Gun Shy

Or — half of a girl, cut from under one shoulder to over the other hip, the top half of her staring eternally forward with milky blue eyes as parts of things that had once been inside her seeped out of the spot where she’d been brutally split.

  I screamed.

  I dropped the fucking flashlight.

  I kept screaming.

  Not just because of the girl. Not just because she’d been butchered, her lower half nowhere to be seen. I wondered, briefly, if I was standing on the rest of her body parts. Her legs. Where the fuck were her legs?

  I screamed until it felt like my throat would bleed. I screamed for Cassie, for Pike, for Jesus and for God. I didn’t believe in the last two, but my subconscious didn’t care about that minor detail.

  JESUSCHRISTOHMYGODCASSIEPIKE

  Over and over again.

  I think I even called for my mother.

  Cassie’s face appeared above me. She was so high up I could barely make out her expression. “What is it?” she called out. “Leo, what is it?”

  Beside her, I saw Pike, lowering the rope down. Too slow. Too fucking slow and I was stuck next to the dead girl and I was still screaming.

  I started to hyperventilate.

  “Karen!” I screamed. “It’s fucking KAREN!”

  I saw Pike speed up, heard Cassie gasp loudly.

  Karen was a girl we went to school with.

  Karen had been missing for almost a week.

  Everybody thought Karen had run away or been swept up in a trucker’s rig, or just plain gone and died somewhere nobody knew about. The police were searching for her, but you could tell it was kind of a half-hearted thing.

  Because girls like Karen went missing, but they weren’t always missed. Girls like Karen were trouble, and she had been in trouble. With drugs. With stealing.

  Karen was the girl who’d given hand jobs to the entire male side of our class by the time she was thirteen.

  Karen was the girl who’d already had three abortions.

  Karen was trouble. Karen was in trouble.

  But Karen wasn’t in trouble anymore.

  Because Karen was fucking dead.

  “Pike, get that fucking rope down here, man, hurry!” I begged.

  I know I’d said the smell wasn’t so bad in the well, but that was before I’d seen what the smell was. Now, it crawled inside my nostrils. It laid a home on my tongue. It burrowed into my cheeks.

  And then I remembered that I’d drank the water.

  I’d drank dead Karen water. Dead girl juice.

  I gagged violently, one hand up against the wall. I was terrified — of what, I’m not sure. She was already dead, after all. She was hardly going to hurt me.

  Something brushed up against my face and I yelled again, jerking my head away from where the sensation had originated. My heart leaped when I saw the rope, a crudely fashioned bar attached to it to wrap your legs around while you got hoisted up or down.

  I grabbed that rope for dear life. “Pull me up!” I yelled. The rope started to jerk almost immediately as Pike wound it up above. Relief flooded my body, right through to the marrow in my bones, and I closed my eyes momentarily as I took a proper breath.

  But the rope was frayed, and I was heavy.

  The rope snapped.

  I fell.

  The fall ended just as quickly as it had begun when I slammed face-first into what was left of Karen. I screamed without opening my mouth, my eyes level with hers, a tiny worm making a hole in her face to burrow into.

  Her eyes had some kind of cloudy film over them, like my grandfather’s eyes when he’d developed cataracts, but it was still as if she were watching me through the dirty windows of the beyond. I pushed away, heaving my body up and sticking to the opposite wall.

  I’d lost the flashlight in my fall. My eyes slowly adjusted to the dark at the bottom of the well, Karen’s face coming into grainy focus. I stared at the milky blue-white of her dead eyes until the sheriff arrived and hoisted me out with a winch.

  Something changed in me while I was down there. Some part of me died with Karen, sucked out of me and into her unseeing eyes. I still remember now, years later, the way I laughed at Cassie before I went over to the well. How light I felt. How easy it was to breathe.

  I don’t laugh much anymore.

  Once I was finally at the surface, I ran as far away from the well as I could get. Cass tried to touch me, but I pushed her away, pushed Pike away, falling to my hands and knees in the dirt. I leaned over, the sight of her on a constant loop inside my head. Karen. Dead. Her blood in the fucking water.

  Her blood inside me.

  I stuck a finger down my throat and gagged. Nothing came up. Fuck, no. I wasn’t going to go on until I had the water that I’d just drank OUT of my body.

  I stuck two fingers down, further, and threw up all over the grass. That strange, metallic taste returned to my mouth, masked by bitter stomach acid.

  Dead girl juice. It took me months before I stopped tasting her in my mouth.

  A bunch of kids found the other half of her floating in Gun Creek a few hours later.

  My friend, Chase Thomas, was one of the kids who saw her lower parts, wedged underneath a grille in the water intake pipe that fed the whole town, legs dancing lazily in the current.

  For a long time afterward, people were talking about how strange it was that Chase and I had found a half of Karen each.

  How convenient.

  Almost like they thought we killed her.

  CASSIE

  NINE YEARS AGO

  I’d only seen a dead person once before. My grandfather. Even then, it was after the funeral home had done their magic, embalmed him, taken away the pale death and made him look like he was simply sleeping. White-haired and fragile, he was like a life-sized china doll, laid neatly in his coffin with his fishing hat and thick-rimmed glasses. It was only when I touched his hand that I felt his death. So, to me, death was cold. Death was waxen cheeks and liver spots, grey hair and wrinkled skin.

  But when I saw Karen — or what was left of her, that part of her — death stopped being cold. Death became a savage thing; it became fresh and cloying and violent.

  Death became our living nightmare.

  Leo, he had it the worst. For weeks, he couldn’t drink anything without gagging. Said all he could taste was Karen. The only thing that could wash her away was whiskey or vodka, any spirit that burned as it went down.

  So he drank, and he stayed in his room, and for weeks he couldn’t even look me in the eye, let alone touch me.

  I still loved him. I always loved him. But Leo Bentley was never the same sweet boy after he came out of that well.

  THE GIRL IN THE WINDOW

  CHAPTER ONE

  CASSIE

  NOW

  I am a girl with a darkness inside me.

  * * *

  CAREFULLY PLACED. Cleverly concealed.

  * * *

  A DARKNESS that could devour you.

  * * *

  ONE HAND on a cold pane of glass, watching the snow fall outside. It’s pitch-black out here, far away from bright city lights. You can’t see a goddamned thing. You can only feel fingers digging into your hips, hot and insistent, a tug of hair, a smack of skin, and the snowflakes as they fall through the weak pool of light that the porch light illuminates below. And the pain. He’s not gentle when he uses me to satisfy his want.

  I think he likes it like this, up on the bed, against the window, as if somebody might see. But nobody could ever possibly see. It’s too dark. No streetlights. No houses for a clear half-mile in every direction.

  * * *

  JUST US, and the silence, and the darkness.

  * * *

  AND THE SNOWFLAKES, steady as they fall, through that yellow beam below.

  * * *

  YOU COULD NEVER COUNT them all. One blink and you’d miss some. One sharp stab of pain that drives your face into the mattress, and you’d miss plenty.

  * * *

  AND TH
AT’S THE POINT, I suppose. You keep counting. You watch the snow fall, and you count every snowflake your eyes can catch until it’s finally over.

  THE DARKNESS WASN’T ALWAYS THERE. I was bright and shiny once. There was no tarnish at my edges, no very bad thing that existed inside me. I had a mother, and a boyfriend, and a life. I was loved. I had plans and goals and aspirations.

  * * *

  ONE MOMENT and they were all gone.

  * * *

  I KNOW what you’ll think after you hear my story.

  You’ll think I went mad when I saw Leo being burned alive, or when I gazed down at my comatose mother in the hospital after, as words like brain swelling and head-on collision drifted through the air, meant for me but headed somewhere beyond.

  * * *

  OR MAYBE, maybe, you’ll think it was during that first time, on the kitchen floor, a tangle of limbs, palm pressed against desperate lips, fingers squeezing wrists until it felt like they would snap.

  * * *

  AND EVERY TIME I’ll tell you, you are wrong. That, even as I cried in the aftermath of his sudden interest in me, I still was a girl without a black coal heart.

  * * *

  I CAN TELL you the exact moment the darkness burrowed in to stay. I imagine it like some filthy worm, coming up from the earth, chewing a neat circle in my skin and wriggling in. Finding that hollow space beneath my heart, in my ribcage, and curling up. Sated. Satisfied. Warm. I feel it sometimes when I’m frightened, and my heart won’t slow down. It beats like crazy like a machine gun with the trigger locked on. I can’t breathe. My vision tunnels. In those moments, I imagine the worm, how happy it must be, how comfortable within my fragile chest.

  * * *

  IT’S strange how you know something has happened, even if you can’t remember it.

  When you wake up in your bed, and the sheets beneath you are wet, and you haven’t wet the bed since you were little, a three-year-old girl who started to cry because she’d slept through instead of getting up and going to the bathroom.

  Eighteen years old, naked, and laying in a cold, wet spot, damp thighs and a bitter taste on your tongue. The taste of a medication you took once after your dad died and you started having nightmares that kept you awake. The bitter pill that your mother crushed into a glass of milk for you, the one that knocked you under and held you there in a chokehold, so that you could still see the nightmares in your sleep, but could no longer wake up from them. It was terrifying then, and it’s terrifying now. It’s in your mouth and in your nostrils and down the back of your throat and all you can remember is a low voice that says, Finish your milk, Cassandra.

  * * *

  YOU HAVE BEEN DRUGGED.

  Somebody has undressed you, tucked you into your bed, and they have used you. They have left something inside you.

  A darkness. A coiled, buzzing midnight that becomes all you’ve ever known.

  You don’t like it at first. It frightens you.

  The darkness is where nightmares come to life.

  But after time goes by, you start to feel differently.

  * * *

  YOU BEGIN to realize that the darkness you’ve been given is not a burden, but a gift.

  CHAPTER TWO

  CASSIE

  EIGHT YEARS AGO

  I’ve never felt rain like the rain we had that night.

  It didn’t fall from the sky so much as it drove into the ground, each drop an individual missile that indented the earth and turned firm-packed dirt to mud. It bit at your skin like tiny stinging bullets, if you were stupid - or unlucky - enough to be caught out in the deluge.

  It’s imprinted in my mind as if it’s still happening now, on a constant loop.

  Truck lights flashed past on the interstate on their way through our tiny town, in and out of Gun Creek in thirty seconds. We had plenty of customers at the Grill, but nobody ever stayed longer than a meal and a bathroom stop. The truck stop out front lay empty most nights, the once bustling stop in the road usurped by a fancier one up the highway fifty miles or so, with its shiny gas station and fast-flow gasoline pumps and sealed parking lot for the trucks to pull in for the night.

  The diner was the most alive part of our town, and it was still dying.

  It was storming, not unusual for that time of year, but the business it brought us was incredible. Dana’s Grill was heaving; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had to seat customers at the bar while I cleared off tables. I had overheard a couple earlier talking about some flooding north of Gun Creek, and I guessed the shiny new rest stop had been cut off by the downpour.

  I was handing change to a table of truck drivers when I heard the sound. It was dampened by the unrelenting rain, the water almost delaying the sound waves from breaching the diner.

  A loud bang. The sickening screech of metal twisting, accordioning in on itself like a can being crushed underfoot. Every head in the diner swiveled to look outside, just as a crack of lightning lit up the world in an eerie blue-white flash that lasted but a fraction of a second.

  A midnight-blue Mustang with a custom-painted white racing stripe down the middle. I looked just in time to see it hurtling toward the rusted guardrail that ran along the edge of the bridge into town. An entire diner full of people watched, slack-jawed and unmoving as the guardrail groaned and gave way, the car hurtling into oblivion below.

  * * *

  IT HIT SOMETHING, hard. What did it hit? Not a tree. There weren’t any trees on this stretch of highway, save for a few dying lemon trees that somebody planted out the front of Dana’s Grill years ago and left to try and survive in the blistering hot summers and fatally cold winters that make up our little spot in northern Nevada.

  Whispers began to flow through the diner before the car had even crashed to a stop in the shallow bedrock below. An accident? Somebody call nine-one-one. What’s going on? The creek was somewhat frozen at this time of year, but no doubt the force of the car would smash straight through any ice and into the freezing water below.

  I dropped the change onto the table, missing the guy’s large, oil-stained hand completely. Coins rolled in ten different directions, and the guy glared at me, clearly unimpressed.

  I wasn’t paying attention to him, though. I was staring at what I thought I’d just seen, what I’d definitely heard, waiting for another crack of lightning to show me I was imagining things.

  “Hey, you okay?” One of the truckers asked me. He was wearing one of those baseball caps, the peak so low I could barely see the whites of his eyes as they reflected my horrified expression.

  My mouth was dry. It wasn’t his car. I just spoke to him.

  “My boyfriend drives a Mustang,” I said slowly. An odd taste filled my mouth, and it was a moment before I realized I’d bitten the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood.

  “Oh, hell,” the guy said, putting a hand on my shoulder as a set of headlights rolled through the rain on the highway stopping in front of the warped guardrail, illuminating it in full detail. The car that had gone over was nowhere to be seen. Oh God.

  I snapped out of my inertia. Tearing my apron off, I dropped it, sprinting for the front doors.

  “Cass?” A voice sounded from my right. Hands fell upon my arms, a face leaning down into mine that I knew but couldn’t place, even though I saw it every day.

  “Cassie!” the face yelled, and suddenly, two light-brown eyes sprang into focus.

  “It could be Leo,” I said to the face with the eyes.

  Those eyes scrunched up in confusion. “What?”

  I needed for him to let go of me. I needed to get to the car down in the creek bed to tell myself it wasn’t Leo. That it was anyone except Leo.

  “The car!” I yelled, shaking myself free. “It’s a Mustang. Let go of me!”

  Chase Thomas. That was his name. The quarterback of Gun Creek High’s football team. The little kid who pulled a chunk of my hair out in kindergarten. He was seventeen, like me. His eyes went wide as he let me go,
and then I was smacking my shoulder against the heavy double doors at the entrance to Dana’s, leaping off the front steps and almost breaking my neck as I landed on icy asphalt. My teeth started chattering almost immediately. It was below freezing that night, and the rain was turning yesterday’s snowdrifts into pale, gray sludge.

  My Sketchers sank into the muddy snow, and I fell over a couple of times. I was getting closer, inch by painstaking inch. The wind whipped my hair around my face, matted blonde strands sticking to my lips and teeth as I kept running and falling. Running and falling and getting back up.

  Almost there.

  I didn’t even look for oncoming cars as I ran across the highway and up to Gun Creek. The banks of the creek were rocky and I slipped in my sneakers. It was cold but I barely felt it, my focus so narrowed in on the Mustang that had smashed over the bridge and landed fifteen feet below on a pile of icy bedrock. One of its red taillights flickered weakly, on and off, a sign of life amongst the otherwise motionless vehicle. Nobody was moving inside. The radio was still playing, but I couldn’t place the song. It all sounded like static to me as I tried to pick my way through snow and ice.

  “Cassie!” A voice sounded from the bridge above. I didn’t even look back. I couldn’t. I had to get to the car and tell everyone it wasn’t Leo inside. “Get the hell away from there!”

  I scrambled over the last of the rock and onto frozen creek bed. I was almost at the car when flames started to spread inside.

  “No!” I yelled, the wind buffeting any noise that might have come out of my mouth, literally making me choke on my own words as cold air slammed into my lungs. I coughed, water streaming from my eyes, tiny icicles already forming on my eyelashes.