Tyler walked through the night at the edge of the road, long after the private streets ended and the grid returned again, the streetlights regulated. He pulled against us, resisting the line in his chest that sought to pull him back, that tightened with every step. Eventually, he figured, the line would either snap or it would bring him down, and he was fine with either scenario. Pain laced through his head, at his temples, down the top half of his face, gathering at the broken cartilage suspended in his nose. He breathed in the fumes of spilled gasoline until his nasal passages went numb. His shoulder throbbed. He could barely keep his eyes open. Every once in a while, he would blink and his vision spotted, a blackness flickered at the edge of his eyesight like a Rorschach blot, like a light stared at too long, a flash of the dreams that awaited him when he finally fell asleep. When it got to be too much, all of it, he would stumble, and the jolt would return him to his senses enough to rebalance, to find his feet again. Blood soaked through his white shirt, joining the blood that had come from Thad, stiffening his clothes as it dried. The wound on his arm gradually stopped bleeding and dried over.

One way or another, in the deep of the night, he approached the strands of I-75, and the remainder of his directional sense brought him back to his own house, where he hadn’t set foot in almost three weeks. He hopped the chain-link fence to the backyard, crossed the scrubby lawn, and entered through the sliding glass door in back that was never locked. The house smelled like burning tinfoil. He crossed the living room, lit blue from the muted TV, and dug his fleece-lined hoodie from the pile in the laundry alcove where he’d deposited it several lifetimes before. He wanted his headphones, desperately—even though he had no phone, nothing to use them with, he felt naked with his ears uncovered—but he didn’t want to risk going any deeper into the house. The pressure in his head urged him to sit down, to collapse on the floor, to go to his bedroom and quietly bleed out, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. If he ended, it would be the same as letting go—another would follow. It would find someone else. We would.

He was opening the back door to leave like a thief, the hoodie bunched in his arms, when he noticed a presence standing on the other side of the couch, where it hadn’t been before, blocking the light of the TV. A chill went all the way through his body.

“Where have you been? You’re never home anymore,” the man said.

Tyler turned back to the door, his hand shaking involuntarily.