Page 57

And it didn’t, yet. Dangling there, lodged against the seat, his mind was more focused than it had been all night, and there was only an icy numbness to his arm, punctuated with a stinging sensation every few breaths.

“Tommy, don’t,” Jane said, choking on a cough from next to him. “Just stay still until help gets here.”

His eyes searched the dark splay of bent and broken branches pressing in on the shattered windshield. A cloud of smoke was beginning to grow thicker and thicker from the crushed engine, reaching toward the glass, and an image of the car going up in flames blazed through his mind—an image of him and his sister burning alive, dubbed with the sounds of their dual wailing.

“But what if they don’t find us down here?” he said, chest rising and falling faster with each breath. “What if we die down here? God, Jane, I’ve got to get it out. I have to get it out of me.”

“Thomas, please calm down, please.”

His tears rushed out faster, rivaling the flow of blood from his sister’s head.

You’re gonna burn you’re gonna burn like a steak kebab if you don’t get the fuck out you’re gonna burn and she’s gonna burn with you—

He gripped the branch with his left hand and began to pull.

The splintered wood held on to his arm, ravaging the muscle and bone like gnawing teeth. His cries turned into the kinds of screams he didn’t know his lungs were capable of, screams that sounded from another body entirely.

Jane reached over frantically to try to detain him. “Tommy, stop! Stop it!” she screeched over and over, until an animal-like whimper escaped her. Eyes bulging, she brought her hands to her left side, choking on several wheezy coughs.

Only then did he let go of the branch.

Thomas stared at his arm, at the gnarled skin and shards of exposed bone, thinking if he concentrated long enough, the branch might magically disappear; he might wake up with a jolt and be lying across his couch while movie credits rolled on the TV.

But the branch remained, trapping him as the smell of gasoline burned at his bleeding nostrils. When he screamed out again, it dissolved into a low weeping.

“Oh, Tommy, no,” Jane whispered, gasping for breath against a sob. “Hey, look at me. Look at me,” she begged. “We’re going to get out of this, do you hear me? I promise you we will get out, but you just have to breathe, okay? Just breathe, Tommy.”

He shook his head, moaning, dissolving into another fit of painful crying.

“Breathe, Tommy. Just breathe,” Jane repeated. She reached across the space between them, and because she couldn’t grab his right hand, she carefully placed her own on the top of his shoulder even though it was clear the reach hurt her. “Breathe,” she said, inhaling and exhaling shaky breaths alongside him.

Then the pain finally rushed in.

—

The store’s entrance is degrees colder now, like they’ve been transported into a mortuary. It chills the sweat on Thomas’s skin so that it turns clammy, and he bows his head, prepared to be sick again.

Breathe, Tommy. Just breathe.

When the bile finally settles, Thomas lifts his eyes.

The chunks of red and pink gore surround Jim like a halo. The man is unrecognizable now, save for the askew baseball cap on his head and beer cans littered close by. Thomas flexes his right arm out straight, curling his hand into a tight fist that only twinges slightly; he never thought the first thing he’d do with the cast off would be extracting a gun from a dead man, blood and all.

“Fuck,” Thomas hisses, squeezing his eyes shut, but the red and pink and bone and brain is all still there, flashing like hazard lights.

Outside, the wind picks up through the trees, rustling in a smell of petrified wood and sorrow. He can feel the Mimic watching them, feel the creature’s cold eyes observe their every movement, studying them, getting high off their pain.

It was Jim’s hands that Thomas stared at the longest after first discovering the body—the man’s hands, rough and calloused, which somehow found the strength to lift the shotgun and press the barrel against something as vulnerable as his own face.

He can still hear it, light as the wind, their names being whispered from the shadows while they each braced themselves or dropped to the ground at Jim’s side. Then those awful noises that flooded in from out in the darkness, chittering and rattling like cackling laughter as Kimi screamed again and again.

Fuck.

“Thomas, it’s time. Everything’s ready.” The voice barely reaches his brain now. “Thomas? How many bullets does it have left?” Kimi asks, and her voice cracks on the words. Her scream still rings in his ears even though it has been long lost, swallowed up by the aisles and drafty ceilings.

She is standing at the head of the aisle with an iron fire poker hanging from a loop in her jeans like a knight with her sword sheathed. Her eyes are puffy and red, and her hair has started to loosen from her ponytail, leaving black tendrils hanging around her face.

Thomas stares at the bloody shotgun clutched in his hands. He swears he can still feel the warmth of Jim’s fingers where they gripped it nearly an hour before.