Moses had leapt in front of the gunman.
Moses had thrown his body between the bullet and Dez.
The bullet that never fired.
Because Dez shot her shot first, pitching a vat of scalding oil onto the kid she loves most in the world.
The pain he’s feeling right now—it’s a tunneling, rib-roasting agony that Dez knows all too well. She can still call it up in her nightmares from when she was a four-year-old girl. Dez’s third-degree burn had taken six months and two skin grafts to “heal.” It never really healed. And it had spanned two inches of her wrist.
Not the entirety of her face and neck.
Moses is on his knees, and the noises coming out of him are inhuman. The skin on his face and neck sizzles. He makes a wet, sputtering sound like he’s struggling to breathe. Dez doesn’t recognize his face, mottled and angry, a flaming almost purple color, the skin sliding off in places like paper in the rain.
Dez can’t move. Can’t look away. Can’t retch up the bile in her throat. Can’t go to him. Can’t even reach for her phone in her apron pocket to call for help. She wants to say she’s sorry, but the words won’t come. She feels everything slipping away into black. She will never, ever forgive herself.
Mo reaches up to the gunman for help. “Am I dying?” he whispers in a ghastly voice.
She watches his eyes drift closed.
Dez wants to go back in time, for it to be one a.m. in their kitchen, Mo wasted but happy, tearing into his bacon cheeseburger, while she snacks on their mom’s instant-coffee crystals, and he tells her every stupid and hilarious thing that he and all his friends did that night.
This isn’t Mo, gasping for air from a burn-ravaged throat. This disfigured thing cannot be her brother.
“Mo,” she finally hears herself say.
The gunman has her brother under his arm and is still pointing the gun at her. He pushes past her, out of the kitchen, taking Mo with him toward the front exit. Her knees are locked. Her keys are still in the door.
“He needs help,” Dez says. Her words feel cloaked in needles in her throat.
The man points the gun at Dez’s left eye. She still holds his in her hand. She stares into the sickening, oozing hole she’s left in his face. She realizes, in all this time, he’s never said a word.
She looks at Mo, but he’s turned away, all his weight against the gunman, his forearms up to shield his face. His feet move clumsily, ankles rolling, like the ground is grease beneath him.
The gunman kicks open the door. It’s a hundred degrees outside, and even from here, Dez can feel the blast of heat. The shriek of pain Mo makes upon feeling the outside air is debilitating. Dez feels it all the way into her toes.
Now she can no longer see her brother. Adrenaline kicks in. She charges after them, out of the restaurant, into the heat of the night.
TIRES SCREECH IN THE PARKINGlot like horned owls flying out of hell. As Dez’s dented Nissan Sentra peels out of the lot, she realizes the gunman’s leaving inhercar, withherbrother.
Dez runs.
“Stop!” she shouts, chasing the car, running harder, faster than she ever has before. She doesn’t feel her body—no burning lungs, no straining muscles. She’s only aware of what she’s done to her brother. How she needs to make it right.
The night is dusty, hot, soaked in the light of a full moon. The car is gaining ground. Even when she watches it turn onto County Road 89 and Dez lags by something like a quarter mile, it doesn’t occur to her she won’t catch up. Failure is unthinkable. She’s heard stories about people’s adrenaline turning them superhuman when their family is on the line.
She sprints to where the street T’s, then barrels onto the county road. She runs fifty manic paces before the total stillness, the utter quiet of the road slams into her. She doesn’t understand. It’s been less than two minutes since she watched her stolen car turn right. Thereare no intersections for miles. But she sees no taillights, no sign of her car.
Nothing but empty road.
She spins around. Nothing behind her either. They’re gone. Her brother is gone.
Dez throws her head back and screams until she can’t scream anymore. Then she folds, dropping her head between her knees. She is indescribably exhausted. She wishes she could collapse, right here on the road, and sleep for a thousand years.
She thinks of her mother, who’s working until ten at the nursing home. Dez needs to call her but feels paralyzed. Mom leaves her phone in her locker, so they’ll have to page her, which will make her panic, hurrying down so many long hallways to pick up the front desk phone. And Dez knows her mother will have tried to convince herself that the news won’t be as bad as she fears. And then, if Dez can speak at all, she will have to tell her mom what happened, what she did. And in fact, for once, the truth will be so much worse than her mother’s anxious mind could have invented. That Dez burned Mo to the edge of death, and now she doesn’t even know where he is.
“Are you okay?”
The voice comes from nowhere, like the night itself is asking. When Dez spins to face a man in a black leather jacket, sitting atop a motorcycle, she jumps back in shock.
