I sat there for I don't know how long, my clothes growing damper and heavier. The fog moved around me, inside me. My ears picked up on a sound in the woods, low and coarse, like the world's largest pencil sharpener whittling the bark off a tree.

That got me rolling.

Ash was waiting outside the house.

"My aunt won't let you," I told her.

"Your aunt," she said, "is not my mother."

♫

I tried.

"Absolutely not," said Sandy. She had taken off her sweater to change her bandages, and now she was sitting in a dirtied tank top, the soaked gauze clenched in one fist, the hole in her arm oozing. "You will absolutely not leave this house. No, just no."

Ash opened her mouth. "But—"

My aunt talked over her. "I don't care what for. You're crazy to even think it. God. What would your parents say if I let you leave?"

"Not much, likely."

"What's that supposed to mean? Not much? Not much? You have no idea what they're going through right now. Them down the mountain and you up here and no way to get to you, no way to know if you're even"—My aunt sucked in a sharp breath that got pinched inside her throat. She let it out slowly."You're my responsibility, mine. And it's going to stay that way until all of this is over, same for all of you." She looked at each one of us in turn. "Understand?"

There were no arguments from Nip.

"Whatever," said Billy, reflexing to his too-cool-for-school self.

Sandy's head swiveled back to Ash. "Give me your keys. Your car keys. Don't say, 'But.' Don't say anything. Throw them over."

Ash held still for one of the longest seconds of my life. Then she reached into her jeans, pulled out her keys, and tossed them. Aunt Sandy stuffed the keys in her front pocket. She tore fresh gauze off the roll and wrapped it around her wound in grim silence. When she finished, she got up and walked down the hall. A door shut quietly.

Ash sat down on the carpet. She gave me a look. I saw no anger in it, and that scared me.

My aunt returned carrying a tall brown bottle and a dusty tumbler. "Let's be calm, okay? Let's just relax. We've got enough ugly. We don't need any more."

♫

The bottle was Eagle Rare, 10 Year, and first it put an easy smile on Sandy's face. Then it loosened the smile at the corners and pulled her lips down. She began to drink faster. I asked for a shot, and she gave me one. I asked for a second shot, and she told me there was a case of bottled water in the hall closet if I was thirsty. I wasn't thirsty. I was terrified.

Ash sat on the floor, asleep or putting on a good show of it.

Somewhere above Honaw the sun slanted down, darkness on its heels.

♫

"What are you doing?" Nip whispered.

Ash dug into Aunt Sandy's front pocket. She didn't bother being delicate. She had already rolled Sandy off her stomach onto her back. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

"She said—"

"I heard her. I was here. But she didn't hear me." Ash pulled out her keys, twirled them around her knuckle, and caught them in a tight fist. "If she'd listened, she'd have seen I was right."

"Right about what?" said Billy.

"Going to school. Seeing if anyone is alive."

"That's nuts."

"No," she said. "Nuts is sitting here with one case of water and no food and praying somebody comes along before we're too hungry to move. Nuts is not looking at what's all around us, not seeing what's right there to see." Ash picked up the half-empty bottle of Eagle Rare, gave it a slosh, and set it back down on the end table. "You lot don't have to come with me if you don't want to."

Nip looked at her like she was a character from one of his books, a fantasy person.

Billy stared at his scabbed knuckles.

"Fine," she said. "Fine."

"What are you going to do when you get there?" I said from the back door where I had positioned myself. "Pull up the van and honk? What if there are survivors?" There couldn't be. "What if there's so many you can't fit them? You going to take them first come first serve? What if they can't walk? What if they're crippled like—"

"You?" she said.

"Yeah. Me."

"I'll think of something." She walked my direction. Her voice grew soft, but her eyes stayed bright. "We're close, Joel. We're right here. We can't just look the other way. We've got to do something while we can. Because we can. Don't you see?"

I saw, all right.

It was right there, in every sentence she'd spoken, every justification she'd built for herself. The truth, buried in shallow dirt.

"You don't care about those kids," I said, too low for the others to hear. "You're curious."

She stiffened.

"The full picture. You said the government didn't have the full picture, and you don't either. Not yet. That's what you want, isn't it? Ghost Girl. The story wasn't enough for you. Breathing its breath isn't enough for you. You need its flesh, too."

Ash bent over and gripped my wheels, her face expressionless. She rolled me out of the way, one slow pull at a time. "I'm. Going. To. Help."

The door slammed behind her.

The house trembled.

♫

Sometimes seeing makes you blind. You open one eye and you close the other. You get so focused you lose focus.

I told Ash she didn't care.

Ash, who had done nothing but rescue me since I arrived in Honaw.

♫

My phone could not keep time. But I could, at least a little.

I did not have much.

Aunt Sandy on the couch, her legs dangling off the cushions. Nip, squeezed against the armrest and staring at me. Billy, also staring at me, also squeezed into a corner. The bully in me jumped to the easy target.

No words were necessary. One sharp look was enough.

Nip pushed off the couch with his shoulders hunched. He walked past me to the door, and hate me for it, I do, but I didn't so much as say goodbye. My gaze was already fixed on Billy.

"What?" he said.

"I saw your father. I saw which way he ran. I could have told you where, but I didn't."

Billy's throat knotted. "Why?"

"Because you'd have chased him, and then we would have chased you, and that would have wasted time." That was all true, like Ash being curious was true. There was also Billy's knuckles and his bloodshot eyes and the booze in his kitchen and the fact that his father had never once—in the whole story told by the creature he'd become—had never once thought of his son.

But I said nothing of that, because Nip was ninety pounds and Billy was one-fifty, and I needed him in that van. I needed this bridge burned now.

Billy stood. He sniffed once, loudly, through his nose. He walked out after Nip and Ash.

Ash.

Ash.

We all fall down.

♫

I rolled over to the couch. Aunt Sandy's sleeping face was worked up into a picture of intense concentration or pain, knotted brows, pinched lips, jaws squeezed tight. Her bandage was damp again. I took a swig off her whiskey bottle, then I picked up the marshmallow candle and pushed down the hall.

The bathroom and office had both caved in on themselves, but the bedrooms were still in working condition. I went into mine. The walls were bare. While I was in the hospital the first time, Aunt Sandy had taken down all the book-cluttered shelves and painted over the flower wallpaper in blue, like a boy's room, like she was expecting. After I moved in, she would come in and tell me about all the things I could tape up, record cases, movie posters, supermodel calendars, wink-wink, and I would tell her that sounded like a great idea, and the next week we'd have the same conversation underneath the same bare walls.

I set the candle on the dresser. All six of its drawers had rolled open. I closed them one by one, and before I shut the last I reached in beneath my underwear and pulled out the Kindle resting there. It had not been charged since summer, since the motel in Reno. I opened the leather cover and the screen brightened on the last page my brother had been reading. I knew the page by heart. I read it anyway. Then I closed the Kindle and put it back in the drawer.

The window was red and the room was dim, even with the candle. I rolled over to the bed and crawled onto the covers. Bits of stucco dusted the pillow. I did not brush them off. I did not have the energy. In my leather jacket and jeans, I closed my eyes and followed a deer down a double-yellow line into sleep.

____ ____

Author's Note:

Thank you for reading! If you're enjoying Poor Things, please consider hitting the vote button—it will help other readers find the story. Comments are always appreciated, too. Seriously, I love them.

Coming up on Friday, Joel waits desperately for Ash and the others to return and Lana del Rey sings a sad, lonely song titled Born to Die . . .