OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller (24 page)

(?) Minutes, (?) Seconds

In reality, I never even reached the Timber Ridge Mall.

I don’t remember doing this, but based on the mileage on my Celica, I’d driven most — if not all — of the way there, with the Mosin Nagant and over a hundred bullets boxed in my passenger seat. Perhaps I’d even made it to within eyeshot of Timber Ridge’s three-floor cement parking garage, where a cop flashed his lightbar and parked sideways to block the entrance ramp. On the east and south sides of the complex, by the Chili’s and Red Robin, an exodus of confused shoppers funneled out through the double doors. Black Friday played in reverse.

So yes, Addie and I did it.

We’d still prevented the mass shooting and saved scores of lives. We’ll never know how many seconds it came down to. But after the Ouija message and Holden’s active-shooter 911 call, we’d rendered the Timber Ridge Mall an inaccessible target, locked down tight and swarming with AR-15’s and radios. I guess the entity still had options — I could’ve rolled down a window and taken pot shots at the evacuating masses, or strolled next door into an Olive Garden and opened fire on the lunch rush.

But the Head-Scratching Rifle is petulant and vengeful. Hit it, and it hits back. Like a child throwing a tantrum in a Toys“R”Us, a furious spasm of blind, inarticulate rage. And it never forgets those who inconvenience it, or dare to stand against it. Like poor Nikolai What’s-His-Face, pressing his ear to the railroad tracks in 1996. We’d ruined the demon’s masterpiece, and now it needed to punish us.

So somewhere on Interstate 7, my hands twisted the wheel and flipped my Celica into a one-eighty. A squeal of rubber. I turned around, putting Timber Ridge in my rearview mirror, and raced back northbound.

Back to Farwell.

* * *

Somewhere real and unreal, existing outside of time, our house burned. Tumbleweeds of fire raced up the walls — blistering wallpaper, igniting framed photos, blackening our smiling faces at Reno, Maui, and Mount St. Helens. Erasing our life together, turning memories to ash. Scorching away all of her belongings I’d been too weak to box up.

We huddled now in our bedroom, backed into a corner, choking on mouthfuls of hot smoke. Our dresser, nightstand, and bedframe were tipped against the broken door, and the Gasman huffed and paced outside, an enraged shadow backlit by a corridor of flames. He reared back and kicked the barricade again, showering us with wood chips.

Addie brushed a splinter from her hair. “He’s pissed.”

“Good.”

“I think we did it, Dan.”

But had we really? I didn’t think so. I was still alive somewhere in the real world of 2015, still possessed and armed with the Head-Scratching Rifle. The entity had been trying to distract me with that false victory at the counterfeit Timber Ridge. To keep me from doing something. But
what
?

“No,” I said. “It’s not over.”

She smiled grimly. “Just . . . trust me, okay?”

“You’re not real.”

“I keep telling you I am.” She glanced down at her Beretta, slide-locked and empty on the frozen carpet, a mischievous smile flickering on her face. “And now . . . now I think I have a way to prove it—”

The Ouija board scraped between us. The planchette darted from letter to letter, spelling my best friend’s panicked message:

DANYOURCARISINMYDRIVEWAY.

* * *

Holden’s front doorknob is broken off. I must’ve tried bashing the door with the Head-Scratching Rifle’s butt stock before noticing the living room window.

It’s shattered. That’s how I got inside his house. A puddle of glimmering shards on the green carpet, crunched to smaller fragments by my footsteps. As I mantled through, I must’ve slashed my palm on the jagged frame, leaving a warm handprint of DNA evidence on the murder scene.

Inside the little house, details are harder to reconstruct. I know Holden had spotted my Celica in his driveway, and likely watched me break in. Maybe he briefly attempted to reason with me. Some of his roommates’ hardbound law textbooks were off the shelf; perhaps he’d hurled them at me before fleeing through his kitchen, out the laundry-room door, and into the backyard.

Not fast enough.

I followed with the oily Head-Scratching Rifle in my hands. Thumbing cartridges into the breech, passing the Ouija board on Holden’s coffee table while the planchette frantically skittered: RUNRUNRUN—

* * *

—RUNRUN, I traced, but Addie grabbed my wrist. “It’s fine.”

“I’m going to kill him—”

“It’s fine.”

“Addie, I’m going to
fucking kill him
—”

“Holden is fine,” she hissed. “Trust me.”

I looked at her.

Because Adelaide Lynne Radnor, the girl I shared atoms with, was suddenly a stranger again. And now, under a ceiling of rolling flames, she fought tears, reached forward, and squeezed both of my hands. Her forehead pressed to mine. The crackle of charcoal and fire, the Gasman snarling and tearing pieces off the barricade, all the chaos bled away and I only heard her shaky voice, floating on shallow breaths: “I have . . . I have a confession to make. It was never about the shopping mall.”

“
What
?”

“You were fighting for Timber Ridge. But I was fighting for you, Dan. For the rest of your life.” She smiled, her eyes brimming with firelight. “And now . . .”

The Gasman punched through the stacked furniture behind us. A dresser drawer banged to the carpet. I glimpsed his big hand gripping the bedframe and hurling it aside, his boneless fingers jellylike, squelching and leaking through charred gloves. Like five slugs sizzling in a campfire.

I looked back at her. “And now what?”

Her jaw curled, pinching, her face turning red.

“And now
what
, Addie?”

“Remember your exploding bullet?”

“Yeah?”

“Let’s just say . . . it worked.”

“But it didn’t,” I said. “It misfired—”

She shook her head, still smiling that strange, heartbroken smile, her tears mixing with ash to blacken her cheeks, and as the furious Gasman threw our nightstand against the wall and came stomping toward us, she reached for the Ouija board. With a trembling fingernail, she tapped a letter.

“Great job,” she told me. “You did it.”

The letter was B.

* * *

Holden ran into his backyard but barely made it past the woodpile. He wasn’t a runner. He’d fumbled his keychain inhaler somewhere in the weeds. No time to grab it. The two acres were forested but the paper birch trees were too thin for cover. I must’ve halted in the house’s back doorway — half inside the laundry room, half out — when I shouldered the Mosin Nagant and aligned the iron sights on my best friend’s back.

I squeezed the trigger.

The hammer released.

The firing pin struck the primer.

And the Head-Scratching Rifle exploded in my hands like a nail bomb.

(?) Minutes, (?) Seconds

Addie’s mystery word?

S-Q-U-I-B.

Apparently the full term is ‘squib-fire.’ It’s an extremely dangerous malfunction caused when a round misfires without enough force to launch the projectile all the way down the barrel. So it gets halfway through and wedges there. I didn’t know this, but Addie did — that yesterday’s red-tipped bullet hadn’t quite failed. It had misfired, yes, but in doing so, it became an airtight blockage inside the Mosin Nagant, as silent and lethal as a blood clot.

Like Dyson said, our battle with the Head-Scratching Rifle was really a chess game against myself. Only Adelaide knew there was a landmine hidden on the board. I should’ve figured — back in my dining room, when I’d watched my reflection raise the rifle and unsuccessfully pull the trigger, I’d feared that the bullet was in my brain. It was actually just a few inches down the rifle’s barrel.

Guess what happens if you fire another bullet?

The blast sprawled me back into Holden’s laundry room, pierced the door with jagged shards, and blew out a window. An abrasive storm of splintered wood and bladed metal. Gritty fragments sprinkled around me and suddenly I was staring dumbly upward through wisps of smoke, half-inside, half-out. Half of a watery, white sky, half of a stucco ceiling. Half-alive, half-dead, slipping under the rhythm of deepening waves.

We did it.

We saved Timber Ridge.

We pissed it off. And in its rage, it forgot its pre-firing safety check.

And it blew itself up, just like my original plan.

Well, almost like my original plan.

Holden came running, his footsteps soundless. His eyes widened when he saw my injuries. Not good news. But not a surprise, either. He fell to a crouch in the smoky doorway, hands closing into trembling fists, and his lips moved soundlessly. He was saying something to me. I guess whoever said hearing is the last to go is wrong.

Oh my God, Addie, we actually did it.

He grabbed my shoulders and propped me up against the washing machine. My head lolled and I saw my jeans were blackened with shiny blood. A warm pool spread beneath me, steaming in the crisp air. He mashed 911 on his phone, but his battery was dead. I tried to work my lungs and tell him it was fine, that I was fine, that everything had (accidentally) gone according to plan. That my red-tipped exploding cartridge had worked beautifully — but in an unexpected way. That the infamous, decades-old Head-Scratching Rifle had crossed oceans, picked human minds apart like delicacies, witnessed the Second World War and the fall of the Soviet Union . . . only to get distracted by us, forget its little safety ritual, and blow itself up in a backyard in Farwell, Idaho—

We got you, you son of a bitch—

—
And in doing so, it must have released something akin to an electromagnetic pulse. The way the Gasman absorbed warmth and electricity in my memories demanded an equal and opposite reaction, I guess, so a bizarre surge of stored energy was violently discharged when the Head-Scratching Rifle exploded. Holden’s phone was instantly bricked. So was mine. His neighbor’s home theater system was fried, as was a power transformer and the AT&T cellular tower up the hill.

But we didn’t know any of that yet. Holden dropped his phone and looked at me, eyes wide and glassy blue. I read his lips: “Stay, Dan.”

Apparently I was leaking quarts of blood through my stomach. Bummer. He clasped my hands to the wound but my fingers slid right off. Why bother? Mission accomplished. The curse was over. I was done here.

I’ll meet you there, Addie.

Holden was screaming silently into my face: “Dan. Stay with me. Stay with me—”

I tried to shake my head but I was sinking deeper into my own skull. My retinas bloomed. I felt my last breaths depressurizing through my teeth, a peaceful release. Falling away, back to her.

“Stay, Dan—”

But I was going.

“Please don’t go—”

I was gone.

* * *

I reached the staircase just as the first firework launched over the glassy surface of Lake Paiute and ignited. A burst of violet filled LJ’s lake house with racing shadows. On the landing below, I heard the muffled chatter of friends, Snow Patrol, and boozy laughter from the card game in the kitchen.

Down the stairs.

To the living room, where I’d found her before by a fireplace of flickering candles. Where she’d be waiting for me now, in the final moments of our last year together. And I couldn’t wait to see her again. I imagined her fidgeting with that yellow dress, nursing the wine glass that killed her, stressing about the birthmark on her collarbone.

Another flash of blue-white, and I stepped out into the living room, searching the kaleidoscopic darkness, scanning faces to find her. She wasn’t there.

“Addie?”

The foyer was nearby so I went there. I wasn’t worried yet; I’d taken some weird detours through time and memory. But I’d found her here, at New Year’s Eve, and now we could be together forever in this lake house built atop a shelf of limestone, because
we share the same atoms, and we’ll always feel that pull—

She wasn’t in the foyer, either.

I checked everywhere. The dining room. The balcony. Even the upper bedrooms. Panic rising now.

“Addie!”

I was knocking on the bathroom door when a hand touched my shoulder. I turned and recognized one of her work friends from Cubek — a tall, spectacled girl named Jamie. Another fireburst of red colored her chipmunk smile, and then Jamie leaned in close, her lips to my ear as the music kicked up, and said something utterly devastating:

“She’ll be right back, Dan. She just drove home to get her charger.”

* * *

I woke up in the passenger seat of Dora, Holden’s stupidly-named Ford Explorer, halfway to Sacred Family Hospital. He’d stuffed me into it, the seatbelt gripping my neck, the upholstery clammy with blood. I glanced around the vehicle in groggy horror, certain this was another dreamscape; another conjured hallucination, like Timber Ridge. I hadn’t expected this. I’d assumed my shrapnel injuries were fatal, that I’d finally be joining Adelaide in death.

They weren’t.

For a long time, we drove in silence.

Holden eyed Farwell’s clock tower as we crossed the intersection on Main. “You beat it,” he said, pointing.

“What?”

“You beat it.”

“Beat what?”

“The rifle’s curse. You know . . . the twenty-four hour record.”

“Oh.” I leaned my forehead against glass and watched coffee stands and discount stores blur past. “I had help.”

We didn’t speak at all for the rest of the drive.

They were stapling my stomach shut in the ED with a gadget that looked like a handheld sewing machine when it finally hit me; that I was still alive and she wasn’t. That this was real, she was gone, she was really gone, and when tomorrow came, she would still be gone. I cried for three hours, a pressurized outpour of raw hurt. Like being electrocuted, raking every muscle in my body. It went on and on. Because Adelaide Lynne Radnor, the beautiful, superstitious girl who hated cats and lemon bars, who loved
Dirty Dancing
, who wrote software code but always wished to be a veterinarian instead, who accidentally murdered twenty-six lobsters with me on the Oregon coast in 2013, was really, truly gone.

I had to lose her twice, I think, to really
lose
her.