by Dan Wells
“You mean … puberty?” asked the mother. “I don’t understand what you’re looking for. What are you going to do to my baby?”
“If she’s still your baby,” I said, “nothing at all. Can you think of a sudden shift in her behavior or attitude or even her food preferences, something you can’t attribute to puberty? Like one day she suddenly stopped listening to the same music she used to love, or she changed all her friends at school?”
“Every teen goes through that,” said the father. “I did it, you probably did it as well. I don’t know what you’re getting at, or what you want from our family, but there’s nothing wrong with Brielle. She’s a wonderful person.”
Just like I feared—puberty was so volatile anyway, it was the perfect time to jump in and take over a life. They couldn’t prove that she was or wasn’t a Withered; I needed more information.
“I can see this is getting us nowhere,” I said. “I’m going to gag you now and go take a look at her room. Mrs. Butler will come with me, so you two stay completely still or she will not be coming back. No moving, no talking, no calling for help, no crawling for the door. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said the father, and the boy echoed him softly. I ripped strips from a throw pillow and gagged the two males, then sliced away the ties from around the mother’s ankles. The blade carved through the shirt with a smooth, delicious, ripping sound, and I had to hold myself back from cutting anything else. One, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen— That only made me think of Brooke, lying unconscious in a bad motel. Focus! I backed away, breathing deeply. When I had myself under control again I gestured with the knife for the mother to stand up. “Lead the way and don’t do anything stupid.” She led me through the kitchen and down the hall; I grabbed the rifle as we walked past it.
“It’s here,” she whispered, stopping at the end of the hallway. “She shares it—shared it—with Jessica.”
“Open it.” I kept my voice quiet as well, just in case she was home already—crawled back through the window after kidnapping and killing Brooke.
If Brooke was already dead, I didn’t even know what I would do.…
Mrs. Butler opened the door softly, pushing it slowly and stepping inside. I followed her closely, keeping the knife by her back and the rifle ready in my other hand, bracing myself for another attack by that towering, inhuman Withered—
And then Mrs. Butler screamed, a long, horrible wail of abject despair. I pushed her forward so I could come in past her, and she dropped to her knees shouting “No no no!” at the top of her lungs. Brielle was sprawled haphazardly on the floor, limbs limp and lifeless. I walked toward her, not believing my own eyes: she was Attina. She had to be. All the clues made sense. And yet here she was, as dead as the others. No ashy sludge anywhere. The window was broken, the sill gouged with claw marks. A Withered had definitely been here, even if it wasn’t Brielle. I saw something white by her lips, and bent down to look. The smell of drain cleaner was so strong it made me gag. Foamy bubbles mixed with blood dribbled from her mouth, eating away at the carpet beneath. Her eyes were open, wide and terrified.
“Call the police,” I said.
“What?”
“It’s a revenge killing,” I said. “Whoever killed her did it the same way Glassman died. I heard someone talking about it at the meeting: ‘Pour some Drano down her throat and see how she likes it.’” I stared at the body, too stunned to move. “Word for word.”
“You tortured my family!” she screamed.
I looked down at the knife and the rifle in my hands, at the makeshift bindings so tight around her wrists they were rubbing her raw. “I’m … sorry.”
“Get out of my house!”
I looked back at Brielle’s body. Someone had filled her with drain cleaner that was eating her away from the inside. Enough to kill her where she stood. Randy was the man’s name—he was in love with Sara and he’d told Agent Mills he wanted someone to hurt Brielle in the same way. And now someone had. Why? That’s the part that never made sense: why? The monster I’d seen had teeth and claws—why did it use drain cleaner? Why did it use chemicals on Brielle and knives on Derek and a truck on Corey? And why avenge a death Brielle hadn’t even caused? What could the Withered possibly gain from killing people other people wanted dead?
Oh.
Oh no.
“We were so close,” I murmured. So close. But it wasn’t the Withered making the rest of the town kill, it was the other way around. The town was making the Withered kill. Randy wanted vengeance for his lost love, wanted Brielle to suffer the same way Sara had, and so Attina had done it. Brielle wanted Glassman to die for attacking her sister, fantasized about poisoning him for revenge, even went so far as to write the whole thing out in her journal, step by step … and so Attina had done it. I’d wanted to light a fire and Attina had lit one. I’d wanted to hit Corey with a truck so Attina hit him with a truck. Officer Glassman had leered at underage girls for years, trapped by a desire he didn’t dare to act on, but he’d wanted it so bad, wanted to dominate Jessica so completely, that as he watched outside her window Attina had leapt up and done the job more horribly and completely than he’d ever intended. And all of it, every death, every attack, every last catastrophe this town had seen, had started when I wanted to cut Derek into pieces. We never would have done it on our own, but Attina did. Attina had sensed it or felt it or known it, through whatever awful mechanism that lurked inside his mind, and he had done everything. Attina was a mirror, a perfect reflection of the community’s unspoken desires. It had been dormant for decades, maybe since the beginning of the town, hurting no one because no one in Dillon wanted to hurt. And then I arrived.
And unleashed hell.
“Get out of my house,” Mrs. Butler growled.
I moved the knife less than an inch from her face, still staring at Brielle’s corpse. “The Withered are defined by what they lack,” I said, thinking out loud. I could figure this out. Every Withered made perfect sense within its own reality, and now that I knew what that reality was, all I had to do was follow the logic. “Nobody didn’t have a body, so she stole them from other people.”
“What?”
“Elijah didn’t have memories. Rack didn’t have a heart. Forman didn’t have his own emotions, so he felt everyone else’s. Attina uses other people’s will, their ability to choose and act, which means he doesn’t have his own. It’s an empty vessel, a hollow shell, a spineless nothing who has no desires, no wants, no self-interest. Someone who fits perfectly into this town because it always wants exactly what everyone else does. A pushover—no … a mascot. Attina is the most representative example of Dillon life. It goes to church. It participates in community events. If you want food it makes food; if you freak out in a town meeting, it freaks out. If you want to hide or cry or complain, it—of course. Beth.”
“Beth?” whispered Mrs. Butler. She was trembling in terror. “Beth Gleason?”
“‘It’s too damn hot,’” I said, repeating her words from the gym. “‘Everyone was thinking it anyway.’” I pulled the knife away from Mrs. Butler’s face. “I wanted to get Brooke out of Dillon, so she took Brooke out of Dillon. That’s why she ran—she wasn’t afraid, she was protecting the person I wanted to protect. Ingrid came right out and told us: Beth will go along with anything.” I looked at Mrs. Butler. “Where would Beth go outside of town? If she needed to get away?”
“I…” Mrs. Butler swallowed, looking at the knife still inches from her face, too emotionally battered to think straight. “I don’t know. Maybe one of the old farms?”
“There’s a lot of them,” I said, remembering our ride into town the first night. We’d passed a dozen or more farms, all spread out in the flat land around the town. “Do you know which one specifically? Somewhere she’d feel familiar and safe.”
“Are you saying she … that she did this? That Beth killed my girls?”
I looked at the clock on the wall: time was up, and the lockdown was i
n place. I’d have to be as stealthy as possible. “I know you think I’m crazy and evil and you have no reason to trust me.” I opened the window to slip out that way. “But yes. Beth killed your girls, and I’m going to go kill her.”
“She has an old farm,” said Butler, wiping her eyes and fixing me with a grim expression. “She hasn’t lived there in thirty years, not since her husband died, and she sold all the surrounding land but kept the house. Uses it for barbecues and church parties.” She pointed north with a trembling finger. “Take Main Street about two miles, then turn on Barkwood Road and look for the mailbox with a rooster on it. It’s about another two miles.” She gritted her teeth, her fear coalescing into sudden, fierce anger. “Make it hurt.”
24
Beth Gleason. She stayed in the background, she did what she was told. She went to church because everyone went to church, and when Marci and I had talked during the sermon she’d shushed us, not because she wanted to but because everyone else wanted to. They were all looking at us, but Beth was the one who said it. In today’s town meeting everyone had been angry, but it was Beth who’d said it. She was the personification of the community as a whole—and ever since Brook and I had arrived, that community had been tearing itself apart.
Everyone thinks dark thoughts sometimes. Did mine finally set her off because … they were more intense? More single-minded? Other people thought about hurting each other, but Attina didn’t absorb thoughts, she absorbed intentions. The will to act. I was the only one in town with the true, unmitigated desire to kill someone, and the clarity of purpose to actually go through with it. Brooke or Marci or whoever it was at the time would always calm me down, but Attina didn’t have that. She had all my rage and nothing to hold her back.
I had to hurry.
The town was quiet, already on lockdown, but without the large influx of troops coming the next day, it was still relatively empty. They couldn’t be everywhere at once. I walked softly down the side of the Butler house, just far enough to peek out at the street. A cop car drove by, and I ducked behind the Butler’s garbage can. The car was moving south, away from where I wanted to go, but I couldn’t risk going right out in the road. I slinked back into the yard and started hopping fences.
The yard north of the Butler house was well-groomed, the lawn cut short and clear of any toys or benches or trees. With no cover to hide in I ran to the next fence without stopping, dumped my knife and rifle over the top and hauled myself over after them. This yard offered more concealment and I was able to crouch behind a small garden shed to get my bearings. Most of the people, I hoped, would be looking out their front doors rather than the back—this made it easy to jump from yard to yard, but my next fence vault would take me to a north-facing home and I would have to run out the driveway and across the street directly toward another row of houses. Anyone looking out would be certain to see me. But what would they do about it?
Most of the people in the town were armed—the unlocked truck with the gun rack I’d found was proof enough of that. If someone saw me running toward his house with a butcher knife and a rifle, would he see me as a threat or as another concerned, armed citizen? My best chance at avoiding trouble was to act like the latter, and walk slowly across the street as if I belonged there. It was a strategy that had always worked in the hallways at school: look like you have a hall pass and most people won’t ask you for one. Would it work here as well? Not with the cops, but maybe with the locals. Most of them were furious about the lockdown as it was; they might even see me as a vigilante hero.
Or, you know, shoot me.
I made another sprint to the next fence, threw myself over, and lowered to a crouch. Here was a driveway leading straight out to the road, but I had to check for police first. I crept forward, peering out and looking both ways. No cops. I slipped the knife into my leg sheath—a poor fit, but better than nothing—and then composed myself, carrying the rifle like a soldier on patrol and walking across the street like it was my job to be there. Halfway across I noticed an old man watching me through the open curtains of a house to my right. I saluted him and then immediately regretted it, wondering if it was too much. A wave would have been better. He did nothing, and I reached the next driveway and went back into hiding.
I crossed the rest of the town this way, jumping fences and hiding from cops. On the last street I had to wait almost ten minutes, crouched behind an old truck, while a police officer talked to a homeowner barely ten feet away. He asked if the man had seen anything and told him to stay inside. When the man left I held my breath, not daring to make even the tiniest sound. The cop got in his car and I moved around the side of the truck, out of sight from the street. He drove away, and I watched. The instant he disappeared around the corner I set out across the street.
“Not supposed to be out here,” said a voice. I turned and saw the man the cop had been talking to, standing in his open doorway.
“Just watching for trouble,” I said, gesturing with the rifle. “You really trust them to keep you safe?”
“Not at all,” said the man, and he showed me a rifle of his own, just inside the door frame. I nodded, and he nodded, and I crossed the street.
Two yards later I was in a field of corn that was nearly shoulder high.
I stayed in the field for a ways, counting my steps and trying to calculate how many of them would make a mile. My steps were about two feet, maybe two and a half, which meant … twenty-six-hundred-something steps? I counted out two thousand, figured it was far enough, and then cut west to the main road, following it the rest of the way to Barkwood. There were no cops out here, and no traffic; I wondered if the police had barricaded the roads into Dillon as well as out. I realized Mrs. Butler hadn’t told me which way to turn on Barkwood, right or left, but when I reached it I saw that left was the only choice. I turned and walked a few more miles, passing a couple of farmhouses. The sun was still high, but both houses had lights on. I’d come back to them later if I didn’t find Beth in the rooster house.
And then I reached the rooster house—an old abandoned-looking farmhouse with patched shingles and a dead, sun-scorched lawn. The rooster on the mailbox looked like an old weather vane, rusted and bent and bolted to the top of the mailbox by a stick of old wood. It was at least a half a mile to the nearest neighbor.
I listened and heard crying.
I gripped the rifle tighter. I still didn’t know how to kill this thing. Did it regenerate? Could it sense me coming? Would my own determination to kill it make it, in turn, determined to kill me?
Two voices crying now. Why two?
Because Attina had no will of her own and only wanted what the people around her wanted. And the only person around her now was Brooke, and there was one thing Brooke wanted more than anything in the world.
I almost started crying with them.
I crept forward, the dead grass crunching softly under my feet. The front windows were closed, the blinds drawn, but I found an unblocked window on the side. I stood on my tiptoes to peer inside, but the room and what little I could see of the hall beyond were empty. Not even much furniture, just a folding table and some old napkins. An old family house they only used for parties. I moved to the next window, listening to the wails as they varied in pitch—now softer, now louder, and suddenly a cry of pain and a whoop of terror. The second window I looked in revealed a view as empty as the first, so I moved to the back of the house. The door was locked. I went to the next window but stopped, seeing a glow by the stump of a dried-out tree. A basement window. I laid down on the dry grass to look inside, and there she was: Beth Gleason, eighty years old if she were a day, in the same old blue dress I’d always seen her in. Her hands, arms, chest, and entire lower body were covered with blood. I almost cried out, terrified that it was Brooke’s blood, that I was too late to save her—but no. The inside of Beth’s forearm held a long, deep gash, from elbow to wrist, sloughing out blood like a shaken trough. And then the gash healed, and the blood dried, and Beth wa
iled in despair and grabbed a pair of garden shears and slashed it open again. She bled, and screamed, and healed. Over and over.
She was trying to kill herself.
It was all Brooke wanted—the bottomless pit at the base of her mind, the horrifying legacy of Nobody. The Withered wretch who’d killed herself a hundred thousand times. Every setback seemed to trigger a new despair, and I’d pulled her back from the brink of more suicides that I could remember. When Attina had captured her, when she’d been separated from me, when it seemed that all was lost, she’d gone right back to it again, like the comfort of an old blanket, and Attina had been powerless to resist. She had no will but what she borrowed from others.
I had to act fast, before she borrowed one from me.
I tried the back door again, kicking it a few times, until finally giving up using the rifle to shoot the doorknob. The sound was deafening; I hoped that Attina’s single-minded obsession would keep her from caring. In the depths of depression, Brooke wouldn’t care—it might actually make her worse. Please let Attina be the same.
The stairs to the basement were right inside the back door, long and narrow. The rifle would be useless in those cramped quarters, so I left it by the wall and pulled out my knife, advancing slowly down the stairs with the blade in front of me. It didn’t have the strength of Potash’s old combat knife, but it was sharpened to a razor’s edge, and it might buy me a few precious seconds, if nothing else. I reached the basement with my ears still ringing, the crying women only barely audible, and rounded the corner just in time to see Beth gash herself open again, bleeding copiously. The pool of blood at her feet covered nearly the entire cement floor of the basement, trickling in a steady stream down the drain in the center. How long had she been doing this?