This conversation was getting weirder and weirder. “What do you mean?” I asked, wondering where she was going with this.
“I mean,” she insisted, her nostrils flaring angrily, “tell me you don’t you feel them. You don’t sense them getting closer?”
Feel them . . . ?
I blinked, not sure how I was supposed to respond to that. Not sure what she was even saying. How would I know if they were getting closer?
Then I thought about my dad saying he thought they were trying to send me a message—through those hikers.
“We’ve seen you, each time it gets close to sunrise, the way your pulse and your blood pressure skyrocket. How long has that been happening? Days? Weeks?” She grinned, standing upright. “It’s getting stronger, isn’t it? Those people who want to buy you say it’s only a matter of time now. They think it’s not much longer ’til they get here. Is that what it meant, the number I heard you saying?”
Sweat broke out on my upper lip as I thought about the knife-twist that came with each sunrise, and the way it had gotten stronger, more intense each dawn.
With each passing day.
Even for a girl who’d lost five years of her life, whose memories were now thriving inside an entirely different body—an alien body—this was almost too much. What if she was right? What if I could somehow, some way, sense their approach? “So why me? If you’re right, why do I feel them?”
She shrugged. “Because you’re one of them? Because they want something from you?”
“Want what?”
“How’m I supposed to know? My job is to make sure you’re delivered in one piece.”
She continued to watch me, and I wanted to tell her to look away, even as the thought struck me: my obsession with time. My preoccupation with the passage of days, hours, minutes, and seconds . . . ever since I’d returned.
Was it possible . . . could that have been why all along? Had my body been somehow programmed to sense their arrival?
“So what . . . I’m some sort of . . . clock? Like a countdown—”
Blood sprayed across my face, almost before the sound of the gunshot split the air.
I blinked blood out of my eyes, and tasted it between my teeth. It had splattered all over my arms and on the blue-green of the gown I was wearing. No wonder it took me so long to register what had happened.
Blondie never had that luxury—that moment of clarity—before her eyes, which had been clear blue and laser-focused on me just a second earlier, had gone suddenly and absolutely blank.
Then every muscle in her body wilted as she’d collapsed to the floor. On her way down, her forehead banged solidly against the side of the metal gurney I was strapped to. It was the only sound I’d heard, other than the bullet that disappeared inside her brain.
I was still gaping. Trying to comprehend what . . . and . . . why, when I saw Eddie Ray standing in the doorway, holding a gun.
“Oh my god . . .” I gasped at him. “What . . . ? Why did you do that?” Chunks of bone and flesh clung to my skin. Blondie’s bone and skin.
“She’s a talker.”
I shuddered at his icy explanation, the realization that the head shot wasn’t the kind of wound Blondie could heal from finally sinking in.
“About . . . me? Y-you . . . you didn’t have to . . . kill her.” I’d never stuttered before, not the old me, but my teeth were chattering and my words tripped over my tongue. “Sh-she . . .” My throat stung. “Said it d-didn’t matter if I knew. She s-said I w-was never getting away.”
“Not her place to decide.” Eddie Ray set the gun down next to one of the monitors. I had no idea how he could be so cavalier, so whatever about what he’d just done.
This time, drugs had nothing to do with the spinning of the room. I needed to get a grip. To be as collected as Eddie Ray was. “Was she right? About what she said? Am I some sort of countdown clock?”
Eddie Ray reached for a stool, one that didn’t look as ancient as everything else in this place—this asylum. He avoided Blondie’s body, parking it instead on the other side of the table. Straddling the seat, he cocked his head to look at me.
Then he reached down and brushed at something near the corner of my eye, and I felt it . . . like he’d picked a wound that hadn’t quite scabbed over all the way. I knew what it was: a piece of Blondie.
I was wearing a dead girl all over me.
He chuckled. Chuckled. Like this was somehow funny. Like there was even the remotest humor to be found in any of this. He leaned close and the urge to flee kicked in.
I’d heard of animals that had literally chewed off their own limbs just to escape the jaws of a bear trap, and that’s how I felt. Like I would be willing to chew off one of my own arms or legs if it meant getting away from Eddie Ray.
“According to our buyers, those alien fuckers are already on their way . . .” God, why did everyone have to do that eye tic thing? I knew who he meant. “It’s just a matter of when. Could be days.”