the top of the circle reaching to his jawline, the bottom skimming the curve of his collarbone. The wound had a pinkish color, as if only lately healed. When the hell had this happened? As a kid he’d been bitten by a dog once; that was what this looked like. A surly old mutt-dog from the pound, but still he’d loved it, it was something that was his, until the day he’d bitten Grey on the hand—no good reason for it; Grey had only meant to give him a biscuit—and his father had dragged him to the yard. Two shots, Grey recalled that clearly, the first followed by a yelping squeal, the second dimming the dog forever into silence. The dog’s name was Buster. Grey hadn’t given him a thought in years.
But this thing on his neck. Where had it come from? There was something familiar about it—a feeling of déjà vu, as if the recollection had been stored in the wrong drawer in his mind.
Grey, don’t you know?
Grey spun from the mirror.
“Iggy?”
Silence. He returned to the bedroom. He opened the closet, knelt to look beneath the beds. No one.
Grey. Grey.
“Iggy, where are you? Quit fucking with me.”
Don’t you remember, Grey?
Something was wrong with him, really wrong. It wasn’t Iggy’s voice he was hearing; the voice was in his head. Every surface that met his eyes seemed to throb with vividness. He rubbed his eyes, but it only got worse. It was as if he weren’t just seeing things, but touching and smelling and tasting them too, as if the wires in his brain had crossed.
Don’t you remember … dying?
And all at once he did; the memory pierced him like an arrow to the chest. The aquatic blue of the containment chamber, and the slowly opening door; Subject Zero rising above him, assuming his full and terrible dimensions; the feel of Zero’s jaws on the curve of his neck and the clamp of boring teeth, picketed row upon row; Zero gone, leaving him alone, and the blare of the alarm and the sound of gunfire and the screams of dying men; his stumble into the hall, a vision of hell, blood everywhere, painting the walls and floor, and the grisly remains, a slaughterhouse of legs and arms and torsos with their roping entrails; the sticky, arterial spurt through his fingers where he held them to his throat; the air whooshing out of him, and his long slide to the floor, blackness enveloping him, his vision swimming; and then the letting go.
Oh God.
Come to me, Grey. Come to me.
He tore from the room, daylight blasting his eyes. It was crazy; he was crazy. Across the parking lot he ran like a great, lumbering animal, sightless and without direction, his hands clamped to his ears. A few cars dotted the lot, parked at haphazard angles, many with their doors standing open. But in its white-hot state, Grey’s mind failed to register this fact, just as it failed to note other troubling details: the smashed front windows of the hotel; the highway on which not a single vehicle could be seen to move; the vacant filling station across the access road, its windows smeared with red, and the body of a man slumped against the pump in the manner of an impromptu siesta; the wrecked McDonald’s, its chairs and tables and ketchup packets and Happy Meal toys and patrons of various ages and races hurled through the windows in violent disgorgement; the plume of chemical smoke from the still-burning wreckage of a tractor-trailer two miles away; the birds. Great wheeling clouds of large, black birds, crows and ravens and buzzards, the scavengers, idly spinning overhead. All of it suspended like the aftermath of a terrible battle, bathed with pitiless summer sunshine.
Do you see, Grey?
“Stop it! Shut up!”
He stumbled on something soft. Organically damp and squishy, under his feet. It sent him crashing to his hands and knees, skidding on the blacktop.
See the world that we have made.
He squeezed his eyes shut. He was heaving for breath. He knew without looking that the squishy thing was a body. Please, he thought, not sure whom or even what he was addressing. Himself. The voice in his head. God, whom he’d never quite believed in but was willing to believe in now. I’m sorry for whatever I did. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
By the time he finally looked, all hope had left him. The body was a woman. The flesh of her face was sucked