Panic(23)
“What are you doing?” Heather asked. Her brain still felt like it was wrapped in a wet blanket.
Dodge passed over the phone wordlessly. Heather saw that Dodge had emailed the photo to [email protected], subject line: PROOF. Heather shivered. She didn’t like thinking of the mysterious judges—invisible, watching, judging them.
“What about the gun?” Dodge said.
“The gun?” Nat repeated.
“Heather found it,” Dodge said neutrally.
“Dodge and I found it at the same time,” she said automatically. She didn’t know why. She could feel Dodge staring at her.
“You should both get credit, then,” Nat said.
“You take the picture, Heather,” Dodge said. His voice was slightly gentler. “You send it.”
Heather arranged the shot glass and the gun on her lap, clumsily, with one arm. Her stomach tightened. She wondered if the gun was loaded. Probably. So weird to have a weapon so close. So weird to see it sitting there. She’d been a year old when her dad shot himself—probably with a gun just like this one. She had a paranoid fear that it might go off on its own, exploding the night into noise and pain.
Once the picture was sent, Bishop asked, “What are you going to do with the gun?”
“Keep it, I guess.” But she didn’t like the idea of having a gun in her house, waiting, smiling its metal smile. And what if Lily found it?
“You can’t keep it,” he said. “You stole it.”
“Well, what should I do with it?” Heather felt panic welling inside her. She had broken into Donahue’s house. She had stolen something that was worth a lot of money. People went to jail for shit like that.
Bishop sighed. “Give it to me, Heather,” he said. “I’ll get rid of it for you.”
She could have hugged him. She could have kissed him. Bishop shut the gun in the glove box.
Now everyone was quiet. The dashboard clock glowed green. 1:42. The roads were all dark except for the sickly cone of the headlights. The land was dark too, on either side of them—houses, trailers, whole streets swallowed up by blackness, like they were traveling through an endless tunnel, a place with no boundaries.
It started to rain. Heather leaned her head against the window. At some point, she must have fallen asleep. She dreamed of falling into the dark, slick throat of an animal, and of trying to cut herself out of its belly with a butter knife, which turned into a gun in her hands, and went off.
SATURDAY, JULY 2
THE NEXT DAY, THE NOTICES WERE EVERYWHERE: PINK betting slips, papering the underpass, stuck to gas pumps and in the windows of the 7-Eleven and Duff’s Bar, threaded between the gaps in the chicken-wire fences that lined Route 22.
The betting slips blew all the way to Fresh Pines Mobile Park, carried on the soles of muddy boots, snatched up by the metal underbelly of passing trucks before escaping on the wind. They found their way to Nat’s quiet residential street. They appeared, half sodden, sunk in the mud in Meth Row.
There were a third as many players now as there once had been. Only seventeen players had even made it over the fence—of those, ten had managed to get something from Donahue’s house.
But there were other notices too: printed on large, glossy sheets of paper, inscribed with the crest of the Columbia County Police Department.
ANY INDIVIDUALS FOUND TO BE PARTICIPATING IN THE GAME COMMONLY KNOWN AS PANIC WILL BE SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL PROSECUTION.
In smaller letters, the pertinent criminal charges were enumerated: reckless endangerment, destruction of private property, breaking and entering, intent to do grievous/bodily harm, drunken disorderliness.
Someone had squealed, and it was obvious to everyone that it had either been Cory Walsh, after his arrest at the water towers, or Byron Welcher, who had, it turned out, been mauled pretty badly by one of Donahue’s dogs, and was now in the hospital over in Hudson. There was no getting to Byron, at least not until he was released, so a few people took out their anger on Cory—and he ended up in the hospital too, his face beaten to the pulpy purple of a bruised and rotten tomato.
That was only a few hours before Ian McFadden found out from his older brother—a cop—that actually it hadn’t been either Cory or Byron, but a quiet junior named Reena, whose boyfriend had just been eliminated from the competition.
By the time the sun was bleeding out over the horizon, all the windows in Reena’s car had been smashed, and her house had been covered with a fine, trembling sheen of egg, so it looked as though it had been enclosed inside a membrane.
Nobody believed that Panic would stop, of course.
The game must go on.
The game always went on.
MONDAY, JULY 4
dodge
THE WEATHER STAYED BEAUTIFUL—FINE AND SUNNY, just hot enough—for a whole week after the challenge at Donahue’s house. The Fourth of July was no different, and Dodge woke to sunlight washing over his navy-blue blanket, like a slow surf of white.
He was happy. He was more than happy. He was psyched. He was hanging out with Nat today.
His mom was home, awake, and actually making breakfast. He leaned in the door frame and watched her crack eggs into a pan, break the yolks up with the edge of a wooden spatula.
“What’s the occasion?” he said. He was still tired and his neck and back were sore; he’d worked two shifts stocking shelves after closing time at the Home Depot in Leeds, where his mom’s ex-boyfriend Danny was manager. Dumb work, but it paid okay. He had a hundred dollars in his pocket and would be able to buy Nat something at the mall. Her birthday was still a few weeks away—July 29—but still. Might as well get her something small a little early.