She saw that cursed flag on the hunter’s T-shirt and wondered if he knew about the glut of traumas that defined this nation’s founding. Had he fallen so in love with the myth of belonging that he thought the corpses of his imaginary foes were worthwhile sacrifices toward barbecues, megachurches, bandannas, and hot dogs?
The primary freedoms this nation protected were the ones to own and annihilate.
“Why are you like this?” Vern asked weakly.
“You first,” he said, glaring hatefully. “Why are you such a freak?”
A few feet away, Queen convulsed, tortured by shocks.
“What’s wrong with it, man?” the hunter standing over Queen asked. He shoved the butt of his rifle several times into her shoulder and side.
Vern thought to say, I wouldn’t do that if I were you, but this man didn’t deserve her warning. He dug his foot into Queen’s side and twisted. “Check this out, dude. Her skin’s like a fucking rhino’s,” he said.
Though Queen’s collar still buzzed electric shocks through her, she’d maintained enough capacity to now grab the hunter’s foot and rip it from his leg in a motion so quick and violent Vern wasn’t sure her eyes weren’t playing tricks.
Vern’s hunter turned his rifle toward Queen, cocked, aimed, then fired, but not before Vern lunged and tackled him to the ground. She straddled him, all the power in her hands now. She was the ruler now, queen of him, lord and lady of him, executioner of him.
Metal slid into her thigh. The hunter had swiped a knife from his belt and driven it into her.
Crying out, Vern rolled off him, the blade still in her leg. She gripped its slick wooden handle, damp from palm sweat. She pulled it from her thigh with a grunt, and as he fumbled toward his dropped gun, she walked toward him on her knees, knife in hand.
She held the knife up as he took aim. Her reflexes were fast—maybe she could block the bullet with a fling of the blade.
The hunter pressed his finger against the trigger. The boom made Vern’s ears ring and throb. He missed, but she could see him smiling. He was playing with her on purpose, and he fired off another shot as she limped toward him on scraped knees. The round grazed her cheek, and she yelped.
Invigorated by the sport of it, he was laughing, and Vern knew it right away. He’d done this before, she could tell. As a teen, maybe, in these very woods, with a girlfriend, a cousin, a sister, a friend, and him saying, I’m just playin around, stop being such a pussy, as he aimed the gun.
“That’s right. Crawl,” he said.
He reaimed the rifle, this time the barrel centered on Vern’s forehead.
The shot didn’t come. In the space it had taken Vern to inhale a single breath, Queen had lunged on top of the hunter and laid in.
Vern’s eyes were deceiving her. Even as the collar sent shocks through Queen’s body, she was eating him alive. Queen glanced up at Vern, blood on her maw. She rasped loudly, and an image of a man running appeared in Vern’s mind.
It was a message. Queen was telling her to get out of here.
Vern longed to touch her, to kiss her gently on the forehead. To rip that collar off, and those damn cuffs.
Queen lapped up blood as she forced another image of someone running into Vern’s head.
Ollie’s control over Queen was far from complete. That had always been Ollie’s weakness. Her hubris, her ego, her complete belief in herself, and her underestimation of those over whom she had power.
Vern nodded at Queen, and then, trying something, she imagined the first lines of Giovanni’s Room. It worked, there Lucy was, sitting on a boulder, reading. Vern didn’t know how to make Queen see the haunting, too, but she put all her mind’s energy into projecting the vision of Lucy forward. Listening to Lucy read had always comforted Vern. Maybe it would comfort Queen, too.
The way Queen stopped rasping, the way she paused from her feast of human flesh, made Vern think it had worked.
“I’ll be seeing you,” said Vern, turning away. It wouldn’t be long.
22
VERN LIMPED into the wild wind, the hunter’s knife wounds not yet healed. A spring storm blew into her, and it took all her strength to remain upright against it.
Vern borrowed the front-desk phone at a motel with aqua-painted doors, a broken signpost, and a parking lot where a woman with waist-length hair leaned against a car, a toddler on her hip, a cigarette in her other hand.
“You got change for a ten?” the woman asked as Vern headed inside. “Linda’s being an ass and won’t break this for me,” she said, holding up the bill.