J​ESSE USES THE ICE PICK EMBEDDED IN THE FIEND’S HEAD TO guide the body to the ground. The wound in his stomach makes him feel like he’s drunk acid, and he lies back and waits to heal more. When the worst has passed, he dusts the biker with the biker’s own knife.

He still doesn’t feel safe, though, not with the last two Fiends in the wind. He gathers all the guns he can find and carries them to the truck in a bindle made from a bedsheet, taking it slow, watching the road and listening for a motorcycle. When he gets close to the pickup he pauses to look for signs of trouble. Everything seems to be fine. Sanders is even behind the wheel. Jesse wasn’t sure he’d make it back.

He was lying in a puddle of blood when Jesse ran into the trailer, not moving. Assuming he was dead, Jesse went to the window and watched the big, dark Fiend he’d stabbed drag the blond woman he shot to safety. Sanders groaned, startling Jesse.

“Where are you hit?” Jesse asked.

“My leg,” Sanders said.

A bullet had passed through his thigh. Jesse cut a sleeve off Sanders’s shirt and tied it around the leg. It was no kind of fix, but it would get him through the next few minutes, when Jesse would need him. He groaned again as Jesse hauled him to his feet, but the leg supported his weight. Jesse had him take up a position at the window, and he crouched in the doorway.

After striking the deal with the Fiend who killed Johona allowing Sanders to go, he told Sanders, “Wait in the truck. If I’m not back by dawn, take off.”

“And your brother?” Sanders asked.

There was only one alternative. “Put him down,” Jesse replied. Edgar not being able to fend for himself, it’d be a mercy killing.

Jesse waves at Sanders now as he approaches the truck, says, “You alive?”

“Barely,” Sanders says.

Jesse walks back to the camper. Edgar peers down from a bed in a nook above the cab.

“Monsieur Beaumont went crazy,” he says. “He like to have kicked that box to kindling.”

“Come up front,” Jesse says. “Everything’s settled.”

Sanders keeps drifting in and out of consciousness, so Jesse drives. Edgar rides between them. Nobody says anything on the way back to Vegas, not even Edgar. Instead of gassing about cartoons or begging to turn on the radio, he stares out the windshield, his big, knuckly hands clutching the dash. Jesse and Sanders reek of blood, gunpowder, and exhaustion. Jesse opens all the vents, flooding the cab with fresh air.