Good Girls (34 page)

She was in midair, stabbing the pinking shears forward, when she realized the Whistler wasn't chasing Rebecca, hadn't moved from his spot near the trailer. He'd stood up, all right, but that was it, and now he was just gazing after Rebecca with what looked like the same admiration and affection Jess was feeling.

Of course, it wasn't the same. Not in the end.

Shears still raised, Jess stared at the creature that had shredded what was left of her life. He wasn't even paying attention to her. Again. He wasn't interested in her. Again. Because he couldn't hurt her enough, she realized instinctively. He had already suffused every atom of Jess's being with hurt, and that made her no longer interesting or useful to him.

Instead, he'd zeroed in on Rebecca, on Amanda and Joel. He gazed at them now like a little boy at birthday presents.

“No,” she said, because she saw what was going to happen next. It was as clear to her as memory, as if it had already happened.

Then it happened.

*   *   *

Late. I'm late. For a most important date
.

That's what Sophie was thinking as she swung-scuttled through the rustling, chattering night-woods. Eventually, she started chanting those words, and that helped, some, distracted her from the sticks jabbing up into her stumps, the snarled, ground-level branches that smacked and scratched her as she plowed through them. After tonight, she really was going to need a pants plan. Or some stilts.

After tonight. And there
was
going to
be
an after, once she had seen the Whistler again, poked his stupid hat off his head so she could see his heartless, gorgeous face, and so he could see her. She wasn't sure he'd even really noticed her before. He would now.

The Whistler
and
Jess. Oh, yes. They'd both see her. She was about to see them both together. Ignoring the scratches and smacks the forest inflicted on her, she dug harder into the earth, swung forward faster. She was moving so fast, darting across streaks of moon from shadow to shadow, that she actually hit an armadillo, pitched forward across it, lurched upright, and found it tipped over on its back, waving its scaly legs in the air.

It was … meowing? Was that what armadillos did? Or maybe this really
was
the Wonderland forest.

Her mouth filled, abruptly, with the taste of just-dead deer, the deer she and Natalie had tried devouring after Natalie had plowed into it with her GTO.
Ah, yes,
Sophie thought.
Another magical night, that one. The one where my best friend tore my jugular vein in half and drank from it.

As though giving CPR—or, negative-CPR, whatever the opposite of CPR was—Sophie leaned over the screaming armadillo, clamped one hand over the other on the soft spot on its chest, and crushed the scream out of it. She pushed a little too hard, wound up shooting half its insides out its mouth like toothpaste through a tube.

“Sorry, dude,” she murmured, and she was, some. “You're too loud.”

After that, she followed the racket. And she was so focused on that that she almost barreled right into Rebecca, fleeing
toward
Sophie down the path. Sophie had to throw herself sidelong, right into a pricker bush, to avoid getting run over. The only reason she didn't get seen was that Rebecca, too, was riveted on the noise from the clearing behind her—the shouting, the snapping and breaking—and was therefore looking that way, over her shoulder. She wasn't even glancing at the wild, wriggling thing yowling in her arms.

Yet another screeching kid that girl could hold in her arms. How, Sophie wondered, did she do it?

Same way I did,
she realized, surprising herself. She went on thinking about that—about her Roo—while she waited for Rebecca to pound away down the trail. Then she eased herself off the thorns that had impaled her, brushed the burrs from her skin, and edged back out of the bush.

There was less sound now from the clearing, which probably wasn't a great sign for the people
in
the clearing. A bat fluttered madly in the leaves over Sophie's head, and then the leaves went silent.

Glancing just once after Rebecca, Sophie was startled to see another figure stagger out of the woods. This one was black-haired, bloodied, broken. And it was calling Rebecca's name.

Whoever that was, Sophie figured Rebecca would come back for her. And that would keep her close by. And that was all to the good.

I'm late,
Sophie murmured to herself, thinking of the Whistler, of Jess. She let herself smile, fingered the phone, the little Bluetooth speaker in her pocket. Then she slipped away once more into the shadows.

*   *   *

There was a moment—several, actually—right after Rebecca snatched up Trudi and fled, when no one in the clearing seemed to know what to do. Gripping the rake, trying to resist jabbing it into her own face in the hopes of waking herself up, freeing herself of
whatever this feeling was,
Amanda stared at the monster in the sombrero. But he just stood there, preternaturally quiet, staring after Rebecca, almost precisely in the way Joel had taught so many of the girls who'd passed through Halfmoon House to watch the night-woods for owls.

Only, this guy was even quieter. He didn't even seem to breathe.

Jess had made some crazy leap, cried out, stabbed absolutely nothing with the pinking shears, and now she was just standing there, too, looking dazed, and also small: a tiny, grief-wracked widow, shapeless in her gray sweatshirt but transfixed by moonlight, ablaze with it. She looked reared up, somehow, like a little gopher at the mouth of its den, waving uselessly at the fox that had come for her young.

And then there was Joel. He, of course, had broken completely with the snap of Danni's spine. Because, as always, he'd gone and done exactly what they'd both set out to do with Halfmoon House, right from the beginning. He'd done the one thing Amanda had never quite let herself do.

He'd let himself love them. Even—especially—the furious and fucked-up ones. And until ten seconds ago, he'd actually believed he could save them all, and that they would save him in turn.

By saving
me
,
Amanda realized abruptly.
By waking me up. As if I were only sleeping, all this time.

She looked at him, her mad, broken, no-longer-laughing husband, arms wrapped around his shovel, mouth open, eyes overflowing, and not just with tears but also everything he'd shared with these children who were not his children: his crazy songs, his dreamed-up-in-the-instant games, his ridiculous theme-picnic plans. All the things she'd loved about him, once. She still loved them. Sometimes.

All the life he still believed—or maybe had believed, until just a few seconds ago—he might one day have.
With me,
she thought.

“Joel,” she said, hating the sound of her voice, as she had for years, now, because even she couldn't read the emotion in it. “Go live.”

He didn't even stir, of course. His attention remained riveted to the heap at the Sombrero-Man's feet. The heap that had been Danni.

But Jess heard. And Jess understood, immediately. Of course she did.

“Amanda,
no,
” she said.

“Save the girls,” said Amanda, feeling herself finally, finally tear free of whatever it was that had held her in place. In truth, it had held her long before today. And now, just like that, it was gone. And here she was, after all this time, unfolding inside herself.

Hello, me,
she thought, trembling, letting life flood in.
Long time no see.
Then she leapt.

She died so fast—so much of her flying in so many directions—that neither Joel nor Jess would ever be sure exactly what it was the Whistler had done to her.

*   *   *

A split second too late, freed by the movement his wife had made (or else by the momentary distraction that movement had caused the Sombrero-Man), Joel leapt, too. He didn't think, hadn't planned, hardly even raised the shovel, but suddenly, he was sailing through a winking red haze that hung in the air, a corona of Amanda—of what had been his wife—around the summer moon.

Like flying through the forest,
he thought
, in the seconds after a tornado hits.

The Whistler smashed him to the ground, knocked the shovel flying, seemed to swirl down on him like a tornado.

*   *   *

The Whistler hardly felt what he was doing, he simply
did,
set the air screaming and the night whistling just by whirling his arms. Sounds spilled from him—from everywhere, really—as he stepped on the neck of the guy with the shovel. The guy
formerly
with the shovel. Unless that was a root he'd leaned down on to crack?

Who cared?! Not him. He flung his wet, red arms wide, bathed them with world, which was there for him to Whistle to, sing to, swallow whole, snap. It existed only to make noise under his feet, come apart in his grasp,
experience.

He was Whistling now, a proper whistle, his first in ages, weeks. He hadn't Whistled this way since his Destiny died.
What a truly wonderful world,
he thought, watching and feeling the blood and flying skin-bits coat and mottle his own skin, become him as he hummed.

Don't know much about … biology …

The movement alerted him, but not quite in time. He shivered back into himself, into the moment, and glanced around.

The other woman—his Destiny's murderer-mother—was gone.

Marvelous!

“Ready or not,” he said-sang to the moon and stars, the trees and trailers, the shredded and snapped things at his feet. “Here I come.”

*   *   *

Trudi hadn't stopped screaming “
STOP!
” since Rebecca had spirited her out of the clearing. But when Rebecca pulled up momentarily and set her down, tried to spin so she could see who or what had just called her name, Trudi somehow screamed louder.

She kept repeating the same word, howling it at everything and nothing, and who could blame her? Right now, Trudi wanted the whole world to stop.

Let me know if you get a response, kiddo,
Rebecca thought, and squeezed her arms tight around Trudi's back, though not nearly as hard as Trudi was squeezing—clinging to—Rebecca's leg. She should have been more afraid. But whatever had just stepped out of the woods, it could have her if it wanted her. Rebecca was too tired, too heartbroken to run from anything else. Using her knee as a nudge, letting Trudi cling, Rebecca eased herself around and saw Kaylene.

She was swaying, leaning sideways in the center of the path—
Jack and the 'Lenes,
Rebecca thought, as she clutched Trudi harder—with her beautiful nose smashed flat on her face and pearls of blood strung like beads through her long, matted hair. There was so much red all over her, even in the shadowed forest dark, that she looked as though she'd been turned inside out.

Rebecca tried to ease Trudi back, just enough so they could move toward Kaylene. But Trudi grabbed tight and dug her nails into Rebecca's shoulders, clinging and kneading like a cat caught in a screen. She was also pleading, without language, just pure, anguished sound. “
Nnnnnnn…”

“Okay,” Rebecca whispered down to her, while looking at Kaylene through a veil of tears that already—had always—felt permanent and part of her. “It's okay, it's okay, it's…”

Then Kaylene's eyes met hers. For one moment, Rebecca almost smiled. “You're okay.”

“He killed Jack.” Kaylene's voice came out metallic, a digital sample of Kaylene's voice. “The guy in the sombrero.”

“I know. I've seen. He killed Oscar, too,” said Rebecca. “The grounds-crew guy I always … my friend from campus.”

From deep in Kaylene's throat came a grating sound, scraped and awful: bottom-of-the-tear-barrel tears, the kind that come after crying. Rebecca knew those tears well. Kaylene wiped at her face, even though there was no new wetness there. “And Marlene.”

“No,” Rebecca whimpered, although she realized she had already assumed that.

Marlene.

Standing there amid the shuddering trees, fighting to hold position as Trudi pressed into her, Rebecca could feel herself shredding. She was a little sapling, peeling apart, its buds and blossoms plucked away, one by one.

“I saw it happen, Rebecca. I
watched
it happen.”

Another sound scraped from Kaylene's throat. That one was familiar to Rebecca, too, though not so much from her own life. She recognized it from Crisis Center phone calls. That terrible, guilty tremor.

“It wasn't your fault, Kaylene. You couldn't have done anything. I've seen him, too. There's nothing you—”

“You're wrong about that,” Kaylene muttered. Behind her, the pines started shaking.

Run,
Rebecca thought, stirring inside herself.
We have to run.
And then she thought again of Marlene. Twinkies in her bag, squashed under her chem books.

Somehow, without letting Trudi go, Rebecca grabbed Kaylene and pulled her close. Kaylene was still shuddering even harder than the trees, in abrupt, violent gusts. Instantly, her hands were in Rebecca's hair, and she was clinging, too, like a drowning person dragged from the water.

But onto nothing,
Rebecca thought.
There's no life raft here. I have nothing, for anyone.

“Kaylene, we've got to go.
Kaylene!
Help me. We've got to
go.
”

“I could have saved her. Rebecca. I could have saved her.”