She looked directly at him. Her pupils widened. “No,” she said simply enough. “Are you?”
He summoned a smile for her, though he felt devoid of any good feelings. He was terrified. The blood did not want to wash off Ellie’s face.
“Dad . . .”
“Yeah, baby?”
“I killed those people.” That flat, toneless voice. He could see himself reflected in the dark pools of her eyes.
“Shhh,” he told her, and brought her close against him. Hugged her.
He wished she would cry on his shoulder, would open up and let it all out. But she didn’t. It felt like hugging a wooden puppet.
Afterward, he carried her back to her room and laid her in the large bed. She was already asleep before her head hit the pillow. David stared at her impassive face for countless minutes, studying her, hoping he’d be able to discern what had changed inside her by such superficial scrutiny. He even touched her, gently and on the side of her face, and closed his eyes. Concentrated. Tried to suck all the bad out of her just as she had done to him. But he couldn’t. He was helpless.
Before leaving the room, David kissed her forehead. Her flesh was cold against his lips.
*
Tim was standing at the far end of the property, at the cusp of the dark woods that swelled up the mountainside, looking down at something on the ground. In the light of morning, the bodies of Kahle and Bandanna looked surreal.
David climbed down the porch steps, and started across the yard to join Tim at the edge of the woods. At one point, he saw pieces of the ground move—small mounds of dirt appearing to respire, to swell up in a mound then collapse again. He paused and examined one such area, a crumbly molehill surrounded by a patch of dark grass. The mound bulged one last time, and something began to emerge from the apex. It emerged headfirst, its head outfitted in oversized, multifaceted red eyes. Its body was ashy white, bullet-shaped, with two translucent, ovoid wings fixed to its back. Once it was fully free of the dirt, it scuttled halfway down the side of the mound, then paused. David got the sense that this large insect—roughly the size of a mouse—was staring up at him. The thing emitted a machinelike buzzing sound that David felt vibrate in his back teeth before it flared its wings—they were as decorative as stained glass—and lifted off into the air. It moved with the labored, weighty lassitude of a carpenter bee. David watched it climb in the air until it disappeared over the roof of the farmhouse.
Moments later, he joined Tim at the edge of the woods. He realized Tim was staring down at Gany’s body. In the stark light of morning, she was almost unrecognizable. A network of black blood vessels had burst along both of her cheeks. The tendons in her neck stood out like hydraulic cables. It looked as though she had screamed with such force that her lower jaw had actually come loose. Blood had spurted from her nose, mouth, and ears, and was now smeared across half her face. And her eyes . . . Christ, her eyes . . . The irises were no larger than pinpricks, the sclera filled with blood.
Insects were already working her over . . .
“After Ellie touched her, she ran off toward the woods,” Tim said. “She was screaming like a madwoman.”
“So then it lingered,” David said. “Even after Ellie stopped touching her.”
Tim looked at him. “Is Ellie okay?”
It took him a while to answer, unsure of the right words. “I don’t know, Tim. She’s changed.”
“I’m sorry about this. Jesus Christ, David, I’m so sorry about this.”
“There’s no way you could’ve known.”
“I don’t know what happened to her,” Tim said, and he bent down before Gany’s twisted body. He looked like he might reach out and touch her—perhaps attempt to slide her eyelids down over those bulging, bloodied orbs—but he didn’t.
“Sometimes people lose their way,” David said. He was thinking of Kathy as he said it. “I just hope she didn’t tell anyone else that we were up here.”
Tim glanced up in his direction. The expression on his face suggested he had already considered this. Then he looked back down at Gany’s body and said, “Let’s clean this shit up.” He rubbed at one moist eye with the heel of his hand, then stood up.
David agreed.
*
They dragged the bodies deep into the woods and buried them in shallow graves. David only gagged and vomited on the ground once, when a large brown beetle trundled out of Gany’s distorted mouth and clattered into the underbrush. He was grateful when the chore was done and they finally returned back to the farmhouse.
For several minutes, they sat on the porch steps smoking cigarettes. When they were done, Tim said he was taking the Tahoe down to the main road to see if he could reset the alarm.
“What should I do?” David asked.
“Get some sleep,” Tim told him.
*
David showered, dressed in clean clothes, and crawled into bed next to his daughter, where exhaustion wasted no time dragging him into unconsciousness.
61