After delivering Magpie to her grandmother, I took my time driving back to Bianca, hoping that one problem, at least, would have resolved itself by the time I got there. No such luck. Gregg was hanging on, still sprawled on the dining room floor, propped against one wall, in a sticky puddle of blood, with a soppy dishtowel balled up over his abdomen. She’d poked him a good one in the shoulder, too, and bashed him in the head and face a few times with something that had broken into scattered fragments of thick ceramic.

  In the kitchen, a long bread knife lay in the sink, still in need of cleaning.

  Jesus, she’d stuck it deep, and more than once by the look of things. Belly wounds will nearly always turn fatal if untreated, but it takes a long time—the kind of useful info you pick up when you let an Attila into your life.

  Gregg roused when he heard me, eyes creaking open, his high forehead traced with dried blood that had dribbled from his scalp. “You bitch,” he muttered at me. “You fucking bitch.”

  God, how they love that phrase.

  I knelt a few feet away, out of range but level, eye-to-eye. I really wanted to look him straight on. “What did I do?”

  “Everything was fine . . . before she met you.”

  A heavy coffee mug winged in from the side and beaned off his skull with a thunk. His head snapped against the wall and he groaned as fresh blood streamed.

  “It was not fine!” Bianca shot me an imploring look as if I were the one who

  needed convincing. “It wasn’t.”

  This much was true: Gregg was an unholy mess, dying, and it seemed like the best option all around to not get in the way of that. I was strangely all right with it. I’d never seen this much blood before, and I was all right with that, too.

  Like Bianca earlier, how could I be this calm? Because I was meant for things like this? I’d been touched by great violence once, then touched by something far stranger, and it had worked its way inside because, why . . . it had a use for me? It was striving to convince me to kill Bianca, or someone like her, even if I didn’t know why?

  But you know what? I was sick of feeling like I was made for no better reason than to acquiesce to other agendas for my life.

  Gregg started to whimper, with quivering lips and frightened eyes—genuine, or switching tactics? Either way, it looked weak. Attila would’ve despised him for it.

  “You had yourself a good partner there,” I told him. “You couldn’t just let her be herself, quirks and all?”

  His anguished eyes tracked her over my shoulder. I had no way of sorting through all the contradictions they revealed. “She’s not normal. I just want her to be normal.”

  “Do you not get it? The reason you probably fell in love with her was because she isn’t normal.” I dropped my voice in pitch, going for that reasonable-yet-aggrieved tone that came so naturally to Gregg. “There’s something about her, I can’t put my finger on what it is, but I like it. She’s different!” I picked up the ceramic mug that had bounced from his head. “Yeah, that never lasts.” I understood the urge to use the mug with bad intentions. “You pathetic little weasel. Take what you don’t understand and try to beat it into something you can. Look where it’s gotten you now.”

  I took the mug back to the sink.

  How had this happened, I wondered. How did it erupt so irrevocably like this? When I looked at Bianca, I didn’t need to say anything. She spent awhile peering at the floor, working her tongue inside her swollen cheek, then looked at the two-seater breakfast table in a far corner of the kitchen. The tablecloth was

  stained with a coffee spill, now dry, and Bianca’s laptop sat there, screen up and asleep.

  Okay. Ground Zero. Got it.

  I poked a key to wake it up and found she’d had it open to a browser window, with more tabs on standby. According to the banner across the top, Bianca had been perusing the site of some matronly looking psychologist named Liz Goldblatt. I still recognized that string of accredited letters following her name. What I could see of the page mostly appeared to be a list of bullet points.

  Memories of a past life you don’t necessarily identify as being human, or as having occurred on this planet, possibly cited as a child and forgotten, or persisting into adulthood.

  Frequent or continual feelings of not belonging to this world, possibly compounded by specific impressions of a world you feel you do belong to.

  Current or past use of words, phrases, or entire vocabularies that do not correlate with any known language.

  Persistent feeling that any or all among the sun, moon, constellations, and daytime and nighttime skies are not as they should be, either in appearance or arrangement.

  Inexplicably powerful attractions to certain people, animals, or natural features such as individual trees, stones, vegetation, etc.

  It went on like that, a checklist that practically defined the short, tragic life of Brodie Baxter; the misgivings that Bianca had been dealing with all along.

  “There’s a name for people like me,” she said. “Atavists. Somebody came up with the name atavists.”

  I clicked through the other browser tabs. There was a questionnaire to fill out and send to Dr. Goldblatt. A private forum for registered site users. A welcome page—Bianca had apparently just registered. She’d opened a handful of the forum threads, one of which had a subject heading that felt uncomfortably relevant to me, too: We are being stalked and killed.

  “The answers are out there, if you keep looking,” she said. “One thing always leads to another. I just had to start following the right trail of crumbs.”

  When she reached over to hold my arm I thought she was going to cry. But

  then I remembered I’d never seen her cry, and didn’t think I ever would.

  “Knowing you, feeling your acceptance . . . this is what gave me the courage to finally go looking.”

  She hadn’t treated her cheek yet, so I went to the freezer to whip up a makeshift ice pack. As I spared a look at Gregg zoning in and out against the dining room wall, it seemed easy enough now to piece together how events had played out this morning.

  Bianca has her coffee and her laptop and, with Magpie bunking a few blocks away, the kind of peace and quiet she never gets to enjoy on a Saturday morning.

  Maybe she Googles her symptoms. Inability to connect with my own child as a living, breathing part of me. Maybe she’s been doing that all week. She must have been enthralled, finding that first real crumb or two to start following.

  Enter Gregg. I can’t see him being eager to share her discovery. But I can see him reading over her shoulder. She could have been so absorbed she never realized he was there. He’s seen enough, though, had enough, and reacts the only way that appeals to his sense of immediate results. It’s time to beat the weird out of her.

  Be normal. That’s all I’ve ever asked for. Just be normal, you fucking bitch.

  Those smooshy thighs of hers could be deceptive. There’s muscle down in there, too, a good sturdy base to fight from. By now Gregg thinks she wouldn’t dare. No more free lunch for him, though. She opens up his belly and cuts that lunch right out.

  “I think I’ll be okay for the rest of this,” she told me. “You can go if you want.”

  What, back home to Val? To deflect, lie, spare his sensibilities?

  In for a penny, in for a pound of flesh.

  “I think I should stay.”

  Bianca gave me that look I knew so well, but never from her: Suit yourself.

  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  She took the bread knife from the sink, then, after a moment’s contemplation, snatched the cleaver from the wood cutlery block and marched for the dining room.

  “You want to know what my problem is?” she said to Gregg. “I’ll tell you what my problem is. You deserve that much.”

  Uh oh. She didn’t make deserve sound kind and considerate at all.

  “I’ll show you.”

  When she dropped next to him, I should have seen it coming. The way he was sitting, one hand braced against the floor . . . that polished hardwood made a perfect cutting board. She chopped down with the cleaver and sent three stubs rolling. It took Gregg a moment to register what had happened, before he started to squeal, and by then Bianca was back at work, slicing here and chopping there

  —nothing big, nothing vital, nothing he couldn’t live without.

  I couldn’t watch, not after the fingertips. But I could hear, and it was agonizing to listen to, for both their sakes. My friend had been driven to this. As for Gregg, he could’ve spent the rest of his privileged life contemplating the secrets of the universe, if he’d just asked nicely.

  She gave him time to settle down, until he wasn’t squawking anymore, and I tuned back in. She held his fingertips in front of his face, one by one, making sure he saw them, then brought them into the kitchen and flung one into the waste can. Another she dropped in the sink for the garbage disposal to grind up and rinse away. She disappeared with the third one. After a toilet flushed, she was back again.

  “Now they’re scattered. Who knows how far apart they’ll end up? Do you see?”

  I had no idea what Gregg was capable of seeing now, while Bianca was only getting started. She opened a window and flipped one of his ears out into the back yard. And teeth—god, she’d bashed out teeth. It was the front door for those, as far as she could fling them.

  “Every direction, scattered. Now do you see?”

  The merciful thing would’ve been for Gregg to not know any more, not feel anymore. But the way he said “No,” a high, sobbing croak ripped from the heart of sorrow, told me he was still very much in the game.

  I’ve been to the toolshed, remember. I know how long these things can go on.

  “We’ll have to get rid of you,” Bianca said. “Maybe I’ll take your head down to Pueblo. Maybe we can take your arms and legs up in the mountains and leave them for the cougars and the bears. The rest of you, maybe I’ll find a nice incinerator somewhere and throw it in and watch for which way the smoke goes.”

  She paused a moment, waiting for some sign of cognizance.

  “You still don’t understand it, do you?”

  Of course he didn’t. He was too busy blubbering.

  “These pieces of you . . . they’ll rot. You’ll rot. You’ll burn. You’ll dissolve in water. You’ll get eaten and digested and part of you will end up as part of the cougar, and the rest it’ll poop out, and that will fertilize something else. Then that will die and rot, and the cougar too, and what used to be you will keep moving on. Nothing gets wasted. It gets broken down smaller and smaller and used again and again . . .

  “Are you starting to see yet?”

  I didn’t know about Gregg, but holy shit, for real—I thought I was starting to.

  “Then someday, in a million years, or a billion, or so far from now there’s not even a number for it . . . in this version of the universe, or in the next one to come, or another one after that . . . these particles that used to be you . . . they’ll end up together again. Against trillions-to-one odds, they’ll find each other again. They probably won’t look like you anymore. They’ll be stirred into something totally different. But down deep inside, something in them will recognize each other and will connect back to before, to now, and they’ll have memories of what they used to be together. They’ll remember being you. Part of them will want to be you again . . . and whatever it is they’ve become, that’s going to make that living being think it’s crazy.”

  She stepped closer and punted Gregg in the face.

  “That’s what an atavist is. That’s my problem.”

  He was reacting about like you’d expect him to by now.

  “This future you, whatever it is, maybe it will remember that kick. And maybe I’ll be there, too . . . something that’s like you then, or something

  completely different. Whatever we are in this other world, maybe we’ll meet, and when that happens, you’ll know this future me. You won’t know why, but you’ll recognize me.”

  Another namaste thing. The archaic form in me recognizes the archaic form in you.

  “There will just be something about me. You won’t understand why, you’ll only know you hate me. Just like I’ll know I hate you. What happens next . . .

  who knows?”

  Bianca pulled a chair away from the dining table and straddled it backwards as she pressed the ice pack to her cheek again, settling down for as long as it took him to finish dying.

  “You go first,” she said.

  Tanner had no idea how long he’d been out. Only minutes, probably, but once he started coming around again, he had no sense of passing time. It wasn’t like sleep. More like anesthesia. There was then, and there was now, and any sense of in-between had been erased.

  Whatever they’d spewed into the air had left him with a headache hacking down through the center of his skull. He was still in his cage, but the rest were empty, all five of them now. If he was the last one left, he couldn’t be the new guy anymore.

  The far end of the prison, that was where they were. Where everybody was.

  Everybody but him. Because he was leverage, a tool kept around to utilize another time.

  And hey, look at that—the iron hatch was wide open.

  He’d never seen the purpose of the thing, not if all it did was open into the front of the basement. It didn’t, from what he could make out . . . even if he couldn’t tell what, exactly, it had opened into. Some smaller chamber, with walls that appeared close and confining, blackened with grime.

  Oh god—don’t let it be a furnace.

  Because Giang, Francesca, the newcomer with disheveled hair and smeary eyes . . . they were lying in it. The view from his cage was of the tops of their heads, their bare shoulders. They’d been stripped. They’d been bound together with nylon rope, all three of them facing inward to one another, nose to nose and chest to chest, then loaded feet-first, like a stack of wood.

  So Jesus god, please not a furnace.

  And he didn’t think it was. The more intently he scrutinized, the more puzzled he became by what its walls were made of. They didn’t look like metal, weren’t straight or squared off. He couldn’t see a back to the chamber. It seemed to go on, extending deeper into darkness, black and uneven, anything but smooth, lumpy here and jagged there, like a throat made of coal.

  Stranger yet, would a furnace emit such cold? With the hatch open, the space beyond seemed to exhale its own air. The temperature in the room must have dropped another fifteen degrees, cold enough for the breath to cloud from his mouth, then drift toward the opening as though suctioned. No furnace he knew of would do that.

  Only the stove in Wade Shavers’ toolshed.

  But here, the pull, the cold, the freezing dread, were magnitudes more powerful.

  Inside the blackened maw, they were coming back to consciousness as well, starting to squirm against each other. One of them had begun to murmur, then gasp and sob, impossible to tell who. Anybody might sound like that in there.

  Tanner found his voice again. He found his feet. He found his place along the bars and banged on them, begging Attila and the others to stop, please stop.

  Yeah, he was cracking. Obviously. Behaving as if they would care what a disposable tool had to say. His third morning here and already he was cracking.

  They’d shed their gas masks by now. The woman, Evvie, stepped up to the mouth of the chamber, something in her hand—bigger than a billiard ball, smaller than a baseball, army-issue olive drab. She pulled the safety pin and let the spring-loaded lever pop free while she reached inside to stuff it into the hollow between the captives’ bound bodies. Attila slammed the hatch shut on

  their screaming and speed-cranked the wheel to lock it, just before a heavy, muffled thump came from behind the iron as the grenade went off, leaving Tanner that much closer to losing his mind.

  Crazier still, the sound of the blast didn’t end. It continued, changing over time, rolling off into an improbable distance as though fed through a pipe, then evolving into a sustained ringing tone. Reverberant, it hovered somewhere between the peal of a bell and the swell of a gong, a sound meant for summoning. The basement floor thrummed with the depths of it. The cage bars quivered in his hands.

  When Attila cranked the hatch open again, the carnage was as horrific as Tanner had expected. Giang, Francesca . . . he hadn’t come to know them well, there hadn’t been time for that, but he’d cared for them as fiercely as if he had.

  Along with the newcomer, they now painted the blast chamber’s ragged walls.

  They dripped from the inside of the iron door. They were pulp and ruin and tangles of shattered ribs.

  As Attila and his cohort stood back watching, soon they began to move again.

  Under their own power . . . ? No, more like the time, in the mountains, when he had seen the carcass of a mule deer jerk and twitch, and only moments later spotted the cougar that was dragging it behind some brush. Like that, with nothing here so prosaic as a scavenger. The sight was as mesmerizing as it was revolting, because he couldn’t conceive of how such a thing could be happening.

  In the lingering smoke, he began to see the cause, the tendrils and filaments that crept forward from deeper inside. They stirred the haze, displaced the haze, became part of the haze. They probed and enveloped, ensnared and encircled and fed. The harder they worked, the redder they turned, and the easier it was to see them, like a circulatory system materializing out of thin air. They drank and digested, and dragged bones back into the darkness. They scoured the chamber’s walls, then ventured out to mop the floor before it and swab the crevices and mechanisms of the hatch.

  He had never witnessed anything that felt more unholy than this.

  As for Attila, for Desmond, for Gregor and Evvie, he could only interpret

  their watchful stillness as reverence.

  It took as long as it took, until the tendrils withdrew, and the chamber looked clean enough to use again with the next victims none the wiser. The door clanged shut, the crank wheel spun, and the bone-hungry cold remained behind.

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21