog down. It drops its head and plays dead.
For a moment, I just stare. As water falls over my body, I think maybe I’ll finally cry. I feel the ability there, rising like a thought bubble inside of me, but then I think, What if I start and can’t stop? What if the authorities arrive before I can sort my hot tears from the lukewarm water? What if my mouth fills with them, preventing me from explaining the inexplicable?
Then Malthus will n
ot be stopped. He’ll keep removing every life he sees as superfluous from the earth. He’ll certainly kill Daniel. And while I still have no idea why he’s targeting me specifically—why after ten months of study he thinks I need to learn to prioritize; why I need to show I care—I do know that he’ll continue killing others long after I’m locked away.
Hurting is what he does.
And then, snap, I suddenly remember what I’ve spent a decade trying to forget: I’ve stopped a man like this before.
I lunge for the free bar of soap, peel off the soaked wrapper, and let it drop to the drain. I coat my body and hair with the cheap, sticky bar and watch death sluice from my skin. Something else falls away with it, a feeling I can’t yet name, but I’ve worn it for so long that I feel naked without it. Lighter too. I scrub and dip my face beneath the hard water spray, and I’m not sure how much time has passed by the time I open my eyes again, but the bathroom is fogged, almost glowy.
“Me too.”
It pops from my mouth as I snap off the shower, an exhumed, belated reply. It’s what I should have said to Malthus back when he first took Daniel, back when he hinted at his true purpose.
Hurting is what I do.
And you’re right, I silently tell him as I towel myself off and meet my gaze in the fogged mirror. I can see that now. There really is an animal inside us all.
For a moment, nothing can touch me.
I leave the room with five minutes to spare. I carry the knife that Malthus used on Crystal in my right hand and hide it beneath the towels I’ve wrapped around the dog. I’ve swaddled him like a baby. I don’t want him to spook once we’re outside and injure himself even more, but his gaze is glassy, and when the yellow glow of the industrial porch light hits us, he doesn’t even blink. His thoughts are still lost somewhere inside Crystal.
I’m wearing the clothes Malthus left hanging for me, and as I lock the door behind me—knowing he’s there, watching—I wonder if I look compliant. I hope so. At the very least I won’t spook anyone. I’ve smoothed my newly shorn hair behind my ears, and my cheeks are pink from scrubbing. I smell like overripe lemon instead of dust and sweat and decay.
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