Prom

Help

She was going crazy. Seeing a dead girl was one thing. Biting herself. Phantom thirsts. Pain. That was something else. She needed help. She carried the crumped can to the self-checkout. Maroon globs dripped out when she tilted the can on its side to scan the barcode. The blue-uniformed woman behind the counter was staring at her, she could feel the gaze boring into the back of her neck. She put the can down, swiped her credit card with a hand shaking so badly she had to try three times. She tripped out the door while her receipt was still spooling out of the machine.

She looked around, squinting against the brightness of the light. She had to call home. She reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone, but there was no reception. It didn’t matter. She could walk. She turned to the right and started tripping towards home.

At the opposite end of the street, walking towards her, were two boys kicking a soccer ball. Maybe ten, twelve years old, one blonde, one brown haired, passing the ball back and forth and laughing. Heir necks were skinny and white. Amy’s pulse quickened and as they walked towards each other she could feel her lips drawing back from her teeth. She ran her tongue under them, hard, but her own blood did nothing for her. Her thirst was so physical now, so aggressively physical, like someone had stuffed her throat full of sponge. It hurt.

The boys were close enough now that she could hear snatches of their conversation. Her hands were curling, The brown-haired kid stole the ball from his friend, ran up the street towards Amy. The ball bounced off a rock and careened towards her. She stopped it with her foot. The kid came running up, still smiling, still out of breath.

“Thanks,” he said.

Amy could feel herself smiling, nodding, leaning forwards, forwards… The kid had a spray of soft hair falling down over one eyebrow, she could see where it feathered. Underneath it his eyes were getting confused, he was backing away, but she was tensed, crouched, and he wasn’t moving away nearly fast enough, hypnotized like a mouse in front of a snake.

His friend the blonde was coming up behind him and his smile, too, froze when he saw Amy’s face. “Hey, are you OK?”

It was like a rubber band in Amy’s head snapped. Suddenly she was back in reality. She was leaning so far that she stumbled over the ball, had to catch herself fast before she fell. She tasted the blood in her mouth. Felt the fear of the children in front of her. What had she been about to do?

“I’m sorry,” she said, and pushed between them to keep walking before anything else could happen. There was silence behind her for three long steps and then she heard murmurs and finally the hollow poing of foot on ball.

She kept walking fast, head down, blushing and afraid and still so thirsty. Help. She needed help.

Then to her left she sensed a gliding yellowness and she turned and there was a taxi. Through dark windows she could make out little of the driver’s face. He seemed short, broad. The light on top was off. And then it was on. She stopped. So did the cab. Amy looked up and down the street. Nobody there. She opened the back door of the cab and sat down.

The driver turned his head halfway back towards her and Amy gave him her intersection. Clement and Benedict. He hit the meter, gunned the engine. They were moving. Amy slumped her head against the window, watched gray and brown building roling past and heard the grumbling of the engine. Then they missed her turn.

“Hey,” said Amy. “That was it. Benedict and Clement.” With her throat the way it was, it was a struggle to talk. She felt hot all over. The cab kept moving. She was too tired to pick her head up off the window, but she rolled it over so she could get a look at the driver in the rearview mirror. He was looking right at her. His eyes were sharp at the corners. Then he looked back at the road.

“Hey,” said Amy, but even her voice was weak. “Clement and Benedict.” The driver grunted, made a turn. Still the wrong way. Amy knew she should be scared, or at least angry, but she didn’t have the energy. The thirst, the pain, were too much. She turned her eyes back to the road, watched the median strips flashing by. They stopped at a red light and she gathered the energy to pull at the door handle but the door was locked. Directly underneath the window was a rat that had been run over by a car. Its head and the top half of its body were flattened and its pink-tan intestines circled it like lace or a halo. Its back half was intact still, the light pink tail arched up and over like a victory arch or a bridge. The light changed and the cab rolled forward again.

They were entering the industrial section of Wilhelm. Shops and restaurants gave way to storage units and auto shops and tall grass. From somewhere nearby, a column of smoke. Then, abruptly, the cab stopped in the middle of a street. To the right, in front of Amy’s window, was a squat black building in the shape of a cube. It was about the size of her house. It had no windows. There were no other buildings on the street.

Amy and the driver sat there in silence until Amy couldn’t take it anymore. Her voice came out as barely a croak. “Where are we?”

The driver reached over and tapped the meter with his nail. She looked at his eyes again and the rearview mirror. No malice. No aggression. Just calm expectation.

“I need to go home,” said Amy. “Not here.”

The driver tapped the meter again. Click, click, click.

She was too tired to fight. She pulled out her wallet, counted out the amount of the fare in cash. No tip. She handed it gingerly through the gap in the divider. The driver took it, glanced through the bills. The locks clicked open.

“No,” said Amy. “I need to get home.” Silence. Her throat was so dry it was hard to breathe now, and she was starting to panic. “Please. Or the hospital. Please, the hospital.” No response. “Please.” The driver pressed the door unlock button again, and the locks jiggled. Amy felt tears starting to form in her eyes. She broke.

“Fine,” she said. “Fine.” She pulled the door handle, half fell out of the cab, then pulled herself up on the door, leaned against it to shut it. The locks clicked back down and the cab pulled smoothly away.

She was facing an abandoned lot. To her left and right, abandoned lots. Behind her, the warehouse. She turned.