Owen didn’t answer. It didn’t matter. Toby had walked the path from his house to Owen’s cave hundreds of times, and though he always made Owen stop walking with him as soon as they were a mile away, it wasn’t a stretch that Owen would have followed the path the rest of the way and figured out where he lived. He hoped to God that Owen hadn’t pounded on anybody else’s kitchen window first.
Owen tapped his eye.
“There’s nothing I can do for you, Owen. You need to run away. People are hunting for you, and they’re going to kill you. You need to run as far away as you possibly can. Never come back.”
“Toby.”
“Go. If you come back here, I’ll shoot you myself. You’re lucky I’m even giving you a warning. I never want to see you again.”
Owen signed: I’m sorry.
“Yeah, I’m sorry, too.”
Owen tapped his eye again.
“I know you’re in pain. I already said there’s nothing I can do about it. This is your fault, too. You took Melissa away from me. Did you know that I was going to ask her to marry me? Did you?”
Owen hung his head even lower.
“Okay, that’s not true-I don’t know why I said that. But it was great to have somebody, you know what I mean? You’re my best friend, but it’s not like we can go to the movies or go get some french fries or anything like that, right? I needed to have part of a normal life, and you ruined that. And now you’re killing people.”
No.
“Bullshit. Don’t lie to me. Why are you doing it?”
Owen rubbed his belly. Hungry.
“Then you can eat deer and squirrels and everything else you’ve been eating your whole life. You don’t need to eat people. Those people had families, Owen. They had friends. The old man had grandchildren. What does that make you?”
No response.
“It makes you a monster, Owen. It makes you an awful, horrible monster. It makes you the goddamn boogeyman. So you need to go back into the woods, run away, run to another state, and live like an animal instead of a nightmare.”
Hurt.
“Stop saying that. I don’t care.”
Miss you.
“So what?”
Scared.
“Me, too.”
Toby sighed. He couldn’t just send Owen away. If nothing else, he might go out and kill somebody else. There were only so many deaths he could have on his conscience before he went completely, genuinely insane and started seeing spiders crawling around on the inside of his eyelids.
“Okay, I’ll help you. I’ll try to make the hurt go away. We can’t do it here, though. You need to go home.” He signed: Home.
Owen signed home back.
“You go there. I’ll be there in a bit.”
No.
“In a bit. I promise. It won’t be long.”
No.
Toby stood there for a long moment. Then he sighed again. “Okay, let me go get some things, and then I’ll walk back with you.”
They walked through the woods, not speaking. Owen looked beaten, almost ashamed. He should, Toby thought.
The thing is, best friend or not, Owen wasn’t human. He was an animal. And when he got hurt, he was going to react like an animal. If Toby got a fingernail in his eye, he’d probably go berserk, too. He just didn’t happen to have claws and sharp teeth.
Melissa was gone forever. Why did Owen have to be?
Because he was a killer.
So was Toby.
But Toby had killed a couple of worthless bullies. Owen had killed two innocent victims and a girl who meant a lot to Toby. You couldn’t compare them.
Owen’s killings were based on hunger. On fear. On confusion. Toby’s killings were based on rage.
What kind of friends was he going to make after this blew over? All of his life he was a social outcast. Did he really think that he’d start forging healthy new relationships after burying his girlfriend in the snow? Was banishing Owen from his life going to make things better, or create a gap that he had no chance of filling?
“You know,” Toby said as they walked. “All friends have fights now and then. Usually there aren’t dead bodies involved, but this isn’t exactly a normal friendship, is it?”
He couldn’t believe he was going to forgive Owen. Maybe the spiders were already squirming around, spinning webs in his eyeballs and he just couldn’t see them.
“You have to promise me something. If anybody comes out here and it’s not me, you need to run. Find a new place to live for a while. You’re in a lot of danger if they find you. Do you understand?”
Owen didn’t seem to get what he was saying, but by the time they reached the cave, Toby thought he’d made his message clear. Then he took the antiseptic and bandages out of his backpack, hoping that the process wasn’t too ugly. If Owen were to go on another pain-related killing spree, having the alcohol rubbed on his wounds would be the thing to induce it.
Owen’s howl of agony seemed to echo through the forest, loud enough to awaken the entire world.
Toby was no doctor, or anything even close, but he thought he’d done a pretty good job of cleaning out Owen’s wounds. It hadn’t been an especially precise process-he mostly just splashed on the antiseptic and then ran for cover, but though the pain was clearly excruciating, Owen had made no attempt to attack him.
If the bullet was lodged in his arm, it was just going to have to stay there. Trying to dig it out with a knife couldn’t end happily, even if Toby thought he had the surgical skill to do such a thing.
Owen gave him a hug.
Sorry.
“I can’t believe we let this happen,” said Toby. “We’re friends forever, right? It’s almost like we let a woman come between us. That stuff, it’s all temporary. This“-he patted his chest, and then Owen’s-”is the real thing. They can’t break our bond. They might think we’re the most fucked-up friendship of the twentieth century, but they’re not going to drive us apart. No matter what, we’re together forever.”
Yes.
“But you can never leave the forest again. Never. Not for anything. Promise me you’ll never walk out of these woods for any reason.”
Promise.
“And, also, don’t kill anybody else, okay, buddy?”
“There’s something I hate worse than a liar,” said Detective Dormin, lighting up a cigarette. “We found your girlfriend, but I’m sure my coworkers told you that when they were driving you here. Her body looked bad. I bet you can envision what I’m talking about, can’t you?”
Toby remained silent.
“We don’t see a lot of murders in Orange Leaf. Last one was, oh, about six years ago. Nothing fancy, just a good old-fashioned robbery. Wild-animal attacks are something brand-new. If you exclude dogs, I don’t think we’ve got any on record. So you can understand that there’s a lot of pressure to find the thing that’s out there killing folks. Not so much pressure on me personally, it’s more of an animal-control issue, but I tend to take a lot of responsibility that isn’t necessarily mine.”
“What’s your point?” Toby asked.
“Sorry, I do tend to ramble on, don’t I? My point, Mr. Floren, is that we know that the animal that chewed up
