Page 86 of With a Vengeance

“I do,” Reggie says, his voice so far away he might as well be in outer space.

Anna says nothing, focusing instead on finishing the stitch job with a triple loop at the opposite end of the gash. She ties it off and lets out a deep, shaky breath.

“All done,” she says, although Reggie can’t hear her, having fallen into a vodka-and-pain-induced slumber. Anna knows that’s for the best. He needs rest. She only hopes he doesn’t toss around in his sleep and break her makeshift stitches. To lessen the chances of that happening, she gently rolls him onto his back.

In the bathroom, she washes the blood from her hands, which tremble uncontrollably. A delayed reaction not just to all the stress of the past hour, but the hours preceding it, and the days preceding them, and the year preceding those.

All of it has taken a toll, as her appearance in the mirror above the sink can attest. Anna thinks she looks positively frightful. There’s blood on her dress, her hair remains a windswept tangle, and stress and sleep deprivation have turned her face pale gray. Her exhaustion is underscored by bruise-black circles under her eyes, which give her a spectral appearance. Simultaneously haunting and haunted.

Exhaustion clings to her as she shushes out of the room. Sheknows she shouldn’t. It’s safer inside with Reggie. But she also knows she’ll go mad if she doesn’t escape the chaos, just for a minute. In the corridor, she drifts to the middle of the car and stares out the window. The snow outside has slowed. Anna can again see the sky as it begins to fade from black to the hazy gray of dawn.

Just a few more hours, she tells herself. Then this will all be over.

If any of them live that long.

Every rattle of the train and every clatter of the wheels has her convinced Judd is right behind her, knife raised, ready to slash. It doesn’t help that the lights have started to flicker again. While Anna doesn’t know if it’s just this car or the entire train, she doesn’t like it. The blinking lights seem to her like a portent of something bad—a feeling that gets worse when they give up the ghost and flash out entirely.

Plunged into darkness, Anna’s about to return to Reggie’s room when a man appears in the doorway at the back of the car. What little Anna can see of him is bathed in the tepid light coming through the window. The meager glow falls in a slant across his face.

As he gets closer, Anna can make out only individual features. A nose. An eye. Half of a mouth. Just enough for her to piece together the man’s identity. Shock vibrates through Anna like she’s a bell that’s just been struck.

“Tommy?” she says.

She’s proven right when her brother—her thought-to-be-dead brother—steps into a patch of predawn light. Anna doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry or scream, especially when Tommy says, “It’s really me, Annie. Gosh, I’ve missed you.”

He flashes that matinee-idol smile she had loved so much, opening his mouth wide to reveal two rows of rotting teeth and blood trickling between them. He lurches closer and Anna seesthat his body isn’t a body at all. Just a mass of blood and bone and sinew.

When Tommy tries to hug her, Anna finally knows how to react.

She screams.

Thirty-Eight

“Annie?”

Anna jolts awake, unaware of where she is, why she’s there, what’s happening to her. A storm-cloud haze crowds the edge of her vision, making everything blurry and indistinct. She’s hit with a memory from several years earlier. She and Aunt Retta turning on the newfangled television they’d just purchased, trying to make out images through the black-and-white fuzz. That’s what this feels like.

Through the buzzing flicker, she sees a man kneeling beside her.

Not Tommy.

Dante.

“What happened?” Anna says.

“You tell me. I just found you lying here.”

Anna looks around, seeing the fully lit corridor of Car 11. “The lights. They started blinking on and off and then went out.”

“They’ve been on the whole time,” Dante says.

“Really?”

“I think you must have fainted.”

“But what I saw, it seemed so real.”

“What else did you see?”

---