John Hawthorne was beginning to grow worried.

  He stood in Mariah’s living room, bloodied hands hanging at his sides. The house was empty, just as Nicholas’s house had been. He had checked everywhere, from the bathtub to the closets to under the bed. He’d even looked in the cranny behind the washer and drier (not to mention in the washer and drier), just in case Mariah had compacted herself somewhere to feel secure. But the mug lying at the window told a different story, and so did the open front door. Mariah had woken up early after all. She’d made herself some tea and pulled back the blinds. And then . . . and then she must have simply wandered off, without even bothering to put on her shoes. Stranger choices had been made on this night that was once a morning. Just outside, a man danced naked in his front yard, his clothes shucked off his sallow, sweating body, while a woman lawnmowed the road beside a row of smoking hedges. The mind could only support so much weight before it buckled in on itself, like a rooftop under gathering snow. John did not see that fate in store for Mariah. He had always sensed a strength in her, a reservoir of willpower, dormant but deep. It was one of the things that had drawn him to her when he should have known to stay away, to let her be. Her strength had touched his own weakness, and yes, there was also the fact that she was beautiful and lonely—in her own way, perhaps even as lonely as him. John rolled his fingers into fists, staring at the mug on the floor. Mariah was gone. That much was clear. But she was not too far gone to recover. He believed that. He knew that. He only had to find her and offer her a hand.

  Wherever she was.

  He looked out through the open front door. Soon he would leave. But not yet. There was one more place he had to check first. He turned and walked through the kitchen. The scratching was very loud. It carved away at what little quiet the night still held. He did not think it was Mariah making that sound, but it was not in him to leave a box unticked. If he left now and never found her, that sound would plague him for the rest of his life. He would see her on her stomach, dragging broken nails across the outside of her back door, until he died. And he had enough regrets to take to his grave.

  He took the knob.

  Twisted.

  Pulled . . .

  And slammed his shoulder against the door, fighting against the tremendous, explosive push that greeted him from the other side. The force of that push would have flung most men back, but John planted his feet, gritted his teeth and quickly stole back the inch he had given. The latch clicked. He swiped the deadbolt for good measure and took in a deep, steadying breath, one hand on the wall. A bear. A Grizzly. He had seen nothing but one wild yellow eye, but the eye had been completely mad, swimming with lunatic fear. The smell of its breath was like corrupted machinery. Like rank engine oil and piss. It had come out of the woods, seeking the light. Why had it chosen Mariah’s house out of all the neighboring houses? Perhaps her light had seemed the warmest, or the closest, or perhaps there was no reason necessary in this new, dark world.

  John straightened his back, shut off the lights, and left. He did not consider which way to go; he let his legs do the thinking for him, as Mariah’s legs would have done for her, and started downhill. The naked man was still dancing, lord of his own universe, and the woman was still pushing her lawnmower. Beside her, the hedges blazed in a fiery row; burning leaves floated on rafts of smoke. As she came up the gutter, moving toward John, flames hopped onto her summer dress and climbed to her hair. The skin crackled on her face. Her eyelashes curled and blackened. But she did not stop, not even when her lips began to bubble and draw back from her white, well-flossed teeth. She marched right on past him, her fingers melting to the handlebars of the lawnmower, while her children clutched each other and cried in the front yard.

  John left them where they were.

  And did not look back.

  ???

  Mariah’s eyes were wandering over the whiskey bottles behind the bar when it occurred to her that she was sitting in John Hawthorne’s seat. The name hit her mind like a splash of cold water, and she sat up straight, her surroundings coming into clear and sudden focus. The Trotter. She was at the Trotter, which was where she worked away her evenings, which meant that she did know the time after all.

  It was opening time.

  She hopped down off her stool to get the place ready. John would be arriving soon. John always arrived just after dark during this season, when the days lived long and died slow. And then there were her other regulars, who might also show at any moment. She needed to set things up for them too—though, if Mariah were honest, she was hoping for a quiet shift. She felt as if last night had barely ended before this night started, and goddamn, a girl could use a break once in a while.

  She walked from table to table, flipping the chairs down onto the floor and turning the glasses drinking-side up (if she didn’t leave them on their rims at the end of every shift, they collected dust, and nobody wanted to sip on that). As she tidied the place settings on the last booth, she paused. There was a curious tickling on her leg, as if someone were lightly dragging a feather or a soft piece of paper across her skin. The sensation stopped, and she shrugged it off as a psychological fluke—her mother always used to tell her she had one mighty imagination. If you aren’t careful with that brain of yours, you’ll rip the seams on your head. This struck Mariah as a pretty neat compliment, no matter how her mom might have meant it. A brain with an imagination was like an oyster with a pearl. It was a rare, special thing.

  Done with the tables and chairs, Mariah got out the dust pan and swept up the glass scattered around the front door. A window had been broken, no doubt as a prank. Later she would get it fixed, but for now the important thing was making sure no one cut themselves coming in—the Trotter’s pockets weren’t deep enough to hire a busser, let alone handle a lawsuit. As she gathered up the few remaining shards, the night reached in and touched her cheek with a cool hand. She shivered. Standing by the window, with the dark outside so close, made her feel as if she were tottering on the edge of some terrible understanding, so she turned around quickly and headed behind the bar. What a mess it was back there! So much to do, so much to do. She cut lemons and limes into wedges and wheels. She unplugged the taps and poured the foam out of the lines. Some brown ick had gathered in the corners of the ice pit, so she gave the steel bin a thorough wipe-down before fetching fresh ice from the dispenser in the staff room. As she returned, she passed by the last booth and caught herself walking faster for absolutely no reason at all. Sure, there was a funny smell around the booth . . . a soured, sweating, roadkill kind of smell. But that didn’t mean anything—of course not—and where the hell was John already? It never took him this long to step in through the door.

  Then she remembered.

  He’d stopped coming in, because Mariah had told him to stop. After their one night together at his house, he had grown distant, remote. That wasn’t to say he no longer showed his face; if anything, she saw more of him following their tryst. He was always popping by her place, busy with some task. One day it was fixing her rain gutter. Another it was tweaking the chain inside her toilet, so the water didn’t keep swirling and swirling every time she flushed. He oiled the squeak out of her cabinets and dug old wet hair out of her bathtub drain. Every drippy pipe lost its leak. Every stain received a fresh coat of paint. His list of jobs could fill pages, but he never let her near him again, never let himself be touched. And she had gotten sick of it. Of him. Of feeling like she was a debt to be paid, a glass of water to be sipped—something kept around as punishment, both an object of desire and an instrument of torture. He didn’t have to pick her up and carry her off (such romantic notions belonged in Harlequin paperbacks, and could rot on the shelves for all Mariah cared), but he needed to be willing to grab the fuck on at the very least. Her own feelings didn’t matter. Loving someone who did not, or could not, love you back wasn’t love at all. For love, participation was required. So, she’d put an end to the whole affair. When John strolled in one evening, about a month ago, she’d placed an empty glass in front of him and said, “I’m out. You understand? Whatever it is you’re looking for here, I’m all out. The next time you come through that door, you come for me. Or you don’t come at all.”

  She hadn’t seen him since.

  She realized she was watching the door now, staring at it, and once again that tottery feeling came over her. She turned her head, saw her phone resting on the bartop, and thought, shame on you. An employee’s phone belonged out of sight during business hours. That was service 101, right up there with don’t cry in front of your customers even if you’re experiencing an existential crisis. She leaned over to pick it up, intending to tuck it out of sight beneath the till, and her hand stopped mid-motion.

  Reaching out from underneath the last booth in the back, waving at her, was a dollar bill. It flicked about lazily, fanning the air.

  The dollar bill was bloody.

  So was the face behind it.

  Rick Lot crawled out of the dark. He did not look well. Patches of his mole-speckled scalp had detached from his skull. His left ear was an overflowing, muddied sump. The fool’s gold sparkle in his eyes was feverishly, frighteningly bright. Flaps were all that remained of his left cheek—gristly, gritted flaps, black with asphalt where they were not red with blood. He was smiling. Halfway, at least. His lips, unstitched at the corner, showed a grinning slice of skid-marked teeth.

  “Well, hello!” he boomed.

  Mariah ran for the exit. Or tried to. Her legs moved with gummy, aching slowness, as if a spell had been cast over them. Rick had no such problem. He scrambled across the floor on all fours, knocking aside chairs and rattling tables, and cut her off at the end of the bar. Only then did he right himself. Wearing that ragged, lopsided smile, that grin that just wouldn’t quit, he rose jerkily to his feet.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “How about that quality time, Mariah?” he said in a thinned, pained voice. But a happy voice, nevertheless. “What do you say?”

  As she backed away, her eyes went helplessly to the closed door, the door she’d told John never to come through again unless it was for her. Open, she thought. Open, open, damn you.

  The door stayed shut.

  Rick came closer.

  ???

  Just before the highway, John came across a big man in a blue deputy’s uniform. The man was sitting on his cruiser’s trunk, smoking a cigarette with a hand that could barely hold it. He nodded as John walked past.

  John paused. That nod, that one small act of recognition, was more than most people currently seemed capable. The night had brought humanity down on its knees, but here was someone who was still upright, still trying.

  Maybe it was the badge, John thought. Sometimes a badge could be enough to lean on, when everything else was giving way.

  “I know you,” said the deputy, and though he might have looked like a man at first glance, his voice betrayed him for a boy. “You’re John Hawthorne from up on the hill. My boss, Sheriff Andy, says you’ve got a streak hard enough to break your teeth on. Or he used to, anyway. Before he died.”

  John said nothing.

  “I’m Dante, if that matters to you.” Dante took a sip of his cigarette and let the smoke out through his nose. “You’ve got blood on your hands. You know that?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “Me too. That guy over there, I shot him. He’s dead.”

  John glanced at the gas station, where someone was sitting in a drying puddle of blood. “Looks that way.”

  “He was looting. So were a lot of others. I tried to stop them. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time. Like the only thing to do. I kept thinking that if I could just stop them, if I could just set one little thing straight, the rest would figure itself out somehow. Sounds stupid, probably.”

  “No. It doesn’t.”

  Dante’s heavy shoulders sloped beneath his uniform. His boots dangled above the ground, swinging ever so slightly, and John thought of Nicholas Krauter—of the tree branch he’d been hung on to die. “That guy . . . there’s a gun in his belt. He reached for it, and that’s why I shot him. But I can’t stop wondering what made him reach. Was it something he was planning? Or did he do it because of what my own hand was doing? I think about it—over and over again, I think about it—and it’s all mixed up in my head so I can’t put it in order . . . but I’m pretty sure I was the one who pulled first. And I wonder if I pulled because I was scared, or because I was mad. See, I was just a nigger to him. He didn’t come out and say it, but he wanted to, it was right there on his lips, and maybe that’s the real reason I shot him. Maybe I just couldn’t stand being hated anymore.” Dante paused as a shivering breath ran through him. “Do you think that’s true? Do you think I shot him to make him stop hating me?”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  Dante looked at John, and he kept looking at him for a long while. “You’re probably right. But I hope you’re wrong. God, I hope you’re wrong. Because if that doesn’t matter then, shit, what does?”

  Mariah, John thought. Mariah matters.

  “You didn’t happen to see a woman come this way, did you?” he asked. “She’d have been walking down the road. Black hair, barefoot. That’s not much to go on, I know, but—”

  “White lady?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Nice on the eyes?”

  “You could say that.”

  “Yeah, I saw her,” Dante went on. “A lot of her, if you catch my meaning—wasn’t wearing much more than skin.”

  John’s neck prickled. “When was this?”

  “Not too long ago. Right before things happened between me and that man over there.” Dante swallowed, and John could tell he was fighting the urge to look back at the body slumped against the wall. “She kept asking me if I knew what time it was, which seemed pretty nuts to me, under the circumstances. But then, she wasn’t the one taking a stand over a gas station.”

  “Where did she go?”

  Dante waved toward the highway. “I think, anyway. I got a bit distracted there at the end.”

  “Thank you. You take care of yourself.”

  “You too.”

  John meant to leave then. But he didn’t. Something Dante had said earlier—because if that doesn’t matter then, shit, what does?—got stuck in his head and wouldn’t budge. He stood in front of Dante, who had tossed away his cigarette and set his face in his hands, until the deputy glanced up again.

  “What?”

  “Back that way, the way I came from, there’s a fire that needs putting out and a pair of kids who need caring for. I don’t know about their dad, but their mom is no longer up to the task.” The night, and all the black promise that it held, had become quiet. “I look at you,” John said, “and I see someone who’s not just big on the outside. I see someone who knows how to help, or at least is willing to try. The world could use that kind of guy right now.”

  “And you?” Dante said. “What kind of guy are you?”

  “The other kind.”

  Dante stared up the road, his smooth, dark face set in profile against the glow from the gas station. It was a boy’s face, yes, but it held the outline of the man he would become. And John had judged the character of that man right, for Dante did not take long to decide. But when he stepped down off the cruiser’s trunk and took out his keys, his legs gave. He fell forward into John’s arms. His chest heaved under his uniform. His heartbeat roared like a runaway train. “I’m so scared,” he said. “I’m just so scared.”

  “That’s a good thing, son. That means you’re still alive.”

  John saw him off and then headed toward the highway. When he got there, he spotted the Trotter standing in a distant pocket of light—the one bright spot on a dark, dark road—and the dread that had been building inside him released its grip.

  Mariah.

  He’d found her.

  She was safe.

  ???

  As Rick approached, Mariah noticed that he was not standing completely straight. He was leaning, weighed down by the ruin of his left side. Teaches you for not wearing a helmet, she thought.

  Then she stopped thinking, and started throwing.

  Rick dodged some of the bottles. Others he blocked with his forearm, letting them shatter on the floor. He crunched through the shards in his big snakeskin boots.

  Mariah fumbled for more ammunition, grabbing nothing but knocking over plenty. Her fingers had no squeeze left; her arms had no oomph. Her body was a leaky balloon, punctured in a dozen places. At last, she gripped a 1.75L of Smirnoff, half full. It caught Rick on the brow with a dull but resounding bonk! He paused to blink, and she had just enough time to smash the next bottle into his obliterated cheek. The sound was like a butcher’s knife chopping through meat, except this knife exploded on contact. Rick wobbled, broken glass embedded in the raw landscape of his face, blood drawing fresh lines down his jawbone and neck.

  “Mariah, that hurt,” he said, continuing his sluggish, limping march toward her.

  Now she was out of bottles, out of room, backed into the dead end of the bar. She looked at the door once more, willing it to open. But the door stayed shut. No one was coming to help. Not Andy. Not John.

  What time is it? she thought as Rick’s hand closed around her throat, and there was only one answer.

  It was time.

  It was time, and it was as simple as that.

  Rick walked soft fingers up her thigh, lifting her shirt. He gripped her by the ass, picked her up, and laid her on the floor mat. Her head turned briefly as she touched down, and she glimpsed something underneath the bar, way back beneath the pipes running up to the soda gun. She took note of what she saw, then tucked it aside for later. The mat was what concerned her. It was rubber and sticky and full of holes, and it had kept her from slipping on many occasions. She focused on it, holding tightly to its surface—not with her fingers or her toes but with her mind. She needed to stand. She needed to get up and stand.

  So she did.

  The part of her that had tried and failed to get its footing in her house, the part of her that had given up and laid itself down quietly to sleep, rose on steady legs and faced the morning.

  Because it was morning, or it should have been. The one clock that mattered—the sun—had broken. Its gears had lost their teeth, and if they continued to spin at all, they spun in silence and darkness, with none of the great light they once commanded. The sun was dead or as good as dead, and the night it had long kept in check now held full reign over the earth. To live under this new night was to live under the rule of a mad king who cared nothing for the land he looked down upon, or the creatures who walked it. He sat up on his high black throne under a vast crown of stars, and he laughed and laughed and laughed as his madness spread across the world. Mariah had come close to giving in—how easy it would have been, how relieving, to let go. To let all thought slide away and dance as her neighbor had danced, unrestrained, wild, free. But she hadn’t, and lying there behind the bar (for her mind might have been upright but her body was still on its back), she understood that Rick was simply fighting the madness in his own way. Doing whatever he could to make things make sense again. For a guy like him, that meant taking back control. Feeling powerful. He’d rape her just to feel the sun on his cheeks one more time, even if it was only in his head.

  His belt undone.

  His zipper down.

  His dick in his hand, as soft as one of those gummy worms she used to chew as a kid. She’d chew this one too, if he tried putting it in her mouth. But Rick didn’t want that. He wanted the other thing, and he was working mightily to get himself up to the task. The tendons stood out in his neck. Air escaped from the grinning rip in his cheek. He panted, his breath coming out of his nose in a sharp whistle. Like the rest of his leaning body, that nose wasn’t quite straight. It sat crookedly on his ravaged face, still wearing the slant that John Hawthorne had given it. She almost felt bad for him, the poor, sad, weeping thing he’d become. It must have been hard, being so big and strong. Spittle dangled from Rick’s cracked lips. The few inches in his hand were becoming chapped—but none the stiffer. If he couldn’t find his prick a backbone soon, he’d beat her to death instead. She had no doubts about that. A good, manly beating-to-death was probably next on Rick’s to-do list, regardless.

  Mariah watched him as she reached slowly under the bar with one hand, feeling with her fingers for what she had spotted earlier. The last night that Rick and his brothers had come in, she’d knocked a champagne flute off the shelf. It had broken on the floor, and she had swept up every piece except for the stem, which she’d never been able to find . . . and no wonder. You had to lie down to see where it had rolled.

  Her hand shut.

  She reeled her arm back to her body.

  Pushing the bastard off wasn’t an option. He was too determined to stay on top of her. But she could bring him in. After all, in was where he wanted to be. Gripping the collar of Rick’s leather jacket, Mariah pulled him close.

  And with her mouth to his right ear, his good ear, she whispered, “Do you know what time it is?”

  ???

  John was a hundred yards away from the bar when he saw the Harley sitting in the parking lot.

  He began to walk faster.

  Then he began to run.

  ???

  Rick Lot felt a cool tickle as the champagne stem entered his clogged ear canal, pushing through the muck and mire and into his brain. What followed was a whole lot of nonsense. His eyelids snapped open and shut of their own accord, like curtains in a haunted house. His dick became suddenly, miraculously, hard. But he no longer had any clue what to do with it. He got up off his knees and headed for the door, thinking of the dollar bill he’d used to graze the stripper between the legs, the same dollar bill he’d later waved at Mariah from under the table. Amazing what a—what a tickle—amazing—amazing—

  The door opened.

  Silhouetted against the dark, shoulders squared, stood the man in the blue denim jacket. The man with winter in his eyes.

  A trickle of blood spilled from Rick’s nose.

  The trickle became a gush.

  “No fair,” he said, and walked back to the bar, where he pulled out a stool, took a seat, put his head down, and died.

  ???

  “I bet you’re here for your glass of water,” Mariah said when John came to her.

  “No,” he replied. “I’m not.”

  He lifted her into his arms, turned for the door, and carried her out into the night.