Authors: Robin Wasserman
And in the meantime, she would not hurt this kid. She promised herself that.
But if she didn’t know why she’d done it the last time, how was she supposed to make sure she didn’t do it again?
They sat cross-legged in the grass, close enough to the shed to duck inside if anyone came near. But it was the middle of the night, and they were alone.
“I brought you these.” With great care and pride, Milo placed a stack of comic books in her lap. “I read ’em already. And I just got some new ones. So you can keep these.”
It was strange to be back on the Ghent property after so many years. She’d spent half her childhood here, playing flashlight tag, splashing under sprinklers, begging Daniel’s mother to make more lemonade. Cass hadn’t been back since his mother died, and it seemed like the grounds hadn’t weathered the storm any better than the family. When Milo first found her and proudly introduced himself, she’d searched his face carefully, trying to find traces of little Danny Ghent. But Milo must have taken after his own mother, and quickly, Cass stopped looking. It hurt too much. The way he smiled, the way he laughed, it was what Owen Tuck might have been like when he’d grown up. If he’d grown up.
“Thanks, Milo, but you really shouldn’t —”
“And I went to your house.”
She stopped breathing.
“I don’t think your parents live there anymore,” he added. “There were these other people there. Big guys. This one had fire all over his face.” He dropped his voice to a whisper. “Like the
devil.
”
Everyone in town knew about the man with a face like the devil.
“And the other guys?” she said. “Was one of them kind of tall, like a giant? With a weird walk?”
He nodded excitedly. “You know them?”
No one knew the Prevettes; everyone knew about them. And now they were living in her
house.
“You can never go back there again,” she said. “Promise me.” What might they have done to him, if they’d caught him sneaking around there? Given their reputation, anything. Although, going by reputations, it’s not like he was any better off with her. At least the Prevette with the devil paint wore his evil right on his face, so everyone knew to stay away.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”
“I don’t think your parents would want you going over there anymore, either.”
“My mom doesn’t care where I go. And my dad’s with God.”
“Oh. I, uh, didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
The kid seemed unfazed. “It’s okay, he’ll be back soon.”
“O… kay.” Cass was totally lost. “Just trust me, then, you do not want to go back to that house. Or anywhere near those guys. They’re bad guys. You know about that, right?” She tapped the stack of comics. “You’ve got to leave the bad guys to the superheroes.”
“What about you?” he said.
“What about me?”
“Those posters with your face on them. They say
you’re
a bad guy.”
“Oh. Well, I guess… I am. But I already told you to stay away from me. You didn’t listen.”
“So what kind are you?” he asked.
“What kind of what?”
“Bad guy.”
She wasn’t about to walk him through the gory details. “I didn’t know there were
kinds.
”
He grabbed two of the comic books, an X-Men and a Batman. “See, there are two kinds: wrong guys and evil guys. The wrong guys do bad stuff by accident. Like Magneto, you know? They think they’re doing the right thing. They rob a bank because they need money for their sick kid. Or to get revenge on a scientist that turned them into a giant lobster. Or because they think they can save the world. Stuff like that.”
“Right. Stuff like that. And the evil guys?”
“They just do bad stuff because they like doing bad stuff. Like the Joker. Or the Riddler. Or – yeah, most of those Batman guys, actually. See, wrong guys think they’re
good.
Evil guys don’t think at all. They’re just evil. And kind of lame.” He tossed the Batman back on the pile. “So which are you?”
“Good question.” It had begun to rain. She’d missed rain. “Let me know if you figure it out.”
Cass resolved not to give him the chance.
Daniel was sleeping when the front door crashed open, and for a bleary-eyed moment his dreams intruded on waking life. He heard the clatter from downstairs as gunfire, and saw, in the moony dark, blood streaking his bare arms, pooling on his mattress, dripping to the floor. But the blood proved only a play of shadows and, as he blinked the sleep out of his eyes, he realized the noise could only be his father.
Boots stomped up the stairs, rotting wood creaking beneath the weight, and then the Preacher himself appeared in his bedroom doorway.
Daniel sat up. “So you’re not dead.”
The Preacher’s hair was matted and ratty and his face wore several days’ worth of stubble. He smelled like a sewer. “Disappointed?”
“Where have you been, then?”
“I’ve been wandering the desert for forty days and forty nights —”
“It’s been a week.”
“—and God has spoken to me—”
“What else is new?”
The Preacher chuckled, and somewhere in there Daniel heard an echo of the father he dimly remembered, the one who’d charmed Milo’s mother into bed and every so often played parent to his sons. “Smart talk won’t save you from the day of reckoning. We’re running out of time to prepare for the battle that is to come.”
“What battle?”
“The battle between the righteous and the sinners. This will be our fortress, and we’ll need supplies. Food, medicine, enough to last through the dark times. I’ll handle the weaponry.”
That did not sound good.
“How about we talk about it in the morning?” Daniel said. “When’s the last time you slept?”
“You think the devil sleeps?” But the Preacher wiped a hand across bloodshot eyes and, all at once, the fight went out of him. “You have no idea how hard it is to wage this fight alone, son. If I had your mother —”
“Well, you don’t.”
“The devil’s bringing death to our world, death and darkness. I saw it with my own eyes, spilling out of the pit. Satan’s crawling into all of us. I’m trying to fight him off, for you and your brother, but if I can’t do that…” He choked back a sob.
Daniel stood up, hating himself for falling for this, again. It wasn’t unlike his father to get weepy after a few too many bottles, especially when the subject of his mother came up. But when it came to Satan, it was unlike his father to admit the possibility of defeat. And it was unlike him to speak of it in such an empty voice, with such despair in his hollow eyes.
He took the Preacher’s arm. “Let’s get you to sleep, Dad. And in the morning, maybe some fresh clothes, even a shower? That’d be something new and exciting, right?”
The Preacher gripped his shoulders. “You know I’d kill for you, right? I’d slay the devil himself before I’d let him touch you or your brother.”
“No one’s asking you to.”
“Tell me you know,” the Preacher insisted.
“I know, Dad. I know you would.” Daniel slung his father’s arms around his shoulders, tried not to inhale the sour whiskey breath, and got the Preacher to his room, heaving him onto the bed. He dropped to the mattress with a grunt, and as Daniel pulled off his shirt, he spotted a smear of dried blood and purpling bruises across his shoulder. “You’re hurt.”
The Preacher touched his shoulder, winced, shook his head. “Wrestling with the angels. It’s not for the weak.”
By now, Daniel knew better than to argue with crazy. Instead, he ducked into the hall bathroom and doused a hand towel with warm water.
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” Daniel said as he returned.
The Preacher was already snoring.
“Nice talking to you, too,” Daniel muttered. “I do love these father-son chats.” He brushed a hand across his father’s sweaty forehead. It wasn’t supposed to be like this, the son putting the father to bed. The son hating the father.
Trying so hard to hate the father.
He pressed the towel to his father’s wound, dabbing at the dried blood, gently exposing the scabbed skin. Hoping it didn’t hurt.
It wasn’t just the drinking, and it wasn’t just the grief. People got sad all the time, and sad people got drunk, and none of them ended up marching around town singing about Judgment Day. Daniel’s father had taught history, read Shakespeare, played gin, cooked stir-fry, laughed, hugged,
fathered
… and then his wife died, and something in him had broken. And Daniel had learned how easy it was to break. How breaking was in his blood. That was the last real lesson his father had ever taught him: how to look inside yourself and be afraid. Because maybe you couldn’t know how much weight you could bear until you snapped beneath it.
The Preacher’s eyes opened, and Daniel quickly drew his hand away.
“There’s still time, Daniel.” Had there always been such a void in his eyes?
“Time for what, Dad?”
“Time to repent. Before the day is upon us and we lead the Lord’s army into the Promised Land.”
“
You
think
I
need to repent?”
“That’s my blood running through your veins,” the Preacher said, in a cracked voice.
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“Righteous blood. You can still be righteous. Doesn’t matter what you’re doing with her. Doesn’t matter what you’ve done, long as you get rid of her now, one way or another.”
“Who?”
“That girl you’re keeping in the shed.”
Daniel recognized the legs first, poking out from beneath Milo’s Batman sleeping bag.
It was the sleeping bag that made him suck in a sharp, noisy breath as he realized who must have given it to her, and clumsily pieced it together: the shed, the unscheduled escapes to the Ghent homestead, the death-defying visit to the Porters’ abandoned home. Daniel would kill him for being so stupid.
Or she would do it first, he thought.
Cass Porter, the baby killer.
That was what he thought as he made the noise that woke her, but when her lids flew open and in one fluid move she leapt to a crouch in the back corner of the shed, her hair slashing through a city of spiderwebs, the sleeping bag held before her like a shield, he was still staring at her bare legs.
Cass Porter, in his shed.
“The kid told me I could stay here,” she said.
Cass Porter, whose long, silky blond hair was now a matted dirty brown. The color it had been when they were kids, before she’d started wrangling sun-kissed locks from a bottle. Either way, she was beautiful.
Baby
killer,
he reminded himself.
“Milo,” he said. “The kid’s name is Milo.” She’d stopped coming around before Milo was born. They all had. With his father gone off the deep end and his mother gone for good, who could blame them?
“I know.”
“You can’t be here,” he said.
Despite the wet-blanket heat of the night, she was shivering.
“I know that, too.” She was already gathering her belongings – or rather, he spotted quickly, Milo’s belongings (and a few of Daniel’s). An eclectic assortment of granola bars, bags of chips, comic books, a brush that he thought he’d lost, and a Spider-Man toothbrush was shoved clumsily into the sleeping bag. All she needed was a stick to tie it around and sling over her shoulder and she would make the perfect storybook tramp. Or orphan runaway. She’d always seemed taller to him, but now Daniel realized he had a couple of inches on her. She flinched when he approached.
“Where will you go?”
She shrugged.
“I’m sorry, you just… you can’t stay here. I don’t know what you told my brother, or what you —”
Her eyes flared. “I didn’t touch him.”
“I’m not saying that.”
“You’re thinking it.” She let the bag drop and straightened to face him. He recognized the look on her face, though he hadn’t seen it since they were children and he’d accused her of cheating at whatever board game she’d just won. For a moment, he forgot what she’d done and why she was here, forgot even the years he’d spent watching her from afar, waiting for her to remember he existed. He went back to the beginning. “Say it. Go ahead. You don’t want me here because you’re afraid I’ll do it again.”
“The cops are looking for you,” he said. “It’s probably illegal for us to even be having this conversation. That’s the reason.”
“And.”
“And… I don’t know what you did. That night. I don’t know what happened. Maybe…” He didn’t want to say what he’d been thinking all year, that maybe events had been misconstrued, maybe the endlessly replayed video had been tampered with, and there was some crucial explain-it-all-away fact no one else knew. That anything was possible, except that Cass Porter, of all people, had fallen apart.
“You think I’m innocent, Daniel?”
Anyone could break.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. “I wasn’t there.”
“I was.”
“Well, yeah. Obviously.”
“I don’t know what happened, either.”
He didn’t know how he was supposed to answer that. She saved him the trouble, adding, in the voice of this new Cassandra who was both harder and softer than the old one, “But I’m not innocent.” She hefted the bag again, clumsily trying to keep its collection of junk from spilling out. “I’ll get out of here. Just please don’t tell anyone you saw me.” She shook her head. Her hair, ratted and greasy as it now was, still splashed about her face in the same rippling waves he’d always admired. “Scratch that. You don’t owe me anything. Tell anyone you want.”
“I need to ask you something,” Daniel said. “And you have to tell me the truth.”
“I don’t owe you anything, either.”
“The truth,” he said.
She nodded, leaving her head bowed, her hair curtaining her face.
“My brother.”
“Milo.”
“Would you ever hurt him?”
She didn’t speak. There was silence between them, and somewhere beyond, the chirping of cicadas and the sizzle of kamikaze mosquitoes dive-bombing the bug zapper, the whistle of wind through the gaps in the shed’s rotting boards.
“Look at me,” he said.
She did.
“Would you hurt him?”
“I don’t know what I would do,” she said, and he finally understood that the terror pooling in her eyes had nothing to do with him. “But I don’t want to. I don’t. That’s why I have to go.”
He told himself it wasn’t her bare, coltish legs that made him say it, or the glimpse of thigh where her shorts were riding up, or whatever dark intentions the Preacher had intuited. He didn’t know why he said it.
“Stay.”
She didn’t ask Daniel to go back to her house and gather some of her belongings, but he heard the need in her voice. She hadn’t said outright that it was killing her to imagine the Prevettes nesting in the house still filled with the gathered debris of her life, but she didn’t have to. She hadn’t said much at all, actually. Not at first. But as they talked into the night, her answers had gotten longer and her muscles less tensed for flight, until finally, just before the sun rose, she had told him what happened that killing night, at least what little she knew. She’d told him about the gap in her memory, and the part of the video they never showed on the news, the important part.
He told her about that day in the drugstore. He told her, as he hadn’t told anyone, about his nightmares. She told him what it was to feel guilty every second, to wish for judgment even as you were desperate to escape it. He didn’t know why it was so easy for him to understand how she felt. But when he closed his eyes that night and saw the drugstore bodies lying beside him, and smelled the blood, he felt it, too.
It felt strange to talk to her like he still knew her; she admitted it felt strange for her to talk to anyone at all.
She asked him for some of his father’s whiskey, to make it all go away; she said they could share, and that way they could both forget. He said no, because he knew where that kind of forgetting led; she pretended not to be angry, then she pretended not to be crying. He pretended not to pity her, and cursed whatever law of the universe dictated that everything good turn to ruin.
When the sun rose, he sat with her and watched her tip her face to the dawn, and told her she could stay as long as she needed. Milo could obviously be trusted to keep his mouth shut, and the Preacher didn’t talk to outsiders… or at least, when he did, they knew better than to listen. She’d be safe. Daniel promised her that, then gave Milo a stern lecture on the right way and wrong way to keep a secret, and dropped him off at day care. And then, without giving himself time to overthink it, he went to see the Prevettes. He rang the doorbell with no plan whatsoever for talking himself inside.
“You again,” Jule said, opening the door. “Does everyone in your family have a death wish?”
“The drugstore’s closed, and Milo’s at day care, so I, uh, I didn’t have anything to do. I thought maybe you’d want to hang out.” He cursed himself for sounding so lame.
“What, you don’t have any friends?” Despite the fact that it was even hotter inside than out, ten a.m. and already an egg fryer of a day, she wore baggy sweatpants and a sweatshirt three sizes too big. The pants were gray but the shirt was a pale blue. It was, as far as Daniel could remember, the first time he’d seen her in a color.
“I guess… not really?” He could feel his cheeks warming.
She swung the door wide and jerked her head in an awkward imitation of a welcome. “Lucky for you, neither do I.”
He stepped over the threshold, trying not to make it obvious that he was eyes peeled for knife-wielding giants.
“They’re in the basement,” she said. “Don’t ask why.”
He hadn’t planned on it.
Everything was as Cass had described, down to the photos climbing the staircase and the lace runners spanning every table. He assumed the dirty dishes, the half-empty pizza boxes, and the six-foot bong were more recent additions. Jule led him upstairs to her bedroom – Cass’s bedroom.
“You can stop staring – none of it’s mine,” she said as he took in the wrought-iron bedposts, the Christmas lights artfully arranged into a peace sign, the photo-studded vanity mirror, and, feeling like a sleaze, the black bras draped over the desk chair. “Well, those are,” she added, stuffing the bras into a black duffel. “Perv.”
He forced a laugh.
“I hope you know I didn’t bring you up here to screw you.”
This time the laugh came unprompted. “Excuse me?”
She pointed at the bed. “You. Me. There. Not happening. Got it?”
“Got it.” Then, aware it might be pushing his luck, he cocked his head at the bathroom. “So does that mean shower sex is still on the table?”
Instead of a kick in the ass on his way out the door, this earned him a curious smile. She pointed to the floor. “Sit.”
It was awkward at first. They were not friends, and their potential areas of common ground – teachers in classes that Jule never attended, students at a school where neither of them spoke – amounted to little more than a trickle of small talk. Fortunately, there was a more obvious topic of conversation at hand.
“Scott thinks it’s some kind of conspiracy,” Jule said. “Of course, Scott thinks everything’s a conspiracy. He’s convinced everyone’s out to get him.”
“Aren’t they?”
“Fair point.”
“What does he think it’s a conspiracy to
do
?” Daniel asked.
“Take over.” She curled finger quotes around the words, then laughed. “Destroy the common man, steal all his money, ruin his life. You know, the usual.” She wadded up a pamphlet and tossed it at his head. “Some literature on the subject, in case you’d like further enlightenment. Scott’s got the rest of them convinced this is just the first step – that all that junk in the air is some kind of chemical warfare. I think he’s raising an army, just in case.”
Daniel snorted. “I guess all the cool kids are doing it.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Inside joke with myself.”
“Shocking that you have no friends,” she said.
“Whereas all the girls at school must be begging you to let them come over and hang out with the meth militia.”
Her expression never flickered, but something about her went taut, and he realized he’d gone too far.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Trust me, it’s not the family I would have picked, but…”
But who got to pick? “Yeah.”
They watched each other in not-quite-comfortable silence. “So do you believe him?” Daniel said, trying to steer the conversation onto a safer track. “You think there’s a conspiracy?”
“I think anyone who thinks keeping us trapped in this town is ‘for our own good’ has never actually been here.”
“You seem to be doing all right,” Daniel said, and they both knew he was talking about this room, which couldn’t be more mismatched to the girl currently living in it.
“You think this was
my
idea?”
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s…”
He waited.
“I’ve never had my own bedroom before,” she said. “I’ve never had a door.”
It was a plain-enough admission, but he could tell there was too much behind it that he wasn’t supposed to know about, and she was wondering why she’d said it and what she’d do if he was stupid enough to follow up.
“Why are you here, Daniel?”
For a moment, he was tempted to admit it: one half confession for another. But before he could decide to trust her based on nothing but guilt, the door eased open. Daniel had never been this close to Scott Prevette. Even if he were a normal-sized man, his aura of pure menace would have been more than enough to strike fear in the hearts of scrawny teenage boys everywhere. And Scott Prevette was basically a giant. Each of his fists looked powerful enough to crush Daniel’s head like a tomato. It was the aura that suggested he’d have a good time doing it.
Scott jerked his head. “You. Outside. Now.”
For a heart-stopping moment, Daniel thought the order was meant for him, and quickly debated the merits of defenestration. Then Jule rose and left the room with her uncle, and Daniel could breathe again. Of course, the reprieve wouldn’t last long if Scott caught Daniel going through his niece’s underwear drawer. So he would hurry. As a bonus: the faster he plowed through her drawers, the less time he’d have to spend feeling like a pervert.
Scott wanted to know what she was doing with a boy in her room. Biting back all the more tempting responses – these days Scott was even less a person to mess with than usual – she muttered an insistent “Just a friend.” He looked so pleasantly surprised she wasn’t sure whether to be touched or offended.
“I do have friends,” Jule said.
He was kind enough not to argue, and then the dark shadows returned to his face. “You want to keep him, you keep him away from the basement.”
“He’s not some lost puppy off his leash.”
Scott grunted, and that was to be the end of it.
She couldn’t blame Daniel for looking nervous when she came back into the room. Scott tended to have that effect. But she’d figured that Daniel, of all people, would be willing to cut her a break on the demented home-life front – instead of jumping to his feet, avoiding her eyes, and muttering something awkward and unconvincing about having other places to be. If one not-so-harsh look from Scott Prevette was enough to scare him off, then she shouldn’t be so disappointed to see him go. Let him.
But the words were out of her mouth before he could. “Have you been down to Route 8 yet?”
“The main checkpoint?” he said, sounding surprised. “No. I heard it’s pointless. You?”