Chapter 21

21

I run up the path and discover there’s now another car in the parking lot of the rest stop. A truck. There’s no one inside it. There’s no one around. There’s no more screaming. No more sound. I don’t know exactly what situation I’m about to stumble upon, but I have a pretty good idea.

I try the women’s room. There’s a smear of blood on one of the sinks, spatter on the mirror above it. I walk up to the sink, run my finger through the blood, and put it in my mouth, just to taste it, as if it’s frosting on a cake and I’m an impatient child. I hate myself for it.

There are a few drips leading out of the bathroom, like breadcrumbs into a wicked forest. I follow them around the side of the building, to the back, where I find Naomi on top of this mountain of a man, annihilating his neck.

She picks her head up only after I call her name for the third time.

“Sloane,” she says, her voice tremulous and thin. “Where were you? Where were you? He came…he followed me into the bathroom. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I didn’t want it. He tried to…he gave me no choice.”

The man lets out a gurgled cry.

I’m not totally convinced she’s telling me the truth, but the truth is irrelevant at the moment; there’s a man bleeding.

“Um…”

“Didn’t you see? Didn’t you see him pull up?”

“I…I didn’t. I was over…What did you do, Nay?”

“Do you not believe me?” she says, vexed. “It was self-defense.”

“Okay,” I say, getting closer so I can see the wound. It’s a red abyss. There are distinct teeth marks, ribbons of skin. He had a neck tattoo, but there’s no telling what of. He’s a puzzle with warped pieces. It’s brutal, and I know in the dark of my heart, we’re not leaving this one alive. “What did you do to him?”

“What I had to! You’re not listening.”

She’s wrong. I am listening. Blood gushes from his wound onto the ground, going to waste, and I hear it whispering to me. Calling me to it.

“He’s going to die, isn’t he?” I ask, closing my eyes and holding my own neck, as if my weak little hands can contain the thirst.

Naomi spits skin out of her mouth. “I fucking hope so.”

The man’s lips flap. He convulses, blood spewing from his maw as he attempts to speak. I lean over, attempting to listen.

“Cu—” he says. “Cunt.”

With that, I’m on him. I’m drinking. Chugging. Jubilant. He kicks his feet at first. He breathes until he doesn’t. And the taste is heaven—better and better and better and better, the blood so deliciously warm until suddenly it goes cold because he’s gone cold.

“They taste a little different when they’re dead,” I hear myself say. “But still good. There’s plenty left, if you want it.”

Naomi takes me up on the offer, takes my place at his neck, and I lean against the back wall of the restroom, gawk at the world’s soft edges. I feel so light, so magnificently untethered. I wonder if I might float away.

“Woof,” Naomi says, wiping her mouth on the man’s shirt. “I think I have brain freeze.”

I’m not sure how much time passes, but eventually I come back down to earth, and the edges are sharp, and I’ve killed someone.

I’ve got some of his skin stuck in my teeth.

I claw at my mouth, trying to get it out as fast as I can. I scrape my gums.

“Hey, hey,” Naomi says, taking my hands. “Stop.”

“I killed him. I killed him.” I keep saying it, so I understand that it’s true, that it happened. The repeated admission my immediate punishment for something I know I can never ever atone for.

“No, you didn’t. I did,” she says. “He followed me into the bathroom and waited for me outside the stall. He grabbed me by the hair and covered my mouth so I wouldn’t scream.”

She lets me go and reaches for the man, flips his hand over, showing me deep gashes. Bite marks.

“He saw a woman alone at a rest stop at night. He saw an opportunity,” she says. “He’s dead because he deserves to be dead. It’s not your fault. It’s not mine. It’s his.”

“Please don’t lie to me,” I say, sobbing into my knees. “Please.”

“I’m not lying!” she says. “Why would you even say that?”

“Because…”

“Because why?”

“Because you’re thirsty.”

She scoffs. “What are you saying?”

“Nothing.” I wipe my face. “Never mind.”

“You think I was the aggressor?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wow.” Her indignation doesn’t exonerate her, but it does make me feel worse. If she is lying, I’d rather believe the lie than live with the truth, if the truth is that we’re murderers.

“His last word was ‘cunt,’?” she says, shaking her head. “Since when do you not trust me?”

Since last night, I think but don’t say. “It doesn’t matter. He’s dead.”

“It does matter. It matters to me that you believe me.”

“I believe you,” I say, unconvincingly. “Now, what are we going to do?”

“Last time I had to dispose of a dead body, I had a vat of acid at the ready, so…”

I can’t tell if she’s sassing me, or if she can see how distraught I am and is trying to save me from a total spiral of despair by making me laugh. If it’s the latter, it fails.

“This is a crime. We’re criminals. We maybe could have gotten away with assaulting the porter, but this? How are we supposed to get away with murder?” I ask, standing. I don’t want to look at the body, but I can’t look away. We chewed so far into his neck.

“You’re the one who’s always listening to those podcasts and watching serial-killer documentaries. Pick up any hot tips?”

“Yeah. Don’t kill people.”

“Let’s just leave him. By the time anyone finds him, we’ll be long gone. And there’s nothing to connect us to him.” She steps back, looks around. “There are no cameras. It’s a rest stop in the fucking Finger Lakes.”

“There are cameras everywhere. There are trackers in our phones, our cars.”

“We stay on back roads. We ditch our phones. The car. We get new identities. Change our hair,” she says.

“You’re romanticizing.”

“So?” she asks, throwing her hands up. “You say that like it’s a bad thing. Don’t you know me? That’s how I live, Sloane. How I survive.”

“And it works for you. It doesn’t work for me.”

“What does work for you? Settling and playing it safe and telling yourself that living, actually living, isn’t worth the risk? You let one mistake, one bad judgment call, scare or shame you into permanent inaction. You’re so afraid of doing the wrong thing that—”

“This isn’t actually living,” I say. “We’re vampires. Don’t you get it? This is what we do now.”

I point to the dead man.

“It is living, Sloane. Living is complicated and messy. To live is to fuck up and make mistakes—”

“This is more than a mistake!”

“Oh, whatever! Fine! Then go back to your air fryer and fucking Dyson stick vacuum and suburban delusion. Go back to Joel.”

Surprisingly, I’m more upset that she’d bring up the Dyson than that she’d bring up Joel. I knew I never should have told her how much I love that vacuum.

“We don’t have time for this.” I lift the man’s feet. “We should at least drag him into the woods.”

“Sure,” she says, scooping her arms under his. “Shit. He’s heavy.”

“How did you get him back here in the first place?”

“I don’t remember,” she says. “It was a blur.”

We carry him to the woods beyond the picnic tables. There’s a slope, and we drop him at the edge and let him roll. I wince as it happens, at the sounds of his lifeless body tumbling down the hill until he smacks against a tree.

“I’m sorry,” Naomi says, snapping off a branch to cover our footprints. At this point, why bother? “I’m sorry I said that thing about Joel. And the vacuum. That was low.”

“If you cleaned, you’d understand.”

“It hurts me that you think I’d lie to you about this. About him,” she says.

“I’m sorry,” I say, walking ahead of her so I don’t leave any more tracks.

“Did you really not see him? Didn’t hear him pull up?”

I shake my head, too ashamed to admit that I was preoccupied attempting to fight the pull of my thirst. And for what? Just to turn around and let it overtake me.

We make it back to the rest stop. There’s blood in the snow, so we scoop it up, treat it like a snow cone. The blood tastes good but the snow tastes sour. I’m realizing that everything that isn’t blood tastes sour.

We go into the women’s room, clean the blood off the sink, the mirror, and the floor with toilet paper, then flush the paper.

“Good enough?” she asks me. “If anyone finds his body, they’ll probably assume it was an animal.”

“They’d be half-right,” I mumble, washing my hands in the sink. There’s blood crusted on my cuticles, under my fingernails. “There’s no soap.”

“It’s almost eight now,” she says. “We could drive all night. Even if we take back roads, we could probably still make it to Pittsburgh.”

“Pittsburgh?”

“I need to see Lee,” she says, staring down at her phone screen. “Then we can head to North Carolina. Or, I don’t know. Mexico.”

“It’s a terrible idea to see Lee. One, because if anyone’s looking for us, they’ll go to Lee. Two, because it would put him in danger. Serious danger. Think about what just happened. What we just did. Are you insane?”

“Sloane. Please,” she says, looking me in the eye. In the soul, if I still have one. “I need to see him.”

“Naomi…”

“I know. But…please? If we’re going to start over, I need to say goodbye. Face-to-face. And he’ll hound me if I don’t. If I just disappear, he’ll make noise. You know he will.”

“Okay,” I say, doing what I do best. Giving up. “Okay.”

She offers to drive again, and I acquiesce. She slips a lollipop into her mouth out of habit, and she promptly gags.

“Tastes like ass,” she says, throwing it in the garbage can in front of the rest stop as we pass by.

“Good. Be sure to leave your DNA all over the crime scene.”

“The cops aren’t gonna look in the trash for incriminating candy,” she says as we climb into the car.

“Go the speed limit,” I say, and she rolls her eyes. “I’m serious.”

“I know,” she says as she speeds out of the parking lot.

If she has any remorse for what happened here, she’s doing a stellar job of hiding it. But I don’t think she does. I really don’t think she does.

And that just might be my biggest problem.

“Music?” she asks.

“Yeah. Okay.”

She puts on some old-school Arctic Monkeys, and I lean against the window and close my eyes. All I can think about is what it felt like to have that man’s blood go cold in my mouth. The weight of him. The sound he made as he fell down the hill.

“You shouldn’t sleep,” she says. “We’ll sleep tomorrow. During the day. When it’s light out. Otherwise we’ll just be bored, cooped up in some motel room.”

“Right,” I say, yawning. “Right.”

But I don’t take her advice. I allow myself to drift off, to disappear into a gentler consciousness.