“In that case,” said Brooke, opening her eyes and flashing another toothy grin, “he knows exactly who I am.”
Mills stared at her, trying to think, and then stepped back in shock as the realization hit him.
Nobody laughed.
“You’re…” said Mills. “I … didn’t think I’d ever get to meet one.”
“I can’t hurt you,” said Nobody, and her grin faded slowly away. “I’ve been dead for two years.”
Mills shuffled backward another half step, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of satisfaction at his discomfort.
“You wanted to know what happened in Fort Bruce,” I said. “Now that you’ve met Nobody, you might actually be ready to hear it: the cannibal we were chasing turned out to be a sort of Withered king named Rack. He didn’t have a face or a chest or a heart, but he could use hearts to talk to us the same way Nobody used bodies to get around. They’re like parasites on the rest of the world, using humans as food and tools and even hiding places. He recruited one of our team to his side with the promise of money and power, but I was able to kill him by stabbing that teammate in the chest, filling his heart with gasoline, and then poisoning Rack with it when he tried to recruit me.”
“That’s…” said Mills. He seemed too squeamish to finish his sentence, so I continued.
“We left without telling anyone where we were going because we didn’t want anything like Fort Bruce to ever happen again. We lost that many people because our methods were too obvious: you can’t wage a war against someone without that someone noticing. The Withered noticed us and they fought back. I’d been telling Ostler since the beginning that I needed to do this alone, my way, and then all of a sudden I was the only one left alive so I took my chance and ran with it. Nobody and I have killed just as many without the help of Task Force Goshawk as we ever killed with it, and we’ve done it without anything like another Fort Bruce. You have to see that this is the best way to do it.”
“That’s not the way our government does things,” said Mills.
“Effectively?”
“Unsupervised,” said Mills. “We can’t just have you running around killing people.”
Nobody snorted. “So you’d rather have the Withered running around killing people?”
“A trained agent with decades of experience might earn the kind of autonomy you’re asking for,” said Mills. “Agent Potash might have gotten it. But you’re an eighteen-year-old serial killer and his dead demon girlfriend. Are you crazy?”
“Technically,” I said.
“You light fires everywhere you go,” said Mills. “How do you think we’ve been tracking you? And even if you don’t cause anything on the scale of Fort Bruce, you still cause problems and you still cause deaths. What are we supposed to tell the people of Dillon? ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about the deaths and the arson, our best teenage sociopath is on the job.’”
“Wait,” I said. “What arson?” I’d been desperate to light a fire all day, but hadn’t lit so much as a match my entire time in Dillon. Oh no.
“What do you mean, ‘what arson?’” asked Mills. “The fire you lit this morning. The one that helped me find you so fast—I was already halfway from Dallas when the state police called me.”
“I didn’t light any fires,” I said. “It has to be Attina.”
“Who?”
“The Withered we’re hunting,” I said. “He’s reading my mind somehow.”
“What did he burn?” asked Nobody.
“The church,” said Mills. “Burned it right down to the ground.”
19
Agent Mills kept us in the hospital overnight, locked in the room. The nurse came to visit us every now and then, though he was always accompanied by a cop from the hall, and they never took off Brooke’s restraints. I don’t know how much the nurse knew, but the cops were on edge and that put him on edge. I sat in the corner and ignored them, focusing on the bigger problems: we still didn’t know what Mills was planning to do with us, and meanwhile Attina was only getting more dangerous.
We had to stop him.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“He’s reading your mind,” said Nobody.
“Probably,” I said. “Can he do that?”
“I don’t know what he can do,” said Nobody. “I don’t have any memories of him at all, just the notes from Forman’s book.”
“What did the notes say?”
Nobody shrugged. “‘Last seen in Dillon, Oklahoma,’” she said. “‘Probably useless.’”
“So far he’s shredded two kids, turned into bigfoot, crashed a truck with his mind, and burned down a church,” I said. “That doesn’t sound useless to me.”
“Because you have no ambition,” said Nobody. “All you want to do is kill loners in dead-end towns, and Attina apparently excels at that. But Forman was working with Rack, and they wanted to raise an army.”
I bristled at her comment but kept my response impersonal. “And you think a telepathic bigfoot wouldn’t be useful to an army?”