—
We’re sweaty, our hearts racing in the silence.
Daniela runs her fingers through my hair, and she’s staring at me in the dark the way I love.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Charlie was right.”
“About?”
“What he said on the walk home. It hasn’t been like this since Jason2 came here. You aren’t replaceable. Not even by you. I keep thinking about how we met. At that point in our lives, we could’ve crashed into anyone. But you showed up at that backyard party and saved me from that asshole. I know part of our story is the electricity of our connection, but the other part is equally miraculous. It’s the simple fact that you walked into my life at the exact moment you did. You instead of someone else. In some ways, isn’t that even more incredible than the connection itself? That we found each other at all?”
“It’s remarkable.”
“What I realized is that the same thing happened yesterday. Of all the versions of Jason, it was you who pulled that crazy stunt at the diner, which landed you in jail, which brought us safely together.”
“So you’re saying it’s fate.”
She smiles. “I think I’m saying we found each other, for a second time.”
—
We make love again and fall asleep.
In the dead of night, she wakes me, whispers in my ear, “I don’t want you to leave.”
I turn over onto my side and face her.
Her eyes are wide open in the dark.
My head hurts.
My mouth is dry.
I’m caught in that disorienting transition between inebriation and hangover, when the pleasure slowly morphs into pain.
“What if we just kept driving?” she says.
“To where?”
“I don’t know.”
“What are we supposed to tell Charlie? He has friends. Maybe a girlfriend. We just tell him to forget all that? He’s finally happy at school.”
“I know,” she says, “and I hate it, but yes, that’s what we tell him.”
“Where we live, our friends, our jobs—those things define us.”
“They’re not all that defines us. As long as I’m with you, I know exactly who I am.”
“Daniela, I want nothing more than to be with you, but if I don’t do this thing tomorrow, you and Charlie will never be safe. And no matter what happens, you will still have me.”
“I don’t want some other version of you. I want you.”
—
I wake in the dark to my pulse pounding in my head and my mouth bone-dry.
Pulling on my jeans and shirt, I stagger down the hall.
With no fire tonight, the sole source of illumination on the entire ground level is a timid nightlight plugged into an outlet above the kitchen counter.
I take a glass from the cabinet and fill it at the tap.
Drink it down.
Fill it again.
The central heating cuts off.
I stand at the sink, sipping the cold well water.
The cabin so quiet I can hear the floor popping as the wood fibers expand and contract in distant corners of the house.
Through the window over the kitchen sink, I stare into the woods.
I love that Daniela wants me, but I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know how to keep them safe.
My head is spinning.
A little ways beyond the Jeep, something catches my attention.
A shadow moving across the snow.
Adrenaline surges.
I set the glass down, head to the front door, and step into my boots.
On the porch, I button my shirt and walk into the trodden snow between the steps and the car.
Then out past the Jeep.
There.
I see what caught my eye from the kitchen.
As I approach, it’s still moving.
Larger than I first thought.
The size of a man.
No.
Jesus.
It is a man.
The path along which he’s dragged himself is plain to see by the streaks of blood that look black in the starlight.
He’s groaning as he crawls in the direction of the front porch. He’s never going to make it.
I reach him, kneel beside him.
It’s me, right down to the coat and the Velocity Laboratories backpack and the ring of thread.
He’s holding his stomach with one hand, which is covered in steaming blood, and he looks up at me with the most desperate eyes I’ve ever seen.
I ask, “Who did this to you?”
“One of us.”
“How’d you find me here?”
He coughs up a mist of blood. “Help me.”
“How many of us are here?”
“I think I’m dying.”
I look around. It only takes me a second to lock on the pair of blood-tinged footprints moving away from this Jason toward the Jeep, and then on around the side of the cabin.
The dying Jason is saying my name.
Our name.
Begging for my help.
And I want to help him, but all I can think is—they found us.
Somehow, they found us.
He says, “Don’t let them hurt her.”
I look back at the car.
I didn’t notice at first, but now I see that all the tires have been slashed.
Somewhere in the near distance, I hear footsteps in the snow.
I scan the woods for movement, but the starlight doesn’t penetrate the denser forest farther out from the cabin.