Nice Girls(95)

I pictured DeMaria’s forearm washing up at Liberty Lake, all gray and chewed up by the fish. I saw a man kneeling in the pool of his own blood, his body split open by the ax. The blood now stained my hands.

I felt the bile rising in my throat, threatening to spill out in one go.

“You shouldn’t have done what you did, Mary,” said John Stack.

I shuddered at my name. I couldn’t stop shaking, either, the cold and the terror mixing in my veins.

Mary, Mary, Mary.

I’d been so close.

“I’m sorry,” I whimpered. My voice was high-pitched and squeaky. I sounded like a little girl again.

John Stack said nothing—he didn’t even blink. Instead he seemed to sigh, as if he, too, were tired.

The wind picked up, wailing gently in my ear. The longer I looked up, the more John Stack and his rifle seemed to glow. Together, they looked real and clear and final. They were the last things I’d see.

“I’m afraid you did this to yourself, Mary,” said John Stack, his eyes flat. “I’ll be praying for you.”

I shuddered again.

Mary, Mary, Mary.

Here one second, gone the next.

John Stack started to rise.

Here.

The gun was moving—

Gone.

I lunged.

I jammed the carving knife into him.

There was a scream and—

A crack exploded in the air.

A puff of smoke.

A ringing in my ears.

It was a gunshot, I realized.

But the bullet was gone.

And John Stack fell into the snow, screaming. The knife had frozen into me—it was a part of me. I could feel when the knife made impact, cutting into his flesh the way a knife would tear into a piece of meat. Whereas I was frozen, he was tender.

I rammed the knife in deeper and deeper, stabbing his thigh. John Stack was shifting around, trying to aim the rifle at me.

But we were too close to each other—the barrel was propped on my shoulder. It was aimed past my head.

And I slashed at one of his hands with the car keys frozen in my palm. They split the skin across his fingers.

He was screaming.

I hauled myself farther up his body, slipping beneath the rifle—

He slammed it against my head, like a baseball bat.

My skull was ringing, the world shaking. Everything was in agony as he swung, back and forth. He was battering me, shattering my skull—

I slashed at his neck with the key. I broke through the skin, slicing deep marks into the flesh. John Stack screamed, one hand flying over it. The rifle fell onto my shoulder.

I moved without thinking.

My other hand rammed into his throat. I rammed in the knife as deep as it would go, feeling the skin and the veins and the meat give way. His flesh was soft, and the blood was starting to stream out, warm and dark red. John Stack dropped the rifle, his hands fluttering over mine, trying to bat me away.

But I rammed the knife even harder.

John Stack was gasping, unable to breathe, blood flowing from his lips, his neck. His glasses had fallen off his face.

I realized his hands were on my neck.

He was choking me.

The two of us faced each other, our hands at each other’s throat. I could see the scars where John Stack had cut himself shaving. I could smell the coffee on his breath beneath all the blood. He looked different without his glasses. He had two dark circles under his eyes, like caverns. His eyelashes were long and curved up toward the sky.

I couldn’t look away. His eyes were alive. They were fearful.

John Stack suddenly sputtered, coughing up more blood from his mouth. His hands slackened off my throat. I wheezed, unable to move away.

He began to convulse. His eyes started to dim.

In one second, they seemed to dart back and forth.

In the next, they were unblinking. They were flat.

I didn’t move.

I stayed put, looking at him.

Slowly, I pulled out the knife. John Stack’s head crumpled back onto the snow. His unblinking eyes looked up to the sky.

I stood up.

I stared at the blood on the snow and the blood that drenched my hands. I stared at the rifle near my feet. I was shaking uncontrollably.

Behind me, John Stack’s car was idling. The headlights were still on.

I took the rifle and climbed into the driver’s seat. I shut off the headlights. Then I turned up the heat, and I waited in the dark.





52




I pulled up into the driveway just after eight. I could only remember flecks of the drive home—the endless snowdrifts that now flanked the highway after the snowstorm; the many lights that appeared on the road; and the police car that trailed behind me in the Sewers. I waited for the siren to blare, for an officer to pull me over and ask me what the hell I was doing in a dead man’s car. But after a few blocks, the police car turned into a gas station.

I couldn’t remember driving at all. My hands had moved on their own.

The Castles of Cordoba were dark, silent. At the house, I could see a dim orange glow from the living room window and the white lights of a TV in the background.

I turned off the ignition. I stared at my hands, how pale and cracked and lifeless they were, the blood caked all over them. The feeling had come back into them—pricks of pain that seemed to pulse in my palms and my fingers.