Things had gone on like that for a while, Carter wasn’t sure how long. The others were whispering away, saying various things, ugly things, but mostly what they said was their names, over and over, like they couldn’t get enough of themselves. Then they fell quiet like the air before a storm and that was when Carter heard him: Zero. “Heard” wasn’t exactly the word. Zero could make you think with his own mind. Zero came into his head and it was like taking a step that wasn’t there and tumbling down a lightless hole and at the bottom of the hole was a train station. Folks were hurrying in winter coats, and the voice over the loudspeaker was calling out the numbers of the tracks and what was going where. New Haven. Larchmont. Katonah. New Rochelle. Carter didn’t know those places. It was cold. The floor was slick with melted snow. He was standing at the kiosk, the one with the four-faced clock. He was waiting for someone, someone important. One train arrived and then another. Where was she? Had something happened? Why hadn’t she called, why did she fail to answer? Train after train, the anticipation intense, then, as the last passengers hurried by, the cruelest dashing of his hopes. His heart was shattering, yet he couldn’t make himself move. The hands of the clock mocked him with their turning. She said she would be here, where was she, how he longed to hold her in his arms, Liz you are the only thing that ever mattered, let me be the one to hold you as you slip away …
After that, Carter had gone plain crazy. It was like one long bad dream in which he was watching himself do the worst kinds of things and couldn’t stop. Eating folks. Tearing them to bits. Some he didn’t kill but only tasted, no rhyme or reason to it, it was just a thing he did because that’s what Zero wanted. He remembered a couple in a car. They were driving somewhere in a hurry and Carter had come down on them from the trees. Leave those people be, he was telling himself, what they ever done to you, but the hungry part of him paid this no mind, it did what it liked, and what it liked was killing folks. He landed hard on the hood and gave them a good long look at him, his teeth and claws and what he was about to do. The two of them were young. There was the man at the wheel and the woman beside him who Carter guessed was his wife. She had short blond hair and eyes that were wide and staring. The car began to fishtail. They were sliding all over the place. The man with yelling, Holy shit! and What the fuck! but the woman barely reacted. Her eyes slid right through Carter, her face as blank as paper, like the sight of a monster on the hood was nothing her brain knew what to do with, and it stopped Carter flat, that’s how weird it was, and that was when he noticed the gun—a big shiny pistol with a barrel you could fit your finger in, which the man was trying to aim over the steering wheel. Now, don’t be pointing that, the one part of him, the still-Carter part, was thinking; you don’t ever point at gun at no one, Anthony; and maybe it was the memory of his mama’s voice or else the way the car was swerving in long looping arcs like a kid on a swing pumping higher and higher and faster and faster, but for a second Carter froze, and as the car began to roll the gun went off in a blast of noise and light and Carter felt a sharp little sting in his shoulder, not much more than a bee might do, and the next thing Carter knew, he was rolling on the pavement.
He came up in time to see the car banging down on its side. It spun in a 360 and crashed down on its roof with an explosion of glass and a shriek of tearing metal. It began to roll down the asphalt like a log, over and over, bright bits of things hurling away, until it flopped one last time onto its roof and came, at last, to rest.
Everything was very still; they were deep in the country, miles from any town. Debris littered the roadway in a wide, glittering plume. He smelled gasoline, and something hot and sharp, like melted plastic. He knew he should feel something but didn’t know what. His thoughts were all mixed up inside him like single frames from a movie he couldn’t put in order. He scuttled his way to the car and crouched to look. The two of them were hanging upside down from their seatbelts, the dashboard crunched up against their waists. The man was dead, on account of the big piece of metal in his head, but the woman was alive. She was staring forward, wide-eyed, blood all over her—her face and shirt, her hands and hair, her lips and tongue and teeth. Black smoke was coiling from under the dash. A piece of glass crunched under Carter’s foot and her face swiveled toward him, slowly, no other part of her moving, tracing the source of the sound.
“Is somebody there?” Bubbles of blood formed at her lips as they curved around the words. “Please. Is … any … body … there?”
She was looking right at him. That was when Carter realized she couldn’t see. The woman was blind. With a soft whump the first flames appeared, licking under the dash.
“Oh, God,” she moaned. “I can hear you breathing. For the love of God, please answer me.”
Something was happening to him, something strange. Like the woman’s sightless eyes were a mirror, and what he saw in them was himself—not the monster they’d made him into but the man he used to be. As if he were waking up and remembering who he was. He tried to answer. I’m here, he wanted to say. You’re not alone. I’m sorry about what I done. But his mouth would not make words. The flames were spreading, the cabin filling with smoke.
“Oh God, I’m burning, please, oh God, oh God …”
The woman was reaching for him. Not for him, he realized. To him. Something was clutched in her hand. A hard spasm shook her; she had begun to choke on the blood that was pouring from her mouth. Her fingers opened and the object fell to the ground.
It was a pacifier.