Chapter 15
We left the RV camp the following morning, turned out onto a featureless highway that stretched through the deserts of rural Nevada.
Our first kill of that day occurred at a small and dumpy nursing home in the suburb of some bigger city that I don’t remember the name of.
All of us girls spilled into the nursing home, splitting off into various wings to do Death’s work.
“Won’t it look suspicious that so many people die at once?” I asked Iona in a whisper, edging around a nurse pushing a patient down the hall in a wheelchair with squeaky hinges.
“It’s not uncommon.” Iona kept a brisk pace.
“It often happens like that in places like this. People die in twos and threes. At least, that’s what my mom told me.
She was a receptionist at a nursing home.
When residents died one after the other, she’d say the angel of death had visited on her shift.
If she only knew just how right she was. ”
The rest was a blur, us moving through the various wings of the nursing home, Iona killing as we went, me watching on, awed by her poise. It was as if nothing—not the grief or the pain nor the horror of death—could touch her at all.
It went on like that, death after death, as we edged closer to the deadline in Las Vegas.
We spent a week descending on a series of rural towns in the desert, visiting hospitals and hospices—or houses, for the victims that were lucky enough to die in their homes.
I learned, in those grim days on the road, that each of the girls had their own signature.
Skye liked to pretend that the deaths weren’t happening.
Her demeanor was so disarmingly casual that none of her marks seemed to know they were dying until their hearts stopped in their chests.
Iona’s targets leaned religious. She seemed to meet them at the crossroads of their faith and whatever it was that she believed in. Sometimes she prayed with the people whose lives she took, an easy recitation of Catholic last rites. Once or twice, she’d sung a hymn.
As for Shiloh, I didn’t know much about the way she killed. In fact, I’d never seen her kill before. I knew, though, that she often disappeared into the night to meet with Death or else carry out his business. All those poor people who died in the dark.
Chloe was irreverent and lighthearted, which worked well for those who shared her dark sense of humor, like the man with the broken back we found lying in the gutter after being struck by a car in the darkness while walking along the side of the road, drunk.
“Ain’t life a bitch,” Chloe had said to him, clucking her tongue.
She was good—eerily good—at staying stoic, even during the hardest dispatches (the cancer kids and the stillborn babies lying blue in their plastic hospital bassinets).
I’d never once seen her clear green eyes so much as mist up.
They didn’t then, as she stared down at the dying man, his spine snapped, gasping for air on the side of the road.
The dying man smiled at her, which seemed like a small feat in itself. An act of defiance, to grin in the face of death herself. “You know, when my mom said I was gonna end up dead in a ditch if I didn’t stop fucking around and start studying…I imagined it going differently.”
Chloe had smiled back, and she put a hand to the man’s chest. “Sorry to prove her right.”
He died then, and later that same night, I’d caught her scratching his name into the little diary she wrote in every night before bed. A death diary, filled with the names of everyone whose life she’d taken.
“Why do you do that?” I’d asked her one night, watching her add another name to her list. It was long, several dozen strong.
“I want to remember them; why else?” She chewed on the end of her pen for a moment, then scribbled down another name, a cashier she’d struck down with a heart attack when she’d handed over the cash for our groceries.
“But doesn’t it make the guilt worse?”
Chloe had looked at me then, some anger in her eyes. “Guilt is part of the bargain we made. We take lives every day; the least we can do is sit with that.”
The next day, I had started a journal of my own.
Stewart Gavin.
Jasmine Wu.
Then I added the RV woman, Elizabeth Paulson. I recalled her name from the sticker on the pill bottle.
I stared down at my short list of dispatches, feeling shame and something worse…
the gut feeling that three wasn’t enough.
I’d need more to appease Death and, in doing so, find out what happened to Adeline.
I would have to find my footing, a way of killing as efficiently as the others did, with that special flair that made the work seem almost easy.
Close to art, even, as if death could be something beautiful.
I wanted to be like Naomi, who was gentle and mothering, good with the children, which was probably why Shiloh assigned most of them to her.
She took her time when it came to dispatches, answering questions, quieting concerns, never rushing things along, always making the moments at the end of a life feel somehow sacred.
In contrast, Riley preferred to make things quick.
So quick, in fact, that most of the people she killed didn’t know that they were dying at all.
Most of the time, she never said a word to her victims, never even made eye contact with them.
At a gas station off the highway—where we stopped one evening, cobbling together a dinner of bagged chips and beef jerky—I watched Riley brush her fingers along the nape of a man’s neck a moment before he succumbed to a massive stroke.
He dropped so hard and fast he didn’t have a chance to catch himself, clipping his nose on the curb between the sidewalk and parking lot.
Blood spattered the asphalt, and the man thrashed and struggled, but Riley kept on walking.
“It’s for the best,” she said, tearing open a bag of Doritos. She’d caught me staring, both aghast at her callousness and impressed by it. “They don’t have the chance to worry about anything if you do it fast. Trust me, it’s a good death. It’s what I’d want for myself. That’s all I can give them.”
—
One week from Death’s deadline, I killed entirely on my own for the first time.
Without Shiloh or Naomi there to talk me through it.
It was a bright and early morning, but the rush hour traffic was thick.
After just a few minutes on the road, the caravan crawled to a complete standstill.
I smelled the accident before I saw it, burnt rubber and gasoline.
And then, above the roofs of cars, in the narrow glimpses between gridlocked semis, a rising plume of black smoke.
I knew, on instinct, that there was a life to claim among the wreckage.
One of the cell phones rang. Riley answered, then handed it back to me. “It’s for you.”
I pressed the phone to my ear. Shiloh’s voice came clear over the line: “This one’s yours.”
I froze.
“You’re ready,” said Shiloh, as if she could see me.
Out the window of the RV, I watched as her truck turned left, into the lane along the shoulder of the road.
Riley followed suit, slotting the RV into a break in traffic, a risky maneuver that could’ve resulted in a car wreck of our own.
Iona trailed behind in the station wagon, cutting in front of a large oil tanker in pursuit of the wreck.
I caught a glimpse of her through the windshield, her face a mask of pain, fingers twisting tight around the steering wheel.
I wondered if she was reliving the crash that had very nearly claimed her own life, would have if Death hadn’t intervened.
The wreck was a bad one. A small red car—mangled like a Coke can someone had stomped on—stood burning in the middle of the road a few yards from the semi that struck it.
Large columns of smoke erupted from the car’s hood and blackened the air.
There was someone inside the car, legs pinned down by the crushed hood, face half-obscured by the smoke. Unmoving.
Riley met my gaze in the rearview mirror, a dare in her eyes. “Well? What are you waiting for?”
I stood up, made for the door of the RV, and stepped out onto the highway. There were the faint screams of distant sirens. I walked toward the burning wreck even as the smoke charred my throat and made my eyes water.
I knew that the person in the car was going to die. The fire was spreading too fast, and the hood of the car was thoroughly crushed, pinning them to their seat, so they’d have to cut themselves free of their own legs to escape.
I leaned down to look into the shattered window. The smoke was so thick I could barely see the bleeding man in the driver’s seat. His eyes were swollen, almost shut, and there was a horrible gash along his forehead. He looked very afraid.
“It hurts,” he said.
“I know. I’ll make it better.” I leaned closer. The flames rippled from the crushed hood of the car, close enough to burn me, but I didn’t feel any heat. Death was making good on his promise to protect me. “What’s your name?”
“Corbin.” He cut it through gritted teeth as the flames chewed their way toward him. “I want my mom.”
I had been told by the other girls that this was a common response. Some people had the luxury of seeing their relatives in the moments before their death, but most simply asked for them, reverting back to a purer time when we still believed our parents could save us from anything.
But Corbin would not be saved by his mother or by anyone else, except for perhaps me. Though I knew the kind of saving I was here to do was not the saving that he wanted.