Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 71067 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 355(@200wpm)___ 284(@250wpm)___ 237(@300wpm)
Safely in the bathroom, I lock the door and look at myself in the mirror.
“You can do this,” I tell myself. “You can’t do this.”
I splash some water on my face with my good hand and close my eyes.
It’s dusty.
Not the bathroom, but the place where my memories take me. It’s the side of a road, next to a gas station where nobody has been left alive. My father is getting back into his clothes, wiping off the streaks of blood that stayed on his body through the shift.
I am fourteen years old now. I am too old to sleep through these murders. It is too hard for me to block my ears and not hear the cries. He kills quickly, most of the time, but when there’s this many people, it’s never quickly enough.
He tosses a bag of meat into the back of the car. “Get in, Nicola,” he says.
I shake my head. I don’t want to be in that vehicle with him. I don’t want to ride smelling the blood and the flesh, and knowing that those people weren’t the first and won’t be the last.
He looks at me. “What’s the matter? You want to get yourself a candy bar? Go on. Run in then. Make it quick. I think one of them had a cell phone.”
He wants me to run past the bodies, over some of them, and get a handful of candy out of the stands that it’s stacked in. I used to do that, when I was younger. I used to hold out the hem of my t-shirt and make a basket with it, scoop all the candy in, and then run to the car. He and I would laugh and have sugar highs all the way to the next kill site.
But something’s different now. My conscience came online when I heard a woman begging for her life when she was losing it.
In the distance, the thin sound of a siren starts to wail. Someone is coming. They’re coming way too late. They won’t be able to save anybody. They’ll call this a wild animal attack, because that is what it is. They’ll go out on a hunt and probably kill something innocent because they’re too stupid to see what’s in front of them.
My father has been doing this my whole life, driving us from state to state, striking in apparently random small towns where the police force is a couple of cops who both used to be QBs at the local high school. Sometimes it gets chalked up to animals. Sometimes, the supernatural.
Nothing ever gets investigated.
He looks in their direction, then back at me. “I said get in the damn car, Nicola!”
“No,” I say. “I’m not coming this time.”
“They’ll catch you. They’ll blame you. You’ll go into a cell and never come out.” He makes a fist and punches the hood of the car hard enough to dent it. “Get in the fucking car.”
If it wasn’t for the sirens, he would come around and throw me into it bodily. But he doesn’t have time, and I know it.
He gives me one last look, then gets in the car, slams his door, and peels out.
I am left standing in the midst of the small massacre. The police do find me when they roll up. But they don’t take me to jail. They take me somewhere worse. A home for girls.
They get psychologists to talk to me about it, but I tell them I can’t remember anything. They put it down to shock, amnesia due to a traumatic event. Their official story is I saw something that I blacked out so hard, I didn’t know who I was anymore.
When I’m eighteen, I leave with a trash bag. I start traveling. Hitching rides, hopping trains. Meeting people. Finding my little band of runaways.
I never see my father again.
A tap on the door pulls me from my reverie.
“Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Sorry.”
I come out to face Fescue, who clearly does not believe me. “You look pale,” he says. “I think you need some rest. I am going to take you back up to the bedroom.”
I let him make the decision for me, because suddenly I really do feel utterly exhausted. I’ve been fighting so much for so long, and now everything I was ever supposed to want is sitting out in a fancy dining room ordering the venison and I am the garbage child of a serial killer and he has no idea.
“Would you like to remove the tracksuit, or would you prefer to get into bed with it still on?” Fescue asks the question with a calm register that makes me almost think he is being earnest until I realize that of course he’s being his apparently snotty self.
“I know how to take a nap,” I tell him. “I don’t need a babysitter.”