Three Miles Past (9 page)

William knew he was rubbing himself again but couldn’t help it, this was so good.

But then the skirt of the trailer, the very edge of the tin, dipped down into the surface of the ground.

William cocked his head to the side, not getting it, then followed the skirt up to the trailer, then to the door. The perfect pair of caramel legs there. The one breast pointing out into the night.

“Julia,” he said, in his other voice, “I was just about to—” and then saw all the way up her, and fell back, never felt the ground.

It was Julia, but not. Julia, naked but for blood. Julia, with the dog head that had lolled off. The Shepherd. She’d pulled it down over her own somehow.

William felt his breath tremor in his chest, tried to smile, couldn’t come close.

“Julia,” he said again, and then she was stepping down, the black dog under the trailer exploding from the darkness, the square-headed grey puppies spilling around Julia’s feet, down the rotten steps.

William pushed himself back through the dirt, tried to laugh at himself, at this, at her. Her gone-breast was leaking down her body, the fingers of the hand he’d cut the coin from dripping black. The eyes of the dog head watching him like a god, unblinking.

William laughed through his nose, wiped his eyes, and shook his head no to her now.

She had a hand to each side of the door jamb, was stepping down.

Laughing with no sound, William slashed the air with his razor but it was weak, nothing.

She lowered herself from the doorway to the dirt, leading with her good foot, the placement so deliberate that William suddenly felt what was happening here. Why. That it was time. That, after sixteen, seventeen girls, it was time. He nodded his head to her—
yes
,
yes
,
this
. He was ready.

“Please,” he said to her, lifting his chin so she could have his throat, “please, I’m sorry,” and then the dog head looked down at him with its dry eyes, knew him all at once, saw him in his cowboy hat, hiding in all the cushions of the couch, and he started throwing up down his chest, pushing back again, away from her, from it, and the body that had been Julia took one more step, no doorway to lean on now, and folded over the bad foot. Onto William. Her warm breath on his inner thigh, through the denim. The dog head nosing into his navel. William’s whole body trembling, neck jerking, cheek stubble wet with tears.

He was alive.

She had spared him. She was forgiving him.

He breathed in, out, made a sound with his voice just to see if he still could. Felt his own nipples swelling with a sort of milk he could feed her with if she wanted.

Everything made sense.

Except then she growled.

From the Shepherd’s mouth.

Instead of standing up like the woman she’d been, she pushed up onto her bowing-out arms, raised her heavy head to study him. To taste the air for him.

William kicked out from under her and she stayed crouched like that, on all fours. The Shepherd head just watching him.

“No, no, no,” William said to it quietly, and the little momma dog under the trailer snarled back there in her wet darkness, and the puppies boiling in the doorway screamed with the voices of sixteen women, and William drew a sharp line across his left nipple with the razor, his own fluids spilling down his front, into his lap, in offering.

She just stared at him.

“Julia?” William said.

In reply, she took her first step, her right arm reaching out for the ground.

William pushed back farther, still shaking his head no, and a second before she lunged forward off her hind legs, he was turned, crawling into a blind run.

Billy Billy Billy the Kid
, she said in his head, in her dog voice, and William leaned forward, deeper into the night, and the puppies and the trailer and his truck fell away behind them, and the one time William looked back, Julia’s new mouth was moving, her teeth shiny wet and curving in and in, and this isn’t one of those stories where the killer is chased by his own guilt out into the road to get run down by a truck his father could be driving, it’s one of those stories where you understand that no matter how fast a man runs, a dog can run faster. Especially when she’s hungry.

No Takebacks
            

1.

We didn’t build the app to kill anybody.

It wasn’t even our idea to build it, exactly. One day RJ’s dad was just standing there in the kitchen with us after his work, and he pretty much foisted the idea on us. His tie was two-fingers loose and he was digging in the refrigerator for a beer. RJ and me were sitting on the island (me) and the counter (him), texting. Or, if I’m going to be honest here, for the first time in somewhat-recorded history, we were
pretending
to text.

That beer, RJ’s dad was sure, had been there this morning?

Yeah.

Anyway, he finally settled on some orange juice straight from the carton, and then he was just standing there with us like I said, doing that thing where he thinks we’re all hanging out, being cool. At least he tries, though, right? More than I can say for my dad, who runs the house like a military barracks, telling us when we can and can’t be at ease, soldiers. Interrogating me about my plans for the future if he ever finds me just sitting on the counter one fine lazy summer day.

To be specific, and blip back to RJ’s kitchen, the
last
fine lazy summer day before senior year started.

“So . . . ” RJ’s dad said, wiping the extra-pulpy orange juice from his top lip, “what are you two troublemakers brewing up this particular afternoon, now?”

I didn’t look up, couldn’t, was too busy processing his ‘brewing’ and what it might or might not mean. Whether it was some kind of coded approval or explicit accusation or what.

“You know,” RJ answered for both of us, shrugging to make it stick.

RJ’s dad nodded, took another deep glug, and then asked if we had that red light, green light one yet?

We looked up to him with reptile eyes.

“That
app
,” he said, about the phones we were still working, and his eyes, they were all glittery with possibility.

I did a short little mental groan, here. Kind of squinted in anticipation. Talking software outside your age group always feels like trying to use sign language through the bars of the gorilla cage.

“It’s free, see,” RJ’s dad went on, “this computer kid from Palmdale, he made it for his little sister one afternoon, because he was supposed to be babysitting her but wanted to play online or something. There’s an article in the paper today, yeah?”

“The paper,” RJ repeated, his sentence the blade on some construction tractor, scraping bottom.

His dad was impervious, though. Had too much momentum. Was probably going to say ‘computer kid’ again, even.

“All you do is stop moving the phone when the light goes red, then on green light you—”

“Cool,” I said, sliding down from the island. “Red light, green light, right?”

I pretended to be calling it up on my phone. On the way out.

“Not really,” RJ’s dad said, his tone downshifting a bit. “But that’s not the point. The point is that that app, it’s the new babysitter. All the parents are downloading it for their babies now. Three hundred thousand so far. And counting.”

He let that hang.

“Dollars?” RJ finally asked.

“Downloads,” his dad said, licking his lips, excited. “And you know what? Each one of those downloads has his name on it. That afternoon watching his little sister, it got him into MIT, yeah?
Full ride
.”

“Ah, the Ride . . . ” RJ said, sliding down from the counter now as well.

This was where all of his dad’s casual just-hanging-out stories always ended up: some kid getting a full ride to college.

But still.

Three hundred thousand downloads? With how many screen refreshes per session?

Probably a million impressions, easy.

And even at a tenth of a cent per—you could do some serious bank that way.

All we needed now was the app.

~

RJ’s great idea was “Naked Leapfrog.” I wasn’t against it, especially as it involved asking Lindsay from Chem to help, but when my mom found our storyboards on the kitchen table that night, we had to have another sit-down with my dad when his shift was up at ten.

It went the usual way.

The only reason I got to keep my phone was by arguing that I was testing code on it, for my college applications.

RJ chimed in too, and threw in a Corvette if the app really took off, if my dad was interested in looking cool.

“A
sports
car,” my dad said, and leaned back in what he called his Spartan chair. His no-nonsense chair.

RJ shrugged, the left side of his mouth eeking over a bit, and, as it turned out for the next twenty minutes, my dad actually had a thought or two about sports cars. Complete with anecdotes and horror stories and statistics. There was maybe even some kind of insurance quote in there.

I apologized to RJ with what of my face I could—we’ve been friends since third grade, so he got it—and then, slouching across the dark driveway to recompose ourselves in the bushes (one cigarette, maybe two), ash out on RJ’s old dog’s real headstone again, RJ said, “Dude, if only we could have seen
that
one in the rearview,” and I kind of looked behind us, had to agree.

People have gotten rich on worse ideas.

~

Most of what we needed for the app we could scavenge from stuff already on the market, though a couple of those took enough hours to crack that night that we probably should have just written them ourselves.

“And we can’t ask Lindsay?” RJ said, his game keyboard glowing up his face like this was a campfire story we were telling to each other, conditional by conditional, curly bracket by curly bracket.

“She’ll be all over us once the cash is rolling in,” I told him.

We hunched back to the coding.

The app we were building was going to be the definition of elegance. Just because it was so simple, or could be, if we wrote it straight. Not a game, not some stupid trivia, no overlooked system utility or navigation aid for amateur seamstresses, and definitely not another porn scrubber or privacy screen.