Chapter 26

26

The scene comes into focus.

The driver of the hatchback has gone through her windshield. She’s alive—she’s moving—but she’s bleeding. The driver of the truck is also bleeding. I don’t need to look, because I can smell it. Smell his blood, and cheap cologne, and whiskey. He’s been drinking. I know the accident wasn’t his fault—it was mine—but part of me wonders if a sip would be justified.

I open my door and drop out onto the road.

The pickup-truck driver is there, already in my face. He’s an older man, probably in his fifties.

“What the hell happened?” he asks. He slurs his words. “Weren’t you paying attention?”

He bleeds from his forehead, from his nose, from his knuckles.

“Hey!” he says. He’s not shouting at me; he’s shouting beyond me.

Naomi comes up behind me, and there’s blood smeared across her face. I’m too afraid to look back at the other driver, the one laid out on the hood of her hatchback.

“Sloane,” Naomi says, possessed. Ghoulish. “Are you thirsty?”

There’s another pop . The woman at the gas station is still shooting. Still screaming. “Stop them! Stop them!” She runs across the street toward the accident, waving the gun in one hand, her phone in the other.

“I’m calling the police! Don’t let them leave!” she says.

I look to Naomi, the fear of consequences taking hold, but Naomi doesn’t look back. She’s busy salivating over the truck driver, who is now slowly backing away from her.

“Miss,” I say to the woman with her cheek chewed through. I clasp my hands behind my back, for her sake and for mine, so I don’t neutralize this threat the way I want to. The bad way.

“Stay right there!” she says, pointing the gun at me. “I’m calling the—”

She’s gone.

She vanished.

She just vanished into thin air.

Only, I can hear her screaming. The screaming is the worst screaming I’ve ever heard. Worse than when she was getting her face bitten into.

Where is she? Where did she go?

“Holy shit,” the truck driver says as all the lights on the street go out.

I look at him, and he’s looking up. Until Naomi’s on him. She sweeps his legs out from under him, so his head hits the pavement, and his lights go out. She’s sipping the blood from his knuckles, cradling his hands to her lips like he’s someone precious to her.

I would tell her to stop, but I can’t get past this screaming. I spin around and around trying to figure out where it’s coming from, to see where the woman went, and how she went so fast.

And then I see.

She’s on top of the convenience store. There’s someone behind her, veiled in shadow, feeding on her. Her arm is pulled back at a terrible angle, and someone’s got it. Someone not letting go.

“Help me! Help!” she screams, until whoever it is reaches forward and twists her head, snaps her neck. Then she’s quiet. Then everything’s quiet.

Sometime between when we pulled out of the gas station and when we crashed, the van arrived. It’s parked on the street right in front.

The woman’s broken, bloodless body drops from the roof and lands on the pavement with a sickening splat . A second later, Tatiana jumps down. She wears a set of hot pink silk pajamas. Her hair is pulled back, and she unties it, shakes it out as she strides past the pumps toward the van. She waves at me, smirking.

Henry stands at a pump, letting gas spill out everywhere. He’s got an unlit cigarette in his mouth.

“Don’t!” I’m trying to shout, to be loud, assertive, because the clerk is still inside the store, and enough blood has been shed, but my voice won’t cooperate. Because my throat disagrees. There’s no such thing as too much blood.

There’s movement inside the convenience store, and I see Ilie and Elisa. They’re framed by the doorway as they feed on the clerk, Ilie on his leg and Elisa at his neck.

“Sloane,” Naomi says. “Have some. He tastes like bourbon.”

I turn around to find her sprawled out on the road next to the flattened body of the truck driver. He’s covered in puncture wounds. Bite marks.

“I saved you some,” she says, with a glint her in eye that might be drunkenness or antagonism. Either way, it doesn’t look like there’s anything left in the man. And even if there were, I wouldn’t touch him.

I’m in the middle of a massacre.

The truck driver starts to wheeze, his chest like a plastic bag in the wind. He inflates and deflates. I step toward him, the soles of my boots crunching on bits of broken glass. His eyes have sunk into his head. He’s too close to death to live. He’s dying, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“Go on, Sloane,” Naomi says.

Would it be a mercy?

“No. No! I’m not…”

“Not what?” Naomi asks. “Not bad like me?”

The door to the convenience store opens. Ilie and Elisa walk around the far side of the lot to avoid the gasoline.

“Are we almost done?” Tatiana asks, exasperated.

“In a rush?” Elisa says, stroking Tatiana’s hair as she passes her by. She crosses the street, coming to us. She opens the gas tank on the hatchback.

“Bring your trunks, loves,” Ilie says, getting into the van.

I shake my head. “No…”

Elisa helps Naomi off the ground, kisses her on the mouth, and then goes to the pickup truck. Climbs in. Pops open the gas hatch. Unscrews the cap. She rips some fabric from the hem of her dress and stuffs it into the tank.

“Don’t worry,” Elisa says, swiping my neck with a cold, soft hand. “We’ll take care of you.”

Elisa and Naomi get our suitcases, pull them toward the van.

I look down at the truck driver. He’s still breathing. They’ll burn him alive.

“Stop!” I say, my voice infuriatingly weak. “What are you doing? What have you done?”

“What have you done?” Tatiana says. She clicks her tongue. “I knew you two would cause problems.”

She carries on muttering in French as she gets into the van. Elisa puts our suitcases in the back, then climbs into the passenger seat.

“Come on,” Naomi says, reaching toward me. “We should go.”

This is her getting what she wants. She’s wanted to be back with them ever since we left. Ever since she met Ilie. She’s under their influence. Their guilt-free, free-love, “take what you like; leave what you don’t” lifestyle. They don’t care about consequence. They don’t have remorse. And neither does she.

But I do.

“No,” I say. “I won’t do it.”

The distant sirens quickly change my mind, my fear leveling the moral high ground I like to believe I have. That I need to believe I have, to hold on to whatever’s left of my humanity. The smell of gasoline is so strong now that I can barely think straight.

I walk toward the van. Naomi’s already in the back, where there are two rows of seats and a pile of suitcases and duffel bags and a giant cooler.

“We should hurry,” Ilie says. “We will need to go fast.”

“Sloane,” Naomi says, curling up next to Tatiana in the back seat. “Get in.”

The sirens are loud. Getting closer.

And there’s a flickering in my peripheral vision. I turn toward the convenience store, and through the windows I can see the fire burning inside.

“Okay, fine!” I say, jumping into the van. I go to the middle row, because it’s empty.

“Leave the door open for Henry,” Elisa says.

Ilie slaps the side of the van. He calls out to Henry in a language I don’t understand. Henry nods, letting the gas pump drop. When he gets to the van, he lights his cigarette, takes a drag, then flicks it, at the exact moment the convenience store windows burst.

Everything goes up. Flames come hurtling toward us. Henry closes the door, and Ilie puts the van in reverse. The road is blocked by a fallen power line, and there’s a queue of cars on the other side of it. Ilie pulls a U-turn and drives onto the curb, past the car wreck right as it catches fire, then cuts across an empty lot.

“Just relax,” Ilie says as he picks up speed. I close my eyes so I can’t see the explosion, but I can hear it. I’ll be hearing it forever, ringing in my ears, echoing in my fucking soul.

“All done,” Elisa says, clapping twice. She turns around and looks at me. “Behind us. Literally and figuratively.”

I’m nauseous, but I don’t know if I can puke with only blood in my system. I want to expel whatever’s inside me, be rid of it all. Eradicate this horror. This guilt. This fear.

“Such brats. You should be thanking us,” Tatiana says. She whispers in my ear, “We cleaned up your mess.”

“You just set a gas station on fire,” I say. “I wouldn’t call that cleaning up a mess.”

Naomi giggles in the back seat, still buzzing on that guy’s bourbon-laced blood.

“No evidence, only ash,” Henry says.

I won’t look at him. I won’t look at any of them. I stare down at my hands, shaking in my lap. There’s a second explosion, and I think of the Texas City disaster, the worst industrial accident in US history. In 1947, two ships carrying ammonium nitrate exploded at the port, first the SS Grandcamp and later the SS High Flyer . The damage leveled almost a thousand buildings, killed more than four hundred people, injured many more. The second explosion was caused by the first, which was caused—historians think—by a discarded cigarette.

“It was an accident,” I say to myself. “It was an accident.”

“Don’t be sad,” Ilie says. “These things, they come up. We get in pickle; we get out. We move on. It is life.”

“What just happened was always going to happen,” Elisa says, again turning around, this time putting her hand on my knee. I pull away. “When you’ve lived as long as we have, you come to understand there are greater forces in the universe. Someday you will look back on this night and be grateful, know it was necessary.”

“If I’m ever grateful for tonight, I hope someone kills me,” I say.

“Sloane likes to think about death,” Naomi says, hiccuping. “Because she came so close. She took the rejection pretty hard.”

It’s the meanest thing she’s ever said to me, and I doubt she’ll even remember in the morning.

“What do you think, Drago?” Ilie says. “We go to the castle and get the bus?”

“Yes,” Henry says. “To the castle.”

“The castle,” Naomi sings. “Sounds fucking magical.”

“Yeah,” I say to the van door. “Happily ever after.”