Total pages in book: 209
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 196141 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 981(@200wpm)___ 785(@250wpm)___ 654(@300wpm)
How they break Brock’s heart in half.
“I … died …” he recites.
“Yes, you did.”
“I … died … and then … came back.” Brock’s eyes well up. Tears? He touches his face, pokes his left eyeball, draws his finger away to find a dot of liquid at the end. “It was … all like a dream. I should … should forget it ever happened. Things are okay now.”
Jessica half turns to him, eyes on the road. “What?”
“I … died.” Brock starts to breathe funny. Something inside is trying to come out. He grips his thighs, clenches his teeth. The tears dislodge, falling down his face. “I … d-d-died …”
“Sweetheart?”
“I … died … I … died, I … died, died, died …”
“Brock, honey, what’re you—”
He can’t stop repeating the words, over and over. “I died, I died, I died …” If he says it enough, he will remember it’s true, he will remember what happened. And how. He will fight the wall of doubt and disorientation that contains him, he will be free.
“I’m gonna pray for you,” says Jessica, her voice unraveling, tears in her own eyes. “Sweetheart, pray with me, please pray to God, pray right now, right the fuck now, baby, p-p-pray …”
“I DIED!” cries out Brock, grabbing hold of his own head.
Asher pulls out his earbuds. “Dad?”
“D-Dear Lord in Heaven,” starts Jessica, her voice trembling, “p-please take my husband in your most capable, loving hands—”
Brock reaches over the center console, grabs hold of Jessica by the neck. She screams, but not for long. The car veers left, veers right. Brock lunges out. The seatbelt snaps, rips out, loud and popping. Asher shouts out as the car rages off the road in a screaming cacophony of metal and sand.
Red paints Brock’s eyes as he grabs and claws and bites.
Jessica’s screams are swallowed, choked away into the noise of glass and metal crunching. The car lunges and bounces and throws its occupants left, right, to the sky, down to the earth.
Crashes. Stops.
Brock chokes, his mouth filled with something.
Something that is not like gummy candy.
Not like the red jelly in a pastry.
He blinks away red from his eyes, stinging red, not the tears that were there before. He’s atop the driver’s seat, straddling it.
No more screaming. Brock blinks and blinks and blinks.
Something spills from his lips. Jessica’s face comes into view.
Except it’s no longer a face. There’s nothing there.
Only hair. Red. Leather from the seat, shredded into flakes, cushion mixed with hair mixed with red.
And bone.
Brock hears a noise, looks up. The back door of the car is open, his son, gone.
“Ash?” chokes Brock through a mouthful of flesh, of blood. He spits. “Ash? Is something wrong? Did something happen?”
He claws his way out through the driver’s seat, staggers out onto the hot sand and cracked earth. The front of the car is folded against a thick, bent-over cactus, the vehicle partly lifted, front wheels spinning.
Brock stumbles away from the car, still blinking wildly, his eyes searching the blinding white-yellow fire of the desert for his son. “Ash?” he calls out. “Did something happen? Where’d you go? Why are you—??”
He collapses to his knees, stares ahead.
A phone on the ground, screen cracked.
Two earbuds, one near the phone, one farther away.
Like two breadcrumbs, the only breadcrumbs, the shape of his son already far away, running for his life, out of reach, the shape of Asher painted against the blurry mountainous horizon.
“I died,” chokes Brock. “And I came back. It was all …” He swallows, tastes nothing but blood, picks a hair from his mouth, spits. “It was all like a dream. Just forget it ever happened.” He stares into the distance for his son. He can no longer see him. “Things are okay now.”
25.
It’s Time.
—∙—
The shifting sands of hourglasses.
The sound is like the ticking of clocks, only the ticks are so much closer together, as if there are countless secret increments of time between seconds of a clock, immeasurable increments, as close together as atoms. It’s the sound that plays all the days and nights long in the private quarters of George, which Tristan has just entered. The doors spread to reveal shelves and shelves and yet more shelves full of hourglasses in every size, style, and color. George once claimed to have just over two hundred, but the first impression one gets upon entering the room is that there are two thousand. All of them seem to be running nonstop somehow, the sounds of shifting sands everywhere, like a soothing white noise.
Tonight, it feels anything but soothing.
Tristan is certain that box was not empty. The box meant for Markadian. Mance’s sick little gift.
George seems to sense Tristan before he’s even entered the room. “I do not have to be an assistant,” states George with an oddly grand flair, like making a profound proclamation. “I do not have to be George. I do not have to be anything at all. Not a human being. Not a Feral. Not even a … a vampire.”