by Scott Hale
“Accomplice?” Echo croaked, her cool composure coming off her in an avalanche of sweat. “Really?”
Ignoring Ramona’s glare, Fenton said, “Yes. Yep. Supposed to be wearing weird clothes, like see-through plastic?”
“Guy or girl?” Echo asked.
“Don’t be so mainstream,” Ramona snapped.
“Didn’t say.” Fenton’s heart was beating so fast he could hear it in his ears. “The blood they found at the crime scenes was contaminated, too. My source says it might’ve come from multiple people, not just the victims or the killer.”
“Killers,” Asher rasped.
“They may be wearing protective gear to avoid bloodstains on their clothing, or leaving prints and fibers,” Lux said. “What was the sex? The gender?”
Fenton shook his head. “Male. Female. Both. Eyewitness testimony isn’t very reliable.”
Lux nodded and said to Asher, “You’ve been quiet. You’re our social butterfly—”
Asher swallowed his revulsion as he felt the invisible killer’s tentacle slide over the nape of his neck.
“—so what do you think? Who did she spend time with socially? Everyone is coming to the party tomorrow. If we can find her crowd, we can find her.”
What did Asher think? It was written all over his face, and if these fuckers couldn’t read it, well, then he’d tell them what he thought. He knew what Lux and Echo were doing, and he knew what Ramona and Fenton were so clearly trying not to do. He didn’t know how this worked, or what the fuck this thing was that kept following him around, but he knew where it came from and why it had been let loose into their town. Lux called him an augur, but all these years he was nothing more than a glorified, gossipy bitch. She wanted to know what the killer was like, labels and all? He’d tell her.
“The killer is a white, twenty-two-year-old, over-privileged lesbian who spends most of her time alone or on the Internet.” The words coming out so quickly they began to slur together. “She has friends, but they are more like pawns. She’d been bullied most of her life for being different, so now, anytime anyone is any different from her, she bullies them. If they’re not like her, they’re an affront to her. She is her beliefs. There’s no separating the two. If one dies, they die together.
“No one ever took her seriously. The only time anyone ever listened was when she was pretending to be some anonymous person posing as a man on the Internet. Her parents never listened to her. They were always gone. She tried to tell them she was a lesbian, and she prepared herself for a big blow-out that never came. They didn’t care. Hurting others is the only way she thinks she can make others listen.
“A guy took advantage of her. Salinger Stevens, I think.”
Lux bared her teeth. Her nails dug into the table. Echo moved away from her, as if she was giving off too much heat.
“That was before… she knew who she was really attracted to,” Asher said. “Or… she took advantage of him. Paul, too, from the Home and Garden. She says she’s gender fluid, but I think she’ll be anything to promote her brand. One time, her heart was in the right place, and maybe it still is…”
Asher felt the killer constrict its grip around his throat. For a moment, he even saw it—and it was like a distorted window through which he saw Lux and his reflection melded into one.
“But it’s more than that. She wants a following. Other people like her. A cult of identity. She wants everyone to be dissected. No secrets. No surprises. If everyone is like her, then she’ll know she was right all along.”
Lux let out the faintest of laughs. Like a queen rising up from her council’s table, she came to her feet, arms out, a gesture for the augurs to rise with her. Aside from Echo, they remained seated.
“Who is the killer then?” Lux asked, searching each of them for signs of betrayal. “Asher…” She swallowed hard. “Asher painted us a very vivid portrait. Are we in agreement?”
Ramona shrugged.
Fenton stared at his shoes.
Echo nodded.
Asher swished the spit around his mouth. It tasted of the sea.
“Then who is it? Who is the killer?” Lux leaned forward, pressing her hands to the table, like a general looking over a map of a battlefield. “We seem like we have it narrowed down. Who is it?”
Ramona didn’t say anything.
Neither did Fenton, nor Echo.
“Do you know?” Lux said, staring at Asher, while her eyes glazed over. “Please, tell us.”
Asher could feel the accusation in his throat. The words were there, fully formed, after such a long gestation. It made him sick to his stomach how badly he wanted to say them. But try as he might, he could not pass them onto his tongue. They wouldn’t take. His sentence would be final. There would be no coming back from this, and he could not leave this place alone. Every one of them was a killer in their own way; the invisible creature beside him was the least of his worries. It would kill him quickly. They would destroy him and his reputation until he destroyed himself. He couldn’t leave here alone. Alone was what had gotten him here in the first place.
Finally, Asher whispered, “I don’t know.”
Lux nodded, her face flickering both a smile and a frown. She straightened up, sized up the augurs, and threw one arm around Echo.
“Party tomorrow night at the wharf on the river. The place is rented out. You can see the wreckage of Brooksville Manor from there.” She kissed the side of Echo’s head. “It’s a good place to rebuild.”
At 6:00 PM, an hour and forty-five minutes before the party began, Asher got into his car and picked up Ramona from her apartment and Fenton from his parents’ house. Neither of them had known they would be carpooling, and yet each of them had been dressed and ready to go, and out their doors before Asher even had a chance to honk his horn. It was one of those rare moments for the augurs were words weren’t needed to know the future. The bond between them had been enough to show them what was to come.
“Lux is the killer,” Asher said, his voice hoarse, almost gone; deprived due to sleep deprivation.
Fenton finished climbing into the car and closed the backseat door behind him. Ramona was there, too, on the opposite side. Asher had been insistent no one sit up front with him. It was almost as if he were saving it for someone else.
“Let’s just fucking say it.”
Fenton’s neighborhood was so rich it made Asher’s teeth hurt. He took off down the street, not watching the road, but his friends in the mirror, who still hadn’t said anything.
“She is,” he hammered. “And if she isn’t, she’s fucking getting someone to fucking do it fucking for her.”
Ramona kicked at the fast food bags that blanketed the floor in the back. “What happened to you?”
Asher ignored her. “Fenton?”
“I’m not gay,” Fenton blurted out uncomfortably. “I’m… not. I’m not at all.”
“We know,” Asher said.
Ramona gave Fenton a shrug.
“Ramona and I are gay,” Asher said. “That’s like a fox going into a hen house and talking about all the eggs it’s laid.”
Ramona snorted. “What the hell kind of simile—”
“Simile? Not a bad word choice for someone who only reads the nutritional facts on the back of snacks.”
Ramona lunged forward. Her seatbelt went taut and caught her before her hands could close around Asher’s glistening neck.
“You guys don’t care I’m not gay?” Fenton’s naivety was in full effect, but for the first time, it was legitimate.
“Jesus Christ, no.” Asher looked at Ramona in his rear-view mirror. “I’m sorry. Fuck. This shit I’ve… and that’s groovy you’re straight, Fen. Doesn’t really fucking matter. Still love you.”
Fenton could feel the weight falling from his face; each layer of the mask peeling away. He smiled, said, “cool” like the most generic man to walk this Earth, and then: “Did you see Lux do it?”
“I saw the post—” The car slowed down as
Asher absently took his foot off the gas, “—and then… something was in my house.”
“What?” Ramona pulled the seatbelt aside, sat as far forward as she could. “Are you serious? The fuck? What? I was texting you. Why didn’t you…?”
“I couldn’t. It wasn’t going to let me.”
Fenton covered his mouth. “It?”
Asher nodded. “Don’t know what it is. But it looked like you—” Could he tell them the truth? “It looked just like you said. I don’t know if it’s human or… I don’t know. But it could’ve killed me, and it didn’t. It just… left.” He had to lie about that part. “As soon as she deleted the post about me, it… left.”
Ramona was squeezing her hands shut so hard it was a surprise diamonds weren’t dropping out of them. Just what the hell was Asher saying? Like a thief raiding a house, she tore the latches off the doors in her mind, hastily rooting through the remnants of coursework she hung on hooks like coats she might wear for the right occasion. Fenton dealt in facts, but he did it coldly; Ramona didn’t know much, or so she’d convinced herself, but what she did know she carried around like trophies.
“Blood came out of my phone,” Asher said, nearly winded by his confession.
Ramona stared at Fenton, while remembering not only what he’d said about the massive amounts of different blood at the crime scenes, but also the blood she’d seen on Zeke/Zoe’s pants and the gore dripping from Ansel’s phone in the library. Psychogenic? No, she wasn’t her dad. She couldn’t make that same mistake and transfer her bullshit onto this. That wouldn’t make it make sense. It would just make it make sense to her.
Fenton cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, mine too.”
The car lurched forward as Asher tapped the brakes. He sped back up as he changed lanes and headed for the highway.
“When?” he asked.
“Few days ago.” Fenton took out his phone—there were red splotches across it; not stains, but shallow burn marks. “I know I should have said something. It seemed so… normal to me, though. Like when you’re in a dream and even the weirdest things seem so ordinary. Like… of course there is blood coming out of my phone. Why wouldn’t there be?”
Psychosomatic. Ramona tried that coat on, and it almost fit. Physical symptoms that manifested from psychological origins. Jesus, was she really going to believe what she was hearing? But psychosomatic didn’t make sense. Fenton wouldn’t lie, and she’d seen what she’d seen, so if there really was blood gushing out of everyone’s phones, then it couldn’t have been psychosomatic. Phones weren’t a part of their bodies. And then, seeing the faded outline of her phone in her pocket, she laughed. It wouldn’t have been there if it wasn’t always there.
“Zoe/Zeke had blood on her pants when I saw her in the library. Ansel had blood coming out of his phone, too,” Ramona said. “I saw him.”
What were you supposed to do with facts that led up to fallacies? Ten minutes after his admitting he was straight, and here he was again, betraying himself for a place within the group. Nothing about these murders or the killer or killers or the omens involved made sense, but then again, as augurs, did they? They assigned meaning in broad strokes, categorized people with all the intricacies of a finger painting. They jumped from one conclusion to another; they never fell because they never failed. They supported each other and the truths they spewed so that they always landed softly. He saw where this car ride was going, and it wasn’t just to the wharf.
Asher merged onto the highway. Going eighty past the sign that read sixty-five, he muscled his way into the farthest lane. The setting sun blasted the windshield with blinding light, but didn’t faze him any. He could see past it now.
“If Lux is part of this,” Ramona said, “then how?”
“Echo said she had posted about all of us, and deleted the posts later. She had posted about Ansel, Zoe/Zeke, and Paul, too. And I think she posted about Salinger, but deleted that one.” Fenton was doing this for them, regurgitating the facts to feed their curiosity. He had to be indifferent. “Everyone she has posted about has died, or…”
Asher looked at him.
“Almost died.”
“And blood. First comes the blood,” Asher said, jumping into another lane. “Blood, and then the killer, like a shark.”
“All the posts about the victims had a ridiculous amount of likes and comments,” Ramona said. “Before yours got taken down, Asher, yours did, too.”
“I never saw one about me,” Fenton said.
“Me, neither,” Ramona said.
“But I saw blood.” Fenton rubbed his phone. “A little. She must have deleted it before anyone really read it.”
“Must be nice.” Asher, realizing how fast he was going, took his foot off the gas pedal and cruised. “If she deletes the post, the killer… goes away.” He checked the passenger seat for its telling glint. “But if she leaves it up long enough… if enough people support it…”
“Is it like a hit?” Fenton gritted his teeth. “Is someone doing this for her? Why… why would she want to hurt us, though?”
“No, she’s doing it,” Asher said, the exit for the wharf a few miles away. “It’s not human. The thing that was in my apartment wasn’t human. She’s doing it. They’re doing it, the people that read her bullshit.”
“Our bullshit,” Ramona whispered, repulsed.
“I don’t know how, but she’s doing it,” Asher said.
Everything they were saying finally caught up with Ramona. Scoffing, she said, “What… what the fuck are we… Lux is a witch? Is that…?”
“She’s been called worse,” Asher said. “I’m not saying I get it. Okay? Honey, I have… no fucking clue. But this isn’t adding up in any normal kind of way.” He flicked his turn signal to get off on the wharf’s exit. “She’s doing something she’s not supposed to be doing. I don’t know if she knows it or…”
“She knows it,” Fenton said. “I think she was testing us yesterday in the meeting. I think she thinks we know and wanted to see what we would do.”
Ramona’s chest tightened. Spit got caught in her throat. How had it come to this? She’d known Lux ever since the fourth grade. Until freshman year of college, they’d still been sleeping over at each other’s houses on a near weekly basis. They were best friends. Partners in crime. After everyone’d had their run at Ramona for her weight and exhausted every insult in the book, she had simply stopped existing to her classmates. Too fat to be attracted to and too serious to have fun with, she had been resigned to the back-row corner desks of the classrooms and all the other places where sharp edges were formed and the forgotten ended up caught on them. The bowers of the cafeteria. The dirt patches behind the bleachers. The ends of buildings, farthest away from doors and opportunities. And that’s where Lux had found her, and with Lux, she’d left them behind forever.
“She wanted to see if we would be loyal,” Fenton continued.
How did it come to this? This feeling inside her? This stark emptiness? This gnawing numbness? How long could someone be friends with someone until they were strangers again? She’d taken for granted how much each of them had changed; that is, she accepted without considering if she’d really accepted it. Maybe Ramona wasn’t as smart as Fenton (she was certainly smarter than Asher), but was it possible she and Lux had reached their event horizon? That dark place where all the light cannot be seen and cannot follow? Talking about Lux as a killer made Ramona feel like she was killing her, and yet there was a certain satisfaction in the thought she might be rid of her. How long had they been fumbling in the dark like this, mistaking company for clarity?
“Then she knows what she’s doing. Echo, too, maybe,” Asher said.
Ramona’s stomach sank. “She wanted us to die.”
“She changed her mind,” Fenton said.
“She still tried,” Ramona said.
Fenton opened his text messages on his phone and went back to the text from Caleb. He read it aloud. “We need to talk. All of us. This is
big. My buddy at the police station has a buddy at the lab where they’re checking the evidence over. First off, said there was way too much blood at the crime scenes for the wounds inflicted. Second off, the lab nerd said there’s something wrong with the blood. Said it’s not just the victims’ or the perp’s. Said the blood was from a shitload of different people. Like… hundreds. Maybe thousands.”
Asher wheeled the car down the ramp. It winded over the outskirts of Bitter Springs, before reaching the warehouses that lined up and down the river that ran between here, Brooksville, and Bedlam. “That from Caleb Jones?”
“Parthenogenic,” Ramona blurted out. “Something from nothing. She’s… whatever Lux is doing… she can…”
“It’s not nothing,” Fenton said. “The blood. The belief, loyalty, whatever you want to call it. I bet if they tested it and had all the right samples…”
“It would match everyone who liked and commented on the posts,” Asher said, coming off the ramp. He pulled the car over into one of the warehouses’ parking lots, parked, and twisted around to face the augurs. “Their blood on our hands.” He laughed, stared into the passenger’s seat. “Shouldn’t it be the way other goddamn way around?”
Ramona took out of her cell phone. She hadn’t noticed it before, but it was there, around the charger port: small flecks of dried blood. “Not if they think we deserve it.”
Fenton said, “Not if Lux thinks everyone’s forcing her hand to do it.”
“Salinger, Zoe/Zeke, Ansel, Paul… us… it’s our fault for being impostors.” Asher slumped down in his seat and dug the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Fuck me sideways, we’re not anything but ourselves.”
“Aren’t we?” Ramona stared out the window, watched the sun slip behind the clouds. “Or maybe we just stopped being her. Like you said, Ash. It’s a cult of identity.”