Then she was gone, the gray metal door slamming shut behind her. Marcy sighed and shook her head as she moved across the parking lot toward the old van. Alicia’s progress from freakshow walking corpse to fully functioning living woman still wigged her out. The formerly dead woman hadn’t required drink or food for weeks. Then, as she began to “heal,” normal human appetites reasserted themselves. At first she’d only nibbled on fries and sipped at fast-food sodas. But now she consumed full, regular meals and guzzled jugs of Red Bull and vodka like a nightclub slut. Very little visible evidence of her original corpselike appearance remained. There was one faint little scar just above her collarbone, but Marcy suspected even that would be gone soon.
Marcy stepped through the van’s open side door and slid into the seat next to Dream, who sat slumped against the window on her side. She clutched a bottle of Boone’s Farm wine in her hands, holding it tightly against her chest. Her eyes were bloodshot and an odor of alcohol clung to her like a second skin. She smiled weakly as she glimpsed Marcy sitting next to her. “Hey, girl.” She offered the bottle. “Have a drink.”
Marcy accepted the bottle from Dream’s shaking hands and put it to her mouth. She tilted her head back and let the warm wine wash down her throat. Then she passed the bottle back to Dream and wiped her mouth. “Thanks.”
Dream sipped from the bottle and leaned her head against the window again. She looked through the window at the gray sky and the cars passing by on the wet street beyond the gas station parking lot. “Where are we now?”
“Back in New York. Near Rochester.”
Dream grunted. “We ought to go south.”
“That’s where you’re from, right?”
Dream nodded without shifting her gaze from the dreary view. “Yeah. Good ol’ Tennessee. But anywhere in the South would be good. It’s so cold and dark and nasty here all the fucking time.” Her tone was laced with melancholy. It was how she always sounded these days. “I wanna go where I can feel the warm sun on my skin. And smell flowers…”
Marcy watched Dream’s eyes flutter closed as her voice drifted. She gently pried the wine bottle from Dream’s numb fingers to keep it from falling to the floor. The van’s interior already smelled enough like an accident at a liquor store. She put the bottle to her lips again and drank as she watched Dream drowse. She was even more beautiful in repose. In sleep the demons haunting her weren’t so apparent, and in these moments Marcy fancied she was seeing Dream as she’d been years ago, back before her life had turned into a perpetual horror show. She looked at her closely now and tried to imagine her with the longer blonde hair she remembered from the old newspaper pictures. It was easy to picture and part of her ached for Dream, for what she’d lost. Yes, she was still pretty now, but she was harder inside than she’d been and that showed in the lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. The hard living was taking its toll.
“Has she passed out again?”
Marcy watched the gentle rise and fall of Dream’s chest. “Yeah.” She held the bottle toward the front seat. “You want a hit of this?”
Ellen was ensconced behind the wheel of the van. Early on in their quixotic quest she’d assumed the role of driver. It gave her something to do. And Ellen having a defined role in the scheme of things was good. This lit tle bit of structure helped keep her balanced in the midst of the insanity swirling around her. She’d also changed her hair, letting it grow out some and dropping the mix of blonde and black in favor of a dark shade of auburn. The new look brought out her features and made her more attractive, which had also served to boost her confidence. Marcy liked that. Little sister was a mousy doormat no more.
She’d only relinquished her position as driver once in recent weeks. That being when Alicia had briefly taken over in the aftermath of the Rainbow Bridge incident. Alicia remained behind the wheel as they followed the course of the river, tracking Dream’s downstream progress via some internal means Marcy couldn’t comprehend. Marcy remembered how she’d fretted over the course of that grim hour, worrying that Dream’s confidence in her ability to negotiate the rapids had been unfounded, that she’d drowned out there in those cold depths. But Alicia kept going, staying as close to the water as possible. And then they’d seen her, sopping wet and sitting cross-legged in the grass by the side of the road. Shivering and smiling in a vacant way as she waited for them.
Ellen turned from the steering wheel and stared through the gap between the front seats. “We should get out of here.”
Marcy frowned as Ellen took the bottle. “What?”
Ellen sipped some wine. “You heard me. We should toss Dream out while she’s unconscious and that freaky bitch is away.”
Marcy shot a nervous glance back toward the gas station. No sign of Alicia. And the bathroom door was still shut. She frowned and looked at Ellen again. “Why would we do that?”
Ellen rolled her eyes. “Because something bad will happen if we don’t. Duh. We might even get ourselves killed trying to find these people Alicia is after.”
Marcy’s frown deepened. “So…you want to ditch our friends and step out of the line of fire? That’s kind of a shitty thing to do. Cowardly, even.”
“They’re not our friends.” Ellen’s tone was thick with exasperation. “You seem to have forgotten that somewhere along the way. We had some real friends, but you fucking killed them all. Remember?”
Marcy’s expression hardened. “They would have gone to the police. They would have ruined everything.” Her hands curled into tight fists. She didn’t like talking about this, and Ellen fucking well knew it. “And anyway, I’m really only talking about Dream. I don’t care what you think about her. She’s my friend. I won’t abandon her. I sure as shit won’t leave her alone with Alicia.”
Ellen scowled. “I can’t believe you. How anyone can go from wanting to kill a person to being their best pal is beyond me.”
“I’m not asking you to understand it. Just accept it.”
“Unfuckingbelievable.” Ellen passed the nearly empty wine bottle back to Marcy. “Take this shit. It’s awful.”
Marcy took the bottle and drank from it again. She wouldn’t admit it out loud, but she knew her sister had a point. They were well out of their league. Yes, the impulsive murders she’d committed at the farmhouse constituted a spectacular lapse of sanity. But anyone could snap and go off like that. It happened several times every year. Regular, everyday people who suddenly lose it and shoot up a schoolroom or workplace, with images of the aftermath beamed into your living room courtesy of CNN and Fox News. But these were tragedies rooted in the real world. They were almost mundane, despite the immense horror and grief suffered by the survivors and loved ones. There was nothing the least mundane about Dream Weaver and Alicia Jackson.
She looked at Dream and thought about that night on Rainbow Bridge. That was when it had all changed for Marcy. In many ways it had been an awful and tragic evening, but for Marcy it had also possessed a kind of strange and dark beauty. She recalled with a shiver the frisson of that moment just before Dream had taken her dive into the river, a sudden shock of recognition that had passed between them, an awareness that beneath the hate and their differences they were kindred souls. Marcy couldn’t explain it to Ellen in any way that didn’t make it sound like she had some kind of dippy girlcrush on Dream. That wasn’t the case. Rather, she understood Dream and her compulsions. She’d come to feel more closely bonded to Dream than she ever had to her own flesh-and-blood sister. So, no, she would not abandon Dream. If necessary, she would follow her to the ends of the earth. With or without Ellen.