She knew he was coming to finish the job.
Cait’s eyes stuttered open. She blinked out at the splintered windshield, the desert shattered into a thousand refracted segments. It was quiet, the only sound the gentle roar of the blood rushing in her ears. For a moment, it was almost peaceful.
And then the pain came.
Her face felt as if it had been bathed in acid, each nerve set alight and burning. Her tongue was swollen and bloodied in her mouth, and when she looked down, she saw that her left arm was hanging at a strange angle.
She felt someone’s hands on her, shaking her, and heard her name called over and over. She opened her mouth to speak but couldn’t find the words. She closed her eyes again. She wanted to sleep now. She wanted this nightmare to be over.
“Cait!” Her eyes flickered open and she saw Rebecca’s face hovering above. Her chin was dripping with blood, and her mouth was swollen and painful-looking. It was her eyes that scared Cait the most, though. They were feverish, burning into hers. They were terrified.
“We have to go.” Rebecca was fumbling with something at her side. “I’m going to move you so I can get in the driver’s seat, okay? I’m going to get us out of here.”
The seat belt released and Cait sagged forward against the wheel. Her whole body was lit up with pain. “Cait, can you hear me?” She managed a grunt. “Can you put your arms around my neck?” Cait tried but couldn’t lift them. She fell back against the seat. “It’s okay,” Rebecca murmured. “Don’t worry.” Hands tugged at her shoulders. Cait yelped as a bolt of pain shot through her left arm. “Okay, it’s okay,” Rebecca soothed. “I think your arm is broken. I’ll try to be careful, but we don’t have much time.” Arms around her waist, tugging, pulling. Her body shifted. Pain shot through Cait like an arrow.
She must have passed out from it, because when she opened her eyes, she was half in the passenger seat and Rebecca was climbing over her to the driver’s side. Cait watched her lower herself into the seat and fumble at the keys.
Rebecca turned the key in the ignition. The engine stuttered. She tried again. Stutter, stutter, cough. Cait could hear the death rattle in the Jeep’s throat. The engine had flooded. She reached a finger toward Rebecca. “The gas . . .” she whispered. “Push the gas pedal . . .”
Her words were drowned by a long, shivering scrape of metal on metal. The two women froze. They heard soft footsteps on the ground outside, a hand rattling at the door handle, another long scrape along the Jeep’s battered body.
Rebecca fixed her wide, terrified eyes on Cait.
“It’s him,” she whispered.
The door wrenched open and the silhouette of a man filled the frame.
Rebecca looked up at the man blocking the doorway. She had never seen him in her life.
She watched as confusion filled his dark eyes, followed by anger. “Who the fuck are you?” he asked, and he punched her square in the face before she had the chance to answer.
Her head snapped back against the seat. Stars swam in her vision. She covered her face with her hands just in time to block the next blow, this one a firm backhand to the side of her head. Her skull seemed to swell. She closed her eyes and let out a whimper. “Get the fuck out,” the stranger said, and he reached in and started dragging her out of the Jeep.
She swung her arms out wildly, hands scrabbling for purchase, fingers probing for weakness. She jabbed a thumb in his eye, and he reared back before reaching for her neck and tightening his grip until she felt her trachea crack. He let go just before she passed out, then watched as she bent over the wheel and retched.
“Get out,” he said again, wrenching at her arm, and she felt herself begin to slide out of the seat.
She swung her legs out to kick him. She caught him square in the chest and he stumbled back. “Cait,” she shouted, pulling at the girl’s arm. “You have to wake up! You have to get out!”
The man caught Rebecca’s bad ankle in his hands. His palms were cold and slicked with sweat. She thrashed like a fish snagged on the hook, but he held on and pulled her body out the door. She landed hard on the ground, and the back of her head scraped against the edge of the doorframe, sending a shock of pain down her spine.
Her fingernails scraped along the dirt as he dragged her into the scrub.
“Who are you?” she screamed, just before he kicked her in the stomach and the world went black.
The air was cold on Cait’s face, and she tried to tilt her head away from it. She was cold all over now, her whole body shivering, every nerve raw.
From somewhere far away, she heard the sounds of a struggle, followed by a series of dull, heavy thuds. She kept her eyes closed and turned away from it. She just wanted to sleep now. Deep, endless oblivion.
A scream pierced the night. Cait’s eyes snapped open. Her face was tilted upward, and through the shattered windshield, she could see the navy velvet of the sky shot through with tendrils of purple and fuchsia. It was the most perfect thing she’d ever seen.
The scream again, cut short. Silence. Heavy footsteps coming closer. Her fingers twitched. Something deep inside her animal brain telling her to go, move, run. Her body wouldn’t comply.
The door next to her opening. More cold air whipping at her skin. A voice, murmuring. Hands on her body, pulling, lifting. A familiar smell filling her lungs. She tried to focus her eyes, but all she could see was the vast expanse of painted sky staring down at her, beautiful and heartless.
The scrape of her heels dragging across the dirt.
A door opening. Leather seat slippery-soft underneath. Another door slamming shut. The click of a key in the ignition. An engine growling to life.
Outskirts of Moriarty, New Mexico—54 Miles to Albuquerque
He hadn’t said a word since he’d pulled her into his car, but she could smell him: oranges undercut with cologne, spicy and sweet. Her head felt like a balloon filled with glue.
Time was skittering; she couldn’t manage to grab hold of it. She closed one eye and let the other settle on the dashboard. Eventually, the green numbers came into focus: 6:46. Numbers circled in her mind. Her mind tugged something up to the surface. “Rebecca.” She fought off the rising tide of panic. “Rebecca. Where’s Rebecca?”
She’d seen his face most days for the past two years, but here, in this light, he looked different. Younger, maybe. The moonlight caught the faint scarring on his cheek, a souvenir from teenage acne.
“How did you find us?”
He scratched at the back of his neck. She could hear his nails scraping at the flesh, too hard. “You need to be quiet.”
Silence, thicker now.
She looked over at him. His profile was eerie-white in the darkness, and she could see the outline of the soft flesh underneath his chin. He looked sweet, innocent.
Now, though. Now she had to relearn him. He was a man who had followed her for hundreds of miles. He was a man who had intentionally driven them off the road, had nearly killed them in the process. He was a man who had pulled Rebecca out of the Jeep and beaten her, maybe to death.
Her stomach lurched.
Rebecca. Where is Rebecca?
And now he was a man who was driving her God only knew where, and who held her life in his hands.
The shaking returned with a vengeance, and she pulled her good arm tightly to her chest. How long had he been following her? Was it just tonight? Or had he been following her for months?
Those times when she’d gotten home after a late shift and crossed the yard, certain that someone was watching her. She’d clutched her keys between her fingers, tensed to fight, until she’d locked the front door behind her and laughed at herself for being so hysterical. The long nights spent staring into the darkness, waiting for the sound of footsteps outside her window. The knowledge that she wasn’t safe, even in her own home.
And him standing at his front door, waving at her, smiling, telling her to have a nice day. Being all fucking neighborly.
A shudder ran
through her. It had been him all along.
Adam
How long had he spent out in the cold? Long years when he had been nothing more than a worm wriggling through the dirt, disgusting and despised. They had hated him at school, even from the first day when he’d spilled milk on his shirt during snack and one of the other boys had mocked him for smelling like sour milk. He knew now that it wasn’t possible for the milk to have soured that quickly. The boy had smelled something else on him, something rotten at his very core, ingrained in his skin and bones and soul.
When he was eight, his mother insisted that he have a birthday party and invite everyone from his class. They booked space at Roller Kingdom, and his mom took him to Party City and let him choose whatever decorations and favors he wanted. He passed out the invitations himself—red and blue, Superman-themed—and watched as the kids shoved them in backpacks and cubbies without a word. When the day arrived, nobody came. Not a single person. He could still remember feeding quarters into the claw machine while his mom stood behind him, pretending not to cry.
After that, he kept to himself as much as he could, creeping around the perimeters of playgrounds and lunchrooms, slinking up the stairs to his bedroom after school each afternoon.
They always found him, though. No matter how hard he tried to be invisible, they always sought him out. It wasn’t enough for them to hate him. They wanted to hurt him, too.
Puberty was particularly cruel. Days spent seeing revulsion reflected in the eyes of every popular girl in school, and most of the unpopular girls, too. Meathead jocks laughing at him, shoving him into lockers, spitting in his lunch. He spent his nights locked in his room, ignoring his mom shouting for him to come down to dinner. He filled whole notebooks with poems for girls who would never love him, and torturous diary entries in which he described every excruciating detail of his rejections.
He used to spend hours staring at his reflection in the mirror, trying to figure out what it was that made him so repulsive. Okay, so he was skinny. When he took his shirt off, which he did only when he showered, he could count his ribs like piano keys. His mother used to give him weight gainer when he was a kid, thick, gloopy shakes that tasted like sweetened sidewalk chalk, but he stayed resolutely thin. His face was thin, too, and long, and his eyes looked like they were too big for his skull. Once, one of the jocks called him Auschwitz because he looked like a victim of a concentration camp, and the nickname stuck.
It got a little easier in college. People seemed to hate him less. He even made a couple of friends. But no matter what he tried, he couldn’t get a date. All he wanted was to hold a girl’s hand at the movies, kiss her good night, take care of her. He was a nice guy. Why wouldn’t they give him a chance?
One night a couple of years ago, a girl at a bar laughed in his face when he asked if he could buy her a drink. He’d thought about killing himself that night—had even gotten so far as running a bath and finding a razor—but he’d pussied out in the end.
Instead, he typed “why won’t girls sleep with me?” into a search engine and ended up in a subthread called braincels. At first he was kind of weirded out by the stuff they were saying about women, but the more he read, the more he found himself agreeing. How many times had a girl rejected him and gone home with some ’roided-up asshole? He stayed on the thread for hours, and when the sun was coming up, he finally worked up the courage to write something himself. He described what had happened that night and how it had been the same night he’d been having over and over since high school.
“Might as well swallow the black pill,” one of the commenters wrote underneath his post. “Come on in, the water’s fucking freezing.”
He looked up the definition on Urban Dictionary: “A concept derived from the notion that romantic success is more determined by genetic signs of good health, prosperity and intelligence (physical attraction, strength, symmetry) than by any esoteric personal quality like kindness or strength of character.”
He felt like he’d been struck by a lightning bolt. Suddenly, it all made sense: the rejection, the loneliness, the helplessness. They had been born this way, every one of them. They would never get a girl to like them, because genetics had determined that they were physically inferior and therefore repulsive. The only guys who got to have sex were muscled-up Chads who would treat them like shit, or beta guys for whom girls were willing to settle as long as they had money.
Here was a community of people who understood that unfairness and shared in it. He finally felt like he belonged.
And when he found out that he was living next door to that stupid feminazi bitch, he finally felt like he had a purpose.
He would be the one who killed her.
Clines Corners, New Mexico—58 Miles to Albuquerque
Cait closed her eyes and pretended to be asleep. She needed time to think. Time to plan.
What did he want from her?
Rebecca, lying in the dirt, covered in blood. Oh God oh God she was dead. And it was all her fault.
She never should have let her set foot inside the Jeep. She should have turned back as soon as the truck ran into them that first time, she should have insisted on calling the police. She should have taken better care of her. Now she was dead.
And soon she would be, too.
Calm. Just stay calm.
The desert swept past, endless empty road. No cars to flag down, though how she’d manage even if there were, she wasn’t sure. A billboard for a junkyard: you trash, we smash. A deserted rest stop.
She couldn’t tell if they were heading east or west. Had she passed through here before? She tried to remember landmarks, but of course there weren’t any. There was nothing out here in this godforsaken place.
Where was he taking her?
She risked a look. He was staring straight ahead, eyes focused on the road. His face was inscrutable. How many times had she let her gaze slide right past him? She could still remember the day she moved in, the way he’d loped out onto the lawn and waved to her, asked if she needed any help. Together, they’d lugged her mattress into her apartment, and she’d offered him a beer as a reward. She remembered thinking that night that she was lucky to have a decent neighbor next door, one she didn’t have to worry about. One she could trust.
Who was he, really?
More important: what did he want from her, and how could she give it to him without giving him her life?
Adam
At first it had been like a movie. He felt powerful behind the wheel of the pickup truck, tall and strong. He could have had her all the way back in Texas, but he’d waited, taken his time. He liked the feeling of hunting her down, the little green dot from the tracker moving across the screen, staring up at him, urging him on. He liked the feeling of knowing something she didn’t, of casting an invisible noose around her neck that he could tighten at any minute.
That first time, after the IHOP—he’d planned to finish it then. It was just as he imagined: the blind terror on her face, the surge of adrenaline as he plowed the truck into the side of the Jeep, the beautiful screech of metal on metal. It was intoxicating, like a drug. He hadn’t wanted it to stop. So he’d teased it out as long as he could, dropping back, letting her think she’d lost him, that she was safe. When she’d played that trick with the headlights, he’d laughed. He was happy to let her have that little victory. They were playing a game, one he would ultimately win. But victory would taste that much sweeter after the chase.
After a while, the chase wasn’t enough. He wanted to hear that shriek of metal again, wanted to see the fear on her face up close, wanted to feel the power flowing through his veins. Wanted to see that power reflected in her eyes.
So he went in for the kill.
That moment when the Jeep flipped over . . . he’d never experienced anything like it. It was like that scene in Pulp Fiction when Travolta jabbed the girl in the heart with adrenaline, only he felt like both Travolta and the girl at the same time. Just pure, pure power.
He hadn’t expected the other girl to be there. He didn’t know how he’d missed her before—a trick of the light, maybe, or he’d been so focused on Cait, it had been to the exclusion of everything else. When he wrenched open that door and saw the blonde staring up at him from the driver’s seat, all he could think was that she looked just like this girl in high school, Jenny, who’d laughed in his face when he said hello to her in the hall this one time, and after that . . . God, he hadn’t known he was so strong. How hadn’t he known? He’d heard soldiers talk about the veil of rage, and that was how he felt in that moment. Overcome.
Now, staring at his hands gripping the steering wheel, he could see that his knuckles were bloodied and bruised, but he still couldn’t feel any pain. Was this what it felt like to be alive? Was this what he had been missing for all of these years?
Now that he had a taste of it, he only wanted more.
Outskirts of Moriarty, New Mexico—49 Miles to Albuquerque
Rebecca knew her eyes were open, but the world remained stubbornly dark. She reached a hand to her face. Her eyes were swollen to slits, and her eyelashes were crusted together with dried blood. She rubbed them, scraping at the blood with her fingernails until she could at last see the deep purple light of the dawn and the scarred wasteland of the desert.
The Jeep sat squat and silent in the dirt. The truck was gone. Rebecca scanned the horizon and caught the last glimpse of taillights heading east just before they disappeared.
She struggled onto her hands and knees and dry-retched onto the cold ground. Her knuckles were bruised and bloodied, and she couldn’t put much weight on her right arm. Pain radiated through every cell of her body.
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