The rest area came closer, taking form in the moonlight. It looked falsely serene, like a model inside a snow globe. She saw the cars — their Astro, her Honda, the buried dumpster she’d once mistaken for Ashley’s car. The icy flagpole, standing like a needle. The bronze crowd of Nightmare Children. And emerging from the darkness, half-buried in windswept snow, with its dead lamp and barricaded window, the Wanapani visitor center itself.
Big Devil, the name meant.
Then Ashley pivoted her — “Turn, turn,” and they followed the footpath from the parking lot to the front door. The final fifty feet.
I’ve saved Jay already, she reminded herself. I’ve gotten the police involved. They have guns. They’ll take care of Ashley and Lars.
All I have to do is survive.
This long walk back had taken ten, maybe fifteen minutes, she guessed. So she was already halfway there.
Just fifteen more.
As the building crept closer, Darby realized something — she wasn’t even afraid anymore. She was exhilarated, actually, drunk with a strange sort of excitement. She’d already been shot at, pepper-sprayed, and asphyxiated with a Ziploc bag, and like a goddamn cockroach, she’d survived everything Ashley and Lars — and even Sandi — had thrown at her. Against all odds, Darby was still in this fight. It was too personal; this eight-hour psychological duel with Ashley, all of the night’s tricks and turns and wins and losses. And now she had to witness her grisly checkmate. She wanted to be there the second it happened, to see the shock on Ashley’s face when the first approaching police car flashed red-and-blue. It thrilled her, in a dark way she couldn’t describe.
You’ll hurt me, Ashley. You’ll hurt me bad. For these last fifteen minutes or so, I’m all yours. But after that?
You’re mine.
And you have no idea—
“Oh, hey.” Ashley stopped. “You . . . got a text message back at the highway.”
The blue glow returned. He was reading her phone again.
Darby panicked. 9-1-1 must have sent a second text message. Of course. The well-intentioned emergency dispatcher had no way of knowing that Darby herself was under duress, that her phone was now in the killer’s hand.
“From . . .” Ashley squinted. “From someone named . . . Devon.”
Then he held the cracked iPhone out to her, and when her eyes pulled into focus, whatever remained of Darby’s world disintegrated.
It happened. Mom died.
“Ooh,” Ashley said. “Awkward.”
Then he broke her iPhone in half. “Keep walking.”
*
The front door shut like a gunshot.
Jay screamed when she saw Ed. Ashley grinned, all white teeth, grabbing her by the collar and forcing her to look. “Cool, huh?”
Ed Schaeffer was slumped in a sitting position under the Colorado map, the front of his Carhartt shiny with dark blood. He tilted his head up at them as they entered the room, and his lips weakly quivered, like he was trying to speak.
“Don’t move, Eddie.” Sandi knelt beside him, trying to wrap the right length of medical gauze around his ruined jaw. The white first-aid box was open on the floor, its contents scattered. “Don’t move, I’m trying to help you—”
Over her trembling hands, Ed’s eyes darted up to Darby — a flash of recognition — and he tried again to speak, but only managed a moaned gurgle. A mouthful of blood, ropy with snakelike clots, squirted through his locked teeth and splashed down into his lap.
Jay cried, struggling to look away, but Ashley wouldn’t let her. “See?” he said into her ear. “That’s a red card.”
Across the room Lars watched all of this like a scarecrow, holding the .45 in one hand and a white jug of bleach in the other, as Ed’s strangled scream reached a fever pitch in the confined air.
All of this horror barely registered with Darby.
She wasn’t there. Not really. She was somewhere else, and this world had gone slippery, tinged with oil. Lights smeared into shafts. Her body was a cold suit, her heartbeat and breaths falling into a slow, mechanical rhythm. She imagined a tiny creature, her truest self perhaps, pulling levers and viewing camera feeds inside her own skull. She’d seen that in a movie — Men in Black. She recalled watching the DVD years ago, with her mother on the basement sofa, sharing a Snoopy blanket. I like Will Smith, her mother had told her, sipping a drink that smelled like peaches. He can rescue me anytime he’d like.
She was gone now, Darby realized.
The body of Maya Thorne would remain in some hospital in Provo, Utah, but the tiny being that lived inside her head was lost forever.
Now Ashley squeezed her right hand, interlocking his icy fingers into hers like teenagers on a date, and he guided her through the room. Past Ed and Sandi, past the stone counter, past the coffee machines. She didn’t know where he was taking her, nor did she care. She numbly noticed her right foot was leaving red footprints — she’d sleepwalked through Ed’s pooled blood. Like a nightmare, she just wanted it all to be over.
For it to please be over.
She twisted her neck, glancing back at the old Garfield clock on the wall. It read 5:19 a.m. For winter daylight savings, she subtracted an hour.
That made it 4:19 a.m.
She’d received 9-1-1’s text message at 3:58 a.m. The walk back had taken twenty-one minutes. Subtracted from thirty, that made nine minutes left until the police arrived here. Nine short minutes.
Survive nine more minutes.
That’s all.
Ashley halted her abruptly — here, at the janitor’s closet door. Still half-open, from when she’d unlocked it. He gently twirled her now, like a slow, dizzy tango, and pushed her against the wall.
“Sit here,” he said.
She didn’t.
“Sit, please.”
She shook her head and tears tapped the floor. Her sinuses ached.
“You’re not going to sit?”
She shook her head again.
“You’re not tired?”
Oh, she was exhausted. Her nerves were shredded, her muscles sagging meat. Her thoughts blurry. But somehow, she knew that if she sat down now, it would all be over. She’d lose her will. She’d never stand up again.
For a moment, she considered just blurting it out, saying what couldn’t be unsaid: Ashley, I threw your keys out the window in the men’s restroom. They landed just ten, maybe twenty feet away in the snow.
You can kill me. I’m done.
Across the room, Jay wept. Rodent Face knelt by her, trying to calm her. “Don’t look at Ed. Don’t look at him, okay? He’s fine—”
Ed took in another tortured breath through his nose as Sandi wrapped another bandage around his jaw, and then he made a strange sound, like a wet burp. The clean white gauze blotted red.
“He’s fine, Jaybird. Wanna, ah, play circle time?”
“We’re all . . .” Sandi sighed, wiping Ed’s blood on her pants. “We’re all going to prison for the rest of our lives. You know that, right?”
Ashley ignored her. He was a black shadow, towering over Darby, studying her. Still gripping her wrist, trapping her against the half-open closet door. His eyes moved up and down her body.
Darby stared at the floor, at her size-eight Converse, slashed by ice and browned with dirt and blood. Ten days ago, they’d been new in a box.
“Were . . .” Ashley cleared his throat. “Were you close with your mom?”
She shook her head.
“No?”
“Not really.”