Stray Fears - Gregory Ashe Page 0,46

man. Nobody . . . nobody can believe what happened. And now Tamika. Aw, fuck, man. This is so fucked up.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said, “but I need to ask you a few questions.”

Kenny glanced at Elien, and Elien nodded.

“Questions about what? About Tamika?”

“You were with her before she died?”

Sniffling, Kenny nodded.

“Did you see anything strange?”

“She blew her fucking head off, man. I was standing right there. How strange can it get?”

“Kenny,” Elien said. “This is important. Did she look different? Act different? Say anything that didn’t make sense?”

Kenny shook his head. But when he spoke, his words were slow. “We’d been . . . we’d been seeing each other, you know. Outside the group. We understood each other. I thought we did. We’d started, you know, staying over. Things like that. I didn’t even know she had a gun. She’d been acting kind of nasty since Tuesday. I thought she was just having a bad week, with Mason, and Ray just before. Today, though. Today she was just being cruel. Slapped me a few times.” Kenny touched his cheek. “Called me some bad shit. She was on something, I think, because her eyes were different. Shiny. Sometimes she’d move her head too fast and I’d swear they were blue. I told her I wasn’t going to stick around for her to treat me like that. She grabbed the gun, put it right here,” he touched his temple, “and said, ‘Please stop me, please stop me, please Kenny, oh Christ, please stop me.’ And then she did it, man.” Kenny started to cry again. “And I didn’t stop her, man. I couldn’t even move.”

“Did you notice—” I began.

Elien jerked his head at me, folding Kenny into an embrace.

“I think I need to stay with Kenny,” Elien said quietly. “Thanks for driving me over.”

“I’ll stay.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Elien, I’ll stay.”

I gave them space, and after a while they sat together, their backs to the painted brick of the apartment building, holding hands. I went back to the Escort and got my Coke and perched on the trunk. The late morning smelled like cigarette smoke and garbage heating in the sun.

Part of my brain was turning this over and over. Kenny hadn’t said anything about blue lights. What he’d described could have been an ordinary suicide—if any suicide could be ordinary. It was a tragedy, yes, but it didn’t match what Elien and I had seen.

But I didn’t believe it was ordinary. First Ray. Then Mason. Elien had been attacked in the woods outside his house. And now Tamika. Four people who were part of the same support group. That wasn’t a coincidence.

It feeds on human lives, especially on pain.

Well, for a creature that fed on pain, a PTSD support group would be a banquet.

Two thoughts came to me. First, this thing, the hashok, was going through its . . . cattle, for lack of a better word, fast. Too fast, it seemed to me. Which meant that either its feeding wasn’t on the kind of regular schedule I had imagined—perhaps it had active and inactive periods, or something like hibernation—or something was wrong.

My second thought came because of the cigarette smoke. The smell of something burning made me look at the fire truck slanted across the street, and the fire truck made me think of arsonists. The thing about arsonists, a lot of them anyway, was that they got picked up pretty easily because they hung around the scene of the crime, or they came back, or they kept coming back. They liked to see their handiwork.

Could the hashok be like that? It had lingered after Ray’s death. Did it stay to watch the fallout from its feeding?

A crowd had gathered, and I searched the faces, snapping pictures with my phone to try to record all of them. I watched one man in particular: he wore winter gloves, and he walked up and down the sidewalk opposite Tamika’s building, laughing.

ELIEN (11)

The helplessness was almost as bad as the grief itself. Outside Tamika’s building, I hugged Kenny, I talked to the cops, I called Zahra and let her know what had happened. But I couldn’t really do anything—not anything that mattered. Kenny still blamed himself, no matter what I said. The cops wouldn’t tell me anything because I wasn’t family. And Zahra told me to take care of myself.

“Richard and I have a conference tonight,” she said, “and I don’t want you to be alone.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Frankly, Elien,