Authors: Kelly Braffet
Layla’s sister. He saw the way the shotgun trembled and the panic in her eyes, and knew that she was not the danger here. What had he done, Patrick thought miserably; what had he gotten them into? He wanted the others to be somewhere else. He wanted Caro to be somewhere else, somewhere safe; away from Layla’s terrified little sister, away from the psycho, away from him.
“Shut up, Mike,” he said.
“Verna,” the psycho said. In his voice Patrick heard warning, encouragement, and command, and understood that it didn’t really matter what he wanted. The girl had the gun but the psycho had the girl. If he made her pull the trigger, Patrick would die. The long hellish night after Ryan Czerpak died would become a moment’s mention on the local news and the moonlit night with Caro, the morning patch of sun—those things would become nothing, they would vanish as if they had never been. The girl had the gun and the psycho had the girl and there were no more decisions to make, no more choices, no more betrayals. His life was no longer under his control, and Patrick had felt that way for years but now that it was true—absolutely, irrevocably true—he understood how wrong he had been, and how much time he had wasted.
“Verna,” the psycho said again.
· · ·
Verna thought desperately of her parents. Home right now, probably. Waiting by the phone. Drinking herbal tea. Maybe some of the people from Worship Group would be there, supporting them in their time of need, waiting for news of their wayward daughters. If Justinian was telling the truth, unlikely as that seemed—if she could do this and get in the car and leave, they would continue to drink tea and pray through the night and into the next morning, when somebody would say,
Oh, Michelle, you look exhausted. You have to sleep
.
If Justinian was not telling the truth, everyone in the house would be dead by the time the sun came up.
What had she done, she thought, miserably. How had she come to this place?
Even if Justinian was telling the truth. Even if killing this man meant that her parents could live, did that make it okay? She knew what was happening at her house because she had seen it happen at the Czerpaks’ after Ryan died, when her father had spent all night with Danny and Rachel while this man had—what? Watched television? Drank beer? He was not a good person. Her parents were. Her parents tried to help people. They tried to make the world better.
But the man in the candy-striped shirt didn’t look like a bad person. He looked like a scared person, like an unhappy person. He was sweating and his eyes darted back and forth between Justinian and the woman next to him (who looked awful, too, now that Verna noticed) and finally to Verna herself.
There was something intelligent in the set of his face. He would have been good-looking had he not been so thin.
“I know who you are,” he said to her. “I know your sister. Don’t do this.”
When Patrick spoke the psycho looked at him with utter contempt, and Patrick realized that in the psycho’s world, he, Mike, and Caro
weren’t even real. They were less than nothing. The bad skin, the stupid hair, the cold eyes: how empty you would have to be, how desperate, to take this guy’s act seriously, to let him do the things he’d done.
“You don’t understand,” the girl said, in a voice Patrick could barely hear. But the gun barrel wavered.
The psycho moved closer to her. “Verna. Consider our discussion.”
Her mouth was quivering, her eyes full of tears. She hesitated a moment more.
Then she raised the gun again.
If Patrick was going to die like this—wearing his Zoney’s shirt, listening to the Eagles, all of his life and his mother’s life and the old man’s life and every crushed beer can and every slam of the screen door and every smell of smoky coconut and hair conditioner and butter and brine reduced down to a nameless convenience store death immortalized in grainy black-and-white security footage—if this was how he was going to go, he’d be damned if this trembling overwhelmed girl was the last thing he saw. If he was going to die, he was going to die looking at Caro. Burning every detail of her into his brain: her eyes, her chin, the slump of her shoulders; her glorious hair, her messed-up heart.
Her eyes met his.
The door jingled again.
“No,” Layla said. Her face was pink and blotched and streaked with black and she would not look at Patrick. She lifted her hands to the psycho’s face, turned his head toward her. “Don’t make her do this. She can’t do it. Let me do it. I’m the one. I have to.”
Her tone was unlike Patrick had ever heard it. The closest was the last time he’d seen her, in his bedroom, when she’d pled for help, but this went beyond pleading. This was begging. Her hands stroked the psycho’s sallow cheeks, his hair, his chest, and Patrick saw that, incredibly, she still loved this asshole.
She’d never had a chance. He wished he’d been nicer to her.
He turned back to Caro.
· · ·
Hope flared like a candle in Verna—if anyone could sway Justinian, it was Layla—but the flame died as soon as it was born. Because Justinian’s face as he gazed down at her sister was sad and disappointed, and that was all. “You had your chance.” He sounded genuinely aggrieved. “Layla, Layla. You should have stayed in the car.”
“I couldn’t stay in the car,” Layla said. “She’s my sister.”
“And now she has to kill all three of them,” he said, sadly.
Verna’s heart seemed to stop beating, and the world blurred at the edges. Justinian’s face remained clear. Dumbfounded as she was, somehow she managed to speak. “But you said—”
She’d turned, almost without realizing it, and now the gun was pointed at him. He put his hands up, as if to try to placate her, but Verna saw his eyes flick upward, toward the security camera.
Again, sudden clarity.
Justinian knew where the security cameras were. He knew how it would look, Verna turning the gun on him, him raising his hands—the gentle rebuke in his expression wouldn’t show on film, probably, and he knew that, too. Until Layla came through the door he had said nothing but her name, and
consider our discussion
, which could have meant anything at all. This was a show. Verna killing somebody on camera, sure. Witnesses to Verna killing somebody, sure. Witnesses to the fact that he was making her kill somebody, no. Justinian was telling the world a story, and the story was that Verna had killed everyone on her own. And once she did, his control over her would be complete and permanent. He would always be able to say that she was the one who’d killed those people, not him; that she was a murderer, and her only hope was to let him protect her. She could even hear him saying
You wanted to do it. If you hadn’t wanted to do it, you wouldn’t have done it
.
He would say it over and over, and there would be nobody to tell her differently. And after a while, she would begin to believe it.
Mike bolted. He grabbed Caro’s arm and pulled her down the household goods aisle, toward the emergency exit. Patrick heard the bang of the panic bar and the creak of the hinges, and then they were gone and it was about damn time. If their places had been reversed, if it had been Mike staring down the barrel of the shotgun, he would have—he would have—he didn’t know. He wouldn’t have known he’d call the cops on the old man, either, or sleep with his brother’s girlfriend. You didn’t know how you were going to act until you had to act, not really, and Mike had done the right thing.
For an instant, Patrick thought he would go after them. But—Layla.
He would not have been able to predict that, either.
If Verna killed the man, Justinian said he’d let her parents live, but she doubted it. Just like he could make them drink each other’s blood, just like he could make them handcuff her to a radiator, he could make them kill people, even people they loved. He could make them do anything. She knew that it would never be enough, that they could never give enough or suffer enough to satisfy him. There would always be more he could do to them, and he would. Over and over, he would.
Layla looked at her and Verna saw the same realization reflected in her sister’s sandblasted eyes. The gun in her arms was heavy, her muscles burned. She remembered being in the car, her hands cuffed in front of her, thinking that if she were only at the window, she would do anything to escape from this, she would do anything to be free.
“Do it, Verna,” Justinian said. “There’s no going back. Kill him and this will all be over.”
The other two people were gone, she didn’t know where. Why didn’t the man run, too, she thought; why didn’t he go after them? Justinian’s eyes were fixed on her, not the man she was supposed to
kill, not the people who had escaped. They didn’t really matter. It was her that he wanted.
She thought of Ryan Czerpak. She thought of her parents, her teachers, Kyle Dobrowski, Calleigh Brinker; Mr. Guarda, Mr. Chionchio, Mrs. Bergman and Ms. Kiser and Mr. Serhienko. Everyone she had ever known, everyone her eyes had ever seen. She thought of Jared. She thought of her sister.
To kill was to be doomed. To kill was to die, yourself.
She lifted the gun. She had never fired one before but Justinian had implied that it would hit whatever unfortunate thing lay in front of it, so she pointed it at his face. Right between those Siamese eyes.
Behind him, Layla’s face contorted in despair. “Vee, no.”
His eyes widened, but his expression was more curious than afraid. “Do you really think you can, Verna?” he said, softly.
“I can try,” she said.
But before she could, Layla dropped to her knees, scrabbled on the floor behind him, and came up holding a baseball bat. A baseball bat? Verna thought, dimly perplexed, and then Layla screamed—a wild, almost inhuman sound—and brought the bat down on the back of Justinian’s head.
He collapsed forward, into Verna. The gun fell to the floor with a clang but the dead weight of his body knocked her to the floor, trapping her beneath him. The smell of him, of blood, was thick in her nostrils, his rangy heron’s body against hers, his coat entangling her like a web. Her boots slid on the floor and something warm fell on her face as she fought and clawed and scrambled. Away, out from under him.
Layla was still screaming. Now, she was screaming his name.
The psycho was still. Clear fluid leaked from his ears. There was blood on the bat that Layla had dropped and more spreading in a
puddle on the floor. Inexplicably Layla had thrown herself across his motionless body, wailing. Her sister’s eyes were blank in her blood-splattered face, her feet and hands slipping in the growing slick as she tried to crawl toward the candy aisle.
Patrick ran to Layla, put his hands on her shoulders, meaning at least to pull her away from the thing on the floor—but then the door opened again with the same surreal jingle and now it was two more people he’d never seen, a bald-headed boy and a chunky girl with blue hair. The bald-headed boy’s face blasted insane fury at Layla, still crouched sobbing over the psycho’s body. “You fucking
bitch
! What did you do? What did you
do
?”
He, too, had a shotgun. Patrick just had time to feel weary, to wonder why these teenagers were so well-armed, and then the boy pointed the gun at Layla. A bubble of saliva swelled and popped between his lips.
The blue-haired girl jumped on his arm. “Eric! Stop!”
The bald boy pushed her away hard, so that she fell back out of the door. He was howling like Rambo, like this was a movie. He aimed the gun at Layla and this time he fired.
Patrick felt a scattering of searing pains on his arm and Layla fell against him. He tried to catch her. Her sister screamed but Patrick didn’t see what happened to her because just then the gun fired again.
Somebody doused the left side of his body in boiling water. He was looking at the kickplate of the coffee bar, dirty and scuffed. Something cold and hard was against his cheek. A pink stirrer lay on the floor a few inches from his nose. The cold hard thing was the floor. Somebody shouted his name, it sounded like Caro but he knew it couldn’t be because Caro was gone, and he just had time to wish that it was her, anyway, before his vision went white and silence—
FIFTEEN
He was working again, finally. Landscaping. Who knew what he’d do come winter, but for the time being at least he was earning money. He could drive a ride-on mower or use a weed whacker even with a sluggish arm that didn’t always do what he told it to do, and the other stuff—hedge trimming, and so on—was getting a little easier, when his bosses let him do it. Which he asked for, sometimes; he couldn’t afford the kind of physical therapy he was supposed to be getting, and he figured working a pair of hedge clippers was as good as anything. The supervisors felt sorry for him and usually let him try, but they never liked it. Exposed them to all sorts of liability. He’d noticed that the other workers tended to clear out when he picked up a pair of clippers, find things to do in other parts of the site. He didn’t blame them.
His left shoulder, collarbone, and upper arm were mostly held together by metal. In the heat of midday it felt like he was burning from inside and out. In the cool of the evening, like now, the external burn was gone but the internal remained, and the rest of his body ached from compensating for muscles that didn’t work the way they should.
When he climbed out of the truck that had driven the crew back to the office, he winced as his feet hit the ground. Bit it back. Ordinary shit hurt now. Always would. No point whining about it.
He still drove the same car. That was where he found her, waiting for him, just like he’d found her sister behind Zoney’s almost a year ago. Unlike her sister, she wasn’t leaning against the car like she belonged there. She simply stood next to it, a bit uncomfortably, as if she were afraid to take up too much space.
He knew her instantly. When he was a few feet away from her, he stopped. There was a thick pause, during which they both looked at each other, and waited to see who would speak first. The two of them had never had a conversation. For most of the time they’d spent together, she’d held a gun on him. He didn’t know what to say to her and he didn’t want to know what she had come here to say to him. The familiar parts of her face were hard to see because they reminded him of her sister, but he was relieved to find that he was glad to see her, anyway; or at least, to know that she was—okay. The bald boy had shot at her, too, but missed. Patrick had known that, but he’d wondered more than once about what had happened after.