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The windshield was a dense spiderweb of cracks that sagged toward her. A fist-sized hole in the glass revealed the crumpled front end of the car. It had fused into the driver’s side of the white cadillac. The windows had crinkled or shattered, the door dented.

Something made an animal noise next to her. A crow was on the passenger seat. Tiny pieces of glass speckled its head like sparkles.

It cocked its head at her and cawed again. Maybe it had come to escort her soul to the afterlife. Or eat her eyes.

The inside of its beak was a hollow void. As if the thing weren’t real, only some specter from another realm come to gape and taunt.

“Fuck you want?” Mercy said. Her voice sounded like her throat had been stuffed with pebbles.

The bird made its signature sound again and another crow flapped down on the hood, peered in from the hole in the windshield. It appreciated her for a moment before three more landed on the car.

Above her and getting louder and louder, the industrial-fan whup-whup sound of hundreds of crows filled her ears.

Supper time, she thought.

She tried the door handle but the door wouldn’t open. The window had shattered. A man in a white cook’s uniform with grease blotches on it that sort of resembled little hearts peered in at her.

She started to say something and then his hand grabbed the back of her head and flung her forward into the steering wheel.

SIXTY-SEVEN

Before his father walked out of the room to leave his young son to tend to his own injuries, he said one final thing. It came out almost as an afterthought, but it was the thing that Victor would come back to again and again over the following years. The thing that would reveal the path the universe had chosen for him. The thing that would connect him with others who were preparing for the Dark Time.

“It’s time to cleanse the world,” Victor’s father said.

He then drove to the diner out on Route 51 and shot four people to death, injuring fourteen, before putting the gun in his mouth and blowing off the back of his skull.

It was almost exactly what Hugo Herrera would do twenty-five years later.

And it was what Victor would do right now if he had a gun. He did have his gun; it was in the trunk of his car.

Inside the diner, there was only a chubby waitress with short hair and a single customer at the counter, head down on his forearms, bottle of beer and cup of coffee before him.

He walked right toward the far end of the counter where the partition was flipped up to allow access to the kitchen behind. He stepped with heavy, wet squeaks as if he had trudged through marshland. He didn’t have to check behind him to know he was leaving a trail of bloody boot prints.

The waitress had started to approach him but as he got closer, she backed off. “Sir? Are you okay?” She glanced at the sole customer. No help there. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

“Fuck off,” Victor said.

It didn’t matter what she did. Victor would be dead before any cops arrived. He knew that. There was no longer any doubt. His father had died in this very place and he would die here, too. His father’s cleansing had marked this place, made it special. It was why Hugo came here to kill, an offering to Victor’s father, a veritable hero in certain circles. It was why Victor believed having Mercy was his destiny when he followed her here yesterday. It was why he thought the mountain towering over the place was his to conquer. He would die here and that was good--he would be a martyr too--but not before he killed that fucking bitch.

Victor pushed open the door to the kitchen and entered. His hand left a smeared splotch of blood.

The kitchen was small with only a large flat griddle and a set of six individual burners. The smell of ground beef was heavy and, despite the gushing wound in his gut, Victor was suddenly hungry, ravenous.

Victor clutched at the island in the middle of the kitchen where plates were stacked. With every step, his legs were losing strength.

The backdoor was open and from outside came the grunting sounds of strenuous labor.

A row of knives were stuck to a magnetic strip on the wall. Victor lurched to the wall and chose the butcher knife. Big enough to cut a whole chicken in half with one, vicious swipe. He would see what it could do to her skull.

He went to the back door. The cook had Mercy Higgins halfway out of the destroyed driver’s window. The car was covered in crows.

“Lionel,” Victor managed to say.

Lionel glanced over his shoulder. He was smiling like a little boy who had found the greatest toy. The smile wavered. “She really fucked you up, huh?”

Victor leaned against the doorframe. More crows were landing around the car, and on Lionel’s ruined Cadillac and across the parking lot. A few cawed but most were silent.

A sign if ever there was one.

Victor raised the butcher knife. His hand shook. “We just have to kill her.”

“We will,” Lionel said. “But I can’t just let her go to waste without a little fun first.”

Victor said “No,” and what he meant was no, they had to kill her right now before he died and his life as a cleanser ended with nothing grander than one dead molester mommy under his belt, but the ‘No’ could have been a warning, too, when Lionel turned back to Mercy to drag her all the way out of the window and she came alive in his arms and buried something in his neck.

SIXTY-EIGHT

There was no time for Mercy to register that the cook had knocked her out against the steering wheel and was now pulling her out of the window over pebbles of broken glass so he could rape her and then let Victor finish her off. She came out of unconsciousness as if she had been zapped with something, grabbed the first thing she could and jammed it into the guy’s neck.

Cars were made with glass that crumbled in tiny pieces so people wouldn’t be eviscerated during an accident. The glass from the driver’s side window was nothing but harmless little fragments without even a sharp point, but the broken windshield, where something had crashed through it, could be shattered into jagged pieces.

At first she thought she had been lucky enough to find such a dangerous shard but as the man stumbled back from the car screaming, she saw the frantic flapping wings of the crow beating against the man’s head is if it were birthing free from his skull. Its beak was imbedded in the flesh of the man’s neck.

She had time to think how what she was seeing was impossible before gravity dropped her free from the window. She pulled her head up in time to save a skull fracture. Upside down, Mercy watched the man beat at the crow.

He tripped on the concrete steps leading into the kitchen and sat with a thump. Again, she wondered how the crow could have broken through her windshield right as she crashed. It was an impossible thing.

No more impossible than cancer, her mother said. No more impossible than a psychotic stranger raping you on a mountain. No more impossible than you surviving all this.

The cook was screaming and finally got his hands around the frantic crow and yanked it free. He threw it and the bird spread its wings to glide across the parking lot where it settled among the growing gathering of crows. A few cawed in response.

Blood bubbled from the man’s neck, quickly saturated the shoulder of his white uniform. He tried to stop the bleeding but the blood overwhelmed his hands. Some spurted on his face. His scream now was one of desperation and disbelief.

She had a moment to realize that this guy, this nighttime cook at the Alexis Diner, was in collusion with Victor Dolor before Victor stepped behind the man and swung a huge butcher knife down into the top of his head. THWAP! The sound was heavy and final.