All the Inside Howling (Hollow Folk #2)(99)

I stared at the Chevy Impala that had saved me. The girl behind the wheel was young, probably still a teenager, with bleach-blond hair. Her mouth was open, and in one hand she still held a silver wrapper. She had frozen in the moment of spitting a piece of gum into the piece of foil.

God. I’d been saved by chewing gum.

Then the girl began to scream, and the driver emerged from the limousine, and a raucous chorus of horns went up. Lena and I met eyes for an instant. Then I turned and ran. The traffic accident had drawn onlookers, and I plowed through the line of people along the curb. Ahead of me, perhaps a hundred yards, Emmett helped Becca down to the tracks. I vaulted the chain-link fence and barreled after them.

“Go,” I shouted when Emmett looked back.

Now, for the first time since everything had gone wrong at Union Station, he looked afraid, bone-deep afraid, the kind that digs its nails into your chest and doesn’t let go. But he ran, guiding Becca across the first set of tracks. To the east, a train chuffed towards us, still moving faster than I had expected. Becca and Emmett would make it with no problem. I, on the other hand, needed to pick up the pace.

I reached the ledge where the ground dropped down to the tracks, and when my feet hit the track ballast at the bottom, the chain-link behind me rattled. Lena’s second thug was there, already dragging himself across the fence.

They weren’t going to give this up. Digging my sneakers into the ballast, I darted across the first set of tracks. It was a good thing I didn’t give up either. A gunshot came from behind me, and this time I heard an answering ping when the bullet struck metal. One of the train cars ahead, perhaps, or the track, or God only knew what. Emmett and Becca had crossed two more sets of tracks. They only had one more to go before they crossed the path of the incoming train, and then they’d be safe. But as they crossed the last set of tracks, a shot rang out, and Emmett pitched forward.

It happened so fast that it looked like a magic trick: Emmett folded up on himself, tripping over the last rail and diving into the ballast. Becca’s scream reached me, even from the distance. My mind fixed on the empty space next to her. I couldn’t see his body, I couldn’t see if he was moving. All I could see was that emptiness next to Becca, the place where he should have been. He’d been shot. It was impossible, it couldn’t happen, but somehow it had.

Turning, slipping as the ballast absorbed my moment, I stared at the man who had shot Emmett. He was big, but I’d already seen that. His face was nondescript, his dark hair cut short, his clothes unremarkable. Everything seemed designed to make him hard to remember. Everything, that is, except his size and the gun in his hand.

I don’t know entirely what happened next. For a moment, hate poured through me. Hate like a—

—bridge—

—fire, flashing from me to him like flame coursing along a gasoline-soaked rag. In that moment, I didn’t need to touch him. I didn’t need to look into his eyes. I swatted at that door inside myself, and it was like swatting open an old storm door. For a moment I was both places: inside myself and inside this gun-toting thug who had—

—killed—

—hurt Emmett. Then I was there, inside him, in the darkness. I raked down through the darkness, searching for this man’s worst memories, ready to drag them to the surface and let them wreck him from the inside out.

But it was like drawing my fingers through the air. There was nothing. Nothing that this man truly hated about himself. Nothing that he regretted, nothing that made him sick at night. It was . . . it was like skimming pristine water and coming up with nothing.

And then whatever strength I had was exhausted, and I found myself dragged back into myself. An instant later I was back under the rushing grey sky, staring at the thug. He didn’t seem to have noticed anything. The pistol came up towards my chest.

I sprinted towards the oncoming train, darting left and right, trying to make myself a difficult target. Its whistle blew, and the volume was deafening, but the next gunshot was even louder. Becca was gone. Had she dragged Emmett clear or left him? My heart pounded, and my breath had turned as hard and heavy as the ballast under my feet. I cleared the next track. The gunshot came again, and then the train whistle, and I ran faster. I ran the way I let myself run in the mornings, in the darkness, when running was the next best thing to running away. My feet seemed to clear the ballast and the tracks, like I’d turned to air, or less than air, like I was nothing more than a thought, a single, hammering thought flashing from neuron to neuron: Emmett. The train’s brake squealed, and its whistle punched down along the corridor of the tracks. Ten yards. Eight.

The thug crashed into me, and we both went down in a tangle. Ballast tore up my arms as we rolled across the crushed stone. I was big, both tall and built. This guy, however, hit me like three hundred pounds of wet cement, and when my head cracked against the track, the world turned into an enormous, shimmering line at the center of my vision, with darkness on either side. Darkness, I thought dreamily from the edge of consciousness, darkness like a vast river, flowing on and on, and that wavering line of reality at the center, barely more than a scratch against the darkness, that was a bridge. It all seemed so simple. I laughed, or I tried to laugh, but my lungs couldn’t seem to get any air. Yes, of course. There was a door, there was always a door. But I hadn’t understood that there was a bridge too. Now I glimpsed it the way all truths are glimpsed in dreams: with a full, perfect comprehension that would vanish, upon waking, like a handful of dust.