“They have to come from somewhere, right? Why not right here, in this empty desert wasteland?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking out at the low, empty hills. “Why not?”
With Attina gone, there was only one other Withered we had a good lead on, but we didn’t know much about him. Brooke called him Ron, or sometimes Rain, but I couldn’t imagine either was his real name. Brooke was also scared of him, intensely so, which made getting information out of her harder than usual. He had some kind of power over … something. I still wasn’t sure. Rain, maybe, but that seemed a little on-the-nose. Brooke had said two things on the subject over the last two years: one was “Ron helps people,” and the other was “‘Run from Rain.” Neither made any sense. The second one might not even be a warning, but rather a description of how one name had changed to another. Maybe his name was Run? Interpreting Brooke’s flashes of insight was sometimes harder than finding the Withered themselves. She hadn’t known much about Attina, either.
How were we supposed to hunt them now? After Ron, assuming that Ron wasn’t just another dead end, where did we go next? Was that all of them? Maybe they were all dead and no one was chasing us, we were just running from shadows. We wouldn’t know until they caught us, and then it would be too late. Maybe we could set a trap—give away our position, just a little bit, enough to draw attention and see who shows up. A demonic duck call, quacking in the marsh.
“Where are we?” asked Brooke.
I looked at her. Another personality shift, but she didn’t seem upset. Someone who knew me, at least, and knew how we traveled. I wanted to ask who she was, but I didn’t want her to feel bad.
“Highway 287,” I said. “We’re going to Dallas.”
“Who’s Dallas?”
One of the older ones, then. “Dallas is a city in America.”
“I know that,” she said softly.
“I know you do.”
She touched Boy Dog’s head, not scratching him but drawing her finger slowly down the center of his muzzle, forehead to nose. “Are we married?”
Lucinda, almost certainly—she asked me that almost every time she showed up. “We’re not,” I said, and tried to remember the details of Lucinda’s life. “Your husband’s name is Gaius, I think. Caius, maybe.”
“Caius,” she said, nodding. “But he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“For thousands of years.”
“And so am I.”
The warning flags went up, and I looked out at the highway, hoping to see something I could use to distract her. “A,” I said. “On that license plate.”
“That’s an N.”
“Are you sure?”
“John,” she said, “your eyes are terrible.”
“There’s another crossroads,” I said, pointing ahead. “Chevron station. Um, so, A.”
She laughed, and I wondered if the moment had passed—snipped off before it could grow too fierce. “What word?”
“Station?” I said.
“Nope,” she said, and laughed again. “You can’t just guess about which words are up there, that’s cheating.”
“Then how about that big building?” I asked. Next to the pumps was a large white building, several times larger than a regular gas station. It was too far off the side of the highway for me to read clearly, but it was obviously a restaurant. I took the gamble that it said so on the sign. “A: Restaurant.”
“That doesn’t say ‘restaurant,’ it says ‘The Armadillo Grill.’”
“I didn’t say it said ‘restaurant,’ I said it was ‘a restaurant.’ Called the Armadillo Grill, which has an A in it.”
“Fine,” said Lucinda. “I’ll give you that one. But no more freebies.”
“What do you mean freebies? I had to fight for that A.”
“J,” she said triumphantly. “Right under the Armadillo Grill—it says ‘Buster and Jackie,’ or ‘Beef and Jerky’ or something like that.”
“Boots and Jackets,” I guessed. “B.”
She peered at the sign. “And K, and L, and M, and N, and O, and … dangit, that’s as far as I can go.” She glanced at me from the corner of her eye. “See how easy it gets once you break past J?”
She seemed fine now, distracted from her momentary flash of darkness, but I didn’t dare to just drop the game completely. If I’d been playing in the first place, she might not have started talking about death. “That same sign had C, D, and E,” I said. Now that we were passed the crossroads, signs were scarce, but I saw a road sign and pointed it out. “‘Ogle Cattle.’ I didn’t realize we were that far removed from civilization.”
“You did not actually see a sign like that.”
“I totally did.”
“It said Montague Jacksboro.”
“Not the one I was looking at.”
She swatted at me lightly, then whooped in terror as the truck bumped and we grabbed the sides, holding on as we caught just a millimeter of air. She laughed. “I missed this.”
“They have a lot of pickup trucks in the Roman Empire?”
“Roman … who do you think I am?”
Had she shifted again? “You’re not Lucinda?”
“Who’s Lucinda?”