Chapter 23
Cicadas fill the night with a constant, reverberating buzz.
They land on my skin and tangle in my hair. The white bones sticking up like headstones in the cemetery of Ellis’s chest are covered with them. I’d draw this scene with black ink. Hatch marks for shading. Negative space. Red pen for the cicadas, I think.
The forest rustles just beyond the tree line.
Ripley steps onto the road. Her tail is up, her head low between her shoulders, and her ears back. There’s a tension to her body—a question to her stance—like she can’t figure out whether to bare her teeth or run. She looks at me and I look at her.
“Ripley? Here.”
Her ears twitch out of sync. First one and then the other, like she’s trying to figure out where the sound she just heard came from. A beat. Another. And then she shakes off the tension and trots over to me.
She puts her paws on my thighs and sticks her nose in my ear.
Every inch of her coat is drenched in god’s blood.
That’s what did this. It has to be. It made a rotting coyote chase me, a dead raccoon wink, and fixed the mangled hole punched through my gut.
Repairing some internal damage from getting hit by a car doesn’t seem so wild in comparison.
I pull her close and let myself be happy she’s alive, even if she’s not as warm as she used to be.
Headlights wash over us. They make a shadowed mountain of the body splayed out on the road.
My vision blazes white and spotty. The car stops and sits with the engine running.
The headlights make it impossible to see who’s inside.
The occupant’s heart isn’t quite the rabbit beat of Ellis’s. It’s not slow either.
The driver doesn’t budge when I get to the passenger side and peer through the window at her silhouette.
Without looking at me, Emma unlocks the car.
Ripley jumps in and settles herself in the back seat when I open the passenger-side door.
It closes with a soft whumpf. Can’t hear the cicadas in here.
Can’t hear the forest or taste the muggy heat of the night.
It’s just me, Emma, Ripley, the smell of Emma’s fear, and the sound of her handcuffs clinking around her shaking hands.
Emma grips the steering wheel. Her knuckles are white. Would her flesh be bloodless if I bit it now? I don’t want to find out. I won’t let myself find out.
Next to me, Emma opens her mouth, closes it. She looks at me with wide, manic eyes, then turns to stare out of the windshield again.
“I’d write Ellis my resignation. But I ate him.”
Her laugh comes out wet and frantic. She puts her face into her hands and rests her forehead on the steering wheel.
“Sorry for dragging you into this.”
“Yeah. Thanks. Hey, quick question. Wasn’t Ripley pretty much dead last time I saw her?”
Ripley pops up in the back seat at the sound of her name, panting softly and tongue lolling. We both stare at her in the rearview mirror.
I shrug. I might not know what happened, but I know she’s my dog.
The satisfaction of consuming Ellis is starting to fade. He’s disintegrating inside of me, becoming part of my flesh, my bones, the collagen in my nails. I want more. I want as much as I can possibly get. I want to eat and be full.
“I’m hungry.”
“Well.” Emma breathes in deep, then lets it out slow. She puts the car into drive. “Let’s find you something to eat.”