Page 135 of Lone Wolf

He could hear the man wheezing beneath the covers.

He drew closer.

Allman lay beneath the blankets, a CPAP contraption strapped to his face. It regulated his breathing—the wheezes Evan had heard from the doorway—but Allman snorted over it, sleep apnea fighting the machine at every turn.

One shoulder was hunched up into view, showing old-fashioned blue pajamas. His cheek and the side of his neck sparkled with sweat—a hot sleeper.

His nightstand held well-used laptops, a half dozen of varying sizes stacked like coasters, and an eye-dropper bottle missing its top.

Evan halted at the foot of the bed and stared at the slumbering form before him, this man devoid of anything Evan could recognize as human.

Evan turned off the CPAP machine.

Allman stirred. He clutched at his mask, sliding it free, tufts of sweat-greased hair shoved tectonically this way and that from the straps.

“Biltmore? Biltmore?” Allman pushed himself upright with a groan.

His face caught a band of shadow. Evan could discern only the outline of his head and shoulders, but he sensed the muscles tense, a sudden stillness.

“Oh,” Allman said. “Oh, no.”

“I’m sorry,” Evan said.

“No,” Allman said. “No.”

He scrambled off the bed, tangling in the sheets and hitting the carpet with his palms. “I don’t understand,” he said, rising. “I don’t understand why.”

Evan said, “I know.”

Allman shook off the sheets and stood before Evan, his eyes darting to the doorway, but there was too much fear. It had overcome him. He wouldn’t bolt. He knew it was hopeless.

Beneath the wild tangles of his brows, those heavy-lidded turtle eyes bunched once, twice. They would have looked closed were it not for the faintest crescent glimmers of awareness seeping through. His chest was jerking violently, the skin tags around his neck bristled darkly, and he smelled powerfully of body odor and sleep breath and Evan was repulsed by him but not nearly so much as he was repulsed by what he had to do.

Because Evan finally saw Allman for what he really was: a child, a fat kid set apart from everyone else by cues and mores he couldn’t grasp and a brain that didn’t work like anyone else’s. A scared little boy who’d built the controls to a universe of his own making, a universe into which he could disappear, a universe in which everything made sense to him. And this world out here was filled with nothing more than avatars, players who could be deleted from the game at will.

Allman’s knees buckled, but he held upright. He was sobbing soundlessly, mouth ajar, jagged teeth exposed.

“I’ll make it gentle,” Evan said.

Allman couldn’t form words, but he nodded once and then again, his mouth frozen in an awful shape of grief.

Evan took him by the shoulders, the pajamas wet to the touch where he’d soaked through them, and turned him gently around. Allman meekly complied.

His head was still bobbing, but no noise came out of him. Only now, staring at the back of Allman’s head, did Evan notice that Allman was shorter than him by a good five inches. He wondered how he’d failed to observe that during their last visit.

Evan let the age-old instinct guide him, arms slithering around Allman’s neck, clamping the head, tipping it forward so his throat met the V of Evan’s forearm and biceps.

And then he squeezed.

“Shhh,” he said. “Shhh shhh shhh.”

Afterward he lowered Allman to the carpet, his thick form puddling.

In the process, Allman’s leg had kicked the nightstand, knocking over the small plastic bottle. Evan picked it up. It read: FOR SENSITIVE EYES.

He set it back on the nightstand.

He made it out of the bedroom, down the hall, onto the porch, and past the trench, where he could hear Biltmore’s labored breathing. He made it down the long narrow drive with the van Gogh cypresses thrusting overhead from either side. He made it out of the gate, which acquiesced to a manual touch of the control box, sliding aside. He made it from front yard to side yard to horse trail to backyard.