Gany reached out, grabbed Ellie’s wrist, and tried to wrench the girl’s hand off of Kahle’s face. A second later, Gany withdrew her hand, recoiling as if shocked by a jolt of electricity. Ellie whipped her head around to watch Gany take a step backward, a look of abject horror now etched across Gany’s face.
Suddenly, the air was sucked from David’s lungs again. He froze, his sneakers skidding in the dirt. His flesh began to tingle.
Ellie released her hold on Kahle; the second she did so, Kahle’s body dropped face-first into the dirt. She turned and clamped both hands overtop Gany’s, which were still clutching the shotgun. Gany screamed and the shotgun went off, blowing a crater into the earth at their feet. She tried to wrench her hands free, but Ellie wouldn’t let her go. She fell quickly to her knees while simultaneously throwing her head back. Her screams became operatic, taking on a frequency David would have thought impossible for human vocal cords. Blood began streaming out of Gany’s ears.
A second gunshot rang through the air. David turned and saw Bandanna firing his pistol at Ellie. He was shooting erratically, his face full of terror. David rushed him, and Bandanna swiveled and got off one more shot before David collided with him and they both went crashing to the ground. The pistol exploded again, the blast so close to David’s left ear that all sound was instantaneously sucked out of the world. Bandanna struck him in the face, knocking him onto his side in the dirt. David rolled over and climbed to his feet, the absence of sound quickly replaced by a shrill, sonorous whistle. He tripped over his feet and fell backward onto the ground, his teeth gnashing together in his skull.
Bandanna loomed above him, a shifting silhouette against the row of floodlights that now partially blinded David, a silhouette that swung its pistol toward him. Faintly, over the ringing in his ears, David heard the roar of a gunshot . . . and in that same instant, his attacker’s silhouette was swept away from the floodlights. David felt no pain.
(sleep you can sleep you can fly you can sleep)
(so cold)
Consciousness threatened to leave him, but he fought to hold on to it. There was nothing but the burning stench of gunpowder in the air, the blinding floodlights that were rapidly pixelating, and the incessant tonal ringing at the center of his head. Even when the smell of gunpowder faded and the floodlights turned dark, he could still hear that ringing, ringing, ringing.
60
He wasn’t sure if he ever truly lost consciousness, though he was aware of his senses rushing back to him at one point, so he must have been close. He smelled the burning early morning air and heard the ringing in his ears. He sat up and saw a dead man with a red bandanna askew on his head not two yards from him, a gaping, sodden wound in his chest.
David crawled to his feet and stood there, wavering like a drunk.
Ellie stood facing him, her eyes wide, her lower lip trembling. She held her arms away from her body, like a child pretending to have airplane wings, and there was blood on her nightshirt, her arms, her face. She wore no expression, as if a part of her mind had fled during the melee. Only her eyes showed any sign of life—two blazing orbs that seemed to be seeing everything and nothing all at once.
Kahle’s body lay at Ellie’s feet, the twisted agony on his face and his swollen, bloodied eyes all David needed to see to know he was dead. Gany’s shotgun lay beside Kahle, but Gany herself was nowhere in sight.
David staggered toward his daughter, and it seemed to take forever to close the distance. When he reached her, he pulled her against him and hugged her hard. She felt as stiff as petrified lumber, and for one terrible second, he couldn’t even feel her heart beating through her chest, couldn’t hear whether she was breathing or not.
“Are you okay?” he said, his face pressed against hers. Her face was hot and moist with tears. When she didn’t answer, he held her out at arm’s length and spoke directly into that blank, unregistering face. “Are you okay, Eleanor?”
“Yessss,” she said, her stare jittering in his direction. The word sounded like the perfect hybrid of a child’s sob and a serpent’s hiss.
*
Dawn broke fifteen minutes later. To the east, fingers of daylight crept over the horizon and threw javelins of pink light through the trees. The forest insects continued their chorus, unabated and unafraid of the encroaching daylight.
Back in the house, David helped Ellie clean up, washing the blood from her face and arms in the bathroom sink while she stood there, her face registering no emotion, the pupils of her eyes tiny and insignificant black dots. Something inside her had changed.
“Baby,” he said, using a warm washcloth to rub away the streaks of blood from her arm. “Talk to me.”
“It’s getting stronger,” she said. Her voice sounded different, although he couldn’t tell why. Something about her was different now.
“Are you gonna be sick?”
“No. Not this time. Not anymore.”
“Are you afraid?”