Her foot lifts up the bed skirt, and she sees a glimpse of something – a metal suitcase, a combination lock, a black lacquered handle – but then her vision is filled with Ashley, her ears lost to the sound of the pulsing blood-beat.

Miriam pulls Ashley's hands off her throat, and she flips him over onto his back. His head cracks into the leg of a nearby table, but neither of them care. She chokes him now. He cranes his head and bites the flesh just south of her clavicle. Miriam feels alive, more alive than she's felt in a long time, nauseated and giddy and wet like a storm-thrown wave, and she wraps her hips around his and she feels him inside of her –

and the lids of his eyes close, and when they open, the clarity is gone. What remains is just a muddy haze. He pulls the oxygen tube from his nose and lets it flop over the side of his wheelchair. His eyelids flutter. His chest heaves once, then twice. A rattling wheeze squeaks from his throat, like a tire's air pushed through a pinhole in the dark rubber. The wheeze turns wet; the fluid in his lungs builds, and he starts to struggle for air, a fish on the dock, his lips working but finding nothing. He's drowning in his own body, and finally one of the orderlies – a reedy black dude with a silver nose ring – sees and rushes over, shaking the old man gently. He picks up the tube and looks at it like he doesn't understand what he's seeing, and the orderly asks, "Mister Gaynes? Ashley?" He gets it now. He sees what's happening. "Oh, hell. You in there, old man?" Ashley's in there for one last second. But then he's gone. The orderly says something else, but it's all fading to black, because dead is dead is dead, a wheezing whimper.

Miriam cries out, not a whimper but a bang, riding the intense mixture of emotions inside her to a throttling orgasm.

It surprises her.

INTERLUDE

The Dream

A red snow shovel hits dead in the center of her back. It slams her to the floor. Her chin hits hard tile; her teeth bite through her tongue. She tastes a mouthful of blood. The shovel comes down again, this time against the back of the head. Her nose breaks. Blood squirts.

Everything is ringing, distorted, a high-pitched whine.

She looks up through teary eyes.

Louis sits on a toilet in a stall. His pants are up. The rickety walls can barely accommodate his broad shoulders, big body. Both of his eyes are gone, replaced with Xs formed out of electrical tape. He clucks his tongue.

"You're a real man-eater," he says and whistles. "Del Amico. Me. That old bastard out of Richmond. Harry Osler up in Pennsylvania. Bren Edwards. Tim Streznewski. See a penny, pick it up. Am I right? Oh, and let's not forget that little boy out there on the highway. So many dead boys. The names go on and on, all the way back to… what? Eight years ago. Ben Hodges."