Chapter 24
WHEN I TURNED TWELVE, I STARTED GROWING LIKE A weed. At least, that’s what my mom said. My knees ached in the night, and I suddenly needed twice as much food—and twice as much blood. A weed isn’t a nice thing to have in your garden.
She was working at a convenience store, getting paid under the table, and they cut her hours out of nowhere, and when she got home, there I was, spitting feral teenage energy and eating everything in sight. Of course she lost her patience.
She stayed up all night tallying what she’d spent on me that year alone.
Food, clothes, school supplies, gas. It was only April, but already my debt was unimaginable.
She stuck it to the bathroom door so I’d see it every day, so I’d watch that number grow.
I’d face it in the mornings and imagine what I’d owe by the time I turned eighteen.
By the time I died. An unceasing mounting of cost, a quantitative measure of the thing I already knew could never be paid off.
I tried to use the bathroom at school when I could, to avoid seeing it.
I tried to eat less, to need less, to be less.
I didn’t like that school. The kids made fun of me for my clothes and for my silence.
When the bullying got real bad, they called my mom in for a meeting with some of the other parents.
I sat in the hall outside, alone. All the other kids had after-school activities, sports or drama club or friends’ houses to go to.
So when my mom tore into those other parents like she was tempted to let go of the chain soldered to her heart, I was the only one who heard it.
“My daughter,” she spat, and it must have been a shout because her words were fierce and clear while the others’ responses were unintelligible, “is worth more than every other child in this school combined. I’ve sacrificed everything for her.
Do you even know what sacrifice is? Do you really want to bring this fight to me?
Do you really want to find out how hard I will come for you? ”
Alone in the hall, I realized something. The same debt that loomed over me, that threatened to topple over and crush me, was also proof that my mom loved me. That she would give so much for me, that was something precious. That was a gift other children lived without and would never understand.
The next morning, there was no tally sheet on the bathroom door. We never talked about it again, but I remembered. Both things: the debt and its secret meaning.
I stay perched behind the truck stop, cinder blocks digging into my tailbone, and wait. Hunger rattles my soft palate. The 18-wheelers never seem to park outside the safety of the gas pumps and their CCTV.
Twenty minutes. Thirty. My phone’s dying. Time’s ticking.
Headlights cut through the early-morning emptiness.
It’s a truck, the same model as Uncle Bill’s but silver instead of black.
Maybe that’s a sign. The driver’s a younger guy, shaved head under a baseball cap and a T-shirt with angel wings on the shoulders.
He’s close enough to call out to. My throat feels like it’s filled with gravel.
Come on, say something. Get him over here.
Say my engine’s dead, that’ll get him to move his car out of the way of the security cameras. And then—
All my joints shudder. My mind’s suddenly plastered with an image of Veer, jacket stripped off to reveal her folded-in shoulders, bending over my car. Red in one hand, black in the other.
I can’t force words through the rockslide in my throat, but I jerk my hand up in an impression of a wave. His attention twitches toward me at the same moment that my phone buzzes. A long, insistent purr, like it’s got something special to tell me.
I glance down. It’s a Reddit notification.
I forget the guy and snatch up my phone. Deep breath. Maybe they don’t know anything. Maybe they’ve only written back to tell me to fuck off.
Hey, it reads. I can’t find the documentation anymore but I think it was a couple miles up Alamo Road or maybe Mormon Well, past the Corn Creek visitor center but before you fully get into the mountains. If you’re not local, I can drive out and take some pics?
Relief soaks through the rocks in my mouth. That’s only a few miles away.
A second message blinks. Are you okay? Why is it urgent?
It’s urgent because the sky is already threatening to fade from blue black to watery yellow. It’s urgent because my veins are howling and I can either feed myself or find my mom before the sun comes up and the flayed man disappears into the crevices of the desert. There isn’t time for both.
Unless.
The convenience store doors cough out the guy in the angel wings T-shirt, Monster energy can in hand.
“Hey,” he calls, and for a second I don’t realize he’s speaking to me. He’s got dark-brown eyes and a friendly smile, like no one’s ever hurt him. “You good?”
I could do it right now. Bite down on his neck and make myself whole again. The sharp-toothed beast in my heart licks its lips. The bones of my face cry out for bloodshed.
Come on, Ellis. Do it.
His eyes aren’t even the same color as hers.
He’s got thick, dark lashes, but the irises are muted and muddy and near black.
Not the same, not brown like well-watered soil, like tea steeped so long it’s perfectly bitter.
His teeth are overly straight, the front four bright white and the rest ivory yellow.
He smells like Irish Spring and eye drops. He’s nothing like her.
And still. I can’t.
A long second passes. The air smells like gas fumes and saliva.
Every breath roils my stomach. All I can move is my eyes, and he must see something in them that looks like an answer because he shrugs and gets back in his car and drives away, and I only regain control over my limbs once they’re crawling with the acidic sting of shame.
My curse growls its contempt against my rib cage.
It doesn’t matter. I don’t matter. Every failure, every weakness, is meaningless, as long as I reach my mom in time. I’m strong enough to keep control of my hunger. I’ll force myself to be strong enough.
I pull my car around and fill up the gas tank.
Last thing we need is to run out of gas halfway to Arizona.
The little screen on the gas pump flares to life, and a perky woman in a blazer blurts out a warning about hiking safety.
Don’t forget to bring plenty of water! The gas fumes make my eyes sting.
They taste like olive pits and hopelessness.
Always tell a trusted friend or loved one where you’re going!
The nozzle clicks, and the screen fades to grainy news reruns. Beloved Italian restaurant closing its doors after two decades. Golden Knights beat the Kings in their first preseason match. Chaney’s ex-boyfriend loved hockey. Preseason’s in the fall, isn’t it? How old are these headlines?
Doesn’t matter. The pump spits out a flimsy receipt, and I ball it up and look for the trash. Woman found dead in her apartment, shot by boyfriend. Search continues for San Diego man whose car was found off-road near Sheep Peak.
My hand shudders, and the balled-up receipt bounces off the plastic lip of the trash can.
Sheep Peak. That’s near Corn Creek, right? I double-check on the map. If you drove past the visitor’s center and headed north, off-road, you’d end up somewhere near the base of Sheep Peak.
San Diego man. Off-road. This time, my search turns something up.
Raul Vargas, runner and IT guy in his thirties, up from San Diego on a road trip.
Last seen at a gas station buying Red Bull and uncooked bacon.
Cashier said he was acting erratic. They found his Subaru in the middle of the Desert National Wildlife Refuge, windows busted, a note written on the inside of the windshield in blood: Gone hunting.
Raul Vargas. RV.
Highway 95 is wide open. I shove the gas pedal down as far as it goes and try to ignore the pounding in my sinuses. The Joshua trees leer as I speed past.
I’ve known hunger all my life, but as the GPS counts down minutes and I lock stiff lips over my lengthening canines, I realize this is unknown territory.
I’ve passed the point where I’ve always caught myself before, where I’ve always fed.
I don’t know what comes next, only that I have to keep myself from finding out before I reach my mom.
I don’t need to ask my curse’s help to scent the flayed man anymore.
My hunger is so close to the surface our senses are melding.
A vibrating ache spreads down my neck, seeps the length of my arms. A series of pops as my wrists begin to shift.
The car veers toward the shoulder. Bite tongue, taste blood.
My own, like ashes. Control it. Feeling springs back into my hands, and I jerk the wheel.
Gas pedal. Speedometer spikes. The horizon’s the color of an orange cream popsicle. I remember the sugar taste of Veer’s wounds. I weave around an oil tanker, jolt past a Prius.
Corn Creek, three miles away. Two. Next exit. My teeth jut over my lip, and for a second my vision goes white.
Control it. I’m so close.
Past the visitor’s center. A sign says five miles per hour. There’s a buzzing in my ears. Is my phone ringing, or is it only hunger snarling its demands through my eardrums?
It doesn’t matter. It hurts to take my eyes off the cracks in the windshield and the faded brown expanse beyond it.
I follow the flayed man’s scent onto a dirt road, wheels throwing up a spray of dust and gravel.
Keep going. My knees shudder, my ankles beg to come apart.
Keeping my foot pressed down on the gas pedal is agony.
When the road craters into piles of rock and withered scrub, I park the car and jump out. The canyon walls look like opening jaws, and the impact of the ground under my feet almost brings me to my knees.
Something pops inside me. Broken rib. It hurts, it must hurt, but it’s hard to tell when all my bones are screaming. I shove my arm between my teeth and bite down. Skin breaks. My curse howls.
Maybe I can catch a rabbit. A snake. Anything I can drain of its blood, anything to keep me contained. But this is the desert, there’s nothing here I can outsmart or outrun, and if I let go, I will turn inside out and lose myself and not know how to get back.
I take a step. My ankle rolls on gravel. I try to remember my name. My mom. Focus on that. He took my mom. The smell is so strong now. He’s nearby. They both are.
I double over as another rib snaps. My phone buzzes in my pocket.
I can’t reach for it. My wrists shatter in slow motion, lacerations snaking up my arms, daring my elbows to join them.
Cartilage warps in anticipation. I’ve made a mistake.
I’ve made such a mistake. Soon the animal in me will punch through my chest, and I will not be able to save my mom, and I will not be able to save myself.
High above, a hawk shrieks. I smell motor oil and dust-slick metal on the wind. A plume of dust from the direction of the road, heading this way. A way out.
I’ll flag them down. I’ll bury my jaws in the driver’s throat.
My cracked ribs shriek as I lift my arms above my head. Blood from my lacerated ankles pools in my sneakers. My elbows shift and snap, and wetness—sweat? blood? synovial fluid?—whirls around me like snowflakes as I wave.
The parched ground laps up my collapsing body, and the car rumbles to a stop.
A dented silver Camry.
“Ellis?” She smells like singed cotton and the sugar stickiness of a spilled energy drink.
“I’m sorry if you don’t want to see me, but I heard something happened at work and you weren’t picking up my calls and I checked the location and you were out here and I just wanted to make sure you were okay and… ”
I’m going to be sick. I grasp for the chain, but my fingers have curled into claws and there’s no purchase on the iron.
The car door slams. My throat closes. The blood coursing under her skin smells like eggs from the late-night diner, like burnt rubber and desperation. It smells like home.
I’m so, so hungry.
“Don’t—” I try to say, but the words catch on my warped incisors. I struggle again for purchase. Pull back. Ten seconds, even, just enough to get her back in the car with a plate of metal between us. Pull, Ellis. Pull. But my name has no meaning when I’m only instinct.
Veer freezes in place, halfway between me and the car. In a half second of lucidity, I see the terror on her face. I don’t look like myself. I’m cracking open. I lunge forward, double over, and she jerks away.
Another rib pops. My sternum sighs and splinters. The beast in my rib cage barrels toward freedom.
Veer backs up. “Oh my god,” I think she says. Words don’t mean much anymore. I’m on all fours, shoulders sliding like tectonic plates to spread open my chest. The air goes charred as Veer’s engine turns over.
The flayed man’s scent overwhelms me. Quartz fragments and creosote and days-old carrion. The stink of decay, of the desert’s harsh corrosion, of rotten flesh and empty canyons, the sharp snap of a hawk’s claws.
Then yellow light.
It feels like it’s coming from inside me, bubbling up from the base of my throat, exploding out of my eyes to blind me. The brown-gray-blue of the world is replaced with a flat screen of dazzling yellow. My curse lunges forward, whining as if its legs are being piloted against its will.
Dust in the air. Veer driving away. I blink again, and the road is filled with blood.
The Camry’s wheels churn uselessly, and without warning it swerves to the left, off-road, and stops with an ear-splitting crunch.
I want to scream. It comes out a howl. I see a canyon before a flash flood, rocks cast pyre red with excitement, chalk white with anticipation.
The flayed man paints one final message across my mind as I turn to face him.
Give up.