‘What were you laughing at?’ Frankie asked as I slid into the driver’s seat.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I was just trying to figure out what we’re going to tell your mum.’
Epilogue
There are places in the woods that only she and Buddy knew. Dark spaces. Hollow tree trunks. The abandoned den of some long-dead animal in which, for hours, she has lain still, concentrating on slowing her heartbeat to a crawl, something she has always found easy. Once, a doctor told her she had both an unusually slow resting pulse and a surprisingly low body temperature. She has always been proud of that. Buddy was the opposite. It was as if they balanced each other out.
Now that balance has gone.
Thanks to the girl.
Katniss, Crow called her, which made Darlene sick. The Hunger Games was one of her favourite movies. She’d watched it over and over. Had taken part a thousand times in her own mind, picturing kills, weapons, plotting out exactly how she would survive – and win. The English girl was no Katniss. She’d gotten lucky with that arrow, that was all, though Darlene guessed that was a lesson. Even the weakest competitor can win sometimes, through a fluke of fate, or a moment of weakness on the part of a natural-born winner.
Her brother paid the price for that. He had thought himself invincible.
Darlene would not make the same mistake.
All yesterday, they searched the woods for her. Men with dogs. A helicopter that swept overhead. But the men hadn’t been looking too hard. At one point, a pair of them came within feet of her and she heard one say he was certain she would have gotten the hell out of here by now.
‘Waste of time,’ the other grumbled.
She had been tempted to surprise them. Slash one’s throat, then the other’s, just that quickly. They wouldn’t have seen her coming. A pair of stealth kills. But in the end she let them go, deciding not to take the risk.
The important thing was that she remained free. That she lived to fight another day.
Morning comes. The second sunrise since the fire and Buddy’s death and her escape into the woods. All night, the scene replayed in her head. The arrow, thwacking into Buddy’s chest. The way he fell.
This she could not bear, so she ran it in reverse: the arrow, sucked from the fresh wound, leaping back to the string of the English girl’s bow.
But then the bitch would just unleash it again. That awful sound. Buddy falling.
Back and forth, up and down, all night.
The last time, Darlene leaps forward, knocks the arrow aside with a forearm and drives the knife into the girl’s skinny throat.
In reality, she crawls from the abandoned den into sunlight.
She is filthy. Black with smoke and slick with mud. She can smell herself, stinking like a real fox, not one who wears a mask. She licks her lips, tastes dirt. Her stomach growls and she remembers how thirsty she is. She sucks rainwater from leaves, wonders about trapping a rabbit or a bird. How long will she survive out here in the forest?
She thinks of the refrigerator at home, always stocked with Coke and Dew. The full cupboards. The eggs Dad used to fix them for breakfast. Sunny side up. Doused in ketchup. The way she liked them.
She thinks of how Dad squealed when she cut him and feels a wave of self-pity. He’ll never cook her breakfast again.
But her house is so close to here. The refrigerator and the cupboards will still be full. And upstairs, her babies will be missing their mommy. Her cockroaches. She misses them. The feel of their little legs on her skin. The sound they make.
Hissssssssss.
Like music.
Thirst and hunger and thoughts of her babies send her in the direction of Penance. She reaches the edge of the woods and crosses the road, climbs a fence and sneaks across a pair of gardens. Through a back window she thinks she glimpses those annoying little kids from next door. She is worried they might see her, but they are absorbed in some dumb game.
She climbs up and peeks over the fence of her own house.
There’s a cop standing by the front door. Another by the back.
Shit.
She imagines herself dropping over the fence, commando-crawling across the lawn, one stealth kill, then another. Grab them from behind and slide the blade across their throats. Easy. Not a sound.
Her stomach growls again. She drops from the fence, turns.
The little bitch from next door is there.
‘Hey,’ the girl says.
‘Hi,’ says Darlene. Her eyes flick towards the house. ‘Where’s your mom?’
‘Still asleep,’ replies the girl. Then she frowns, eyeing the knife in Darlene’s hand. ‘Are you going to bury me? Like that cat?’