Quite Contrary (41 page)

I reached down and tried to grab her hand, and she grabbed mine. We both pulled, and she staggered to her feet. Something made a wet gurgle and something else rasped and splattered behind me. I didn’t have to look. In my head, I could see Puzzle’s wet, bloody liver falling out of her chest, trailing tubes.

Scarecrow pulled me now, and we stumbled through the clinic, leaving bloody footprints. A rectangle of sunshine was the front door, and Scarecrow yanked it open and we were outside. The door shut behind us. I couldn’t hear anything from inside. The only blood I saw was smeared around the bottom edges of my shoes.

No, that wasn’t true. I could see Puzzle’s blood gushing over my Wolf’s face, hear the faint, lustful whine of pleasure he made as her chest fell open. I could feel my body again, and it shook so hard now I wasn’t sure if I could stay standing.

“We need to run, Miss Mary,” Rat squeaked into my ear.

Scarecrow tugged at my hand. “I really want to get away.”

We couldn’t. That was what Rose had told me. There was no getting away. The Wolf was going to do that to me. His teeth would rip a hole in me and everything blobby and red would fall out. He’d take his time, chewing and tearing, and I’d have to watch because it would take so damn long for me to die. I’d been pretending I didn’t remember what Rose told me all along, but I knew she was right. I’d known then that she was right.

“We’re near my world, Rat. Civilization. Unlostness. Whatever. Take me home, please. Get me out of this story forever.” I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to squeeze the shaking out of me.

“I don’t know that I can. If I do, it will change you. Hurt you in ugly ways,” Rat said.

The little bastard. Didn’t he see what I just saw? Couldn’t he see it in his head, still?

“I don’t care. I don’t give a fuck, okay? I’m going to die. He’s going to rip me open unless you take me home. Take me home, Rat. Please!” I begged.

He was my rat. He understood please. He clawed at the top of his own head, but he understood it. “The road. We’ll start with the road.”

Scarecrow helped pull me while I figured out how to run again.

e walked up the gravel path back to the rest stop. At least on gravel I couldn’t see the bloody footprints my boots were leaving.

“Shouldn’t we go in some other direction?” Scarecrow asked, “When that Joseph man comes back, won’t we walk right into him?”

I didn’t care.

“We have time,” Rat answered. He’d resumed his perch on my shoulder, looking forward and back and all around constantly. “His story won’t try to stop us anymore.”

Because Puzzle had been ripped into a bleeding mess and died in pain, not even knowing why.

I didn’t want to think about that. Let Rat do it. We’d climbed the subtle rise until the rest stop was no longer a big, distant building. I could see details now, like the nearest door. I’d left it open. Now it was shut, jammed shut with a board through the push bar. I couldn’t see anything inside, because oily black slime covered the inside of the glass. It looked just like the oily black slime painting paw prints on the concrete leading out the door.

Something else had changed. A pickup truck sat next to one of the gas pumps. It should have been obvious the pump didn’t work, but a big man was kicking it and snarling at it anyway. I couldn’t make out the words, but they were obviously profanity.

Rat tugged on my neck with one paw and pointed at the edge of the building. I headed towards the wall where I’d be less conspicuous. When Scarecrow didn’t follow me after the first step, I grabbed her wooden wrist and pulled her along.

“Do you think he’d give us a ride? We—” Scarecrow asked. “Do you even listen? We already told you, hitchhiking will get me killed!” Even faster.

“We can’t ask, and we can’t drive ourselves, but we really need that ride.” Rat dropped backwards off my shoulder, claws skidding along my horrible Red Riding Hood costume until he dropped onto the concrete. “I’ll distract him.”

It was a pickup truck, so the other half was pretty obvious. Rat scurried out from behind cover. The shouty guy didn’t notice, right up until Rat crawled into the leg of his pants and bit him. The guy screamed even more profanity, kicked Rat out of his pants, and as Rat ran in the opposite direction from us, pulled out a pistol and fired a shot at him.

The pop was loud! So loud that in the seconds after he fired, echoes I knew weren’t real pounded in my ears. That little brown shape was Rat still streaking away. The bullet hadn’t hit Rat, and Rat had the guy’s full attention. Perfect. His ears had to be ringing twice as loud as mine and I could barely hear my own footsteps as I ran across the gas station’s lot to the pickup truck. Another ear piercing gunshot. This guy really held a grudge. He was hardly ten feet from us as I climbed over the edge of his truck’s carrying bed, pulled Scarecrow up fast, and then lay down under the wall. The bed was half full and piled high with green bags made out of that woven plastic stuff used for tarps. It gave enough cover. His swearing rumbled at the edge of my distorted hearing as he climbed into the cab and slammed the door.

I felt way too exposed as I leaned over the edge of the bed, but the engine started up without a pause. Rat had just enough time to streak up the asphalt and jump up to grab the edge of my sleeve before the truck lurched into motion. I sank back onto the lumpy metal bed in relief. We were getting far and fast away from here.

After that, we sat around under the shadow of the plastic bags to stay out of sight. I folded my arms over my knees and stared at dead grass and huge spires of rock. Across from me, Scarecrow did exactly the same thing. Rat tried to climb up on my knee, but I pushed him off. I was in no hurry to be touched right now. Especially by something with claws.

Grass and rocks slid past, and nothing happened. I saw exactly one car, a pitch-black sports car too low and sleek to be real. It wasn’t any of my business.

My head and shoulders dragged. I hadn’t gotten enough sleep last night. I could never get enough sleep to be ready for what I’d seen this morning. My butt ached from the lumpy metal bed, and my back from slouching against the side out of sight, so sleep wasn’t going to happen.

I have no idea how I signaled that. I didn’t mean to, but Scarecrow sat up across from me and yanked and twisted one of the green bags, pulling it off the pile and pushing it past me. I twisted out of the way, biting back my urge to yell at her for bothering me, until I figured it out. I helped her turn the bag behind me, and lay back on it. It felt like it was stuffed with leaves and sticks and logs, but it was way more comfortable than corrugated metal.

I drifted off to sleep.

Not a good idea. No sooner did I relax than my body turned to wood, and I struggled with my arms and head, unable to stop them from shoving a crowbar between Puzzle’s ribs. My Wolf licked the blood from the wound as Puzzle screamed faintly in the distance. Blood sprayed all over both of us as I twisted her rib cage open. Reaching into the slithering mass of her organs, I pulled out the slimy, pulsing blob of her heart and placed it into my Wolf’s mouth. As his tongue glided over my hand, I managed to wake myself up.

Then, all I had to do was get control of my breathing and not cry. Had I screamed? No, nobody seemed to have noticed. Not that Scarecrow’s expression ever changed from a copy of my irritable pout. The truck didn’t slow down. Instead, we zoomed over a bridge across a river, and on the other side everything turned green. Well, brown and green, late fall grass and colorful dying leaves and a few trees that were evergreens or just stubborn.

Scarecrow finally got too bored. How she’d held it back all this time I had no idea. She slipped a hand under one of the bags and tugged it up, then poked at the one underneath. She kept pushing at bags as she asked, “What do you think is in these?”

“Leaves and wood,” I answered. Talk about your obvious question.

“Sure, but there has to be something else, right? Maybe he’s stupid, but he can’t just be hauling a few bags of leaves across country,” she said.

At least she kept her voice down.

“It won’t be anything safe,” Rat cautioned us, but it would be something to distract me from the phantom feel of Puzzle’s slippery heart thumping in my fist. Scratchy plastic weave covered that sensation nicely as I lifted and pushed at bags with Scarecrow, looking for something out of place.

I pulled at the bottommost bag, and Rat skittered sharply back. Bingo. Scarecrow and I hooked our hands into the bottom, lifted as best we could, and peeked underneath.

A girl stared back at us. A woman. College age, I figured. Pretty, in a Barbie doll blonde-and-top-heavy kind of way. She didn’t exactly stare at us. Her eyes were half-lidded, like she’d been drugged. From shoulders to ankles, she was wrapped in green plastic tarp, with her hands sticking out the back. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her, and chains wound through the handcuffs. I saw chains on her ankles, and a lot of irregular lumps under the tarp looked like more chains. She was gagged, but instead of cloth like I’d expect, a metal bit kept her teeth and lips apart. And after all that, she’d been pinned under these bags.

“We can’t leave her like this. We need to rescue her,” Scarecrow whispered.

Rat tugged on one of his ears, torn. “It will throw us right into the middle of something ugly again, but you’re right. We can’t just leave her.”

I leaned my head in closer. “Can you hear me, Miss? Can you talk through that thing?” I asked her.

That woke her up. Her eyes snapped open, and she looked at me, and then Scarecrow, and then Rat. None of us got more than two seconds, stared at by flat gray eyes with tiny dot pupils. Her lips curled around the thing in her mouth. That coy, flirty smile didn’t fit. Neither did the way she dismissed us immediately, searching around us and past us for whatever she wanted to look at. She twisted an inch in her chains, and I glanced down at her grasping hands. They fit the claws on her fingertips just fine.

“Forget it. This is none of our business, and I’m not going to be stupid enough to mess with it,” I decided, shoving the bag back down. Scarecrow accepted that, sinking back into place against the wall of the truck’s bed.

Behind her, I saw a building go past on the side of the freeway. One of those low, inscrutable block buildings you got at the edge of towns. Then, a furniture outlet store. The truck crossed an intersection without stopping, and buildings surrounded us on all sides. We’d arrived somewhere, and somewhere close to civilization from the looks of it.

We were still lost. We were just lost in suburbia. Rows and rows of little brick houses, shopping centers, and intersections just big enough to have stoplights. All the streets had names like ‘Evergreen’ or ‘Southlane.’ We could be outside any big city anywhere, and there’d be no way to tell.

The truck turned into the parking lot of a motel, the only car there. With a little bump, we slid to a stop in a parking spot. Scarecrow and I flattened ourselves tighter as the driver got out, slammed his door, and walked around the corner into the motel’s office. I grabbed Scarecrow’s wrist, Rat latched onto her ankle, and we all three crawled over the back of the truck and marched good and fast to the opposite corner of the bent building. Planting my back against the brick wall, I let out a sigh. We were out of that.