“She wasn’t when I started,” I said, and turned to him without blinking. Even thinking about this made me want to scream in rage, but I’d be damned if I was going to let them see me lose control. I told the story in short, even tones. “Nobody possessed Brooke, so I was trying kill her. My mom showed up, Nobody left Brooke to attack her, and … she died.” I made a small rolling motion with my hand. “Yada yada yada.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?” asked Diana, and somehow that was the comment that stung me worst of all.
“The Hunter knows too much about us,” said Nathan. “If he has all of this he could have anything—he could have my parents’ address.”
“People have been sent to your friends and family,” Ostler repeated. “The Withered bodies the FBI picked up from the hospital were more … enlightening than my superiors expected. I think they’re finally taking our work seriously, and that includes this implied threat to your loved ones.”
“You still haven’t read my section,” said Potash.
“It’s the conclusion of the letter,” said Ostler:
“‘And of course Albert Potash, the Death that Walks. How many people has he killed? What noble justifications did he claim? Let this be the most damning evidence of all: I know everything, and I could find nothing on him. He is a man without a past. In the modern age, nobody loses their past unless someone has gone to very great lengths to bury it.
“‘There are antelopes, and there are lions. And then there is something more. Think carefully about the company you keep.’”
14
When I was a little boy I used to love dinosaurs. Who wouldn’t? They were huge, and everyone was afraid of them, and they could eat my parents. I didn’t necessarily want them to eat my parents, but I knew that they could; I knew that they had the power to do whatever they wanted, and no one could stop them because they were dinosaurs.
Clayton County didn’t have a zoo, but once when I was four we went on vacation to San Diego, and we visited the zoo there, and the lions and tigers and gorillas were great and all but what I really wanted to see were the dinosaurs. I’d been reading about them my whole life, and this was my big chance. Did the zoo have a T. rex? A stegosaurus? My favorite was always the triceratops, don’t ask me why. They just looked cool. Do they have a triceratops, Dad?
He laughed, and told me the dinosaurs were dead.
Imagine for a moment that you’ve gone to a zoo, excited to see your very favorite animal—let’s say elephants—only to learn that all the elephants have died, just before you got there. That’s what I thought at first: that the dinosaurs at the zoo had all gotten sick, or been poisoned by bad food, and had passed away in a sudden tragedy. How would you react? How would you react if you were a four-year-old boy? It destroyed me. I wanted to know what had happened to them, and if the zookeepers had tried to save them, and when they were going to get new ones. And of course my parents were both morticians, and I had a vague sense of what that meant, so I wondered if we were going to embalm the dinosaurs while we were there on our trip. I didn’t know what embalming was when I four, but I knew the word. I knew it was something you did to dead people, and that it was important. I figured that dinosaurs were important enough to warrant the same treatment.
I don’t know if my father understood the depths of my confusion—if he understood what it meant to me—but around this time he figured out why I was confused. No one had ever told me that dinosaurs were extinct—or if they had, they hadn’t explained what the word meant. My father laughed again, delighted by his four-year-old’s adorable misunderstanding, and told me that all the dinosaurs were dead, in the whole world. That they’d been dead for millions of years. No matter where I looked, or how long I lived, or how hard I wanted to, I would never see a dinosaur anywhere because they didn’t exist anymore. All we had were bones, and even those were too old to touch.
Roll that around in your mind a little. The sudden realization that every animal you wanted to see was suddenly and irrevocably killed—sure, it had happened millions of years ago, but for me it happened right then and there. In my head they were alive, billions of them, and then the meteors struck, and the world ended, and they all died in fire and agony. I was a personal witness to a mass extinction. How can a child endure such a thing?
There’s a lot of trust tied up in the way we learn about the world. The things we know, and the things we think we know, and the people who tell them to us. The facts we learn for ourselves, and the facts we assume about everyone else. Trust is how we function as a society. Take away the trust, and you take away the function.
I joined Ostler’s team because I had nothing else left, and no other clear alternatives. My plan had always been to grow up, get a degree in mortuary science, and work as a mortician. I’d never really wanted anything else. That seems like a weird dream in hindsight, to be so set on following in the footsteps of parents I hated. But the hatred, when I thought about it, was recent, a new development brought on by divorce and abandonment and adolescence. For most of my life they’d been fine: angry sometimes, loving at others. My father beat me up a few times, and he beat my mom a lot of times, but I didn’t have the emotional capacity to separate that from the good stuff: the jokes at dinner, and the movies on the couch, and the stories at bedtime. Sometimes he slept on my floor because I was too scared to sleep alone. I don’t know if that made him a good dad, but it made him more than just a bad one.
By the time things soured and we all fell apart, my heart was already set on the family business, and no amount of uncomfortable association could change it. Embalming a body—cleaning it, caring for it, giving it that final solemn celebration of the life it used to have—was my greatest source of peace. It’s where I went when things got too messed up to deal with, and when my family got messed up. The embalming was all I had.
And then the Withered came, and my mother died, and I ruined Brooke’s life, and Ostler had the only key to the only door that looked like an escape route. I’d done a lot of very shady things killing those Withered, and in my final desperation to kill Nobody, I’d done things I couldn’t hide. If I worked for Ostler I could help Brooke, forget my mom, and make all my crimes go away. I could leave my life behind.
That’s never as easy as it sounds. And now I was doing it again: I was leaving, maybe forever. I’d slipped free of Potash again, and I was ready to disappear for good.
Almost ready.
I was back in the park, holding a new box of wood as I stood before the grill. It hadn’t snowed since the last time, and the half-charred logs of my previous fire lay in a wet, cold heap on the ground. I kicked them out of the way; they’d burn, but only when the fire was already big. That wouldn’t be a problem today. I was going to make a very big fire.
I started the same as always, breaking the planks into smaller and smaller pieces, bending them with my hands—feeling the wood resist, feeling it bite into my hands as I strained against it, gritting my teeth until the boards snapped with a brutal crack that made Boy Dog yelp. I ignored him; I couldn’t allow myself to laugh at his fear, but I couldn’t bring myself to comfort him, either. He was simply there, and I was simply next to him, and any interaction we had was an illusion, like the puppets on the Mercer boy’s TV. I took deep breaths and stacked the splinters in careful rows, crafting my little log cabin with all the precision of an architect building a world-spanning bridge: piece by piece, bit by bit, this twig here and this wood there and each one exactly where they had to go until I couldn’t take it anymore and scattered them with my hands, screaming in frustration. Boy Dog stood up in his spot under the table, looking around for whatever danger had alarmed the weird human boy. I clenched my hands in fists, breathing deep. I had copies of The Hunter’s letters in my pocket, all three of them, and I pulled them out now and crumpled them into balls, and piled the wood scraps haphazardly on top of them. It wasn’t pretty, but it would burn. I struck a match and lit the paper, watching it turn brown and then blac
k, with a thin line of yellow crackling hot along the edge. A wave of color spreading across the wrinkled surface, leaving a blackened char behind.
The smaller sticks began to smolder, and then to burn with a low, almost invisible flame. I watched the fire carefully, feeding it bigger sticks when it was ready to catch them, and smaller sticks when it just needed fuel. Soon the flames were high, burning hotter than they needed to, so hot they’d burn themselves out before all the fuel was gone, but I didn’t care, and when the heat beat against my face I realized I was smiling, and when Boy Dog barked I realized I was laughing, whooping with joy at the chaotic mass of flame. I needed more; this wasn’t big enough, the fire wanted to get out of its metal box and burn higher. I looked around, but everything was covered in snow. My eyes lit on my cardboard box of firewood, and I placed it carefully in front of the metal grill and then pushed the entire fire into it; dumping the fire had killed it last time, but now I’d been smarter; I’d moved it into fuel and safety, and after a brief lull it caught again, flames licking the cardboard and lighting up the wood until it seemed to glow with an inner power, as if the wood itself was only fire in disguise, trapped in a painful solid form and yearning to burst free. The flames grew higher, climbing and leaping until they rose two feet out of the box. More than three feet off the ground.
Three feet was high enough to reach the picnic table.
I wanted more.
“Out!” I shouted gleefully. “Get out of there!” Boy Dog looked at me dumbly, but when he saw me shoving the fiery box across the ice toward the mouth of his lair he yelped and ran out. With Boy Dog out of the way, the space beneath the picnic table was a perfect cave of snow-covered wood; the box was almost too hot to touch, the flame eating hungrily at the cardboard sides, but I pushed it under the table with my foot and watched with giddy fascination as the fire began clawing at the table itself.
The fire was going to be free.
The poor ventilation made the air roar as the fire sucked it in beneath the table. Melted snow dripped down between the boards. I found the old, charred planks from the last time I was here, and used them as makeshift shovels to push the snow off the top of the table, and suddenly instead of melting, the snow was evaporating completely, rising into the air in visible clouds of steam. The thick, painted wood of the picnic table started to blacken and burn, and I smiled as the orange flames curled up and around each individual board. The fire had grown and swelled and taken over, leaving its tiny box and going not where I wanted, but where it wanted. And it wanted everything.
“That’s right,” I said, watching it, and then shouted at the sky: “That’s right!” I looked at Boy Dog, hoping to share my exultation, but he only stared back morosely, unmoved either way. I thought again about the puppets on the Mercer boy’s TV, and the sudden juxtaposition struck me as so funny I couldn’t help but bring up my hand, flapping the fingers and thumb together like a puppet mouth. “Hey there, Boy Dog, what do you think of this awesome fire?” I made a grumpy face and spoke in a gravelly tone, opening and closing my hand in time with the words: “Well, John, I’m a stupid dog. I have no opinion about anything that isn’t food or Potash’s blankets.” I returned to my normal voice, facing the hand puppet with my most serious expression. “Speaking of Potash, why didn’t he follow me? Too busy murdering innocents to threaten my life today?” Back to the dog voice. “I know, it’s like he doesn’t even care about threatening you anymore. The magic has gone out of your relationship completely. Maybe he’s off growling at some other teenage boy he’s been threatening on the side. You’ll be gone for days before they even … notice.…”
I stopped talking, but kept moving my hand, opening and closing the fake puppet mouth, staring straight into it. It was the same hand motion I’d done in our first viewing of the cannibal’s first victim. I’d been demonstrating the movement of the teeth. I bared my teeth now, clacking them together, and mirrored the motion with my hand.
It was a puppet.
The picnic table snapped loudly, some knot in the old wood popping in the heat. A car drove by in my peripheral vision, along the road on the far edge of the park, and seeing it brought me back to reality with a sudden shock. This wasn’t a barbecue or a campfire anymore, it was arson—arson in a public place, destroying city property. I swore and backed away, looking at the scene with a critical eye. The snow I’d pushed away was too obvious: no one would see this as a picnic that got out of hand, but as a deliberate attempt to burn the table. My best bet was to grab Boy Dog and go, to get away before anyone noticed. I called him softly and ran toward the car; he followed, but only in his slow, plodding way. I called again, patting my legs, but he couldn’t be bothered to move. I opened the car door, shifting the things I’d packed there in the early morning when Potash was asleep, and Boy Dog picked up his speed a little, shifting from a walk to a slow jog. I looked around. Who was watching me through distant windows? Under heavy branches?
Should I warn the others about the puppet? Would they even take me seriously if I did?
Boy Dog finally reached the car, heaving himself into the foot well on the passenger side. I made sure he was out of the way, slammed the door, and ran around to the driver’s side, fumbling for my keys. I threw myself in, sat down and stared at the fire. It seemed thin and ethereal from this distance, in this light, the flames fading into the morning sky beyond. Black smoke was beginning to curl up in dark, angry billows.
I had to leave now. I had to get to Brooke and go.
But if I did, the whole team would die.
I pulled out my phone, dialing Potash’s number with one hand while I started the car with the other. I got a recorded alert for a wrong number and wished I’d bothered to put everyone in speed dial. I hung up and dialed again.
Potash answered his phone. “John, why did you leave again?”
“Plausible deniability,” I said. “I didn’t see you commit any genocides, and you didn’t see me not burning down a picnic table.”
“Did you burn down a picnic table?”
“I just said I didn’t, do you even listen to me?” I shoved my keys in the ignition and turned it on, hearing the engine roar to life. “The Hunter is using a puppet.”
“What?”
“He has a skull puppet, probably an actual skull—he cleaned it up, bolted the jaw on, and now he’s using it to take bites out of the corpses.” I threw the car into reverse and backed up wildly, looking over my shoulder as I shouted into the phone. “That’s why he doesn’t pass out when he bites the sedated bodies, and that’s why the bites are scattered all over instead of concentrated in one spot, and that’s why his methods are a crazy mishmash of precision and ferocity: because he’s faking being a cannibal. It’s all an act, from the bites to the hidden injection marks to the letters he sends us. It’s all fake.”
“Why would he fake cannibalism?”
“To throw us off the scent,” I said, putting the car in drive and heading for the street. The park table was burning brightly behind me now, and it occurred to me that in all my frantic planning, I’d only thought about escape. I’d never even considered the possibility of putting out the fire. I could have, if I’d acted quickly; there was enough snow to smother the whole thing. But it hadn’t even crossed my mind. I hate to kill a fire.
“John?” said Potash.
“He’s trying to trick us,” I said, as I pulled into the street. “He’s a Withered and he knew we had Brooke and now he probably knows we have Elijah, so he’s hiding his methods. If he’d come into town killing people the same way he always did we’d have figured out who he was and how he worked, and then we could have figured out a way to kill him. He knew we could do that because we’d done it to half a dozen Withered already. So he’s hiding his real kills and feeding us a bunch of fakes to keep us in the dark. When he comes for us, we won’t know anything about him.”
I paused, waiting for him to answer, but all I heard were vague mumbles in the background. After a moment Potash
spoke again. “It looks like we’re the ones going after him. Trujillo thinks he’s figured out where he is.”
“Where?”
“Do you know anything about this guy?” asked Potash, ignoring my question. “Anything at all? A cannibal we thought we could deal with—just wear body armor and shoot first. But if that’s all an act … we need to know what we’re up against.”
I hemmed and hawed for a minute, trying to piece together the few bits of info that we knew about The Hunter—or the real killer who was using The Hunter as a facade. He was smart. He was careful. He was patient. But we knew all that already. He was taking on an FBI kill team all on his own.… “He’s confident,” I said, slowly putting the picture together in my mind. “He’s made a lot of plans, including a lot of interaction, and so far all of it has worked. He’s a planner, which means he’s planning something big—not just individual kills and messages, but an end game. He’s…” I shook my head, watching for ice on the road, trying to think as fast as I could—all the more difficult because there was so much I couldn’t say without giving myself away. “He’s a talker,” I said, thinking about the letters. And the e-mails: he’d insisted on communicating with me, but he’d never really said anything. “Words are important to him,” I said, “and communication. Something about that means something to him, maybe the exchange of words or thoughts or ideas.”
“Maybe he’s just an extrovert,” said Potash.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe he’s just a liar. His communication is only important because it’s been a method for deceiving us. He planned this entire thing to throw us off his trail, which means … which means that his real trail has nothing to do with what he’s trying to make us think about.”
“So he’s not a cannibal,” said Potash.
“Maybe he can’t be a cannibal,” I said suddenly. “Are you there with the others?”
“Yes.”