Alice Isn’t Dead

Alice Isn’t Dead Joseph Fink From the creator of the wildly popular Welcome to Night Vale podcast comes a story about loving, about searching – and about the courage you need when you find the unexpected.For fans of Stephen King, Serial, Twin Peaks and of course the eponymous number one iTunes podcast itself.Keisha Lewis mourned the loss of her wife, Alice, who disappeared two years ago. There was a search, there was grief beyond what she thought was possible. There was a funeral.But then Keisha began to see her wife, again and again, in the background of news reports from all over America.Alice isn’t dead. And she is showing up at the scene of every tragedy in the country.Keisha shrugs off her old life and hits the road as a trucker – hoping on some level that travelling the length of the country will lead her to the person she loves.What she finds are buried crimes and monsters (both human and unimaginable), government conspiracies, haunted service stations and a darkness far older than the highway system it lies beneath.Inspired by the eponymous podcast, Alice Isn’t Dead is a story about loving, about searching – and about the courage you need when what you find is terrifyingly unexpected.Cast in the fluorescent lights of midnight diner-signs, this story is as big as the open road and as intimate as the darkness of a trucker’s cab: perfect for fans of Stephen King, Serial, Twin Peaks and American Gods. Copyright (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF Published by HarperVoyager an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018 www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018 Copyright © Joseph Fink 2018 Jacket design by Rob Wilson © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Joseph Fink asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library. This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins. Source ISBN: 9780008323707 Ebook Edition © November 2018 ISBN: 9780008323721 Version: 2018-10-15 Dedication (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) To Meg, who took this road trip with me. And to Jasika and Jon, who made it possible for me to share it. This isn’t a story. It’s a road trip. Contents Cover (#u8b2038db-247a-549b-85ed-aea30068d528) Title Page (#u00176f15-df45-5f5e-8a6f-0da750998bcb) Copyright Dedication Part I: Thistle Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Part II: Bay and Creek Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Chapter 23 Chapter 24 Chapter 25 Chapter 26 Chapter 27 Chapter 28 Chapter 29 Chapter 30 Chapter 31 Chapter 32 Chapter 33 Chapter 34 Chapter 35 Chapter 36 Chapter 37 Chapter 38 Part III: Praxis Chapter 39 Chapter 40 Chapter 41 Chapter 42 Chapter 43 Chapter 44 Chapter 45 Chapter 46 Chapter 47 Chapter 48 Chapter 49 Chapter 50 Chapter 51 Chapter 52 Chapter 53 Chapter 54 Chapter 55 Chapter 56 Chapter 57 Chapter 58 Acknowledgments About the Publisher PART I (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) THISTLE (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) WHY DID THE CHICKEN CROSS THE ROAD? Because the dead return, because light reverses, because the sky is a gap, because it’s a shout, because light reverses, because the dead return, because footsteps in the basement, because footsteps on the roof, because the sky is a shout, because it’s a gap, because the grass doesn’t grow, or grows too much, or grows wrong, because the dead return, because the dead return. 1 (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) Keisha Taylor settled back into the booth and tried to enjoy her turkey club. The turkey club did not make this easy. A diner attached to a gas station, a couple hours outside of Bismarck. A grassy place between towns. Keisha’s main criteria for choosing the diner had been ample parking for her truck. Once upon a time people chose food based on the season, or the migration patterns of animals. She selected her meals based on the parking situation. Her difficult relationship with what the menu called “The Chef’s Special Club” was made more complicated by a patron in the booth adjacent to hers. The man was eating an omelet, scooping big chunks of egg with long, grease-stained fingers, and shoving them into his mouth, each bite followed by a low grunt. He was a large man, with a face that sagged on one side, a lump on the top of his shoulder, and a long fold of extra skin hanging from one arm. His clothes were filthy and she could smell him from where she sat. He smelled like rot. Not bad, exactly, but earthy, like fruit disintegrating into soil. His dirty yellow polo shirt had the word Thistle on it. He was staring at Keisha with eyes that went yellow at the edges. He chewed with his mouth open, and his teeth and food were both a dull yellow. Keisha did her best to look anywhere else. At the crowd of bystanders behind the on-location reporter on the muted televisions, a crowd she reflexively scanned for a familiar face. Or the bathroom door as the cook took his third visit since she had arrived. At a van driving by on the highway with a cartoon logo of chickens and the name praxis! in bubble font. But the man’s grunts were insistent and soon she couldn’t look anywhere else. And then, to her horror, he got up, omelet hanging from his lips, and limped toward her like his legs had no muscle, mere sacks of meat attached loosely to his torso. “Doesn’t look much like rain,” he said, plopping himself across the table from her and licking the egg off his lips with long wet passes of his pale tongue. The smell of damp earth got stronger. Her heart was pounding, as it often did when she felt trapped, which she often did. Her life, at the best of times, was a minefield of possible triggers for her anxiety, and this was not the best of times. “Hope you don’t mind if I join you,” he said. Not a question or a request, but a joke. He laughed, and his jaw sank crookedly into his neck. “I was hoping to eat alone,” she said down at her sandwich. “Good people deserve good things.” She didn’t know what to say to that. He scratched his cheek, and some of the skin peeled away. “It’s dangerous out here.” She didn’t want to engage with him at all, felt even responding negatively might encourage him, so she started to slide off the duct tape patchwork that had once been a booth, grabbing her backpack and making a determined look toward the door against the pulsing of her panicked heart. He held a hand up, and she froze, wanting to leave but not able to find a way to do so. “Want to see something funny?” he said, in a voice with no humor in it. It is often said that bad experiences are like nightmares. But what Keisha noticed most in this moment was how real it was, how she couldn’t escape its reality, how she would never be able to convince herself she had remembered any part of that evening incorrectly. He got up, wiping the egg from his hands onto the word Thistle on his chest. His face was slack and not arranged right. He walked over to a table where a man sat. A truck driver probably. The man looked like a truck driver, she thought. What does a truck driver look like? “Hey, Earl,” the Thistle Man said. “Huh?” said Earl, frowning. The Thistle Man grabbed him by the back of his neck and Earl’s face went blank. The Thistle Man guided Earl gently out of his seat, like a parent shepherding a sleepy child. Earl’s eyes were empty pools of water. Neither Earl nor the Thistle Man paid their checks. No one made a move to help. No one looked. Keisha didn’t know what to do. She walked toward the door, wanting to help, having no idea how. “You planning on paying for that?” said her waitress. “What? Yeah. I was just. Yeah.” Keisha handed over what she thought was the right amount, left some sort of tip, and then was outside in a night unusually hot for early midwestern spring. The lights on one side of the gas station were out. And in the shadows, the man in the Thistle shirt was cradling Earl. Earl was fully awake again, but the man’s arms clung like ropes around Earl, and he couldn’t move. She could see the pulsing of his muscles as he tried, the strain in his face. Behind them, in a different world, people sat eating waffles and sausages. “Shh,” the man in the Thistle shirt said to Earl, who tried to scream in response, but the scream was lost in the baggy flesh of his captor. The loose-skinned man didn’t seem human. He was like a boogeyman from a vaguely recalled nightmare. The Thistle Man. He bent down and took a bite out of Earl, at the artery in his armpit. Earl made a noise like a balloon letting out air, and blood poured down his torso. He was crying, but still couldn’t move. The Thistle Man reached his long fingers into the wound and tore off fragments of flesh, lifting them to his mouth. The movement was the same mechanical movement he had made with the omelet. Keisha had only a moment to decide how to respond and didn’t need even that. She ran, of course. Ran for her truck with her breath and heartbeat deafening in her ears. The Thistle Man chuckled as she went, slurping another fragment of Earl’s body into his mouth. As Keisha started the engine, she looked at Earl, who looked back at her. A man who had expected to go to sleep tonight, who had ideas about what the next few days would be like for him, had some sort of plan for the future. Who was, instead, watching the one person who could help him driving herself to safety, leaving him with only a monster to accompany him in his dissipation. Although Earl and his murderer didn’t know it, there was another witness. A small figure in a hoodie, standing behind one of the fuel pumps, the hood drawn over the face. The figure in the hoodie wasn’t running away but was no more able to help than Keisha. Some moments can’t be changed. 2 (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) Alice’s funeral had been a strange occasion. Not because she wasn’t well liked. Almost everyone liked Alice the moment they met her. She had an ease and a casual intimacy that transformed the people she met instantly into friends. In this way she balanced out Keisha, who was withdrawn and anxious. At a party on her own, Keisha would feel lost, but with Alice she was able to step into conversations, letting her wife lead the way whenever her own line of thought faltered. The funeral was strange because Alice’s death had been strange. No cause of death. No body. No certainty. There was a disappearance, and after a long and increasingly hopeless search, the presumption of death. And so Alice’s friends and her family mourned while holding the thought that maybe, after all, Alice was alive somewhere, although none of them, least of all Keisha, believed it. Meanwhile the funeral presented Keisha with what was, in a practical way, a party to navigate, and she did not have Alice to help her. Instead Keisha carried her grief through the crowd, and her friends reached out and softly touched her and murmured, and she kept moving room to room, as though in one of those rooms, somehow, Alice would be waiting. Two years after the funeral, knowing Alice wasn’t dead, there were times Keisha hated her, of course. But through all of that she loved her. Loved her more than she had ever loved anyone. And so she would continue to look for the wife she loved and hated. Keisha tucked up her legs on the small berth in the back of her truck’s cab. On the pillow next to her, unread because she couldn’t find the concentration, was one of the books from the library she had collected under the passenger seat. Outside the cab, she heard, as she swore she had heard every night since that night at the gas station diner, the whisper-scratch of fingernails. A sound so quiet it was easily mistaken for silence. But she was sure it was the boogeyman, the Thistle Man, waiting for her to get curious or afraid enough to investigate. “This better be worth it, Alice,” she whispered. Nothing ever could be. She saw the Thistle Man again and again in the weeks following the murder. Behind the bathrooms at rest stops, in the snack aisle at gas stations, sitting alone at the biggest booths of the smallest roadside bars, places with one kind of beer on the menu and video poker in the bathrooms. Clumsy and brutal movements, like he didn’t understand how his body worked. Sharp, yellow teeth. Yellow fingernails, not cigarette yellow, but translucent yellow below the surface. In Horse Cave, Kentucky, she saw him in the buffet line at the Love’s Travel Stop. He was leering at her, and eating pizza with snatches of his spindly fingers, and she, no longer hungry, put the jerky she had been about to buy back on the shelf. In Haugan, Montana, she saw him perusing the bargain knife selection at the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar and Gift Shop, the biggest gift shop in the state. Animatronic statues of angels flapping their wings. Ceramic wolves in ceramic landscapes. Signs with cutesy sayings like “A Closed Mouth Gathers No Foot.” He held up a knife and winked at her and then laughed at something the salesman said. Later he would eat the salesman alive. In Davis City, Iowa, the Thistle Man crossed the street in front of her. The town was small, almost all of it visible from its main intersection. Her breath caught when she realized what was gazing back at her from the crosswalk, smiling into the hanging folds of his skin, and winking, and then the light was green and she tested out the limits of her truck’s acceleration. In each instance, no one else reacted as though there were anything off about the Thistle Man. It wasn’t that they didn’t see him. She noticed many of them look at him, but then their gazes slid off him. He wasn’t invisible. People saw him and then decided they didn’t want to. The night of the Iowa encounter, still shaken by what she had seen, she stopped to treat herself to a hot dinner rather than a protein bar eaten while driving. “So what do you do, honey?” said the man at the counter next to her. She had gone through some version of this conversation almost daily for the year she had been on the job. Please don’t. Please, no, she thought. I just want to eat this food and get back on the road, where the miles turn to cents turn to dollars turn to a paycheck. She nodded to the trucks parked outside. It was a truck stop. There was no one in this restaurant who had any other job except the people cooking the food and the people serving it. What else? her nod said. He looked at the trucks, then looked at her, and grinned to show he had a new and exciting thought, a thought that would really change things for her. “Honey, you don’t look like the trucker type.” She wasn’t big, she wasn’t white, she wasn’t male. Her hands shook as a rule, and her voice was soft when she spoke at all. But she drove a truck. She did it for a living. What does a truck driver look like? Your days are numbered, motherfucker, she wanted to say. There’s a new world coming. Get out of the way or get on board, I don’t care which. She took her food and moved to an empty table across the room. He made more of a meal of innocently throwing up his hands than he did of the lukewarm meat loaf on his plate. “I was just saying, honey. Jeez.” She thought about dinners she and Alice had back home, before Alice’s disappearance, before Keisha’s long search. Nights where they made pizza. Dough from scratch. Sauce from scratch. Cheese from the store. Keisha had loved making the dough for the crust. Flour and water in her hands, first separate then merging into a silky whole, the yeast and gluten giving it life and breath. Her hands and her shirt covered in flour because she had never gotten in the habit of wearing an apron. They would open a bottle of wine and eat the pizza they made and watch whatever on TV and fall asleep in a wine-and-bread coma. Love is cooking together. It’s creating together. That’s what Keisha thought. She didn’t know what Alice thought. It turns out she had never known what Alice was thinking at all. Flour on their hands. Sauce on their hands. Their hands on their hands. Something forgettable on the television. Leg upon leg. That was a life, she thought. She could go to the police. She could tell them, what? She had witnessed a monster eat a man, in a murder no media had reported on? And this same monster was now following her, although she couldn’t prove it? No, for now she would have to take this on herself, as scared as she was. Later that night, dinner over, man ignored as he tried to engage her again on her way out, and a good fifty billable miles of road driven, she switched on her CB radio, held the mic up to her mouth for a long time on the open channel. “We talk about freedom the same way we talk about art,” she said, to whoever was listening. “Like it is a statement of quality rather than a description. Art doesn’t mean good or bad. Art only means art. It can be terrible and still be art. Freedom can be good or bad too. There can be terrible freedom.” She stopped to think but kept the send button held. She didn’t want a response. She had heard enough from other people that night. “You freed me, and I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t want you to. I am more free now than I have ever been, and I am spiraling across this country. Maybe you are too. I want our lines to cross. Even one more time.” She put the mic back. Switched the radio off. Hand upon hand, she thought, upon leg upon heart upon couch upon a day where we made pizza together. That’s love, Alice. That’s what it’s made of. And so what is this? 3 (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) Grass and barns and metal windmills. Kansas scenery had delivered on Keisha’s expectations. Her anxiety was a low, manageable buzz. She had a song she liked on her phone. She hadn’t bothered to figure out how to connect the phone to the truck’s stereo, and so let it play tinny and soft from the phone’s speakers, bopping along to a melody she couldn’t quite hear but knew well enough to sing anyway. Sitting next to her was the second volume of a comic series that she was looking forward to starting over dinner. The air through the window was dry and cool. Not that she was ever calm, but if she were to be calm, it would look like this. She had stopped to pee at a McDonald’s with a plaque indicating it once was a historical school of some sort, but now it wasn’t a school, it was a McDonald’s, and she peed at it. Given how often people stop at those places to use the toilet without spending any money, she wondered, were they more restaurantor public bathroom on a sheer numbers level? It was an interesting question, and she had nothing but flat road hours to think it over. No plans to stop again until dinner, and dinner would be as late as she could make it. There would be miles done today. She could use the pay, and even more so the sense of movement. The feeling that she was getting somewhere even if she would have to turn right around and head back. Thump. She felt the vibration through her seat before she heard the noise. Thump thump. THUMP. At first she thought it was her tires going funny, but then realized the sound was coming from the trailer. To be heard all the way up in the cab, above the whoosh of the air and the growling cough of the engine, it must have been seriously loud. (And there it was again, THUMP.) A beast the size of a grizzly bear, running back and forth, slamming into the walls. There her fear was, right where she always left it, deep in her throat. Metal and acid washed over her tongue and perspired out onto her palms. Her chest was a closing door. A monster in her trailer. Ridiculous. Absurd. A fairy tale. But hadn’t she seen monsters on these roads? No way from the trailer to the cab, and so she just wouldn’t stop. She would drive and drive forever. She wouldn’t eat, her truck wouldn’t take fuel, she would be saved by the miracle of sheer movement. Because she couldn’t bear to think what would happen when her body or her truck forced her to stop. THUMP, and her heart echoed the sound with a beat so hard she felt the skin of her chest pulse outward. Thanks to her anxiety, fear was a constant pulse in her life. And now this terrible racket. And she was alone in Kansas. Grassland out to the end of it. When it gets dark over the grass, it really gets dark. Like being on an ocean, the distant lights of towns like ships. Only her on the road and a fuel tank that was down to a quarter. She would need to stop soon. There was no avoiding this conflict, but she could control how it was confronted. She had to find a way to do it that would be least likely to get her killed. Good luck to her. In the darkness of the fields there was a single billboard, well lit and maintained. It had a picture of a smiling family, and against a soft pink background it said a company name. PRAXIS. She settled on pulling off in the parking lot of a Target. At least the crowds. Or if not crowds, then at least other people. And if not other people, then at least the lights, bright and sterile across the vast lot. The lights would keep her calm after the long empty of the grassland. Keisha clutched her heavy flashlight, and she crept around the trailer. There was no noise, not a hint of movement. She had parked as close to the entrance of the store as possible, a bank of automatic doors blaring a welcoming fluorescence out into the cool evening, but still there were only a few cars around. Her hand shuddered as she reached for the latch. A metallic clink. The groan of the handle upward. The rattling complaint of the door opening. She squinted into the darkness. Her cargo had been pallets of paper towels, and the boxes were torn open by swipes of what seemed to be giant claws. The towels were shredded and tossed about. And there was no need to search for the cause. A yellow baseball hat. Yellow fingernails. Skin in loose folds in places and in other places stretched over angular protrusions. Sharp teeth. Eyes, yellow and pink. Polo shirt, yellow and dirty. The word Thistle on the right breast. “It seems we keep running into each other,” he said, in his hollow, rattling voice. “How crazy is that?” 4 (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) Keisha backed away, holding the heavy flashlight in front of her as a club. The man smelled like a compost pile that is almost soil. “Where do you think you’re going? I mean, where would you even go that I couldn’t follow? Don’t you know who I work for?” He indicated the Thistle on his pit-stained shirt. He was sweating thick mildew. “There are people all over this parking lot,” she said. This was self-evidently not true. It was a Target parking lot, but it was also late, and in the middle of nowhere. There were a few cars, yes, some people, but she didn’t expect help from the world, and generally the world met her expectations. He coughed up laughter, continuing to hobble toward her. “People?” he said. “People!” He shook his head and grabbed her arm. She didn’t know how he got that close, but he was there, and he took her arm like a dance partner, gentle but insistent, and then with a tremendous strength, well beyond what even his large frame would seem capable of, he twirled her up against the truck. His skin writhed, like there were insects crawling back and forth under it. The smell was overpowering. His tongue was swollen and covered in a white film. It was over. His arm was on her throat and he was pushing enough to let her know he could do it, but not enough to cut off air. She drew shallow, frightened breaths against the weight of him. She kicked for the crotch, of course, but it was like he felt nothing. And then she flailed at him with the flashlight. His body dented with the blows, whatever was under his loose skin sinking with the force, but he didn’t stop smiling. Didn’t even grunt. Pushed a little harder on her throat. The flashlight dropped and rolled away. “I could take a bite of you right now and it would be over. I could devour you. And then what would become of Alice?” Alice’s name in the monster’s mouth made Keisha slump, made her give up. If he knew about Alice, then he knew about everything, and then what was left? She had been searching for her wife for a long and terrible year. All those miles upon her, and now a monster. She adjusted to accepting her own death. As she did, a feeling sparked. It wasn’t a feeling she recognized, but it spread like her anxiety, tingling at her skin, zipping up her spine, and exploding in her brain. Fuck the Thistle Man, the feeling said. She kicked and screamed with all the energy she had left. Perhaps she would go down, but it would not be quietly. Other people in the parking lot were finally turning, finally seeing. Even if she couldn’t beat him, she could get them to look. A family, a father and two kids, and the kids were pointing, and the father was on his phone. He was talking urgently and gesturing toward her. She fought until the Thistle Man’s arm on her throat lowered her into a quiet darkness she had apparently always carried somewhere in her mind, and then there was a siren, and the arm was off her throat, and the world returned to her, and a police car pulled up. The police officer got out. A white man. No partner. Big. Not big as in muscular or big as in fat, just big. She stumbled a few paces away from the Thistle Man, out of his reach. The policeman sauntered over. He was a man used to the world waiting for him. He must have seen the Thistle Man attacking her, but he didn’t seem worried about that. He examined Keisha with heavy-lidded eyes. “What seems to be the problem here?” he said. She did her best to tell him. The noises, the stopping, the Thistle Man, the air, the lack of air, the struggle. He frowned. Made no notes. He turned to the Thistle Man, who hadn’t moved, hadn’t interrupted, had leaned with crossed arms on her truck. “That true?” the policeman asked him. The Thistle Man giggled, a high, childish sound. “Doesn’t sound like it’s true,” said the policeman. She didn’t know what to do. On one side, the police. On the other side, a literal monster. The policeman nodded to the Thistle Man. “If he has to come talk to you,” he said, “then you’ve been asking the wrong questions.” He lumbered back to his squad car, opened the door. “My advice,” he said to Keisha, “is to stop asking the wrong questions.” He tipped his hat at the Thistle Man. “You have a nice night now.” The Thistle Man did a lazy wave in return, as the policeman folded his towering frame into the car. “I will, Officer,” the Thistle Man said. “You know I will.” The police car drove away, but the Thistle Man made no move toward her. “You see now. You see how it stands. Go home.” He made a face of concern, worry even. “You can still go home.” He turned and stalked away into the night. To the lit edges of the parking lot, and into the sparse landscaping, and the vacant grassland beyond. Keisha stood frozen until she found it in herself to get back in her truck and drive away. No one in the lot talked to her or checked to see if she was alright. They looked at her and then looked away. Police cars followed her for a few days after. No siren, no lights, but staying close on her tail. She had well and truly gotten their attention now. But the Thistle Man was wrong. She couldn’t go home. Because home wasn’t a place. Home was a person. And she hadn’t found that person yet. After five days the police stopped following her. They had let her off with a warning. It was a warning she was going to ignore. 5 (#u458d346a-06f3-581d-b24b-c85c54e08529) It’s a long and desolate way from Florida to Atlanta. The landscape is constructed of billboards. There are no natural features, only a constant chatter along the side of the road. A one-sided conversation. Lots of anti-evolution stuff. Advertisements for truck stops with names like the Jade Palace or the Chinese Fan, written in racist faux-Chinese fonts, and wink-wink language about the massages available. Keisha winced. Lord, get her to Atlanta. At least there was cruise control, and a road so straight all she had to do was make sure she didn’t go crashing off into a billboard telling her the Confederacy still could win, which was an actual billboard she had passed. The subtext of America wasn’t just text here, it was in letters five feet tall. Business wasn’t booming. Many of the ads on the billboards were ancient. Announcements of local fairs from 2005. Fire sales for stores long since buried under pitch and concrete. A lot of vacancies, phone numbers to call for renting the space. She wondered how much an ad on a stretch like this would cost. Even on her wage she might be able to buy herself one, maybe this bare one between an ad for dog grooming whose tagline was DECADENT DOGS and yet another thinly veiled ad for sex work. She could reach out to Alice that way, even if Alice could never respond. Shout at the passing cars long enough and maybe someone somewhere would hear it. Or, hell, she could pick up her radio again and tell her entire story to every bored trucker in range. But instead she would keep driving, keep moving, and hope eventually she would arrive somewhere. A conclusion, a great transformation, or, failing that, Atlanta by the afternoon. She was weighing the merits of stopping for a coffee when she spotted a billboard that didn’t fit. For one, it was spotless, installed maybe in the last week. It was a black billboard that said in tall white letters, HUNGRY? Was it advertising the concept of food? The idea of eating? If so, it wasn’t effective, because when she looked at it her gut twisted. The billboard pointed her somewhere bleak and horrible, even as her conscious mind hadn’t picked out why. Another billboard, a few miles later. Same design; black background, white text, plain capitalized letters. BERNARD HAMILTON, it said. Then another that said SYLVIA PARKER. With each one she felt sicker and sicker. Someone was sending a message to someone, and the message felt to her monstrous and wild. After Alice’s funeral, Keisha had mourned privately for weeks, refusing to see friends, missing work. She had sat at home and allowed the grief to weigh on her, a physical pressing on her chest that strained the muscles if she tried to get up or even turn her head. If she had had someone else to look after, a child, an elderly relative, even a pet, then maybe she would have forced herself into something resembling the person she had been before. But even then, inside she would be a vessel of fluids and mourning. She wasn’t the person she had been before and she never would be again. Sure, she had always been anxious and shy, but it had never been what defined her. She was able to relax when with friends and family. She had her hobbies and dreams. For some time she had been thinking about quitting her job to start a bakery, because the idea of arriving to work at four in the morning to make bread sounded like the best possible job in the world, but it had never been quite the right time for her to do that. All those parts of her were gone. It wasn’t only Alice who had died. Each death leads to smaller, invisible deaths inside the hearts of those left behind. Alice never called Keisha by her name. This is true for many couples. Chipmunk, Alice would call Keisha. Chanterelle. Often Chanterelle. Walnut Jones. Alice found that last one especially funny. Now everyone called Keisha by her name. “Keisha,” they would say, in soft and worried voices, and Keisha just wanted someone with a laugh in her voice to call her Chanterelle, to call her Walnut Jones. It wasn’t an intervention from her friends that broke her out of her stasis, although to their credit they tried. Showing up with food and with concerned frowns and busy hands tidying a house she couldn’t care less about. But none of them were able to reach her. Because they were trying to reach the Keisha they had known, and that Keisha was gone. No, it was not her friends who changed her, but that after two months she grew bored with her absolute grief, and so she pulled herself up against the weight of it and started going to grief counseling groups. She sat in circles and described the shape of the monster that was devouring her. Because that’s what, as a civilization, we do. We try to talk our way through the ineffable in the hope that, like a talisman, our description will provide some shelter against it. But the monster continued to devour her, no matter how specific her description of it, no matter how honest the shell-shocked sympathy of her fellow mourners. And when she wasn’t describing Alice, over and over talking about Alice, as though her wife could be resurrected with stories, Keisha watched the news. The news was good, full of tragedy and loss that had nothing to do with her. So many people in pain, she couldn’t possibly be alone, even though she felt as alone as could be. And then, six months after the funeral, somewhere in the third hour of Keisha’s daily news binge: a murder, brutal, somewhere in the Midwest. Bystanders gawking, standing in a circle and trying to describe with only their faces the shape of the monster they had seen. Behind the witnesses being interviewed, unmistakable, staring at the camera as person after person babbled their way through the horrible story—Alice. Keisha laughed, and then sobbed, and then threw up, and then looked again and there was Alice still, looking back at her, not dead at all. The names on the billboards kept coming. One every three miles. TRACY DRUMMOND. LEO SULLIVAN. CYNTHIA O’BRIEN. They felt more like a memorial than an advertisement. At the next stop she pulled off the road and searched the names, one after the other. It didn’t take long, because one name was connected to the next, and most of the articles were the same articles. Anxiety bubbled in her blood. Found near major highways all over the country. Lives torn short under overpasses, on frontage roads, in broad wooded shoulders. Lost even in the age of GPS and Siri. Gashes on thetorsos. Defensive wounds on the hands. Victims of an unsolved serial killings from a murderer who reporters had nicknamed the Hungry Man. The nickname came from the single common thread between all the murders. A human bite on the neck or shoulder or armpit. Not elegant pinpricks, the romance of a vampire, but ragged and clumsy. Every name was a human being who had died alone on the sides of highways. Or, worse, not alone. 6 (#ulink_ad2ed894-06d4-589f-9927-53aa5438d049) Bernard Hamilton left for San Francisco immediately after graduating from college. He had no job set up there, no friends or acquaintances waiting for him. He had never even been to San Francisco. But youth is the time for great leaps of faith, and so he packed everything he owned into his Corolla and started the drive from Connecticut because he believed that to experience America is to experience its distance. He called his mother every night, because she was worried he would be murdered, and he was willing to humor her silly fears. He was driving on major highways, staying in budget chain hotels with free coffee in the lobby. This was transit, not hedonism, and lots of people do it every year. He was no different from lots of people. Of course, lots of people get murdered every year, but he thought he was different from those people, for reasons he could not have articulated because the idea that nothing horrible could ever happen to us personally exists not in our thoughts but in the base of our necks. Bernard told his mother about the Great Lakes, how Lake Michigan looked like the ocean, how he couldn’t see the far shore even from the high floor of an office building in Chicago that he snuck into because he couldn’t afford any of the viewing platforms or skyscraper restaurants. He told her about the flats of the Midwest, how there were no physical landmarks to divide anything from anything else. And then he got to Utah and he stopped calling. His mother contacted the police the first night she didn’t hear from him, but the police told her that they weren’t going to look for an adult man because he hadn’t called his mother. But she was right, because he was dead and shoved into a bush in the parking lot of a budget chain hotel with free coffee in the lobby and his body wouldn’t be found for four days. There is some version of the world where he made it to San Francisco, grew lifelong friendships there, found a career, found a partner, grew old. But that never happened in our world, which is a sadder, emptier place. Each name on each billboard was a story with a promising start and an unhappy ending. Tracy Drummond was a church volunteer leading a trip to Mexico to build houses when she vanished during a dinner break in Waco, a day short of the border. Leo Sullivan was a trucker, who had last been seen eating dinner with a man in a yellow hat and was found a day later by a group of prison laborers clearing garbage from the side of a highway. Keisha read the stories, scrolling down and down, and feeling sick with what she knew, and scared with what she didn’t know. The Hungry Man, who she thought of as that nightmare creature, the Thistle Man, had been active for almost two decades. He only struck occasionally, only sometimes left behind a life torn open and bleeding out. And now he was following Keisha. How long had he followed the others before he killed them? How long before those brutally strong fingers reached out of parking lot darkness? Perhaps soon, because she knew that this was him taunting her. He had discovered her upcoming routes and had arranged for these billboards to be erected as a message to her. This is who I am, the message said. This is what is coming for you. She pulled out of the truck stop, back onto the highway. Because what else was there? She had no hope that surrender would save her. No, if she were to be murdered, then it would be while moving. Alice wasn’t dead, and neither, yet, was Keisha. Another billboard. NED FLYNN. A body somewhere with a big bite out of him. All of these names were dots on a map. Last known whereabouts. Keisha was a dot on a map, too, but she hadn’t settled into a final location yet. Her last known whereabouts were somewhere behind her and her body kept driving. A few miles later she saw the final billboard. In design it was similar to the others, but there were more words on it, and the text was smaller to fit the space. She squinted as she tried to read it with eyes that she hadn’t admitted to herself were approaching middle age. The words came into focus. She gasped and almost swerved off the road, almost did the Thistle Man’s job for him. Her eyes were stinging and blinking with tears, but she managed to put on her emergency blinkers and pull slowly to the side of the road under the sign. She got out on the door not against the highway and leaned on the truck to support herself. Once she felt somewhat steady, she looked up again at the billboard. CHANTERELLE, MISS YOU. GO HOME. A nickname that no one knew except her and one other person. This was the final piece of the message. She had misunderstood. The billboards weren’t a threat, but a warning. Alice had had the same idea as Keisha when she had seen all these vacant billboards. Shout at passing cars long enough, and maybe the person the message was for would hear. She had put them up to show Keisha what was after her. Keisha dropped into a squat because she couldn’t find it in herself to stay standing. She shook with new grief and with rage. Go home, why? Because she wasn’t safe? Because Alice thought she could keep Keisha safe? Because Alice thought safety was an option that had ever been available to Keisha? She hadn’t been safe since she was born into this country, this angry, seething, stupid, could-be-so-much-more-than-it-is country. And Alice wanted her to turn and run? Through the tears, she saw movement a hundred feet down the shoulder. A pile of clothes under the billboard stirred and rose into a human shape. Keisha sprang up, not sure if she was happy or furious. Alice had waited for her by the sign. Finally Keisha would meet her wife in person, would touch her. But the shape didn’t move like Alice. If it wasn’t Alice, then it was the Thistle Man, come to take her after weeks of promises and threats. She reached for the handle of the door. Would she have time to get the truck back on the road before he reached her? Like hell she would. She tried to comfort herself that even the Thistle Man wouldn’t be so brazen as to take her from the side of a busy highway, but she had trouble believing her own reassurance. The figure moved toward her. She needed to go. She needed to run. But she didn’t. Because what if she was wrong, and it was Alice after all? She couldn’t let that possibility pass her by. The figure was close now. It was slight, and short, more like a child than a grown man. Keisha saw the scared, thin face of a teenage girl. What was a girl doing by the side of a highway like this? There were far worse things than men circling these roads. The figure reached out her hand. “I know what you’ve seen,” the girl said, “and I need your help.” 7 (#ulink_b299e73b-0af1-5c26-9596-3fde90b43af6) Keisha’s first impression was frailty, and so she mistook the girl for maybe fourteen. But there was a hard and adult aspect about the girl’s face, and on reconsideration Keisha decided she was probably sixteen or even seventeen. The girl considered back, giving Keisha a hard up and down, and then, apparently satisfied with what she saw, brushed by her and hopped up into the passenger seat. “Excuse me?” said Keisha, unsure of what was happening. The girl was already tossing a backpack behind the seat and feeling around for controls to move it into a more comfortable position. “What do you know?” the girl asked. Keisha put her hands on her hips. “I know you’re a kid and you shouldn’t be on the side of the road like that, so I guess if we’re making a list we could start there.” “You stopped and looked at one of those billboards. The new ones. You were looking at one of them and crying. Do you know who put them up?” Keisha felt the weak and tired part of herself falter, but she wasn’t about to let the kid see it, so instead she hopped up into the truck, too, and pushed past the kid’s legs. “Am I driving you somewhere?” Keisha said. The girl shut the truck door, which Keisha took as a yes and so she pulled back into traffic. Neither of them spoke. A few miles of silence. The girl smelled overpowering. Not like she needed a shower. Instead as though she had taken too many showers, over and over, until any natural human smell was replaced by perfumed soap. She smelled like a walk through a park condensed into a single, overpowering whiff. In small doses maybe the smell would have been pleasant, but Keisha found her stomach turning again and rolled open the window. “Ok, maybe you don’t know anything,” the girl said. “Fine, I don’t know anything either.” She kicked Keisha’s book pile out of the way to make room for her feet. Brat. “What’s your name?” “Sylvia. Sylvia Parker.” Keisha glanced at her. “I’ve heard that name somewhere.” “Common name, I guess.” “Where are you going?” said Keisha. “Swansea, South Carolina.” “Bad luck. I’m on the way to Atlanta to exchange shipments and then I’m heading west. Where can I drop you off?” Sylvia didn’t look at her, instead watched the blur of billboards. “Swansea,” she said again. Keisha sighed. Fine. She was almost to Atlanta anyway. She’d get the girl to leave there, and until then maybe it was nice to have friendly, or at least nonhostile, company for the first time in months, even if the smell was a lot to handle. Sylvia’s face softened and she turned her body back to face Keisha. “No offense, I have to know if I can trust you,” Sylvia said. “I have no idea if you can,” Keisha said. Sylvia nodded as though that were the right answer. “You’ve seen it too,” the girl said. “Visions out on the highway. The road takes weird turns for you, same as it does for me.” “What have you seen?” “What have you seen?” Sylvia said, and smiled. That was a good question. A lot that was impossible and terrifying. Keisha couldn’t find the shape of the tongue needed to name them. She shrugged. “Exactly,” said Sylvia. Another half hour of silence, and then, as they entered the traffic that marked Atlanta long before the skyline was visible, she spoke again. “Don’t you wish sometimes that you could forget? That you could have your memory wiped, and then you wouldn’t be a person wandering but a person who was almost somewhere, a person about to arrive, and when you arrived you could just stay?” “Yes,” said Keisha. “Yeah. God, yeah, me too.” When they got to the distribution center, Sylvia clicked off her belt and hid in the back. Keisha didn’t know if that was necessary, but also didn’t know how to explain to her supervisors why she had a runaway child in her truck and so decided that it was probably for the best. Pallets of cereal were unloaded from the truck and replaced with pallets of travel-sized deodorant. When packaged, the two looked much the same. Brown boxes covered in plastic wrap. Only the logos were different. As Keisha waited for them to finish loading, a hand came out of the curtained back with a book. Sylvia was holding up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S., the second volume from that comic series, which Keisha had just finished reading. “Is this any good?” she asked. “Hell yeah, it is.” “Ok,” she said, considering the cover for a moment before tossing it back by her feet. Once the new cargo was in place and all the paperwork had been signed off, they were back on the highway and heading west. Sylvia had made no move to leave, and Keisha hadn’t found a way to ask her to. Sylvia hopped back up to the front. “My mom and I, we used to travel a lot for work,” she said, as though it were part of a conversation they had been having for a while. “And on breaks from school I would come with her. Lot of time spent in cars. We started to see what other people were missing. Between the rest stops and the Taco Bells. There’s danger out there. There’s a crack somewhere, and a terrible force is seeping through.” Keisha nodded slowly, not sure how to respond. “Do you know what that terrible force is?” she asked. “Mm,” Sylvia said. “I need to get to Swansea, South Carolina, and I can’t tell you why. Can you take me there?” “South Carolina’s the complete opposite direction from where I’m going. I have to get to a supermarket in—” “You’re the first person I’ve talked to, like really talked to, in, I don’t know, weeks? Months? I need you to take me to Swansea. It has to do with, you know.” Her hand spiraled out to indicate all the things neither of them was willing or able to specify. Keisha snorted. “Sylvia, I’m an adult. I’m an adult woman with a job. And that job says I have to deliver deodorant to a supermarket, not drive a teenager hundreds of miles to a town I’ve never heard of for reasons that kid won’t tell me. I’m a responsible goddamn adult.” 8 (#ulink_d81709b2-565a-528c-a70d-a859e34db93b) Swansea was not a bustling town. Nice, but also empty. Life had left this town. There was less of it than there once was. Sylvia directed them to an E-Z Stop on the highway, across from a farm stand that was closed, and two different car washes, both closed. Keisha shut off the engine. “So what now?” she asked. “We wait,” Sylvia said. She picked up The Girl from H.O.P.P.E.R.S. and started reading. “Alright then, I’m getting some jerky. You want anything?” Sylvia didn’t look up. “Suit yourself.” As Keisha walked toward the E-Z Stop she kept asking herself what she was doing. A runaway child and a delivery that would be at least a day late. She probably wouldn’t have a job soon, and then how would she look for Alice? And all because someone had spoken to her as a fellow human being for the first time in a long time and she had responded like a stray dog finally fed. She had risked it all so that she could keep this little bit of company going, as fucked up and weird as the company was. Or maybe, though she wanted to deny this, she felt that the kid could lead her to some new revelation or piece of evidence. Maybe she was using this runaway teenager to help her search. Maybe that’s the kind of person she was. Or maybe she had found a teenage runaway and didn’t want to abandon her. Maybe there was some instinct of protection in her that made her want to keep Sylvia close. Most likely some mixed-up combination of them all. The drive to Swansea was only a few hours, but it had been late and so they had spent the night at a stop east of Atlanta. Keisha had tried to insist on giving Sylvia the cot, but Sylvia curled up in the passenger seat and either fell right asleep or feigned sleep well enough that Keisha gave up and slept in the back, feeling guilty right until she nodded off. The guy at the E-Z Stop counter was withdrawn. Didn’t comment on the truck, or the jerky. Didn’t comment on anything. Laid-back. Or shell-shocked. Probably surprised to see a customer in a town this dead. By the time Keisha got back to the truck, she had rediscovered some semblance of adult composure. Sylvia didn’t acknowledge her, and so Keisha ate her jerky and waited. The sky changed shade, and then color. Sylvia fidgeted in her seat. “He was supposed to be here already,” she said. “Who was?” Sylvia rocked back and forth, and she seemed the youngest she had been since Keisha first saw her, slight and childlike, rising from the shoulder of the highway. Sylvia ran her hands through her hair, shook her head, and then reluctantly said, “You know about the Hungry Man?” This violated their tacit agreement of not specifying their fears and experiences, and Keisha wasn’t sure what to do with it. Finally, she nodded. “The Hungry Man killed my mother,” said Sylvia. “At a gas station a couple hours north of New York.” Sylvia and her mom saw the Thistle Man. Or, as she knew him, the Hungry Man. They saw him commit a horrible act. Sylvia wouldn’t elaborate what it was, but Keisha could guess. And her mother did what Keisha could not. She tried to intervene. After that, Sylvia didn’t have a mother. She went back to Georgia, was moved from home to home. No one would believe her story. Or no one would admit that they believed her. There was one policeman, Officer Campbell, who took a special interest in her. Something close to kindness. He warned her that she needed to stop describing what had really happened, needed to stop trying to get people to believe her. That it would be easier if she let that go. But letting go wasn’t an option for her. Keisha could understand that. If Keisha knew how to let go, she would have been thousands of miles away, living her life, pretending that she had never seen her dead wife on the television. Sylvia ran away from the last of those foster homes, two days after moving in, and went looking for what scared her most. “You want to find the Thistle … the Hungry Man?” Keisha could feel the arm against her throat, the must of his breath. “He’s dangerous.” “Oh, is he? I must not know that. I must be stupid.” “Not what I meant.” “Yeah, it was.” Arm against throat. The policeman’s glance of comradeship at the monster. The smirk on peeling, sagging lips. “It’s not what I meant,” Keisha said with finality. Sylvia snorted. A few months before, Sylvia was sleeping in a city library. There was a window that didn’t lock in one of the reading rooms, and she would slip in after closing, and, thanks to her inability to reach deep sleep since the death of her mother, slip out as the front doors were being unlocked. She checked her in-box on one of the public computers to find an email from Officer Campbell. He said that since she clearly was never going to let this go, he wanted to help her. But it had to be secret. No one could ever know. He told her to meet him, at this date and time, in the parking lot of the E-Z Stop in Swansea. And he would give her the information he had been able to find, all of it. “I think he hoped that somehow I could put a stop to it, or at least tell the world. I don’t think he knew what he had signed up for when he signed up for it.” “Ok,” Keisha said. “Maybe the guy inside saw him.” They went in and asked the guy behind the counter if he had seen a cop car in his parking lot recently. A cop car from Georgia. The guy’s eyes widened, but he shook his head. Keisha revised her impression of him. He wasn’t laid-back. He had seen something. Something of the terror that she and Sylvia had seen. And he wanted desperately to forget. She leaned in, gentled her voice. “Man, hey, now look at me, I’m gonna need you to look me in the eyes. I know what you’ve seen tonight. I’ve seen terrible things too; so has this girl, and as long as we’re all quiet, nothing’s going to change. Those terrible things are going to keep on happening.” The guy didn’t meet her eyes, tapped his hand on the counter. “Do you want to live in a world where what you saw is possible, or do you want to let us try to change that?” “I’m sorry,” he said. Sylvia pulled at Keisha’s arm, wanting to leave. Keisha’s anxiety was a vibration in her limbs and chest. “Ok, how about this,” Keisha said, leaning forward and letting him see on her face every mile she had driven in search of the person she loved. “Whatever scared you, my man, know that I can be so, so much scarier than that.” His mouth twitched downward and his fingers fidgeted. “I’m sorry. I’d like to help but I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He pointed, past the back wall of the store, to the thick trees behind it. “There we go,” she whispered, and she patted his hand. “There we go, man.” Sylvia and Keisha went out back, where he had pointed. They looked down into the embankment lined with trees and Keisha spotted a side mirror sticking out of the leaves. There was no blood, no body. But the windows of Officer Campbell’s cruiser had been broken, all of them, systematically, and every seat had been slashed over and over. Not a trace of Officer Campbell. Keisha suspected that there would never again be a trace of Officer Campbell. Sylvia groaned, an animal sound of despair, and she collapsed onto the hood of the car, a car that had belonged to the man who she thought would save her, a man who, as is often the case, couldn’t even save himself. 9 (#ulink_e15d211c-4b27-50bf-9da0-21efab028280) The cruiser had nothing useful left. No notes or documents. The computer destroyed. No sign of what he had been planning to tell or show Sylvia. Keisha searched quickly because she felt that it wouldn’t be safe for them to be in this town much longer. She finished up, slammed the door, wiping with her shirt any surface she might have touched. “Ok,” Sylvia said, her face hard, already on to the next plan. “He was based out of a precinct in Savannah. We’ll go there, see if he left anything that could tell me what he wanted me to know.” “I’m not helping you break into a police station, Sylvia. You’ve dragged me far out of my way, but you’re not landing me in jail. I have my own search to get back to.” “Alright, take me to Savannah, drop me off. I’ll be fine on my own. Been fine on my own for a while.” “I can’t just—” Keisha started but Sylvia waved it off. “Of course you can. You already want to. I’m giving you permission. Take me to Savannah, leave me near that police station, drive away. You don’t ever have to hear about this again.” “Ok. Yeah. Ok. I’ll take you to Savannah.” “Thank you.” Sylvia didn’t sound annoyed or angry at the possibility of being alone again. She sounded relieved. As they drove out of town, she asked: “What is it you’re looking for anyway? What did you lose to end up circling these roads like me?” “Ha.” Keisha did not laugh, but said the word to indicate the possibility of laughter. And then she did her best to tell the story, as far as she understood it. A year and a half before, Keisha had seen her dead wife on the news. After that first sighting, Keisha decided she couldn’t afford to miss a minute. Multiple channels of twenty-four-hour news, and she did her best to cover them all, fast-forwarding, rewinding, searching for proof that she had seen what she had seen. A fire outside of Tacoma. A landslide in Thousand Oaks. A hostage situation in St. Joseph. Earnest folks speaking earnestly, describing only the bad parts of the world. And among the concerned faces that the news cameras used as a backdrop, Alice. A fleeting face, sometimes, other times a long, head-on stare. Alice over and over. Keisha scrawled down in a notebook in which the first fifteen pages had been grocery lists, a list of every place Alice appeared, and that list became a map of America. Keisha stopped going to groups. She stopped sitting in circles, stopped describing the shape of the monster that was devouring her, because now she knew that she didn’t understand even the most basic shape of it. The counselors from the groups and some fellow grievers who weren’t quite friends but weren’t quite not friends called her for a few weeks, checking in, but after she assured them over and over that she was fine, they gave up and let her be, and then it was her alone in the house with the question that her life had become. She quit her job, such as it had been. Ever since what she had believed to be a death, she had been taking a leave, anyway. She went through Alice’s things. Her work stuff, her laptop, letters hidden under piles of clothes. Was that an invasion of privacy? Keisha wasn’t sure. It’s not an invasion of privacy to go through a dead wife’s records. That’s being organized. But Alice wasn’t dead. So did she deserve privacy? Keisha didn’t care. Alice had made herself a mystery, and now everything she left was a clue. She was a missing persons case and everything she had ever touched was evidence, right down to Keisha’s hands, her skin. The abandoned wife, exhibit A. Again and again, in the papers and computer files. Phrases Keisha didn’t understand. Praxis. Vector H. References to a war, to “missions.” And more than any other, to Bay and Creek Shipping. Over and over Alice had written about Bay and Creek Shipping. Keisha had called about a job with Bay and Creek the next day. “Shit,” said Sylvia. “Yeah,” said Keisha. Neither of them said anything else for a while. On the way through Georgia, they passed a house by the highway with a pile of trash burning on its front lawn, big orange flames, thick plume of smoke. A man standing there watching it burn. Sylvia only saw it for a moment, and only in the corner of her eye, and that slice of time was stuck in her head that way forever. The man never moving. The fire never consuming. Keisha never saw him. That moment of time didn’t exist for her at all. Even after a couple days, Sylvia smelled as strong as ever. Something natural, but not. Organic, but aggressively so. “What’s that smell?” Keisha asked. “I was wondering how long you’d be polite. It’s heather oil.” “Why are you drenched in heather oil?” “Yeah, I dunno,” Sylvia said. “I’ve heard the Hungry Man, he doesn’t like it. Wards him off. Probably bullshit but …” She shrugged. “You heard that? Where did you hear it from?” “You think we’re the only lives he’s touched? You think you’re the only one he’s talked to? Word gets around. I’ve been wandering this country for almost a year now. Others have seen him. I’ve met them. Most were too scared to be as helpful as you.” Sylvia smiled at her and Keisha managed back a grimace that was a distant cousin of a smile. “Bad news. I’m real scared too. Kind of all the time. Used to go to therapy and shit.” “Ain’t important if you’re scared,” Sylvia said. “You’re helping anyway. Can’t control feeling fear. Can control what you do while feeling it. Learned that too.” “A hard-won lesson of life on the road?” “Nah, I used to go to therapy too. Anxiety bros?” She held up a fist and Keisha bumped it. Sylvia did a big exploding movement with her fingers, adding sound effects. They both laughed. “Sure. Anxiety bros,” Keisha said. “I’m still only taking you as far as Savannah, though. Then I have to get back to my thing.” “I know. Man, I hope you find her.” “Yeah.” “Hope she wants to be found.” “Yeah,” Keisha said. “Yeah.” Another silence. Keisha didn’t want to say what she was about to say but was unable to stop the words. “Shit,” she said. “Let’s break into a police station.” “Thank god,” said Sylvia. “I kept thinking, ‘She’s gonna offer to help me, right?’ And then you didn’t and I was, like, ‘Man, I thought she was a good person.’” “So I’m a good person now?” “Good? Remains to be seen. You’re cool, though. Let’s do this.” 10 (#ulink_d4f8c5b1-ffd3-5c4e-a1c8-e4c09d7a2682) Savannah looked like a city half remembered from a visit years before. Hazy and dreamlike. Brick buildings sagged into themselves. The trees were more moss than tree. The park at the center of town was full of gutter punks. Kids who had run away out of choice, not out of fear. Two of them catcalled passersby, the same line over and over. They’d removed themselves from the system enough to stop showering but not enough to stop harassing women. Keisha and Sylvia walked the few blocks to the station and scoped it out. The front of the station was a big glass window, fine, but the rest was cinder-block blank, barred windows, a back door hazardously blocked by a dumpster, nothing that could be crawled through or into. It was a box with one available opening, and that opening was right on the street. Even trying to case the place was hard. There were cops everywhere, hanging out, chatting, and staring at Keisha and Sylvia as they tried to casually walk by. “Nothing casual about the two of us, I guess,” Keisha said. “Could we just run in and run out?” “There’s one usable door. You run in, it’d be tricky to run out.” They took their fourth walk down the block. An officer across the street watched them with open suspicion. Keisha felt her heart pound seeing the uniform, remembering a dark parking lot in Kansas. “Not the front then,” she said. “I’m going to walk down that alley, meet me on the other side.” At the end of the alley was another dumpster. Well, fuck it then. She climbed up on it and from there got on the roof. Body prone so there would be no footsteps, she crawled along the top of the building. There were skylights at regular intervals. She peered over the edge of one, down at a desk that needed decluttering and a floor that needed mopping. She inched her way back, hopped from roof to dumpster to ground, and continued through the alley to where Sylvia was waiting. “So here’s what, Sylvia. I’m going to need you to make a distraction.” “What kind of distraction?” “That I don’t know, but I need to do something very stupid and very loud, so I need you to do something stupider and louder than me.” She grinned. “I know just the thing.” “Oh, man, don’t tell me. I’d have to try to stop you. Just do it.” Keisha clambered back on the roof and waited. She couldn’t see anything from her crouched position, but then, if she couldn’t tell when Sylvia’s distraction started, the distraction hadn’t been big enough. As she waited, she wondered how stupid she was, letting a teenager lead her to sitting on a roof waiting to do somesilly stunt that would land her with a felony charge. But all that became moot as time passed with no sign of Sylvia, and Keisha knew that it had gone wrong and that Sylvia had been caught, with Keisha aiding and abetting her in this nonsense. Then the distraction came, and it was big enough. Sylvia had strolled a few blocks away, broken into a car, and hot-wired it. A few years on the road had made her good at that, for the days when hitchhiking wasn’t working or she had a gut feeling that today would be the day a murderer would pick her up if she tried thumbing a ride. She drove the car to the street in front of the station, pointed it at that big glass front window, and, in a move that she managed with far more grace than she would ever have expected, simultaneously gave it a rev and rolled out. The sedan heaved forward, then rolled on momentum, slow enough that everyone could get out of the way but fast enough to be unstoppable. It entered the front window with a pop and came to a rest there. A lot of the cops ran after Sylvia, which she knew would leave the station empty for Keisha, great!, but also meant, oh shit, there were a bunch of cops after her. There was no way she could outrun them, but she had planned a route to a hiding spot down a side street. Her one chance was to get to the spot before any of her pursuers turned the corner and saw her hiding. She couldn’t waste time looking back and so she dove behind the wall she had picked out and crouched there, praying to whatever was out there, praying that none of them had seen her. All of them ran by. She put her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Now it was all up to this woman she had met only a couple days before. Keisha heard the car and was immediately on her feet, stomping on the skylight until it gave and her body went with it. She landed hard on her side in a shower of glass and found she was somehow unharmed. The cops were all either out front inspecting the damage or failing to catch Sylvia, and so she was alone in a room with five desks. She wasted a good thirty seconds finding the one with Ben Campbell’s nameplate. By that point she had no time to look at what she was grabbing. She seized every scrap of paper on top of and inside of his desk and threw it into her bag. It was time to get out of there. Which is when it occurred to her, with the usual stab of disappointment in herself, that she had not fully thought through this plan. Because get out of there how? The front was a swarm of uniforms, the back door was blocked, and the skylight was high above and rimmed with vicious broken glass. She was trapped. Panic welled up her neck, sloshed around her brain, made it difficult for thoughts to connect. Giving up felt like a reasonable option, but she shook that off, tried to find determination or at least manufacture a simulacrum of it. Every second she stood there, the probability of getting caught ticked toward one. She tried jumping, but the skylight was way too high for that. She scrambled around for a miracle. But there was no miracle. There was only her, and her body, and whatever she would be able to do with that body. So she clambered up on Officer Campbell’s desk, turned, and, without giving herself time to think, hurled herself from the desk up at the skylight, sucking in her stomach in a half-assed attempt to keep from bleeding out on the glass. Her hands slapped onto the roof, and her chest slammed into the edge and that did some bad things, but there wasn’t much glass where she hit, so she avoided getting completely skewered. Even with the excitement of the car, there was no way a bunch of cops wouldn’t notice a woman jumping off a desk and half landing up through a skylight. She had to move fast. Her chest was on fire, and her hands were painfully sliding on the sandpaper roof, about to lose grip. Footsteps, louder and louder. Shouts. In a few moments, there would be a hand around her ankle. She thought again about a parking lot in Kansas. About an arm on her throat. And she dug her hands harder into that roof, pulling with whatever she had and ignoring the pain as her chest slid along the edge. In a moment, she was off the roof onto the ground with a brief, awkward stop on the dumpster that didn’t so much slow her fall as roll her ankle. And so, bleeding and limping, she tore as fast as she could away from the station. She ran until the world flickered at the edges, until she could hear the hollow of her breath. She made it back to the truck where Sylvia was already waiting. They were about a half hour out of town on the highway, the long slashes on Keisha’s chest no longer bleeding, her ankle throbbing, when she started laughing. She laughed and laughed, and Sylvia started laughing too. Every time they glanced at each other another wave would come. They laughed until there was no sound, only shaking, and Keisha had hiccups for the next two hours. 11 (#ulink_46f92bf6-bc85-5797-88d3-8a8153f69bda) Fourteen months ago. Keisha’s friends, and yes, she had once had friends, even though that idea seemed as distant from her current life as every other part of her past, were worried about her sudden obsession, and especially her plan to become a truck driver. “Do you know how hard those things must be to drive?” said Margaret, the last friend she hadn’t fully pushed away with the utter focus on finding a wife they all believed was dead. They were in a kitchen that had once been Keisha and Alice’s kitchen, and soon would be no one’s kitchen, a kitchen in a house that would stand empty month after month. “I’ll learn,” Keisha said. She didn’t want to talk to Margaret. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. “You’ll learn.” Margaret sat at the counter. “Keisha, how long has it been since you were in therapy?” “Too busy.” “I know.” Margaret tried to make a compassionate expression, which really pissed Keisha off. “Finding Alice.” “Yes, finding Alice. Yes, that’s what I’m doing. Because my wife isn’t dead. And as long as she isn’t dead, I will use every moment of my life finding her. And I don’t need therapy for that. I need support. And if you can’t give me support, you can give me my fucking quiet morning back.” And that was the last time she had spoken to Margaret. Margaret did return, five days later, to try to make amends, to try to find some better way into the maze that Keisha was running inside her head, but by then no one was home. Margaret would check the house once or twice a month, to see if Keisha had come home, had decided to get better, but eventually Margaret realized she hadn’t checked the house in a couple months and then she never did again. Keisha and Sylvia stopped in a parking lot off 95 and went through what they had taken. A lot, and mostly crap. Reports. Department memos. Printed-out emails. Because it became apparent that Ben was the type of person who printed out his emails to read them. Which would have been amazing luck if his emails had been anything but the dull minutiae of his job. Ticket quotas. Reminders of policies. Automatic emails to let him know that someone had responded to his comment on Huffington Post. Even the emails that might hold interest didn’t have enough information to lead to further investigation. Emails to a library near Tulsa with questions about a flooding incident they experienced as a result of burst pipes over the winter, and questions about papers there belonging to someone named Cynthia. Repeated delivery failures from Ben’s attempts to email a variety of addresses all with the domain of praxis.edu. Keisha paused at those, but his sent emails contained nothing but short greetings, and none of them had gotten anything but an automatic error reply. “Do any of these places seem important to you?” said Sylvia, after nearly an hour of tedious reading in which they had both learned a lot about Ben’s opinions on Star Trek canon. It was a list of cities, handwritten on the back of one of the printed-out emails. VECTOR H Everett Kingston Waco Victorville Paw Paw Burnt Prairie Vector H. Keisha felt the swoon of grief. One of the phrases from Alice’s secret papers. “Yeah,” she managed. “This is definitely something.” She considered the crossed-out names and the one that had been underlined. “Of course it had to be the one on the complete other side of the country.” She had been getting frantic calls from Bay and Creek, about the missing travel-sized deodorant shipment, about the missing truck, about the missing her. She had ignored them. So she probably didn’t have a job now. That was fine. After everything she had lost, what was a job? “This is going to be a long drive,” Sylvia said. “Do you have an iPhone hookup in here or something?” Keisha considered this teenager whom she had only known a few days. The girl was so young. And so fucking brave. She was so much braver than Keisha. Smarter too. Faster. Stronger. By almost any measure, a better person. And, knowing this, Keisha knew what she had to do. Sylvia didn’t take it well. Immediately reverted into arms crossed, slumping back, an angry kid with a bargaining mother. “Well, you can kick me out if you want,” she said. “Be a dick move after everything, but I’ll find another way to get there.” And Keisha believed that she would. Sylvia had gotten a long way on her own, and she could get a whole lot further. It wasn’t a question of could, though, but should. “It’s silly, what we’re doing, Sylvia,” she said. “Maybe even it’s wrong. But you and I, we can’t not do it. Right?” Jaw set, a slight nod. “Right,” Keisha said. “We’d be out here no matter what, even though whatever is waiting in that town, it’s not good. Maybe it’s the kind of thing a person doesn’t come back from. And, Sylvia, I am a foolish, foolish person. Because I’m going to go. No matter what, I’m going to that place.” “And I am too,” Sylvia said, in a voice soft as stone, gentle as a knife. “But you’re not a fool,” Keisha said. “The Thistle Man, the Hungry Man, whoever else is doing all this, they should be terrified of you. Because I think you’re going to be the one who stops it. No, I mean it. I think you haven’t even grown into the force for good you could become. But you won’t stop anything if you get killed poking around some town that may or may not have any answers. That doesn’t have to happen. Because, no matter what, I’m going to go there. Whether you go or stay, it’s too late for me. I need you to be smarter than me. I need you to lie low, and keep trying to hear what you can hear, and I need you to grow and get even smarter and more powerful than you are now. Let me be the fool. You be the one who lives.” It was only when the drops reached her mouth that she noticed she was crying. “Whatever needs to be done in that place,” she finished, “I will fucking do it. I really will. And if I fail, then you will be right here, alive and ready.” Keisha didn’t say please. Didn’t try to touch Sylvia or make any gesture. She sat and she waited. Either Sylvia would agree with her or she wouldn’t. The girl was old enough to know which. Sylvia’s glare faltered at the edge of her eyes. Her arms loosened. And then she pulled Keisha into a fierce hug. She shook through the hug, and so by transposition Keisha shook too. Sylvia’s tears soaked into the shoulder of Keisha’s T-shirt. “Ok,” Sylvia said. “Ok. Ok. Ok.” 12 (#ulink_70c9cf94-ba14-5976-bdb8-02cf604addf5) She crossed into California north of Lake Havasu. Then into the Inland Empire. Land that would hardly be populated if it weren’t for the tempting light of LA over the San Gabriel Mountains, a daily commute for those who want a house more than they want the hours of their day. Land that would be uninhabitable if it weren’t for the water brought in by canal, portioned out to farmers, who then sell their portions to the thirsty cities, making them nothing but water farmers. Foreclosures and cabbage and Vons supermarkets. Victorville is a city of about a hundred thousand people, named after a man born in Ohio who died in the Inland Empire working as a manager of the California railroad. If a person is not from Southern California, it is unlikely they’ve ever even heard the name of the city. And somewhere in it was the secret that had destroyed Keisha’s life. Or so she hoped. It was thin evidence, the fact that the name had been underlined while the others were crossed out. Maybe it merely meant it was next on Officer Campbell’s list to investigate. And who even knew where he had gotten his information. What his sources were, and whether they were telling him the truth. She had left Sylvia at an Extended Stay America in Arkansas. Keisha had paid for a couple weeks in cash. After that, Sylvia would have to figure it out. Most likely she would disappear out onto the roads again. Keisha wasn’t worried about her. She could take care of herself. Ok, Keisha was a little worried about her. She left the truck outside of town and bought the cheapest used car she could find on Craigslist. “This barely runs,” the man said, as she picked up the car from his driveway. “Won’t last a year.” “Who’s thinking that far ahead?” she said and drove off, after a lesson on coaxing it into ignition. The issue was where to even begin. Victorville is small, but not that small. A slice of suburb too far from the city to be a suburb. Strip malls and industry and agriculture. Keisha started by randomly sampling the city. Trying local businesses. Eating pizza, getting her nails done, buying shoes at Kmart, and everywhere trying to make idle conversation. Gently poking her way through to anything strange that maybe people noticed, or that they forced themselves not to notice. But it was only a city, only a place where people lived and worked and died. Until the Burger King, where the guy behind the counter saw her copy of the third volume in the comic series she was reading, Perla la Loca, which she had brought in to read with lunch, and said, “Love and Rockets! That’s my shit!” and she explained that it was very much her shit, too, and they started talking about the series. He was getting worked up about a recent story line she hadn’t gotten to yet, and somewhere in that explanation, he referenced “the other town” as though it were a place in Victorville. She let him wind his way down, and when things seemed as friendly as they were going to be, she asked: “What other town?” He blanched and tried to recover. “Huh? No, no other town. Or, like, Apple Valley, I guess. It’s right there, you know. The other town. So.” She tried to keep the conversation going by talking about one of her favorite panels in Perla, the one with the dog that was actually the devil, but he muttered down toward the register that he had to get back to work and gave her the order number. After she ate she said good-bye. He only nodded slightly. But now she had a phrase. “The other town.” And with that phrase she returned to the places she had already been to. At each business, she worked the phrase into conversation. Never as a direct question. But as though it were a piece of knowledge she already had, and she would place it out next to a few innocuous statements and then watch how people reacted. The man at the hardware store was stoic but excused himself a minute or so after she said it and never returned. The woman at the nail salon winced. “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “They leave us alone. You leave it alone.” She wouldn’t be drawn back to the subject, and she rushed Keisha’s appointment. The woman at the bike shop got angry. “Don’t even say that in here. You don’t say those words in my store. You’ll bring him in.” “Who?” “Get out.” By the time she was at a party supply store, it was well after dark, and she was the last customer before they closed. The teenager behind the register shuddered. “Jeez, dude. You can’t talk about that.” “Why not?” He glanced out the front windows. “Because when you talk about the other town, there’s a tendency for him to show up. You haven’t been going around talking about that, have … oh shit,” he said, looking again out the window. “What?” “You need to hide right now.” Given her experiences up to this point, if someone thought she needed to hide, then she hid. She crouched behind a wire bin of cheap inflatable balls. The door chime rang. “Hey, Mike,” said a voice that was not a voice she knew but had a familiar tone. Like the hollowing of the wind. “Oh, hey, man, so,” Mike said, in a high-pitched waver. “Son, no need to be worried like that. Heard that someone might be asking around about the other town.” “Oh?” “Yeah, seen anyone like that?” “Not that I remember?” “Don’t you think you’d remember if they mentioned the other town, son? Wouldn’t that stick out in your memory?” She shifted slightly so she could see around the edge of the bin. The man was wearing a dirty polo shirt. His fingernails were yellow below the surface. His skin stretched oddly over his face. Keisha had never seen this man before. It wasn’t the Thistle Man. Or, more accurately, it was a Thistle Man but not the Thistle Man she knew. There were more than one. 13 (#ulink_f70c88d9-649b-5244-975f-b536a1af4dd2) Her mind was in a race with her heart and both were losing. If there was another Thistle Man, then he was not a monster but a species. How many of these Thistle Men were out there? How many families with a quiet space where once a life had been lived among them? How many people died looking into dull eyes and a gaping yellow mouth, rimmed with sagging flesh? Keisha couldn’t put her jumbled thoughts together. Her heart pumped blood madly through her shivering body. “Uh, no,” the kid at the register said, his voice lost in a quaver. “You’re right, no. Definitely no one asked about any other town.” This new Thistle Man was silent for a long while. From where she crouched, Keisha couldn’t tell what was happening. She could only see the strange crooked posture of the creature, as though gravity for him was slightly up and to the left of the rest of the world. She could only see the deep fear in the teenager’s eyes as it occurred to him, maybe for the first time in his life, that no breath came guaranteed. But the next breath came, both for the kid and for her. “Pfft,” the Thistle Man said. “Whaff. Narn.” His wet lips smacked. Then this other Thistle Man turned and ambled crookedly out of the store. Keisha waited until she was sure he was gone and came out. “Thank you.” “Just get out of here,” said the kid. She did, and despite everything both mind and heart were telling her, she followed after this new Thistle Man. He crossed the empty road, desert wind blowing hot down the street divided by a planter of yellow flowers and waxy leaves grown with borrowed water, and the Thistle Man stomped over them. The two of them crossed a massive parking lot, almost completely empty, and entered a Vons. The swish of the door opening, the swish of the door closing. Quiet warm darkness replaced by blaring light and air-conditioning, and the murmur of music designed to shop to. There was no sign at all of her quarry. Or perhaps she should think of him as her hunter. Cautiously she walked past the aisles. There were no customers, only the lines of logos receding into a vanishing point of dairy refrigerators. Back again along the aisles. Where were the customers? Where, even, was the staff? She turned a corner in frozen foods and there he was, only a few feet away. Back turned. His shoulders bouncing like he was laughing, but the sound was more like a man drowning, thick, desperate gasps. He shouted, no words, just sound, then back to gasping. A Vons employee, the first other person she had seen, turned the corner on the other end of the aisle, saw the man, and immediately walked away. Keisha retreated a few aisles down, trying to stay out of sight. Now that she had caught up to him, she realized that she didn’t have any clear idea of what her plan had been. Once again, she had pointed herself in the direction of trouble without thinking through the consequences of finding it. But the Thistle Man did not turn. He stopped gasping and thrashing and started walking again. Every few feet his right leg would give, like it had no muscle or bone, and his entire body would stoop to the side and then unsteadily lurch its way back up with his next step. She stayed on the opposite ends of the aisles, tracking his movement. He circled the store once and then went back out the exit, never looking around him, although she didn’t know whether that meant that he hadn’t seen her or that he didn’t need to. Out in the parking lot, he got into a car, a silver Toyota a few years old, relatively clean. As it had happened, she had left her car in this same lot, because it was central to a number of the businesses she had been going to. But the lot was big enough that she still had to sprint at least a quarter of a mile, trying to reach her car in time to follow him. Keisha turned the key and only a faint cough happened and she thought, No, no, no, I’ve come this far and I won’t have the world fail me, and she turned the key again, relieved to hear the unsteady whine of the starting engine. The Toyota turned left out of the shopping center and she followed. She tried to keep a distance between them, but few cars were out in a town as quiet as Victorville, and so it was hard not to be visible. At first they were surrounded by strip malls, but then the right-hand side of the road fell away to desert, where the darkness was near total. In the distance, some sort of factory, all glow and smoke. Sweating, breathing human beings on a night shift inside that factory, and on every side of them, darkness and sand. They hit a T intersection and made a left, past the bus station. A bus was pulling out, on late-night departure to who knows where. On the other side of the road was the Route 66 museum. A museum to road tripping, to distance, to how big and spread out America is. As Keisha drove, in order to distract her nervous mind from what she was actually doing, she thought about how her country was a place defined as much by its distance as its culture. Sand drifts on the road. They were fully outside of town now. Stacks of boxcars. An outpost of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Wires emanating from it, almost invisible against the sky, carrying the lights to Hollywood, the air-conditioning to Malibu. Here there was no glamour, only the machine. They turned again. A road called Gas Line Road that intersected a block away with Powerline Road. And finally, a military airport. Barbed wire and hangars. They drove along the fences. The road was completely empty, and so Keisha switched off her headlights and drove only by watching his car and trying to mirror its movements. It felt dangerous, but also somehow restful and quiet, like swimming underwater. In the dark, with the thrum of the engines, she could almost let her natural anxiety fade into an undercurrent that wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts. The Toyota slowed, put on a blinker (signaling to whom?) then turned through a hole in the fence into the airport. The hole was rough, with wire hanging loose around it, looking innocently accidental, but was also exactly wide enough for a car. A small plane came in for landing, and as she drove toward the entrance, she watched the entire landing happen. Red lights blinking their way down, and then finally touching earth and she realized she hadn’t been breathing, and then she hit the curb and screamed. 14 (#ulink_6c94ee38-6614-5319-9a96-0fb50d7b49d5) Keisha stopped the car on the road, undecided for a moment, but then made the turn. If he noticed her, he noticed her. She had gone too far to be able to make any other decision in that moment. She was always afraid but did what she needed to do. As she passed through the fence, a shape loomed down at her from the dark. She swerved instinctually, fishtailing for a moment. The shape was huge, with a snub-nosed face and weird shadows crisscrossing from light passing through the fence. She squinted as she drove around it and saw a broad wing, like an arm reaching out for help, and she understood. A passenger jet, a double-decker giant, designed for international flight. Company name painted over. The plane was silent and earthbound. Her eyes adjusted, and she saw there were more of them. Line after line of retired jetliners. No sign of any other car. She drove slowly past the skeletons of flight. At this point, with her engine coughing loudly in this silent graveyard, she had given up any hope for the stealthy approach. Now it was likely he was stalking her. It would be so easy for him to circle around behind. Perhaps that was his intent on leading her to this place. Perhaps she had driven willingly into a Thistle murder site. She passed under a wing, and its elongated shadow lingered over her car. Under the belly of one of the planes, she thought she saw movement, and she turned the car toward it. The machines around her had avoided disaster again and again only to end up here, in this desolate place, grounded forever. The omen was not lost on her. All luck runs out eventually. Otherwise it wouldn’t be luck. Keisha opened her window so she could hear the night. The night sounded only like her car and like the wind. Some of the small port windows on the airplanes had been knocked out. She thought about what the inside of these dead airplanes must look like. All fixtures gone, only hollow metal filled with moonlight and rattling in the wind. When the brake lights came on, her mind didn’t have time to react but her body was already slamming her foot down. The belt went tight as her car gritted to a stop on the gravel. The Thistle Man’s car was a hundred feet or so in front of her. It was idling. Waiting for something. She switched off the engine, got out, and left the beater behind, running across the hardpacked dirt. The night beyond his Toyota shifted, and she realized that what she had thought was sky was a high wall, and a gate was opening in it. She couldn’t see what was on the other side. The Toyota pulled through, the gate slid closed behind him, and the wall became invisible again against the hills. The wall was featureless, except for a small sign by the gate. It was understated, even elegant, more like a sign for a fancy restaurant than US military property. The sign said THISTLE. She put her hand on the fence, and it was cool, even in the hot night. She tasted sour acid in her mouth and took her hand away. There was something terrible behind this wall, and despite herself she needed to know what it was. She circled around it, but the wall was unbroken, well maintained, and clean. A lot of money and time had gone into keeping whatever was inside this wall hidden. Giving up instantly on the idea of scaling the smooth expanse, Keisha looked around for another option and saw a nearby hillside that appeared to rise above the wall. She had to crawl under the fence to get to it, and the wounds from the skylight in the police station opened up again. Her shirt went wet with blood, and this mixed with the dust into a red paste that covered her as she scrambled her way up the hill. The brush was thick and thorny, but she picked her way through until, panting and bleeding, she turned to see if she was high enough. She was. Inside the wall was a little town. The other town. Houses. A market. A gas station. Even at this hour, the town’s population was out in force. Every one of them was a Thistle Man. A town of nightmare creatures. Loose skin, boneless legs, jittering movements. None of them talked to one another, although sometimes one would laugh, long and loud, and then return to monastic silence. And there was him, the original him, the Thistle Man, the Hungry Man. He was leaning on one of the pumps at the gas station, reading a newspaper. An entire city of them. Creatures so dangerous, so powerful, that a single one of them had almost destroyed her. And here there were hundreds. Were all of them serial killers, uncaught, living together, hidden in this airplane boneyard on a US military air base? A US air base. She could have fooled herself that there were some corrupt cops involved with whatever the horrors of Thistle were up to. But this was beyond a few cops. This was a system of violence and laws that protected Thistle from the likes of her, five foot three, a gash down her chest, and a constant fear that she wouldn’t recognize a heart attack if it came because it would feel like her panic attacks. The imbalance of power wasn’t merely unfair. It was monumental in a literal sense of the term. It was a monolith of disparity and she could almost laugh at the sheer lopsided span of injustice she was contemplating now from that shrubby hillside. Not that long before, on a highway in Georgia, a wife she hadn’t seen in over two years had left a billboard with some advice, and now she was going to listen to it. Who was she to fight a war this lopsided? Her wife had perhaps decided to fight it, and her wife had disappeared. She wasn’t as strong as Alice. She wasn’t willing to disappear. She was sorry to have failed Alice, although this was what Alice had wanted. She was even sorrier to have failed Sylvia, although she knew that Sylvia would be fine on her own. But this was beyond Keisha. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/joseph-fink/alice-isn-t-dead/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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