Chapter 23
I WRENCH MYSELF UPRIGHT. MY TEETH AND HANDS ARE human again by the time I slam through the revolving door.
I sprint through the parking lot, away from the shouting and the blare of the PA, and if people turn to watch as I pass, I don’t have time to look back.
I’m gasping for breath when I reach my car.
I twist the key so hard my finger bones shiver and I drive and drive and drive until the highway clears out and a sliver of space opens up in my thoughts.
Keep driving north, toward Corn Creek, toward the mountains. Toward the flayed man. This can’t all be for nothing.
Blood on my hands has transferred to the steering wheel, and I wipe it off with the hem of my shirt.
I try to burn the memory of the cop’s limp form into my mind, try to make myself feel something.
I should mourn for that man. I should mourn for Joanne.
But I can’t even mourn for myself. I’m an infection inside my own body, a bulbous growth displacing the natural order of my organs.
All I can do is keep driving and promise myself that at the end, it’ll mean something.
Mile markers flash by, white paint leering through their coatings of dust. Do I risk loosing my curse again to see if I can wrestle more direction from it before my hunger takes over?
That mouthful of the cop’s blood bought me a little more time, but only a little.
I can’t lose control. My head is so heavy.
I haven’t slept since when exactly? Yesterday morning? That seems hard to believe.
My mom and I once slept curled in the back seat of her car, driving through the heart of Oklahoma, the corn stretching flat and green as far as we could see.
It shivered at night, the dry rustle of stalk against stalk like a lullaby as my mom twined her arms around me and promised that things would get better.
She wore that sweatshirt, a gas station souvenir, and the pink glitter on the letters scraped the backs of my arms in my sleep.
“Soon, baby,” I hear in her voice. “So soon. I promise. You trust me, don’t you?”
But now she’s gone, and I’m old enough to know that things never get better. Not for us.
Hunger digs its claws into my gums. I bite down, try to stifle it. Try, too, to stifle the grief that clings to me like a shadow, like a coat I can’t take off.
I want to go home. But I can’t, never again, not after what happened at the hospital.
Someone almost certainly got a video of it, and if they didn’t, there’s always CCTV and the surviving cop’s testimony.
They’ve probably stormed our apartment by now and found the wreckage that the flayed man left when he took my mom.
I press my palm to the car window, let the night cold leach the sweat out of it.
I hated leaving Colorado too. I fought it, as much as you can when you’re fifteen and all twisted up inside.
Some moms would have said something kind, about how home is with the people you love, not confined to our one-bedroom in Colorado Springs any more than the countless apartments and hotel rooms before it.
That cheesy bullshit would have made me feel better, even if I couldn’t admit it was what I wanted.
“Las Vegas was built in the middle of the desert,” she’d said instead, elbow deep in dirty dishes.
“The whole city, it’s a mirage, baby. It’s not supposed to exist, just like us.
You’ll see when we get there. A shiny city in the middle of the dustiest bowl of nothing, and it fights tooth and nail every day to stay that way.
Just like us.” She finished rinsing, set the mug down on the counter.
“It’ll be better, once we get there. My brother will take care of us. ”
Sixteen years is a long time to stay anywhere. Maybe what those years taught me is that home is a casino cashier desk where care is changed for obligation, but the exchange rate’s steady and there’s no threat of a robbery. Maybe that’s as good as it gets.
My joints groan. I dig my knuckles into the scratchy fabric of the seat.
If I don’t feed soon, there’s a serious chance that I’ll find my mom only to lose control of my body.
If I can’t stay human, I’ll burn in the daylight, no different from the flayed man.
But there’s nowhere else to steal from. I don’t know the layout of any of the other hospitals, don’t have access to Uncle Bill’s work or another lab.
The only option left is the oldest way, the hardest and worst way: violence.
What happened at the hospital shattered something in me, a glow stick deep in my skull that’s cracked now, leaking poison fluid. I don’t want to find out what killing would do to me.
But it’s the smart choice. The safe choice.
When someone’s dead, they can’t call the news or post on social media about the nightmare creature they saw with its bones on the wrong side of its skin.
And I’ll be alive. Isn’t that what matters?
If anything, the man I left behind at the hospital was worse, because I left him for dead and his blood with him.
I can still taste it in the cracks of my lips.
I suck on my fingernails, one by one, like there might be some still left in the crevices of my body.
The desert smells like desperation. Or maybe that’s me.
When I pull into a truck stop for a bathroom break, I think of the woman’s terrified expression back at the hospital, and blink back tears. I miss my mom. She knows the worst parts of me, my ingratitude and selfishness, but she would never be horrified by this.
Her sweatshirt, hood pushed forward and sleeves pulled long over my balled fists, hides most of the blood still left on my shirt and skin.
I wash my face in the sickly flickering light of the mirrorless bathroom and buy a radioactive-looking Slurpee to soothe my aching gums. The sugar leaves a coating like rotten fruit on my tongue.
I move my car around the back of the truck stop, out of the way of the CCTV over the entrance.
Then I perch on a pile of concrete blocks that form a half-hearted barrier between the asphalt and the desert and start counting security cameras.
It’s the right choice. I repeat it until it tastes like a prayer. It’s the right choice. And it is, I know it is, I just don’t want to have to make it.
But I owe it to my mom to do whatever it takes. So I survey the highway as hunger sharpens my teeth. Waiting for someone alone or distracted or tired or high or drunk, someone who I can lure in close and catch off guard.
All the worst things I could imagine have already happened. What’s one more?