I dropped my feet through the trapdoor. My hands were jittery. My teeth went click-click-click. I clamped them together, rolled onto my stomach, and took one last look at the room where I had lived without break for close to a month. The crusted drum set. The flaking radio. Alice Cooper in his scab of a top hat. Slowly, carefully, I pushed myself backwards into the hole. I felt my legs hanging down like an anchor tied to my hips. Their weight began to drag at me. My fingers dug grooves in the red carpet. At the last second, I let go and gave a mad grab for the ladder . . .

. . . and landed on the soft heap of cushions and pillows stacked in the hallway.

Ash and Nip stared down at me.

"Told you he wasn't ready yet," he said.

"Pussy."

♫

Above the patchwork fog, the sky was bruised with clouds. No stars flickered. No moon glowed. The low beams of the van were the only light in the world. As we turned from the driveway, they swept through the woods and cut a slice of red from the darkness. Nature had changed since I last laid eyes on it. Pine trees held out bare, withered branches. Oaks stood disrobed, the bark melted off their bodies in puddles of scarlet. Underbrush matted the earth like a soggy pelt.

Ash pulled over to the shoulder at the main road. Nip and Billy climbed out of the back. Both were equipped with flashlights and backpacks.

Ash rolled down her window. "You've got everything?"

Nip counted off on three fingers. "Water, food, batteries."

"Condoms," Billy added.

"I'm serious," she said.

"I am too."

"If something happens," said Ash, "if anything doesn't feel right up there—"

"We turn around. Yeah, we know."

"Here. Take this." Ash held out a key. "In case you make it home before we get back with Bitchmaster."

Billy pocketed it. "What about you?"

"You think I'd give you my only key?" Ash pressed the gas and after a brief struggle, the van pulled itself out of the mud onto the road. As we rounded the bend, two small lights flicked on in the rearview mirror and revealed a pair of walking shadows headed the other way, toward the mine. I wondered if they would find the trail. I wondered if the trail was all they would find.

A small noise, snip-snip, made me turn my head.

Ash waved the tiny pair of scissors she had used to open my undershirt during my fever. "It's not too late," she said. "I can still pull over."

"No thanks."

She was smiling. There was an undertone of strain to the smile that said, Keep talking, keep talking, keep talking. I could sympathize. I had spent almost a month not feeling anything, or feeling my own pain too much to feel anything else, but I could still recognize worry when I saw it. And yes, I was worried myself. About Bitchmaster and what had become of it out in the fog. About what would become of us in the world beyond Honaw, if we managed to make it down the mountain at all. That old saying 'blood is thicker than water' was snaking around inside my head. We had taken in the blood of the Beast, and with it we had formed a bond deeper than family, deeper than the laws of life and death. Could a bond like that ever be broken? Could we ever escape the watching eye of Widow's Peak?

"Are you sure?" she said, still wagging the scissors.

"Sure enough."

"Your hair sure doesn't look sure. Especially those bangs. Those bangs look like they'd love to bang my friend here."

She gave another snip.

"My bangs aren't that drunk."

"Fine." Ash stuffed the scissors back into her pocket. Her hands fidgeted on the wheel. "They're going to be fine. They're going to be just fine."

I had on my jacket and nothing underneath it. The sleeves had fused to my arms and back through a combination of sweat, fog, and sickness. Scabs covered my stomach and chest. They looked like a bad stitch job, but they were there, and that was good. That meant I was healing, or my body was, or was trying to. Or something.

We followed the curves, the headlights swooping left and right over a passageway of bony trees and jellied embankments. The landscape opened up without warning, as it always did, and the road straightened out for the downhill stretch into Honaw. The town had also changed. Where there had been stone-gray piles there were now clotted red mounds, pierced by jags of wood. Street lamps hung heavy, dripping heads. Gutters backwashed onto the asphalt. The coffee shop appeared up ahead, its windows like stop signs.

"There," I said. "That's where we ran out of gas."

Ash slowed the van.

We inched along for a hundred yards, a football field's length. Nothing stood alongside the curbs but rubble and the occasional car-shaped lump.

"It couldn't have rolled this far," I said. "Turn around."

She spun the wheel and I both felt and heard the tires fighting for a grip on the road. We started uphill.

"You look right," she said. "I look left."

"Okay."

I watched fog curl around the same leaning street signs, the same crumbled buildings. When we reached the coffee shop, I said, "Turn around."

"Maybe it's just . . . gone."

"No. Turn around."

Ash pointed us downhill once more. My eyes picked up on a subtle movement low to the ground. "Over there."

Ash steered in toward the curb. "What is it?"

It was a he, and a small one, so coated in muck that his body blended into the gutter. One of his legs had slipped into the drain and gotten stuck. The boy crawled in place, head lifted, hair hanging down over his eyes and open mouth.

I heard Ash notice him by the change in her breath.

"Where is he trying to go, do you think?" she said.

"Wherever all the other children went, probably."

It settled into me for the first time just how still Honaw had become. How quiet. Except for the lone kid and the fog and the slow trickling surfaces of the buildings, nothing moved in the town. Perhaps because I was thinking of something else, because I wasn't looking, I spotted it. A bulge on the front of a car. An extra set of wheels growing out of the bumper.

"Stop—stop the van."

I fumbled open my door and locked in place, caught by my seatbelt. Ash must have buckled me in because I hadn't. She grabbed at my shoulder as I thumbed the button and released myself. There were no cushions to catch me at the end of this fall. I hit the road, shockwaves up my shoulder and through my chest, a splash of wet against my cheek.

"Joel!"

I pulled myself across the slick asphalt, to the car. Its bumper dripped on the back of my neck. I paid no attention to the warmth soaking through my shirt, or the marshy darkness below the undercarriage, or the moaning of the child in the gutter.

It had been a hard month for Bitchmaster. Red dangled from the handles and cobwebbed the spokes. The seat wore a layer of red, which came away to reveal another, thicker, layer beneath. I wiped and I wiped until my fingers reached leather, but it was not the leather I remembered. It was soft, saggy, like cardboard left out in the rain. I lifted myself into the chair, not certain it would hold my weight, not certain I wanted it to, but it did. Somehow, it did. I sat there in the dark on my tired throne.

"Joel?" said Ash. "Are you coming?"

I nodded. I think I nodded. Either way, I took the wheels. They were goopy. They whimpered when I pushed them, like they were in pain. Three feet from the van, I slowed to a stop. My body knew what I was looking at before my eyes did. Every part of me that could tighten, from my hands to my heart, tightened.

On the asphalt, next to the worming trail my body had made in the blood, was an enormous paw print.

"Joel?" Ash's voice sounded soft, not quite there.

I took the paw print in, disassembled it, put the pieces back together. One large blot. Five smaller lumps crowned in five tiny notches. Those notches I stared at the longest. They dug themselves deep into the marrow of me.

I turned Bitchmaster up the road. Past the paw print was another, smeared. Past that waited a third, a fourth, and a fifth. The sixth was in the gutter, near the kid. I could not find the seventh. I scanned side to side, leaning forward in my seat, and there, there it was, yards away from the last. I followed the trail uphill, losing it and finding it again among the van's tire tracks. My arms began to ache. Red spots danced in my eyes. I pushed faster. I pushed like gravity, against gravity. I pushed until the road and paw prints were gone and I was pushing across nothing, under nothing, everything dark.

Arms wrapped around me from behind.

"What is it? Joel, what is it?"

The dancing red spots grew claws. I tried to shut them out, but they were inside my eyelids, walking away on black emptiness.

"Talk to me. Please. Say something."

"It was here."

"What was here?"

"It was here. It was here." I could not say anything else for a while, and then I could not say anything at all.

The bear had been on the Road.

It had been on the Road, and it had been moving north.

____ ____

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 next, bad news.

Very bad news.