Two yards later I was in a field of corn that was nearly shoulder high.
I stayed in the field for a ways, counting my steps and trying to calculate how many of them would make a mile. My steps were about two feet, maybe two and a half, which meant … twenty-six-hundred-something steps? I counted out two thousand, figured it was far enough, and then cut west to the main road, following it the rest of the way to Barkwood. There were no cops out here, and no traffic; I wondered if the police had barricaded the roads into Dillon as well as out. I realized Mrs. Butler hadn’t told me which way to turn on Barkwood, right or left, but when I reached it I saw that left was the only choice. I turned and walked a few more miles, passing a couple of farmhouses. The sun was still high, but both houses had lights on. I’d come back to them later if I didn’t find Beth in the rooster house.
And then I reached the rooster house—an old abandoned-looking farmhouse with patched shingles and a dead, sun-scorched lawn. The rooster on the mailbox looked like an old weather vane, rusted and bent and bolted to the top of the mailbox by a stick of old wood. It was at least a half a mile to the nearest neighbor.
I listened and heard crying.
I gripped the rifle tighter. I still didn’t know how to kill this thing. Did it regenerate? Could it sense me coming? Would my own determination to kill it make it, in turn, determined to kill me?
Two voices crying now. Why two?
Because Attina had no will of her own and only wanted what the people around her wanted. And the only person around her now was Brooke, and there was one thing Brooke wanted more than anything in the world.
I almost started crying with them.
I crept forward, the dead grass crunching softly under my feet. The front windows were closed, the blinds drawn, but I found an unblocked window on the side. I stood on my tiptoes to peer inside, but the room and what little I could see of the hall beyond were empty. Not even much furniture, just a folding table and some old napkins. An old family house they only used for parties. I moved to the next window, listening to the wails as they varied in pitch—now softer, now louder, and suddenly a cry of pain and a whoop of terror. The second window I looked in revealed a view as empty as the first, so I moved to the back of the house. The door was locked. I went to the next window but stopped, seeing a glow by the stump of a dried-out tree. A basement window. I laid down on the dry grass to look inside, and there she was: Beth Gleason, eighty years old if she were a day, in the same old blue dress I’d always seen her in. Her hands, arms, chest, and entire lower body were covered with blood. I almost cried out, terrified that it was Brooke’s blood, that I was too late to save her—but no. The inside of Beth’s forearm held a long, deep gash, from elbow to wrist, sloughing out blood like a shaken trough. And then the gash healed, and the blood dried, and Beth wailed in despair and grabbed a pair of garden shears and slashed it open again. She bled, and screamed, and healed. Over and over.
She was trying to kill herself.
It was all Brooke wanted—the bottomless pit at the base of her mind, the horrifying legacy of Nobody. The Withered wretch who’d killed herself a hundred thousand times. Every setback seemed to trigger a new despair, and I’d pulled her back from the brink of more suicides that I could remember. When Attina had captured her, when she’d been separated from me, when it seemed that all was lost, she’d gone right back to it again, like the comfort of an old blanket, and Attina had been powerless to resist. She had no will but what she borrowed from others.
I had to act fast, before she borrowed one from me.
I tried the back door again, kicking it a few times, until finally giving up using the rifle to shoot the doorknob. The sound was deafening; I hoped that Attina’s single-minded obsession would keep her from caring. In the depths of depression, Brooke wouldn’t care—it might actually make her worse. Please let Attina be the same.
The stairs to the basement were right inside the back door, long and narrow. The rifle would be useless in those cramped quarters, so I left it by the wall and pulled out my knife, advancing slowly down the stairs with the blade in front of me. It didn’t have the strength of Potash’s old combat knife, but it was sharpened to a razor’s edge, and it might buy me a few precious seconds, if nothing else. I reached the basement with my ears still ringing, the crying women only barely audible, and rounded the corner just in time to see Beth gash herself open again, bleeding copiously. The pool of blood at her feet covered nearly the entire cement floor of the basement, trickling in a steady stream down the drain in the center. How long had she been doing this?
How could I get away from her once this obsession cleared?