She Has A Broken Thing Where Her Heart Should Be - J.D. Barker Page 0,201

his shirt and gingerly pulled the material away from the wound before removing it altogether. He continued to stare blankly ahead, oblivious to what she was doing.

“The bullet went straight through,” she said, dabbing with an alcohol-soaked cotton ball. “That’s a good thing. He’ll have a scar, but it should heal without stitches. The bleeding nearly stopped.” She placed bandages on both sides and secured them with white surgical tape.

I fished a cotton dress shirt from my backpack—the only shirt I owned with buttons—and together we got it on Hobson. His arms were limp, like a big rag doll. He didn’t fight us, but his state made the task no easier.

When I waved my hand in front of his face, he didn’t blink. He didn’t react at all. “It’s like he’s been hypnotized.”

“I think he’s stuck,” Stella said. “He was told to kill Cammie Brotherton, and he’s in some kind of holding pattern until that happens.”

“We should tie him up.”

“Cammie is the only person who needs to worry about this man right now.”

Stella seemed sure of this, so I didn’t press the issue. She was sweating again, a thin sheen across her forehead. She looked pale, too. This is how she looked before the lake, and that was less than a day ago.

I glanced around the parking lot. “We’re not going to find a car here.”

“What about that one?”

She was pointing at a four-door black Honda Accord parked on the corner across the street, a red and white FOR SALE sign in in the window.

We found the keys under the passenger seat. I told myself we weren’t stealing it. We were just taking it on an extended test drive.

We managed to work our way through the traffic and get to US-101, then followed the California coast north.

We considered heading inland to one of the interstates, like I-5, but we figured that was where they’d expect us to go. US-101 was older and slower, passing from one seaside town to the next in leisure. Restaurants, tourist attractions, and strip malls lined both sides of the road, and here we blended with the locals—the pond was bigger, and we needed a big pond.

Hobson sat silently in the back seat, his gaze focused on the road ahead, looking at everything and nothing in particular. At one point, he started mumbling softly to himself, incoherent, jumbled sounds more than words, and then he went quiet again. Stella had tried speaking to him, and although he would sometimes glance back at her, he didn’t answer. She had given up after about an hour, fished out both copies of Great Expectations, and began randomly flipping through the pages, insisting my father left the book for a reason, and growing increasingly frustrated when she couldn’t find it.

I continually scanned the cars around us. Whenever a white vehicle appeared in our rearview mirror, I’d tense and slow down, my breath catching until they finally rolled past us, my eyes drifting over the driver, finding relief when I confirmed they weren’t wearing white.

Stella had grown increasingly pale over the hours, and I tried to calculate how much time had gone by since yesterday when she had first began showing signs of her hunger, until we finally pulled over at that lake. Six or seven hours at best, from what I remembered. It seemed to be progressing slower this time. Maybe the lake had bought more time. How much was anyone’s guess. Something bad was coming, though.

“The gas light is on.”

The car had grown so quiet her voice startled me. “I know.”

We had been driving for nearly five hours. The tank had been full when we borrowed the Honda, but we’d been running on fumes for the past ten miles. “We’re coming up on Manchester. We can stop there.”

“Jack, there’s something else I need to tell you. Something important.”

“What is it?”

“It has to do with my condition.”

“You can tell me.”

“Even I don’t completely understand it,” Stella said. “I know when I touch something, I take the life from whatever that something is, I drain it, but it doesn’t always end the hunger. Some things work better than others.”

“I get that. The fish in the lake, the tree back in Nevada. That cornfield a few years ago. They helped a little, but you need a person, you need to—”

“Jack,” she interrupted. “Not every person works, either. That’s what I’m trying to explain. Some are better than others. I don’t understand what the difference is, but some people buy me a few