“So you were just messing with us?” Daniel’s voice lifted to an incredulous squeak.
“I am trying to learn how, since it appears to be the preferred interaction mode of the human beings in this car. Am I succeeding?”
“Is Melissa’s life really in danger?”
“I don’t know.”
William shook his head. “Hanging out with us is turning you into one seriously twisted machine.”
“William,” the apparition said, “will you teach me how…to love?”
“Fuck you, Otto.”
The doorbell rang. Its two-note chime was identical to the one at Melissa’s house in Fremont Hills. She could scarcely remember how she wound up in a place so far from the old rambling Tudor where she’d created the first halting *DIYfashion365* videos that would never ever see the light of day, but which made her think, I could really do this.
Everett put a finger to his lips. His eyes twinkled like an enthusiastic mall Santa. The gaunt man was still.
I should scream, Melissa thought with troubling detachment, as if she were absently jotting it down. She tried to bring herself fully into the moment, but some part of her wanted so badly to wrap herself in laundry-scented impressions of home that her attention remained divided.
She remembered her mother warning her that burning plastic coats your lungs, and focused on holding her breath.
Three crisp knocks rattled the door in its frame.
Everett chewed his lip.
Two more knocks came. Faced with a persistent visitor, Everett motioned to the gaunt man, who gestured to Melissa with his gun and stepped toward the wall. Melissa mirrored him, sliding into the corner. Now they wouldn’t be visible from the doorway.
Everett took off his cap and ran a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair. Then he replaced the cap and strode to the door, affecting the brusque demeanor of a suburban dad who most certainly did not want to be bothered at this time of night.
He cracked the door and peeked out. “Help you?”
“We’re looking—”
Before Daniel said “for,” Melissa screamed with the hysteria and conviction of a truly deranged individual, “I’M IN HERE HE’S GOT A GUN!”
She was aware of three things at once: the flung-open door cracking against the wall, the gaunt man’s body twitching with hummingbird speed, Daniel’s fist hammering the corner of Everett’s mouth. The Cardinals cap flipped back, and Daniel’s second jab caught Everett in the neck. The man hit the floor before his cap did. Daniel went to his knees, striking the prone man’s bland face.
Everett’s leg jumped. Daniel hit him again. Everett flopped and was still.
William and Christina were inside now. Melissa was still screaming, a banshee torrent of rage and fear and humiliation. The gaunt man stepped back and swung his gun to cover the intruders. Panic clawed his eyes wider and wider. He returned his aim to Melissa, and then she was looking at William’s back as he moved in front of the barrel.
“I’ll shoot you, boy.” The man licked his cracked lips, darting his tongue like a lizard. “I will fucking shoot you where you stand.”
William stepped forward. “You think this is the first time I’ve had a gun pointed at me?”
The gaunt man’s eyes flicked to Everett’s motionless body. Then he swung his gun toward Christina as she pulled something from her pocket.
“Drop it!” His voice was a weasel screech.
Christina held up a bulky gray device. “It’s just a flip phone, okay? I just hit nine and one. You’ve got five seconds before I hit the last number and the cops start tracing the call. What do you want them to find when they get here?”
“Hey!” William said, waving madly. “Point that at me!”
Daniel crossed the floor in front of the couch.
The gaunt man appeared painfully uncertain. The gun trembled as he bounced his aim along a crooked axis from Christina to Daniel to William. Melissa remembered a Loud Science video about getting shot. Survivors described it like a sledgehammer blow. Without knowing why, she curled a hand tightly around her wrist.
“Fuck Hitler,” William said. His hands balled into fists. “FUCK HITLER.”
The man turned and ran into the kitchen, hurdled a landscape of bottles and tubing, wrenched open the kitchen door, and plunged into the darkness of the backyard.
Melissa felt Daniel’s arms around her while sense returned in a disjointed rush of cockroach hues, ammonia stench, crawly things in neglected corners, the horror of never seeing home again. She buried her face in Daniel’s shirt and pressed her forehead into his chest.
Christina completed her call. “Yeah, hey, a crazy shirtless Nazi guy just ran out of 1843 Windmere with a gun…. He went out the back…. I think the place is a drug lab.”
“You guys!” William said, adrenaline cranking the volume of his voice. “I peed myself a little.”
Christina flipped her phone shut. “I peed myself a lot.”
“I need to sit down,” William said. “I feel really weird. This place reeks. I do not feel right. Holy shit.”
“I feel all rubbery,” Christina said.
“Holy shit,” William said. “Melissa. Jesus.”
It occurred to her with startling clarity that she’d been holding her breath for a very long time, and she exhaled. Reality seemed to ebb and flow; the room felt like a screen saver. Daniel shuddered and turned away. Her body was cold even though she was sweating, and she wanted his arms back.
Daniel doubled over, and the movement flickered through her head in jump cuts, missing frames of film.
He puked on the floor. When he straightened up, he looked at Melissa with the soft-eyed love she remembered from those mornings when he’d wrap her up in great big spinning hugs.
“I think I peed myself too,” he said.
The dinosaur shook William out of his reverie.
He rubbed his eyes.
A life-size aluminum T. rex shining with green reflective paint presided over a barren stretch of desert highway. Historic Route 66 signs came and went. He wasn’t sure when they’d crossed into Arizona. The night made him feel like he was sitting in a parked car and the world was moving past on a high-speed treadmill.
His limbs were entangled
