Black Moon

6

THE SUN WOULD STOP IT FROM HAPPENING. There were no working streetlights anymore, no power in the lines. Drivers couldn’t see in the dark—sleepless people who shouldn’t be driving anyway. But it was coming, the sun, a dumb but faithful beast of fire, as though no one had told it everything had changed.

Lila could see the sky lightening behind the craggy mountains, a peach-colored hue slowly seeping into the pale canvas, bringing some definition to her surroundings. It was such a relief to see. The night had taken forever, and, though it was receding, the crashes continued. Over her shoulder, on a winding concrete overpass suspended high overhead, she heard the shriek of tires and the crunch of metal and glass as another speeding car joined the long chain of collisions. She winced, then lightly touched her swollen face. She was pretty sure the Marine driver was dead, if not from their crash, then from the eight or so crashes that had followed in the darkness. The car—which her father had given to the Marine for his willingness to drive her—had probably been gradually crushed in a vise of impact.

“The sun will stop it,” she said aloud.

Daylight revealed that she was standing in the basin of a wide, arid valley. They had lived in the area for a while, though many miles from here, when she was small. She only vaguely remembered it—a date tree in the yard, the elderly neighbors splashing in their pool behind the oleander hedge, coyotes close to the fence at night, a fire on the ridgeline and ashes snowing down.

The freeway cut through the valley and the loop of overpass, from which she had staggered down, swung close to a neighborhood. She could see that it was a development of identical tract homes, painted in gradients of beige and roofed with pink Spanish tiles. It was very similar to Lila’s own neighborhood out in the desert, behind the treeless, moon-colored mountains that loomed in the background. The trees along the parkway were little more than frail saplings tethered to posts for support. She knew from watching neighborhoods sprout in the desert how it had evolved from skeletal two-by-four frames mounted on concrete slabs to stuccoed and shingled homes. How the lawns had been rolled on like carpet, how the crosswalks and yellow lines were spray-painted from a slow-moving truck. As she entered the closest cul-de-sac, she could see that the sidewalks were flat, unbroken by roots or earthquakes, and the gutters were dry and free of moss. Under the chaotic clutter of junk on the lawns and driveways, and a heap of ashes in the middle of the street, it was all brand-new.

As the sun inched upward, she felt wobbly in the legs and sat on a curb. What now, what next? How would she get home? Where was it, exactly? She was overwhelmed by a sudden sense of her smallness, her solitude. Crying into her hands, she was careful not to press too hard on her battered face. They had betrayed her by sending her away, her parents. For her own good, they kept saying, her own safety, to protect her. They hadn’t been themselves for a couple of weeks now, alternating between fits of delirious rage and apologetic promises to have her taken somewhere safe. A base near the coast where her father had contacts. They have others over there, they told her. People like you who can still sleep. But where? The Marine driver would say nothing about it, though she had pressed relentlessly from the backseat.

God, this is so messed up.

She pulled off her left sock, which was soaked with blood from a gash in her thigh, and dropped it in the dry gutter. It looked gruesome, like an organ torn from a body. There must be a cut somewhere on her head too, because every time she pressed her hand to her temple, it came away daubed with red. Her entire scalp and swollen jaw pulsed with pain. Her lip was still bleeding; she could taste the blood. What frightened her was seeing part of her own face out of the corner of her eye.

A number of vultures were circling the overpass, like trash bags in a dust devil. Lila had counted more than two dozen when a woman came out of the house across the street and noticed her sitting there trying to decide what to do. She crossed the street, her oversized flip-flops clapping against her heels. Judging by the woman’s frazzled appearance and darting eyes, Lila figured that she had been sleepless for some time. She was stout, wearing a simple denim skirt and a man’s pinstriped dress shirt that was buttoned wrong. Her wide bulldog face looked sunburned and her lips were cracked.

The woman said, “Why is it you that is sitting out here with these bloody socks in the middle of everything? Come home away from here!”

Lila allowed herself to be led into a nearby house, pulled along by the woman’s grip on her arm. Not the one from which the woman had emerged, but the house immediately behind Lila. There, the woman sat her at the kitchen counter. The sink was filled with broken dishes. There were blackened pots and pans on the floor and what looked like shards of dried pasta everywhere, as well as dark soupy splotches. Lila wanted to plug her nose. Something was rotten somewhere close. On the windowsill, a dark avocado seed was suspended over a jar by toothpicks, like a dried and shrunken heart. There was no water in the jar, Lila noted, just a filmy residue. Maybe someone drank it. She wished she had water now, and food.

On the counter, there were several bowls of uneaten cereal. Someone, perhaps this woman, had placed one before each barstool. The woman glanced around. She opened the refrigerator to reveal its emptiness. Like the inside of a spaceship in the future, Lila thought, looking past the woman into the white plastic void. She picked out a cornflake from the bowl in front of her and put it on her tongue. It was soft and stale. She didn’t care. It had been weeks since she had had cereal and almost two days since she had eaten anything at all.

The woman seemed surprised by the empty state of the fridge. She stood back and studied it, scratching at her heavy thigh. Her legs were webbed with purplish veins. She walked past Lila and opened a door, which Lila could see led into a dimly lit garage. Was there a car in there? Could she drive it home? Could she drive a car? It didn’t look that hard, you just turn the wheel when the road curves.

The woman stepped into the garage and shut the door behind her.

Lila sat alone in the kitchen, painfully chewing fistfuls of the soft flakes and watching the door. Her hope was that a larger meal was coming her way, and the possibility of eating overrode all other concerns for the moment. Five, then ten, minutes passed and the woman did not return. Lila got up and tried the faucet. Water miraculously spilled from it with a steady hiss. She leaned into it and drank, though this made her head wound throb. She could feel water passing through her throat and sloshing heavily in her stomach. The water was cool and airy, almost fizzy, as it flowed from the tap. She finally broke away from the stream, gasping for air, and wiped her mouth with her hand. She looked out the window. The street was empty. She liked that—the absence of people. People without sleep were trouble, broken and dangerous even if they’ve loved you their whole life.

Before she sat down, she held the jar under the faucet and filled it so that the bottom of the avocado seed sat in water. Then she placed the jar back on the windowsill and returned to the counter, where she started in on another bowl of stale cereal.

Eventually, she heard movement from the hallway. The woman must have come back in through another door. The shuffling footsteps came closer. The woman who emerged was not the same woman who had led her into the house. This woman was tall with short blond hair—nearly as pale as her white top, which was streaked with orange and yellow stains. When this new woman saw Lila, she stopped, her deep-set eyes narrowing on Lila’s forehead. “Baby, what is it that has happened there onto your head?” she said.

Lila’s hand went up to her wound, then to a gash on her left thigh. “What is what what?” the woman said, now very concerned.

She went to the sink and wet her hand, then rubbed at Lila’s head wound. The rubbing hurt. Lila pulled away. “No it’s not,” the woman said to herself.

She pulled off her top and wet it under the sink. The woman wasn’t wearing a bra and her small, freckled breasts were even whiter than the rest of her skin. She held Lila’s head against her chest as she scrubbed at the wound. It felt like her face was on fire.

When Lila squirmed, the woman said, “Hold so that.”

Then more firmly: “Hold so that I can.”

After she had cleaned the wounds on Lila’s head and thigh, she put the shirt back on, though backward. Lila could see her bloodstains on the shirt.

“Go you with them and find wood that burns,” the woman ordered cryptically.

She shooed Lila off the barstool and into the hallway. It was a white-walled corridor with four doors and a low ceiling. Family photos hung on the wall and Lila studied them for a moment. The pale woman was there, and children with her deep-set eyes and light skin. One girl was maybe the same age as Lila. There were pictures of her dressed as a cheerleader. A man, bald and lean, also appeared in the pictures—the father. There were older black-and-white pictures too, the family before the family. The people like you who came before you, Lila found herself thinking, hinting at who you’ll be. Clues to the answer that’s you.

They had pictures just like this, she and her parents—her own family. Though they hadn’t been taking pictures much the last couple of years, she realized. Probably, she considered, because her dad had moved out to the desert base to start his new job while she and her mother had stayed in San Jose. For a while, Lila wondered if her parents had separated. She was astonished when her mother casually told her that families weren’t necessarily permanent. It was only after Lila tearfully demanded that she be allowed to live with her dad that they made the move. The desert turned out to be all her mother said it would be, only crappier. But at least we’re together, they’d all say, to the point that it became a punch line in their wry attempt to transform any mishap or unsavory condition of the environment into a shared joke. When the air conditioner broke, when their neighbors shot automatic rifles into the air on the Fourth of July. Or once, while they were driving, when they spotted a dead fox on the shoulder of the road being torn at by coyotes.

“At least we’re all together,” her mother had said with fake cheer.

Lila thought she heard a cough coming from the end of the hallway. One of the doors was cracked open. She went to it and listened, hearing the quiet sounds of someone in the room—the occasional sniffle, the squeak of mattress. When she slowly pushed the door open, she saw the man from the pictures sitting naked on the corner of the bed. He was staring at the TV, which wasn’t on. Lila could see that he was wearing tennis shoes, no socks. He was remarkably thin, with his ribs exposed, his sinewy frame, the dark patch of hair and his penis like a bird in a nest. She had seen a lot of naked adults over the last few weeks, especially in the desert, and was surprised at how quickly she had gotten used to it.

The man caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye. He made no move to conceal himself. Without turning in her direction, he said, “Go away, Dad. You can see that there is a nasty business here. Fuck, your beard is such a ruiner.”

Lila backed out of the room. Off to the left, another door was partly open. She pushed through and found herself standing in a dimly lit bathroom. To her relief, there was water in the toilet. The whole neighborhood must still have water. They had lost their water in the desert a few weeks ago. One well on an abandoned property became the source for the whole community, requiring her father to walk out to it every morning with a five-gallon gas can and fill it up, sometimes fighting with others who tried to hoard the source. When that became too dangerous, they started taking water right out of the aqueduct and boiling it.

Lila used the toilet, savoring the whoosh of the flush but watching with skepticism. Maybe that was the last flush ever. Yet the bowl slowly refilled.

Just like hope, Lila thought. That was what her mother would have said.

Then she held her breath and turned, daring a look into the mirror. She could hardly recognize herself. One side of her face was swollen. A cut ran from her scalp to just below her cheekbone. It was red and raised, but probably from that woman scrubbing at it, she thought. Both eyes were purple with bruises, though one was worse—puffy, the skin stretched tight, shiny. Her lower lip was swollen and split. There was the painful gash on her thigh too. She knew she was supposed to feel lucky to be alive, but she didn’t feel much of anything. This must be what shock feels like, she thought.

She should never have allowed herself to fall asleep. The Marine driver wasn’t a sleeper. She thought she had sensed it when he first arrived at the house, but he did a good job of hiding it. He probably saw faking it as the only way off the base, arranging with her father to serve as courier in exchange for medical authorization and the car. Who knows where he was really going, and when he planned to ditch her. It was the car and the clearance he wanted. Probably just made up the safe haven.

The Marine didn’t say a word as her father threw her into the backseat. Her mother seemed to have forgotten their agreement, or her instincts took over. She started slapping and clawing at her father, screaming, “You let her go!” But he already had Lila in the car, door slammed. He slapped the trunk and the Marine floored it, throwing her back as the car lurched forward and ignoring her screamed demands to stop and let her out. Instead, they rushed headlong and she watched her mother draw back into the distance, swallowed by the desert darkness.

She tried to reason with the back of her driver’s head—a square block of meat, prickly with high-and-tight hair, rising from bulky shoulders. A faceless face with no connection to emotion. He sat stony and fixed, eyes squinting at the unlit road ahead. The engine whined as they shot up the on-ramp and onto the deserted freeway, the scarecrow forms of Joshua trees blurring by. She sobbed and screamed behind him, face glazed. His response was to stomp the pedal, throwing her back against the seat, her head banging against the door as he swerved to dodge something in the road. She sat upright and again he swerved hard, this time tossing her into the door to her left. Her head hit the window, rattling her brain.

“Better strap,” he said. These were the only words he spoke to her. It was his erratic driving that encouraged her to pull the seatbelt around herself.

The swerving continued, though she saw nothing in the road ahead of them. She should have known then that he was an insomniac, dodging imaginary obstacles. But instead she thought he was just trying to keep her off balance and out of sorts, or in such a state of worry about his driving that she would give up trying to get him to turn around. Still, she had no intention of falling asleep in the presence of this stranger.

But crying was like a sleep drug for her. About an hour into the drive, as they ascended the overpass, she nodded out. It was only for a few seconds, but it was enough for the Marine, who caught the dropping of her head in the rearview. He turned in his seat, reaching for her with both hands, completely abandoning the wheel and shouting incomprehensibly, and she jolted awake. She screamed, seeing the crashed car rushing toward them over his shoulder. The impact sucked him halfway out the windshield and spat him back into the driver’s seat with a smashed face. The car crumpled toward her as she folded over, bashing her mouth on her own knees, then blasted back with the seat into the trunk, which held her like a coffin. She had had to kick it open to escape, then wandered a few wobbly steps before collapsing on the shoulder, out cold. Another crash—a car plowing into the trunk she had just fled—jolted her back onto her feet. She darted for the concrete barrier that lined the road and almost threw herself over before realizing she was several stories above the ground.

NOW she was in the home of some strangers, staring into the mirror looking like a stranger herself. Maybe she was no stranger to them, she pondered. Maybe I just think I’m a stranger because I was in a crash. I’m just confused or something. Happens in movies all the time. Maybe I really do live here and have always lived here and that other life is just a dream I had. That’s why they don’t ask who I am. But she also knew that the sleepless are like that. They lose the ability to recognize people.

Plus, they get really stupid, Lila reminded herself as she stepped back into the hallway. You can talk them out of anything, except shipping you off to some imaginary safe zone, even though it’s just a rumor passed around by a bunch of sleepless lunatics.

Oh, man, my face kills.

She found the next door closed, but not locked, so she ducked inside. The bed was unmade. There were posters of shirtless actors on the wall. Eww. That whole vampire scene that Lila hated. This must be the cheerleader’s room. She went over to the desk where a laptop sat. She tried to turn it on. Nothing, of course. There were trophies on a shelf—cheerleading victories.

Catching her reflection again in the dresser mirror, it occurred to her that she should change her clothes. She searched the drawers and selected a pair of jeans. Sitting on the bed, she stripped off her bloodstained shorts and slid into the pants. They were a little loose, but she cinched them tight around her narrow waist with a belt.

She decided she wanted a shirt with buttons so she wouldn’t have to pull anything over her battered and bruised head. When she pulled open the closet door, she was confronted by two large eyes in the darkness—unblinking eyes the size of saucers. She gasped and drew back before her brain could process what she was seeing.

It was a mask.

The mask of a team mascot. An owl’s head with enormous eyes. Oh, yeah, she thought, recalling the local high school’s team name from the trophies. The Night Owls.

OUT on the street there was a commotion at the center of the cul-de-sac, where the ashes were piled. Several parents and kids had emerged from the houses and were gathering in the hot, shadeless street. Lila could see them from the cheerleader’s window. She wondered if one of the kids was the cheerleader. Maybe they had food out there. The soggy cornflakes hadn’t quite filled the void of hunger. She had been carrying it for weeks now—always hungry, always sleepy.

She made her way to the gathering, stepping over the clutter of objects the houses seemed to have coughed up on the yellow lawns—toaster ovens, printers, shattered televisions and torn-up books, soiled clothes, soccer cleats, documents blowing around. Broken shards of circuit boards and plates, barbecue grills. How had all this gotten outside? A couple of young boys came up behind Lila, running past her toward the ash pile, where two men were standing with rifles slung on their backs. Lila studied them. Could they drive her home? They wore only shorts and boots. One had a long, wild beard that hung down, dark and wet over his sunburned chest. “The fire we want is higher than the houses,” the bearded man said.

The other began speaking before the first man had finished. “The ones who don’t are the ones who won’t, better understand.”

Lila saw the woman who had first led her into the house. She came out the front door of yet another house, walking with an elderly woman in a bathrobe. Trying to lead her by the arm, but the two of them staggered drunkenly off the path into the lawn. The older woman slumped toward the ground, but the other woman held her up. Another woman was watching from her upstairs balcony as she threw papers into the air. There were about a dozen kids now. Most of them were younger than Lila—eight, ten, maybe. Boys and girls, thin and scraped up. Red-eyed and twitching with nervous energy, practically panting like dogs chained to a tree.

There were four teenage boys and three girls. A fat boy was shirtless, exposing his floppy breasts and loose folds of skin. Another boy with a scruffy goatee held a homemade spear. It looked to Lila like a curtain rod with a knife duct-taped to the end. He looked old enough to drive, not that messed up. Sleepless, she could see, but not that sleepless. Not too sleepless, yet.

One of the girls was wearing a tattered yellow prom dress. She could not be the cheerleader, Lila knew, because her hair was nearly black. The cheerleader, like Lila, had dirty blond hair. Another girl was wearing a one-piece bathing suit and running shoes. The third looked as if she could be going to school, with capri pants and a flowered blouse. She was holding a broken umbrella over her head, creating a circle of shade with a bite taken out of it on the ground. Everyone seemed to have a hammer or a hatchet, or even a monkey wrench, in their hand. They wavered where they stood, blinking at the light.

Without any apparent cue, the boy with the spear let out a whoop and started running down the street. Everyone ran after him, including Lila. She did not know what else to do, nor could she tell if they were running with or after the boy. But if it led to food, she would play along.

She ran with this pack of sleepless youths past the end of the block and into a nearby field of dust, charging down the shallow remnants of vague furrows and past the gnarled wicks of long-dead grapevines, the sky a pale blue parachute above them, the vultures churning over the ribbon of concrete suspended on columns like an ancient aqueduct. They yipped and howled. The older boys seemed to be racing toward some unspoken destination, with the teen girls trailing, the smaller kids already falling behind and fanning out.

Lila ran hard, trying to keep up. Each step caused her head to pulse with pain, her thigh wound to flash hurt like lightning. But she had been a junior varsity soccer player at school and some of that was still with her now, in her muscles and the targeting of her steps, as they crossed a dirt road and started down a slope of quartz boulders. Below was an undeveloped stretch of washland—a field of speckled rocks and mustard stalk. Lizards darted off sun-baked boulders as they approached.

Sleep inside them, she thought. Tiny doses. Lila could hear their dry skittering in the weave of dead grass.

The kids stomped like wild horses through the terrain, now heavy-footed, breathing hard. No one was whooping now. They fell a lot, crashing to their knees, skidding in the dust. Soon it was just the older kids. They ran down old winding motorbike trails, through the brittle scrub, scaring up grasshoppers. The land gradually tilted toward the bottom of the valley. In the distance, a lone tree billowed darkly among the thistles.

They turned toward it.

Is that the wood for the fire? Lila wondered. Are they going to chop it down?

The tree was a massive old oak and, Lila could see as they approached, it held in its branches a sloppily built tree house. Really it was a mishmash of old cable spools, plywood, and two-by-fours hammered and roped together. There appeared to be a main platform, suspended like a crude porch about twenty feet in the air, where the trunk split into three massive branches. Higher up were some actual semienclosed and roofed platforms, perched like crow’s nests. Boards had been hammered into the trunk to serve as rungs of a ladder. Some of the tree house had already been dismantled and there were loose pieces of wood, prickly with rusty nails, among the layers of dead leaves all around the base of the tree. Not enough to build a fire, everyone seemed to know as they waited to catch their breath, standing stooped over in the shade of the tree.

Some of the smaller kids caught up and immediately started for the ladder. The boy with the spear pulled them down and started up himself, leaving his weapon propped against the elephantine trunk. The other kids followed while Lila lingered on the ground, hoping her head would stop hurting. The run had set her heart pounding, shooting pain through her scalp and down the side of her face. She delicately caressed her cheek, her face screwed up. Looking up into the dark branches above, she watched the boy in the lead reach the first deck, then start climbing toward one of the higher rooms. Others swarmed out over the deck itself and began hammering at it with rocks they had scooped up, or viciously attempting to pull up boards with their hands. She backed away as chunks of timber started flying down, bouncing off branches and landing in the dense compost of fallen leaves.

Crazy winged monkeys, she thought.

She had started for the ladder when a shout of raw anguish—of volcanic rage—came from above, followed by a scream. Lila flinched and backed away, knowing the sound. A sleeper had been discovered. Is it me? she couldn’t help wonder, panic coursing through her. She scanned the branches and followed the movement of kids as they stormed up one of the ladders, climbing like rats up a rope. High above them, where the boy with the spear had gone, there was a struggle taking place in one of the crow’s nests. Through the slats of the platform, Lila could see only hints of violent motion.

The boy continued to yell, a guttural, choking sound, as someone—it sounded like a woman—screamed, “Get away from me!”

Then a body fell, scream trailing after it all the way down.

Lila could see that she was falling headfirst. A teenage girl. Lila turned away before the body hit and the screaming stopped. But the kids were still shouting from above. They threw their rocks and tools down at the body lying in the leaves. Lila backed away, then started running.

She ran back through the washland, using the overpass as a landmark. As she neared it, she heard claps of gunshot coming from above. They were killing something up there. She ran on, returning to the neighborhood, which again appeared empty. The house she had explored earlier was also vacant. She moved quickly down the hallway and into the cheerleader’s room, where she sat on the bed and began to cry. She fell forward on the bed and sobbed into the cheerleader’s pillow. It was just too much and it wasn’t fair that she had to do it alone. How was she supposed to stay alive in this totally messed-up world? It was her, she thought. It had to be the cheerleader sleeping in the treehouse, then screaming and falling. The hammers and rocks raining down. She recalled the terrible soft thud the rocks made as they struck the helpless body, then shook her head violently, trying to work loose the memory, but was stopped by the pain it summoned.

She thought she heard someone in the hallway. Oh, crap. What if someone should come in? She wiped away the tears and looked for a place to hide. The closet made sense. She opened it and there was the mask, staring out at her. Eyes wide. Always open. Always awake.

WHEN she emerged later that night wearing the mask, she was just as invisible as she had been before. No one questioned the unblinking eyes that covered her face. They were like badges, she thought. Sleepless people actually got out of her way, stumbling over one another. No one had the attention span or focus to investigate. A couple of kids leaned in, trying to see her face through the owl’s open beak, but it was too dark to see much of anything. What would they see anyway? Just two black eyes, the pout of her mouth. Dirty, tear-stained cheeks.

A fire was eating at the stacks of wood piled in the center of the cul-de-sac, casting a Halloween glow. But it had already lived out the most luminous phase of its lifecycle, having flared up and roared, throwing a column of smoke into the breezeless air, then settled into submission. Now the neighborhood people piled on what looked like skinned dogs, strapped with belts to heavy grilles—repurposed iron window grates. They hooked and dragged the grilles into position over the flames with golf clubs.

The smell of burning meat made Lila’s mouth water. She ventured closer to the fire and watched the neighborhood women turn the flayed bodies of birds on stakes. The birds looked like scrawny chickens. Then she caught sight of one of the heads when it flopped into view. They were vultures, she could see. They had shot vultures. The dogs, she realized, were probably the coyotes she had seen strolling up the freeway on-ramp at dawn. Of course they had eaten their own pets, just as they had in her own desert neighborhood. But this cul-de-sac had been blessed with a great lure for living creatures. The pileup of speeding cars on the overpass, the bodies as bait. The scavengers came in to feed and now they were feeding on them. She retched inside her mask, her appetite gone.

She sat on the curb, her back against a feeble parkway tree, and watched what had become of the human race through the mesh eyeholes of the mask. At first glance, or maybe from a distance, she thought the scene could be mistaken for an end-of-summer gathering. A block party barbecue. With people standing around, sharing food, talking about how summer was ending and school would soon start. But the reality was no one was talking about anything. They seemed oblivious to one another as they gnawed on half-cooked hunks of meat. They wore bizarre assemblages of clothing, or no clothes at all. They squatted like apes to shit on a neighbor’s lawn or crouched to suck water out of a sprinkler.

She stood, head in a tiny globe of darkness, fronted by the same protective pattern found on the wings of butterflies and the flared hoods of cobras. She decided it was time to go. Drowsiness pooled behind her eyes, starting to press. It would be suicide to fall asleep here. What she should do was find a bike. She was only about two hours away from home by car, she figured. The desert lay beyond the wall of mountains. She could get there. Just follow the freeway back, up through the pass, right?

In her mask, Lila moved away from the fire, scanning the yard clutter for anything she could use. A map, maybe. She was prodding at a file cabinet someone had apparently pushed out a window when she heard a groan.

She squinted into the darkness, into the backyard of a large house. Suspended between two trees, she could see the faint form of a hammock. It sagged, its middle swollen with the weight of a body. Again, a groan.

She edged toward it.

His face was also concealed, behind a slick mask of blood, but she knew it was the Marine driver. One eye was mashed shut and the other looked out at her from a gummy slit. She could see that his legs were strangely bent, propped before him. Blood bubbled from his flattened nose and his lips were flecked with shards of teeth. She winced inside the mask. They must have brought him here. Found him during the hunt and now here he was, abandoned, forgotten.

She cautiously moved closer, afraid that he might somehow rise up and grab at her like the last time she saw him. But other than the movement of his eye, he did nothing to acknowledge her. The mask, she thought. She reached for it, then paused. But how could he be dangerous? He was so messed up. Her throat clenched and she fought the impulse to cry. She couldn’t help feeling responsible. “Oh, man,” she said.

She slowly lifted off her mask. He seemed to watch, but again there was no change to his anguished expression. She thought then that maybe he was paralyzed. She brought up her hand, covered her mouth. She had thought to ask him where he had been taking her, or how to get home, but what came out instead was an apology.

“I’m so, so, sorry I fell asleep,” she said.

He couldn’t help trying to attack her, she silently acknowledged. That’s just how they get. Nothing could stop it—not even the need to keep your eye on the road. Not even if the sleeper was your own daughter.

She was startled when his arm moved, dropping to his side. His hand began clawing at his thigh. It took a moment for her to realize that he was digging at the low pocket of his blood-soaked cargo pants. She waited for him to stop, but he persisted, groaning again. His eye darted from her face to the feeble business of his shattered hand. It pulled at the snapped flap, but failed to access the pocket itself. He wanted help.

She reached out and pulled at the flap until the snap released. She saw the white edge of an envelope. The Marine’s hand fell away and he stared up at her expectantly. She drew out the envelope and saw her name written on it in her mother’s handwriting.

The letter, which she read by the fire, told her never to return to the house. It said that they were already gone, that they went to sleep forever. Sleep! We will carry the memory of you, of every minute of your life, it said, into whatever place of dreams follows the terrible nightmare this world has become.

By the time she returned to the Marine’s side, he was dead.