Chapter 12

John did own gloves, as a matter of fact. They were heavy and black, their fingers bendable but solid, as if packed with some sort of rubbery steel. Mariah found them in one of his bags as she tore apart the trunk looking for a first aid kit. She cast them aside—fat lot of good they would do him now—and kept up her whirlwind until she turned up a small white box. At least she thought the box was white. It was hard to see anything with the stars and moon shut off and her smoke-raw eyes filled with burning tears. Up in the front of the truck she heard John rasping under his breath, singing about those same stars and moon in a broken, tuneless lullaby—good night, good night—and his arm was bleeding so bad, she’d never seen bleeding so bad, not even when she jammed the champagne flute into Rick Lot’s ear canal, and where the fuck were the stupid fucking stitches? The box had bandages and Neosporin, petroleum jelly and hydrogen peroxide, all useful things but not what she needed. Had John hit an artery when he shoved his arm through the window? She hoped not. If he’d hit an artery, she wasn’t sure there was anything she could do, short of holding him and rocking him down to the sleep his tired body so desperately wanted. She slammed the box shut and tossed it out of the truck bed. It was as if a space in her head had been cleared; giving up on the stitches allowed her to see what had been sitting right in front of her all along, tucked in the corner with a few other stray tools.

It was a crude yellow thing, caked in sawdust from some odd job. Roofing? Flooring? She didn’t know what John had used it for, but she bet he had damn well never used it for this. Mariah picked up the staple gun and hopped out into the dirt where she’d thrown the first aid kit. She left it there, would come back for it later (if John was lucky enough to have a later). Her tongue lay on the floor of her mouth like a dirty welcome mat. She could taste her sickness, smell it; the flavors of the night were smoke and vomit.

And blood.

That too.

John turned his head toward Mariah as she approached his open door, but she could not tell if he saw her. His pupils were big, unfocused. She was relieved to see that his eyes had not turned up to their whites, like the eyes of the sleeping family in the car. His broad, sweating chest filled with breath and let it out oh so slowly. She’d taken off his shirt and cinched it above his right elbow. Below that, his flesh was opened into weeping fissures, the largest and deepest of which zigzagged the length of his forearm.

“He moaned when I hit the radio,” John mumbled. “He moaned like Nicholas moaned on the branch.”

Nicholas? Mariah couldn’t place the name at first, then the voice of the man on John’s driveway came back to her. I couldn’t even sit with my Nicholas like I wanted to . . . Nicholas had been Matthew’s son, and Matthew had said something more after that, hadn’t he? Something about a boy on the TV. A sad boy. A crying boy.

“I didn’t want to use the knife,” John went on in the same muttering sleep-speak. “But sometimes hurting is helping. Sometimes hurting is the only thing you can do.”

“I’m so glad to hear you say that,” Mariah said, and raised the staple gun.

She took his wrist, trying not to look at his mangled hand, and guided his arm into range. Pinching the heavy flaps of his skin together, she pressed the staple gun’s steel mouth into place. Only then did it cross her mind that the thing might not be loaded. What if it’s empty? she thought as she pulled the trigger. There was a loud, reverberating thunk. John let out a gasping husk of a scream, and his head lolled forward on his neck. Well, that answered that. Mariah glanced at her work. A bit crooked, but it would do. She continued up his forearm, thunk, thunk, thunk, pausing on occasion to pull a chip of glass from his flesh. Her fingers were blood-slicked, her grip untrustworthy. She probably should have washed her hands first, too, now that she thought about it. She still had vagina all over them.

“Sorry, John,” she said, and she laughed, because if she didn’t laugh she thought she might go crazy. He’d been in her vagina, and now her vagina was in him, giving it right back, tit for tat, and if he got an infection, why, that was only fair. He had, after all, planted in her a gift of his own.

After five staples and just as many screams, John swooned forward in his seat. His forehead landed against the steering wheel, and the horn went off.

And off.

And off.

And off.

Mariah didn’t pick him up. Couldn’t. For a few full seconds, she forgot all about the job at hand. His back. She had never laid eyes on it before, though she had felt it once, in the dark. Her fingertips carried a memory of smoothness, of knotted silk where there should have been dry skin. But touch was not the same as sight, and she had been taken by other feelings then. His lips on her neck, his breath in her ear. Weight and motion, warm sweat, cool sheets. Now there were no distractions. She looked down at John’s backside in the dim red shadow of the distant fire, and she shivered at the five glossy gray scars running from his right shoulder to his left hip. Where they crossed his spine, the knobs of his bone stood taut against the flesh. Claw marks. But what kind of animal could have done something like this? And when? Once upon a time. That was when. Once upon a time, somewhere white and cold. Because these were the kind of scars you read about in the darkest of fairy tales. Not real life. These were the scars that came to mind when you thought of dark woods and bitter winters. Of deep snow and frozen rivers . . . and wolves.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

The blaring horn began to sound like a howl. Mariah lifted John’s head from the wheel and leaned him back against the seat to finish stapling his arm. Each pull of the trigger coaxed a shuddering breath from his body, but no more screams. It seemed John had run out of those. Finally, the job was done. The pain in his face settled, if not lessened.

Mariah found herself staring at his ruined right hand, and she swallowed back the rising lump in her throat. What am I supposed to do for that? she thought, turning away from the truck to get some fresh air. But there was no fresh air to be found. Ash blew into her eyes and mouth as she walked to the first aid kit. She picked it up, thinking that she would start with hydrogen peroxide, yes, that was what she would do. Then Neosporin. Then bandages. Or were you supposed to let a new wound breathe? She reached reflexively into her pocket for her phone, forgetting that it was still in the bar with Rick Lot, that she had left it in Wrightwood along with the rest of her life. The realization put an ache inside her. It wasn’t just the phone; it was what the phone represented. The convenience it provided. The community. To have a phone was to have everything you’d ever need right on hand, and perhaps that explained why she had grown to resent it in the end. Perhaps having so much, so effortlessly, was a sort of trap. Mariah stilled. Something about that last word—trap—stirred up uneasy feelings inside her, like a draft stirs up dust and cobwebs.

It sings a lullaby . . . it sings a lullaby, to lay you down to sleep.

Mariah was suddenly glad she had lost her phone. Because if she hadn’t, if she still had her phone with her, she was not sure she would be able to resist using it, and it was all too easy to imagine popping her earbuds in for a little Zeppelin, only to hear static where there should have been music . . . static, and a sobbing voice. She pictured John sitting alone in the truck, waiting for her to return, and she shivered once more, a long, slow shiver that seemed would never stop. How close had she come to hearing the boy (it—John called the boy it) sing his lullaby on the radio?

How close?

Mariah guessed she would never know, which was probably a mercy. She unlatched the first aid kit. Sitting on top of everything else, in plain view, was a clear plastic case about the size of a cassette tape. STITCHES. She started laughing again. She laughed and laughed, a slender woman in a man’s clothes standing alone in the firelit darkness of Death Valley. When she was finished, when all her laughter had been spent and then some, she walked back to the truck.

“You do not want to know what I just found, John.” Mariah stopped at his door, the first aid kit in one hand, the staple gun in the other. “John?”

He sat where she had left him, as she had left him. With one small difference. His eyelids were no longer cracked open.

They were shut.

John Hawthorne had fallen asleep.

✽✽✽

The last time Mariah drove stick, she had been twelve and sitting in her father’s lap. They’d gone out to El Mirage after a good hard rain pummeled the dry lakebed into mud, and she’d been given full reign to slip and slide and spin around that wide playground in her dad’s old Toyota. It had taken them hours, literal, honest-to-God hours, to wash the muck off the pickup and turn it red again, but they’d had nearly as much fun cleaning up the mess as they’d had making it.

This wasn’t so different.

Except it was night instead of day, and the lap she sat in was soaked in blood.

John’s chest rose and fell against her back in slow waves. His breath warmed her neck. She hadn’t been able to move him, had been too scared to try. She knew that if she got him out of the truck, she might not be able to get him back in. His mangled right hand (though ‘mangled’ was too kind a word, wasn’t it?) rested across the emergency brake atop a fluffed sweater.

Mariah had poured hydrogen peroxide on his fingers and watched, both fascinated and horrified, as the exposed bones and cartilage foamed. The mere sight had made her own hand ache terribly, but if John felt anything, he hadn’t shown it—his lips had come unsealed around a drowsy murmur as the initial splash hit his skin, and that was it. Nothing more from that point forward. Wherever he was, whatever kind of sleep he had sunken into, he was too deep for pain to reach.

Or shouting. Or shaking. Mariah had tried it all in those desperate first minutes after finding him unconscious, and he hadn’t budged. Even his eyelids, which she’d expected to lift slowly and reveal the same blank white stare of the sleeping family in the car, had stayed closed. That was something to be grateful for, she reflected. That, and the fact that he was not smiling. He was gone, but he wasn’t that gone. And maybe, just maybe, that meant that he wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t come back.

Mariah glanced over at his hand one more time. She still wasn’t sure bandages were the right way to go, still heard a voice in her head telling her to let the wound breathe, but at least this way she did not have to look at the awful thing while she drove.

She popped the clutch too fast on the first go and stalled. On the second, she gave too much gas and the tires kicked back dirt, causing her to slam the brakes in surprise and stall again. On her third try she struck the right balance—or right enough to get rolling. She realized then that she could not see, that the windshield was buried in ash, and she fumbled for the wipers. They clicked on as the truck coasted forward, and bit by bit the night came into view, its deserted landscape boiling with red hot shadows, both dark and bright.

“Okay then,” she said, staring into the strange fiery twilight beyond the headlights. “Where to?”

The mouth touching her neck exhaled.

Mariah began to accept what she already knew deep down.

She was on her own.