I starting gathering our few belongings, repacking them in our backpacks. “No, just lost in thought and standing in a weird place. Tell me about Yashodh again.” The Withered assumed human identities, but they had their own names. Nobody, the demon who’d taken Brooke, had been called Hulla. The Lord High Light-Bright, as the clerk called him, was named Yashodh.
Brooke shook her head. “You know I don’t like talking about Yashodh.”
“Well, we’re going to meet him at some point, so we need to get over that.” I zipped one pack closed and collected some discarded socks for the other one. Today was my last clean pair; we’d need to do laundry soon. “You knew this day was coming. We’ve done all the other Withered we can find, so it’s time to do Yashodh.”
“We haven’t done Attina.”
“This is on our way to Attina,” I said. “We do it now, or we do it six months from now.”
“I know,” said Brooke, falling back on the bed, “I just … I don’t know. Maybe I can remember some others.” Her memory was riddled with holes, but it was also the only tool we had to find and hunt the Withered. She clenched her teeth. “You don’t know him like I do.”
“So tell me about him.”
“I already told you everything I know.”
“You can’t have it both ways,” I said. “Do you know him or not?”
“He hates himself,” said Brooke, “even more than I do.” I glanced at her; I’d known her long enough to see the real meaning behind that statement.
I corrected her softly. “You mean ‘more than Nobody hates herself,’” I said.
“I am Nobody,” said Brooke. Or, I suppose, said Nobody.
I shrugged and zipped up the second backpack; she didn’t show any warning signs of another depressive attack, so it wasn’t worth arguing.
“Each of the Withered gave something up,” said Nobody, and her eyes got that faraway look they sometimes had when she talked about the distant past. Nearly ten thousand years ago, if the FBI’s researcher had guessed right. “I gave up my body,” she continued, “because it was horrible and I hated it. Yashodh gave up himself.”
“But what does that mean?” I asked. “We’ve been tossing that around for a year now, trying to figure out what he can do. Nobody gave up her body and gained the ability to take the bodies of others. Can Yashodh take the ‘selves’ of others? What does that even mean? It might explain the cult, if he’s somehow subsuming their individuality into some kind of collective, but why? What does he possibly gain from doing that?”
“He’s weak,” said Nobody, her voice dripping with disdain. “He’s lucky to get anything, let alone something he wants.”
“He’s a ten-thousand-year-old monster,” I said, “one who can probably mind control people. The more we look into him, the more I think he can get anything he wants.”
“Then why is he here in two-bit Crapville?” asked Nobody. “Everyone loves him, and he can have everything, and he doesn’t even have to kill people, and all he does is sit here picking his nose—”
“Wait,” I said, standing up in a rush. “That’s new—you’ve talked about Yashodh for a year and this is the first time you’ve said he doesn’t have to kill people.”
“That’s new?” Her eyes went wide and she looked down at herself as if expecting to see something different. Almost immediately she shook her head and closed her eyes, squinting them shut as she thought. “Something new … think…” She clenched her teeth with the effort. “He doesn’t kill people … he doesn’t have to kill people.…”
“Do they worship him?” I asked. If he’d set himself up as a messiah figure in a backcountry cult, maybe it was the worship itself that sustained him. “You said everyone loves him, right? Is that a means to an end, or is that the end itself?”
“That would make sense,” said Nobody, rubbing her fingers together as she spoke, staring at the wall.
“But is it true?”
“I don’t know,” she growled, “I’m trying to think.” She focused on the wall like it was a portal to the past. “Come on, brain, spit it out. He doesn’t need to kill people. Maybe he doesn’t want to kill people. Maybe he can’t kill people.”
“He gave up himself,” I said, trying to keep her thoughts focused; brainstorming new ideas wouldn’t help us, we needed to dig deeper into the handful of truths we already had.
“He gave himself up,” said Brooke. “Everybody loves him … because he gave himself up. He saved them.”
This sounded wrong. “From what?”
“From sin,” said Brooke, looking up at me. “He died for our sins.”
I shook my head. “How many of your personalities are Christian?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Lots. I’m just talking about Jesus now, aren’t I?”
“Yashodh is not the messiah,” I said, “but he needs to convince people that he is. For … something.”
“So he can be happy,” said Brooke.
“That’s it?”
She looked at me with a frown. “What do you mean, that’s it? That’s everything.”
“The Withered are not trying to be happy,” I said, “they’re trying to gain … power, money, something. They’re trying to survive.”
“That’s what happiness is, John. It’s how we survive. It’s why.”
I sighed and rubbed my face with my hands. “Whatever. We can think on the way.” I grabbed my backpack, and looked down at Boy Dog. “Sorry, dog. You’ve got a long walk ahead.”
3
“What’s your favorite song?” asked Brooke. We’d found State Road 27 but hadn’t managed to catch a ride yet so we were just walking along—slowly, so Boy Dog could keep up.
I answered without thinking. “‘Don’t Stop Believin’,’ by Foreigner.”
Brooke laughed. “No it’s not.”
“Sure it is,” I said. “Why not?”
“The question isn’t why not,” she said. “It’s why. What on earth about that song makes you like it?”
“You say that like it’s impossible to like,” I said. “That’s one of the most popular songs of all time.”
“Is that why you picked it?”
I glanced at her. “I picked it because I like it.”
“So sing it.”
“What, right now?”
She spun slowly in the empty country road, looking at the wide fields and dusty trees that surrounded us. “Are you shy? We could sing at the top of our lungs and no one would even hear us. So prove it, big guy: if ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ is your favorite song, sing it.”
“I don’t really sing.”
Her eyes gleamed with mischief. “Then recite the words.”
I sighed. “Fine, I don’t actually know the words.”
“Of course you don’t,” she said proudly. “You didn’t even know who sang it—it’s Journey, not Foreigner, and I should know because I went to their concerts. Several of me did.”
“They’re the same band,” I said, and then frowned. “Aren’t they?”
“They’re not the same band, they’re super different.”
“No, seriously,” I said, “isn’t it just, like, they changed their name? Like how Jefferson Airplane became Jefferson Starship.”
“Wow,” said Brooke, “you’re going all in on classic rock, aren’t you?”
“What else am I going to listen to, modern stuff? Have you heard modern stuff?”
“More than you have,” said Brooke, “which is my whole point. You don’t listen to anything, classic or modern or anything else. I’m going to guess that somebody, probably your mom, listened to classic rock all the time, so you picked the most popular one as your ‘look how normal I am’ answer if anyone ever asked.”
I sighed again and shrugged. “Fine, you got me. And it was my dad, actually—huge classic rock fan. I don’t know if you remember him very well.”
“He left when we were little, right?” Brooke had lived two doors down from me since elementary school
. “I liked him.”
“Most people did,” I said. “People who didn’t live with him at least.” I heard a car behind us and turned to face it, sticking out my thumb to try to hitch a ride. The car ignored us, not even slowing down. I faced forward again, but Boy Dog had flopped down in the dirt by the side of the road, taking our brief pause as an excuse to rest. I gave him a moment.
“I don’t know why I bother keeping up the pretense with you,” I said softly. “You know everything about me.”
“I don’t think anyone knows everything about you,” said Brooke.
“But you know that I’m … different,” I said. I don’t know why it was so hard to say; I used to wear it as a badge of honor. “I’m sociopathic. I don’t feel things the way you do, the way anybody does. Everything I do is fake, to make people think I’m normal. This morning I lied to the motel clerk, trying to convince him we came to town on a bus. He doesn’t care how we came to town. Some of the lies were to put him at ease and get info out of him, but even after he gave us the info I didn’t want him to know we were drifters. I wanted him to think we were normal.”
“You just want to fit in,” said Brooke. “Everybody wants that.”
“I never used to.”
She shrugged and started walking again. Boy Dog heaved himself to his feet and started following. “People change,” said Brooke. I caught up with her in a few long strides. “And circumstances change. When you were a kid you lived in a nice little house full of nice little people, and it was all nice and little and normal, and you wanted to stand out.”
“I lived in an apartment over a mortuary,” I said. “My dad beat us and then left.”
“So why you’d pick his favorite music?”
I thought about it then shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Either way,” she said, “your old life was pretty friggin’ normal compared to your current social circle: a possessed girl and a dog with the dumbest name in the history of dog names.”
“A demon named him,” I said. “So to be fair, that name is not the worst thing it’s ever done.”
Brooke laughed, and I couldn’t help but smile at the sound. We walked for a while longer, listening to the wind rustle through the trees. After a minute or two Brooke spoke again. “What do you think my favorite song is?”
“I don’t know.”
“How could you not know? We lived next door to each other for sixteen years.”
“Since we’re being so open and honest,” I said, “let’s get this out of the way and say that I did, in fact, stalk you for several months—”
“That’s creepy.”
“Compared to what aspect of our current situation?”
“Fair point,” said Brooke. She took a few more steps, then asked, “Because you liked me?”
“I told myself I was protecting you.”
“Were you?”
“Well, you’re not dead.”
“I did get kidnapped because of you, though.”
“And rescued.”
“And possessed.”
“Are you going to hold that against me forever?”
“I’m just teasing,” said Brooke. “There’s, like, a million girls in here, and you only ruined one of their lives.”
“Listen,” I said, “I am doing everything I can to—”
Brooke burst into laughter. “I’m just teasing!” she insisted. “Come on, John, you know I love you.”
“And we know that that’s, like, the worst thing that’s ever happened to you.”
“You’re my best friend,” said Brooke. “You’re literally the only person who knows me—the real, current me, I mean. My family just remembers Mary.”
“You mean Brooke.”
“I mean all of them,” said Brooke. “Mary and Brooke and Katherine … honestly, like at least a hundred Katherines. They’re all gone—even Brooke—but whatever I am now, some kind of messed-up, emotional Voltron made out of old, discarded daughters, you’re the only one who knows that me. This me. And I know you don’t love me, but you like me. And … that means a lot.”
“Well,” I said, not knowing how to respond. “There you go.”
She raised her eyebrow. “Very romantic.”
“But my point is,” I said, “that despite stalking you, I never paid attention to the music you listened to.” I paused. “I remember hearing a Pink song once.”
“How can a song be pink?”
“Pink was a singer,” I said. “Well, still is, I guess. Sometimes I feel like we’ve left the world, but we’re still in it, just … on the fringes.”
“What was the name of the song?” she asked.
“I don’t really know music,” I said, feeling guilty that I couldn’t tell her. “Sorry.”
“It would be nice to have a favorite song,” she said. A moment later she pointed ahead. “Is that it?”
I peered down the road; the distance was blurry, but there was definitely something there. People, and a large dark shape that could be the produce stand. “Did we walk the entire way?”
“Poor little Boy Dog,” said Brooke, bending down to scratch his ears. “His legs are, like, eight inches long. He’s taken ten times as many steps as we have.”
“We have to be careful,” I said, watching the dark shape slowly come into focus as we walked closer. “Yashodh can control minds, and we don’t know how to kill him yet—we’re going to have to find some way of staying close to him long enough to figure him out without getting brainwashed, and that’s not going to be easy.”
“What was the old trick you used to use?” asked Brooke. “When we had the whole team?”
The first year Brooke and I were on the road we’d been in the employment of the FBI and we’d managed to kill eight Withered before they’d starting fighting back. That whole team was dead now, except for the two of us, but we’d learned a lot before the end. One of the simplest tricks was the speed-bump test: most of the Withered had incredible regeneration powers, but not all, so step two, after we’d found one, was to find a way to hit them with truck. If they regenerated we buckled down for a long game of cat and mouse, figuring out exactly how to kill them and then planning the perfect way to do it. I was really good at that part. If the truck worked, though, then it was over—the Withered was dead, and we moved on to the next one.
“I don’t know if we can arrange a speed-bump test,” I said. “At least not one we can get away with afterward. Potash was a military-trained assassin; I’m just a creepy kid with a knife.”
“And a gun,” said Brooke.
“And a gun,” I said. She knew where it was in my pack, but I always kept the bullets hidden. A gun wasn’t a great thing to have handy during one of her suicidal mood swings.
“Hello, travelers!” One of the people at the stand was waving to us, and we waved back. I think I’d been expecting them to be dressed in white robes or something, but instead they looked like they’d stepped out of a western movie: homemade dresses of colorful gingham, linen shirts, hats they must have purchased from a store somewhere. They weren’t dour, they weren’t otherworldly, they were just … people. They greeted us with smiles, and I slowed my pace for the last several yards, trying to gauge the danger. Boy Dog walked straight to the shady triangle by the wall of the food stand and plopped down, panting in exhaustion. One of the cultists picked up a ceramic plate of zucchini, dumped them into a box of yellow squash, and set the empty plate in front of Boy Dog, filling it with water from a plastic jug. Boy Dog eagerly lapped it up.
“You’re a long way out from the city,” said a woman.
I nodded, shielding my eyes from the sun. “Yep. Haven’t been able to hitch a ride all morning.”
“Where were you headed?” asked a man.
“Here,” said Brooke. She was never very good at deception.
“We were looking for the Spirit of Light,” I said, trying to spin Brooke’s up-front confession into the same cover story I’d given the clerk. “My sister was d
own here a few months ago,” I said. “We thought maybe she’d joined your commune.”
The woman tilted her head. “Sister Kara, maybe?”
“Her name is Lauren,” said Brooke, before I had a chance to say yes. I bit my tongue, wondering how I could talk to them without her spoiling all my lies, but the man laughed.
“We all get new names when we join with the Light,” he said. “I don’t remember Sister Kara’s old name, but she joined us two months ago, so it might be her.”
“She won’t want to leave with you,” said the woman. “Sister Kara is happy here—we all are.” Her face softened and she peered into my face with concern. “You don’t look happy at all.”
“He never does,” said Brooke, and looked at me with an expression almost identical to the woman’s. “He’s happy sometimes, though. More often than you think.”
“How can you tell?” the woman asked.
Brooke nodded sagely. “The dog’s still alive.”
It disturbed me how close Brooke seemed to the cultists—how eerily her attitude of cheerful innocence matched their vibe of brainwashed emptiness. I’d grown so accustomed to her over the last few months that I’d forgotten how damaged she really was.
“That’s good to hear,” said the man. “Isn’t it great to be alive?”
“We were hoping we might have a chance to go back to your farm with you,” I said. “Just to look for her? We don’t want to try to take her away, so don’t worry—we just want to make sure it’s really her, make sure she’s safe.”
“I assure you that everyone in the Light is completely safe,” said the woman firmly. “Christopher makes sure of it.”
“Is that the leader?” I asked.
“The Vessel of the Light,” said the woman. “If you’d like to meet him, you’re welcome to join us for dinner.”
“Thank you,” said Brooke. “That’s very kind.”
“Pull up an apple crate,” said the man. “It’s a long day until then. Have some tomatoes—fresh off the vine this morning.”
I nodded my head in thanks, still leery of the emptiness behind their eyes—or was I just imagining it?—but Brooke smiled brightly and shrugged off her backpack, sitting in the shade and accepting a tomato happily. After a moment I took off my pack as well, though I told them I preferred to stand, and watched as they went about their business with the vegetables. There were five of them at the stand: Sister Debbie and Brother Stan, the two who’d greeted us, and behind them were Sister Tracy, Sister Molly, and Brother Zeke. The names seemed strange to me—not really biblical, and not from any other religious tradition I could think of, either. They were just names, and the only benefit to getting a new one seemed to be the loss of the old one, a clean break from your former life, which tied you to this new community only in the sense that you weren’t tied to anything else anymore.