He stood looking at the car for a long time, wanting to go over and peek inside but wanting at the same time to run away as fast as he could. Eventually, curiosity won out, and Davy limped across the clearing.
Overhead, the moon shone out from behind a bank of wispy clouds. It was just a thin thing, pale, a fingernail clipping. Without the canopy overhead, Davy could almost see without the flashlight, but he left it on just the same and watched his reflection swim across the surface of the station wagon’s intact windows.
They were all inside. Davy swung the beam from the front seat to the back, then to the ground, and he threw up his tomato soup. The vomit was red, bloody looking; Davy wiped away the last dangling strand and dared another look into the car.
More windows were missing than were left, and the smell from inside was worse than the potty bucket and Mr. Boots’s armpits combined. If Davy hadn’t thrown up before gagging on the horrendous stench, he certainly would have after.
Daddy. Mommy. Georgie. Manny was in there too, his bloated head twisted to the side and his tongue sticking out from between his teeth, so thick and gray it might have been a piece of uncooked sausage. Davy’s stomach twisted again, but there was nothing left inside to come out, and he ended up coughing hard and spitting up nothing more than a mouthful of saliva.
Mommy and Daddy sat in the same seats they had during the crash, their bodies strapped in place by their seatbelts, but both leaning inward so that Mommy’s puffy head almost touched the empty bowl where Daddy’s brain used to be. One of Mommy’s eyes was twice the size of the other and about to pop out, and although Davy tried not to look at it, he couldn’t seem to turn away.
This was his mommy, the same mommy who’d taken him to the apstract sculpsure show, the same mommy who tickled him when he pretended to sleep and called him a silly goose. He retched again, but his mouth had gone completely dry, and this time he spat out nothing but stinky air.
He shone the trembling light into the back seat across the bodies of his brother and his dog. Manny lay up against the backrest, his too-big head and sausage tongue in Georgie’s lap. Georgie, his mouth open wide and full of flies and wriggling maggots. Georgie, whose t-shirt and flesh punched out in the middle of his tummy where he’d been pinned to the tree that rainy night a week ago.
Spread throughout the car were the remains of their camping supplies: a sleeping bag (the one he’d peed in?), a skillet, torn clothing and toiletries—everything covered in blood and mud and insects.
Davy hadn’t realized he was crying until the sopping neck of his shirt slid down his chest. He dropped into a sitting position, pressed his back against the car’s wrinkled back door, pulled his knees to his chest, and sobbed.
His family. All gone. Left in the car to rot, all gross smelling and icky looking and dead.
Dead.
And Davy knew what worms-for-lips, gap-toothed, boots-wearing monster had left them there. He slammed his fist into the ground beside him and wiped his eyes and running nose with his shirtsleeve.
He thought about the things he’d lost: his family, his real life, his freedom.
Except…no, he hadn’t lost that last one. Not yet. He’d gotten his freedom back, hadn’t he? He’d escaped.
Davy, still crying but gaining control of himself, pushed away from the car and up onto his feet. He walked away from the station wagon without looking back. The moon above him disappeared for a second behind an especially thick cloud, then reappeared and shone its sputtering candle’s light.
Davy had almost re-entered the woods when the beam from his flashlight arced across the birch once more, showing him again the ghost’s face he’d thought he’d seen earlier. Except this time the face wasn’t in the tree, it was in front of it, and it wasn’t a ghost at all.
Mr. Boots uncrossed his arms and smiled.
Davy wasn’t sure how long he’d been standing there and watching, and he guessed it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t run away now, barefoot and still feeling sick to his stomach; he wouldn’t get twenty feet.
The flashlight. He realized too late that it had given him away, that he might as well have been running through the forest shouting at the top of his lungs and covered in glow-in-the-dark paint. He could try turning it off, or throwing it in one direction and then running in the other, but he didn’t think that would fool Mr. Boots for very long, and probably not at all.
Instead, he gave up. Mr. Boots was a grown-up, and Davy was just little. He didn’t know how he’d thought he could get away in the first place. He walked to the man with his head hung low and handed over the flashlight.
Mr. Boots took the light and tapped it against his pants leg like maybe he was thinking about something—maybe about smacking Davy in the head. Mr. Boots stared, the light swinging back and forth across his leather footwear, reflecting off the mud in a way that almost made the boots look like they were on fire.
Davy waited, half ready to pull back if a punch was thrown, half wanting to stand there and take it like the man he wasn’t. Maybe the punch would kill him, and he could be with his family after all.
Mr. Boots finally made a strange clicking sound in his mouth and stopped tapping the flashlight. He said, “Well, I guess I’d of done the same thing.” Then he nodded, as if happy with what he’d said, and motioned for Davy to lead the way back toward the house.
Davy did so, but not before taking one last look at the station wagon.
He knew that someday he would become a man very unlike Mr. Boots, and when that day came, it would be his responsibility to fix what had been wronged. His responsibility.
When the time was right, Davy would be ready.
He walked through the woods without bothering to dodge the sharp rocks and sticks, and by the time they reached the house, the bottoms of his feet were just about slimier and grosser than Mr. Boots’s cracked lips.
FOURTEEN
Bethany Winston sat on the concrete patio behind her house, playing fetch with Alfred while the sun set and occasionally staring down at the pair of nubs under her t-shirt.
She was twelve years old, headed for the seventh grade, and still stuck with the training bras she’d had since she was nine. If she didn’t grow something down there soon, she thought she might as well run off with the circus and star in her own freak show.
Alfred trotted up to the patio with the oversized tennis ball in his mouth, his tail wagging so hard he was wagging most of his back end with it. Beth took the ball from his mouth and flung it across the yard for what must have been the thousandth time in the last half-hour.
Her mom had told her it was totally normal, that she herself hadn’t started to develop until she’d turned almost fifteen, but her reassurances hadn’t comforted Beth. Especially not after last weekend, when she’d heard a couple of boys snickering about her at the pool while she’d lounged on her towel and pretended to nap.