I nodded. “Iowa’s probably FBI, like you said. This is a Withered.”
She glanced at the dryer, only a few minutes into its cycle. She swallowed and sat back down. “Which one?”
“You tell me,” I said.
“Why aren’t you terrified?”
“I am,” I said. “I’m just reacting to it differently. We need to figure out what’s going on and how to respond to it before we do anything rash.”
“Rash?” she said, a little too loudly. We were the only two people in the laundry room, and when I glanced at the door I didn’t see anyone looking in. Her voice was high pitched with worry. “What kind of word is ‘rash?’”
Boy Dog was on his feet, aware that we were agitated even if he didn’t know why.
“Stay calm,” I said. The last thing we needed now was another mental-health episode. I put my hand on her arm. “Search your memory. We can do this. Wake up Nobody, if we have to. This Withered just cut a teenage boy into a hundred pieces: who does that sound like? What do we know about them?”
“It sounds like you,” said Brooke.
I faltered a moment. “I’ve never cut anyone into pieces.”
“But you want to,” she said. “You told me.”
“I told you I had dreams about it,” I said. “I don’t actually want to do it.”
“Don’t you?”
“Focus,” I said. “Someone is following us, and we need to figure out who.”
“I know,” she said. “I’m just freaking out; it’s hard to think.”
My stomach roiled at her accusation, not because it offended me but because it felt so accurate: not only had I dreamed about cutting people up, I’d fantasized about cutting up Derek himself. Turning those smug leers into screams while I sliced through muscles and tendons and separated the bones like a butcher. Now someone had actually done it. What had it felt like? How long had it taken?
I was thinking about the wrong things—I needed to focus on the parts of the kill that would help us to figure it out. Why had a Withered cut Derek to pieces? They didn’t kill out of annoyance, at least not that we’d ever seen. They killed because they were missing something—because they needed something that only that kill could give them. What had it been this time? Information? If something was tracking us, could it carve memories out of its victims like flesh?
Had this happened in every town we’d visited?
“Turn up the volume,” I said, looking at the TV. “Have they talked about similar attacks? If this has happened before they’ll think it’s a serial killer, cutting its way across America.”
“The story’s already over,” said Brooke.
“Crap,” I said, rubbing my eyes as another realization washed over me. “If the FBI has followed us, then they know where we’ve been—and if there are kills in each place they’ll think the killers were all us.”
“That happened last night,” Brooke reminded me. “You said it yourself. Iowa saw us in Dallas yesterday morning, so they know we didn’t do this.”
“If he’s FBI,” I said, shaking my head. “We’re making too many assumptions. We need to know. We need to find out how many other times this has happened—there might be more information about the previous kills because they’ve had more time to investigate them.”
“There’s an Internet cafe by the restaurant,” said Brooke.
“Good thinking,” I said, and stood up. “Stay with the—no, come with me.”
“Damn right I’m coming with you.”
We gathered our food and our half-empty backpacks and left our laundry drying; we had another forty minutes, at least, before it was done. I took deep breaths to calm myself down and followed Brooke to the Internet cafe, which turned out to be three old desktop computers on a low counter. Each keyboard had a credit-card reader on it, and I threw back my head in disappointment.
“Crap.”
“Maybe they’re…” Brooke wiggled the nearest mouse and read the screen. “Yeah, cards only.”
“Maybe they have something at the front,” I said. We walked to the checkout counter in the convenience store, which served as the hub of the whole place, and I waited while the guy in front of us paid for his soda. The cashier was a short, stocky man, with a nametag that said Carlos, and he looked puzzled when he saw us holding the half-eaten food we’d bought from him barely ten minutes earlier.
“Is there a problem?”
“Is there any way to use the Internet without a credit card?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Sorry, that’s just how they are.”
“Do you have a credit card?” asked Brooke.
“Everyone has a credit card,” said Carlos.
I could kill him and take his credit card and—
Stop it.
“We just saw a news report about a friend of ours,” said Brooke, and I thought Don’t connect us to Dillon!—but she’d apparently already planned for that. “There was a drug bust on the news, and the house next door to it was my friend Rachel’s. I need to find out if she’s okay, but we don’t have a phone or a credit card.”