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There is a deep web of cracks in the screen of Susan’s phone.
It’s funny, how quickly these things happen, how easily. One instant of distraction, one momentaneous loosening of a grasp, and it slips between fingers to hit the ground. One brief second, and when you next need it, it’s there but it’s broken. Unusable. Useless.
The phone is in the glove compartment anyway. Force of habit.
The sun is still high in the sky. According to the map, it’s at least a three hour drive to the nearest gas station.
Susan drives on.
---
When Susan was fourteen years old, her mother took her and Debra and the car to see her parents in South Carolina. The memory of it is strange, a clear crystal thing, sharp and jagged and as distant as a dream or a story told by someone else. It reminds Susan of burnt caramel, the orange-brown shade of the light in the habitacle and a bitter aftertaste and the way the edges of it cut as she tries to pick it up.
In the memory, Susan is sitting in the back of the car.
Her head hurts, a painful throb behind her eye where she took the punch earlier that day. She tried to press a water bottle against it to soothe the pain, but they’ve been driving for hours, and the bottle isn’t cold anymore, and now lays discarded on the backseat. It’s night. Outside, the sky is dark, the world a pool of ink torn by intermittent lights. She lays her head against the window, and the vibrations of the car make the headache worse, but she’s tired. She’s so tired. She wants to sleep.
In the front seat, her mother chokes.
Now, with the knowledge and hindsight of adulthood, Susan knows she didn’t, not really. It was hyperventilating, a panic attack maybe, or something similar. But in the memory, in the head of Susan, fourteen, scared to go home, she doesn’t know what is happening, and it sounds like her mother is choking, like her mother is drowning on dry land. Like she’s going to die. Like she’s going to lose control of the car, and they’re all going to die.
They don’t. Debra, sweet Debra, twelve years old Debra sitting in the death seat, talks their mother down until she manages to stop the car on the side of the road. Until she lays her forehead against the steering wheels, hands shaking, and cries.
They don’t die. They aren’t hurt, not anymore than they were when they left. That story has a happy ending.
Susan doesn’t like driving.
She can drive, she is driving, but she doesn’t like it. She’s never done it for so long, for more than a half-hour drive. Nancy’s the driver between them, Nancy’s the one who always sits behind the wheel.
Nancy isn’t there now.
Two hours. Two hours left, and it’ll be over.
Surely, she can hold on for two more hours.
---
There is blood on the steering wheel.
It doesn’t quite look real against the black plastic. Just dark. Just wet. Just tacky and sleek under her fingers. There is blood on the steering wheel and there is blood on Susan’s hand.
She stops the car on the side of the road.
It’s strange. She can hear her heart, can feel it pounding against her skull, and everything is too bright, soo quick, spinning round and round and round around her, and there is blood on her hands.
Susan throws up.
Susan can’t breathe.
She feels like she’s dying.
She’s not. She’s not. She’s not. She knows what this is. She’s not choking, she’s not dying, she’s not lacking air. She needs to breathe out.
She’s not sure how long it takes her to calm down. To stand up. To look at her hands.
The blood is hers. There are cuts on her fingers. She must have hurt herself with her broken screen. The blood is hers. The blood is only hers.
There is blood on the car hood.
---
It all starts when Nancy stops the car.
There is a RV on the side of the road, a white thing like there are thousands, and a little girl kneeling in front of it, and a man standing beside her, looking at the road.
“Everything all right?” Nancy asks.
The girl straightens a bit, turns away from the RV and half-toward you, her hair golden in the sunlight. The man smiles. He looks familiar.
Susan thinks nothing of it.
Maybe he just has one of these faces, after all. What else could it be?
Later, Susan will remember this and feel like a fool. Like the worst of imbeciles. Like she got up to close the leaking tap and found the rust was blood instead. Later. Too late.
Now, she just wants the trip to be over.
“Flat tire,” the man says. “I don’t suppose you have a jack I could borrow?”
His tone is perfectly polite, but there is something underneath, some kind of amusement, as though he were laughing at a joke only he understood, and Susan is being silly, being stressed from the car trip and looking for reasons to be wary. She always overthinks, everyone always tells her so.
“As a matter of fact,” Nancy says, “I do. Want a hand?”
Susan doesn’t quite pay attention after that. Nancy steps out of the car to help as Susan scrolls through her phone, chatting with the man as she does, good-day-for-a-drive-isn’t-it and not-too-much-traffic-on-the-roads-that’s-nice and bit-low-on-gas-but-it-should-be-fine and all kinds of idle nothing. The girl interjects, sometimes, calls the man Uncle Jack, and that was the joke, Jack needing a jack, and Susan really did overthink it. Everything is fine. There is a small bloodstain at the bottom of the girl’s dress, and her hair is in ringlets. The man looks like Johnny Depp.
The realization hits Susan just before the knife hits Nancy.
She gets out of the car. She doesn’t think before she does, doesn’t even consider the danger, the insanity of it, she just gets out of the car, phone slipping from her hand, and she rushes toward Nancy, toward the man and the girl and the monsters, and Nancy isn’t dead. Nancy isn’t dead when Susan gets out of the car.
There is a spider with a brain and a spray of something colorful, and then there is nothing at all.
---
Susan wakes up in the driver’s seat.
The girl is leaning over her, grinning.
“Don’t worry,” she says. “You won’t run out of gas ever again.”
She waves through the window as the RV drives away.
---
The broken phone is in the glove compartment.
---
The night is falling when Susan reaches the gas station.
There is a car at one of the pumps, a neon sign stark against the dusk, a family sitting at a picnic table. They look at her car as she parks, and Susan can see the moment they realize the red and brown isn’t rust but blood, can see the way the mother pulls the children behind her as the father takes a step forward.
“No!” Susan screams. “Don’t come closer! Stay away!”
She was unconscious. She was unconscious and Bonesaw was there and she doesn’t know what happened. She doesn’t know what she did. She doesn’t know why she left her alive.
She doesn’t know what might have been left inside.
She needs to give the alert, and she might have brought the enemy herself.
“Call the PRT!” Susan says. “Tell them I saw the Nine!”
The father stares, wide-eyed. The mother is the one who makes the call.
All there is left to do is wait.
---
“You’re clean,” the man says as he comes into the quarantine room. “As far as we can tell, Bonesaw didn’t leave any surprises inside you. Didn’t do anything at all. You’re going to be fine.”
It doesn’t make any sense.
She can’t be fine. That was Bonesaw, and that was Jack Slash, and that was Nancy, and she can’t possibly be fine. Why would she be fine? Why would they have spared her? It doesn’t make any sense.
“We’ll keep an eye on you, of course,” the man says. ”Just in case. But it does seem that you were lucky.”
Lucky.
The worst part of the PRT coming wasn’t the blaring sirens, the harsh lights, the faceless masks. It wasn’t looking at the family through the glass station windows, wondering if she had condemned them. It wasn’t sitting in her car, waiting, not knowing whether she would live or die.
It was telling them she hadn’t been alone in the car.
It was telling them Nancy was under the hood.