I should leave. Right now. Get in my car and go. To Mexico, maybe. The thought lingered, but only for that instant.
“Sir?” I called, louder this time.
Rain continued to splash onto the blacktop. I swiped strands of hair off my forehead and ran the rest of the distance, at which point I immediately wanted to revisit that whole Mexico thing.
His teeth chattered.
At first, he didn’t look at me and that was bad, but then he did and that was worse. He had eyes the color of maple syrup. Wide and alert as a cornered animal. His jet-black hair was plastered to his forehead, and he lay flat on his back, one arm stretched out with his palm open like he was waiting to be crucified.
Not knowing what else to do, I kneeled on the road and took his hand in mine, our skin slick with water. Drops poured down my nose and into my mouth.
“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. Or at least I thought I sobbed. I couldn’t tell on account of the monsoon beating down against us. “I couldn’t see you. Or I mean, I didn’t see you,” I corrected myself. I hated to lie, but not nearly as much as the thought of telling the truth.
His eyes seemed to register me for the first time. He had high cheekbones and tan skin, the good looks of a high school Homecoming king. He was about my age, too. There was a gash over his left eyebrow, but the rain fell too quickly for him to bleed much. I bit my lip and glanced away from his face, my own eyeballs stinging.
Farther down, dark crimson bled through his white V-neck T-shirt, spreading into fuzzy edges on the fabric. My stomach flopped over like a beached catfish.
His Adam’s apple spiked. He looked up at the sky and then back at me.
Gently, I peeled the edge of his shirt up over his ribs. A long, curved gash ran down his side from just below the right side of his breastbone to the top of his hip. Pink, tattered skin flayed open, creating a crevice where blood pooled and oozed while he panted for breath.
“It’s not that bad,” I told him, knowing full well it was exactly that bad. “See, I’m—” I patted myself until my fingers closed around the hard rectangle of my phone still stuffed inside the pocket of my jacket. I pulled it out. “I’m calling 9-1-1 right now. They’ll be here any minute.” He nodded a silent agreement and I felt a ballooning in my throat.
I pushed the top button. The screen stayed dark. Frantic, I pushed it again, hands shaking more than ever now. It’d been working two minutes ago when I got Owen’s text. This time I held down the button. I tried counting to five. Counting to five felt like an eternity. Nothing happened except the boy moaned.
I shook my phone as hard as I could and held it up to my ear as though I might hear the ocean if I listened hard enough. But it was no use. The screen was soaked.
I felt the corners of my mouth curl downward and my face break apart with the horror. My phone was waterlogged. No help was coming. Not quickly, anyway. I took the phone and threw it against the concrete. It split open on the pavement. I wanted to scream, but the sound was trapped inside.
“It’s okay. Don’t worry.” I pushed my hand into the gummy swamp of his side to stanch the flow, but blood oozed through my fingers, and more pools of red leaked onto the concrete than I had hands for. The asphalt had ripped into his legs, leaving tears in his jeans that revealed bloody scrapes of road rash. I sucked in a lungful of air. “Okay. You wait here.” Like he was going anywhere. “I’m going to get help. I’ll be back before you know it, I swear.”
His hand squeezed tight around mine, clamping down on my bones. I stared hard at him, refusing to cry out in pain. “All right, I’ll stay,” I said at last, and his grip loosened. “I’m sorry. That was stupid. I’ll stay.”
Shiny red bubbles started to form at the corners of his mouth. Trying to look unfazed, I tucked my toes underneath the back of my jeans and rocked. One of my hands held his, and the other pressed into the chewed-up edges of his wound. Without thinking, I began humming the tune of one of my mother’s old hymns. I had to hum with such force to be heard over the raucous weather that my lips tickled and I felt my nose get twitchy. But still, I hummed on.
I was in the middle of the chorus when his head jerked off the pavement. His eyes went round and rabid. I froze. His chest heaved.
He gasped in one desperate inhale and said, “Meg,” before his head fell back to the ground.
FOUR
Observations: A pattern has emerged regarding the use of the brine water in the experiment. Aldini used troughs with zinc and copper, but I’ve found the solution of saline to be a better conductor. Brine water was first used as a conductor in the early nineteenth century. When the brine water is used, the core body temperature of the subject heats up more before burning than during experiments without. At first, I marked this as a correlative relationship, but enough evidence has been gathered that I’m prepared to count the use of the conductor as a cause for better results.