Chapter 16
In the cold wet of dawn, Acton stood up and lifted Ember into his arms, walking at first, and then building to a sprint. He harangued her into changing back into the clothes that Thalia had given her, and then carried her and her new bag of supplies back out into the brightening woods. When he set her down several hundred feet from her mother’s home, she almost cried.
“I don’t want to go back there,” she pleaded. “Can’t I just stay outside? I could live out here, like Isaac.”
“You’re one of them, even if you don’t act like them.” Acton said back to her, nodding toward the house. “That will never change. And I have needs that you don’t meet.”
“Acton…”
“Just stay in your room,” he said over his shoulder as he walked away. The back of his black suede jacket was damp from being on the ground all night, and little bits of dried grass had stuck to it. It was the messiest she had ever seen him. “Come back out tonight, or don’t. I’ll watch for you either way.”
Ember watched him until he was gone, but then turned around, picked up her bag, and slowly trudged back to her mother’s house, thinking about how nice the stars looked through the haze of Acton’s hypnotism. The world was filled with broad strokes of bright colors whenever he did it; it was like looking at a living impressionist painting.
There was a layer of damp on the stone wall at the back of the yard, and Ember didn’t even have the energy to care. She wasn’t going to walk around to the gate. She laid herself flat, hugging the wall as she slid over on her stomach, feeling the cold and the grime as they attached themselves to the cotton garments she was wearing.
The fire pit where her mother had created an inferno the night before had gone to a cold grey muck. Ember stared at it longingly; everything she had brought with her had gone into that pit. That was what it all came down to in the end; ash and mud.
She picked up a stick, poking through the mess, wondering if anything had escaped the blaze. It wouldn’t be like having it back, but even something little—like a metal button, or a coin—would be enough to remember it all by. She would keep the little souvenir safe forever after, and it would be like she had somehow salvaged a piece of everything she should have kept safe to begin with.
But as she stirred the gunk, she hit on something hard and smooth. She poked at what she thought was a large river stone until it turned over. Two empty eye sockets and a gaping maw of teeth stared back at her.
Ember dropped her stick.
Acton had said that Gina was a killer. He had said that she killed on a regular basis, but it hadn’t been a reality to Ember until right in that moment. She wondered what unfortunate soul had gone up in flames with her tennis shoes, underclothes, and cell phone, and felt sick to her stomach when Thalia’s words came back to her.
Gina and Ethel had had a fight. Ethel had “gone away,” and Thalia wasn’t sure when she would come back.
Ember wasn’t sure if she was ever coming back.
She crouched down in front of the skull, wondering if she would even recognize her grandmother, inching closer, trying to make her hand leave the side of her body to fetch the bone, thinking that someone ought to give it a proper burial. It didn’t deserve to rest there, covered with black-brown goo and grit. It looked like it was in a cesspool.
With her throat gone dry, and just as she had finally convinced her fingers to reach out and brush a glob of fine-ash muck from the skull’s brow, the skull moved.
Ember jumped back in surprise, landing on her rump in the mud. She crab-walked backwards a few feet, keeping her eyes on the skull, unsure if she had actually just seen what she thought she had seen.
After a few more moments, as the skull and Ember stared each other down, the skull gently rolled onto its side, and something black started to come out of it.
It wasn’t like the mud or the wet ash, or even like decaying flesh. What was slowly inching its way out of the eye socket, like a massive worm trying to wiggle away from the mouth of death, was the same substance that Ember had seen bleeding from Kaylee’s hand.
It was alive.
As Ember sat transfixed, the worm slowly gyrating and pulsing as it struggled to birth itself from the eye socket, the skull suddenly exploded beneath the heel of Gina Gillespie’s boot heel. She kicked at the struggling black worm, and then tossed a soaked towel over it.
Ember caught a whiff of the kerosene just before Gina struck the match and flames shot up from the ground; the black thing writhed and hissed, like bacon shrinking in a hot pan. Gina beat her hand against her apron to put out the part of her that had caught when she had lit the towel she had carried, and then looked Ember coolly in the eye.
“We’ve got food, and you’re welcome to it,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk to you, so keep your mouth shut unless you’re putting something in it.”