back. He moves carefully around the door, then closes it behind him with a gentle thunk. He sees me watching him and winks. He cocks the rifle again.
“No,” Christie says. “Not him. Not yet.”
“You sure about that, boss?” Griggs asks her, smiling at me. “One shot and he’s down. Wanted the big guy to feel his.”
Boss?
“Not until we find out who else he’s told. What else he knows. No more loose ends. Not now. We can’t take the risk. I already had to get rid of Dougie.” Griggs snorts. “Dougie was a fucking dumbass, anyways.”
Christie frowns. “He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.” Boss. No. No.
“You bitch,” I mutter. “Oh, you fucking bitch.”
“I don’t expect you to understand, Benji,” she says almost regretfully. “Some things happen just because they have to.”
I charge at her. A crack of gunfire and a divot appears in the pavement two feet in front of me. I stop.
“Not so fast, Benji,” Griggs says. “She might be the boss, but if you take one more fucking step, the next bullet is going into Abe’s head. His old brains will be all over the ground before you can even think your next thought.”
I gag, clutching at my stomach. My vision narrows as my blood boils. My eyes feel lazy as they shift out of focus.
And it is here, in this moment, in this impossible (improbable, my father whispers, it’s all so improbable) moment, that I fall to my knees. The ground beneath me is solid, but that roaring in my ears is like swiftly moving water, and I lay my hands against the pavement. They get wet and the ground rolls beneath me. The rain splashes fat drops onto my skin. I try to clear my head, but it’s a losing battle and I can’t breathe, I can’t move. And as darkness clouds my vision, I am overtaken by a river.
And it is into this river I drown.
look away
I am at the river. It’s raining. I stand on the road. It’s the same. It’s all the same.
Except it’s not. The rain is falling harder than it ever has before. Lightning flashes overhead. Thunder cracks like—
gunfire oh my god shot he’s shot he’s shot and
—God is angry, rolling through the hills, causing the trees to shudder down to their roots. This is different. Things are not the same.
I slide down the embankment. I can feel the mud on my clothes. On my skin. Could I feel that before? I’m drenched. Did I get this wet before? I don’t know. I can’t remember. This may be the first time. It may be the last time. I don’t—
The world lights up an electric blue as lightning touches down on the other side of the river. Then there is a cross, a white cross, bigger than any I’ve seen before. It stretches to the sky and screams HERE LIES BIG EDDIE! BIG MOTHERFUCKING EDDIE LIES HERE BECAUSE HE’S DEAD, HE’S NOTHING BUT BONES AND DUST AND HE WILL NEVER BE ANYTHING MORE EVER AGAIN!
“Help me,” I tell the rain, the river. I turn my face toward the sky and water falls on my tongue. It tastes like earth. “Help me. I’m haunted.”
Another flash of blue (Blue?) light and the cross is gone, but the ground, the river, the earth, the entire world, is covered in large feathers. They’re a deep blue, almost black, but they are all covered with splashes of blood and the red is so bright it stings my eyes and I cry out because I know—
he’s gone dead shot dead fell bitch whore
—what it means, I know the red is truth and the blue feathers will be nothing more than memory. Even as I think this, the feathers begin to melt, leaving behind droplets of blood that mix with the rain and reflect the menacing sky above.
Things change further. There’s a whine of an engine up on the road. I turn, but I can’t see the road from my position. There’s a crash of metal against metal, a breaking of glass, and it sounds so familiar that mile marker seventy-seven disappears around me and I’m—
stuck upside down in the Ford and am I still in there? Is this all just a dream? I hit my head, maybe. Maybe nothing that followed is real and we’re still in the truck and that’s why I can hear the crashing in the dream because it just happened to me and Cal is still okay. He’s still fine