THIS BOOK WILL KILL YOU

21_troupe_

He did, because he's waiting for me there, sitting right in the corner with his back to the wall. He was the younger of the two cops who came to see me yesterday, but he's aged a century or more since then. His face is a leather mask and there's less of his hair attached to his puckered scalp. He's jacked up, on edge, his head jerking left and right studying anyone who comes close, so it doesn't take him long to see me. He does a double take and I realize that he probably thinks I've aged too, that I'm a half-dead girl.

"Did you bring them?" I ask as soon as I'm close enough. There's a table of four next to us, parents and two young kids, and they're all quiet, looking up at me like I'm an addict collecting her next fix. The fact that Cyrus grabs my hand, yanks me down into the seat opposite him, even though I was about to sit there anyway, doesn't exactly help.

"Hey," says the dad on the table next door. "You okay?"

Cyrus does his best to smile, flashes his badge and the butt of his pistol. The man lifts his hand in apology.

"Sure, no problem," he says, but he's still looking at me like I'm in a bad place. Cyrus rubs his face with both hands, scratching his stubble. Then he flinches, snapping his hands away as if remembering what happens when he closes his eyes.

"You all alone, Tammy?"

"Tommi," I say, but I'm not sure if he hears me. I'm not sure if he sees me either because his head is still swinging left and right, left and right. "Yes," I say. "I'm alone. I need your help, did you—"

"What's going on?" he says, suddenly looking right at me. His hand is on my arm again and he won't let me pull loose. "You better tell me, because I swear to god I'm this close to losing my freaking mind."

"You're seeing them too," I say, watching the family walk away, taking their food with them. When I look back at Cyrus his swollen eyes are ready to pop clean out of their sockets.

"My wife gave birth last night," he says, and I can hear the lunacy riding his voice. "She wasn't pregnant, but she gave birth, right there in our house, and it's sitting there, a fucking... a fucking..."

He's struggling to form the word, his mouth isn't obeying him.

"I took her to the hospital but there's nothing wrong with her and now there's a baby in our house and it won't stop screaming and they said there's nothing wrong with it either even though... Christ, the feathers, she..." He's hurting my arm.

"Cyrus," I say. I can't remember his first name but I bunch a fist and slam it down on the table, hard enough to jolt the condiments. "Please, you need to..." I don't even know what to say to him. "I see them too, everything is wrong, everything is rotten. It's her, she's doing this."

He remembers himself, letting go of me. I rub at the welts he's left, I rub them away. He's staring at the table.

"It's a baby, or a bird, I can't look at it long enough to see." He lets his mouth hang open and I see that he's broken, that he's already outside himself. Nothing I can say will bring him back. He sits there like a child, picking dried blood out of his long nails.

"I don't know what it is, exactly," I say as calmly as I'm able.

A couple has sat down on the table next to us, younger than me, laughing their heads off. It's this that doesn't feel real, I think. The girls with no faces, the birds climbing out of throats, the babies with feathers, that's my new reality, maybe it was always my reality. The world I used to be a part of, it doesn't feel like it ever really existed.

"All I think I know is that as soon as you read one of the stories, it triggers something, a game, maybe, or a race. I don't know. It happened to Cara, she was using the stories to try to work out how to win the game, how to beat the..." I can't say it, I can't say the word. "But she gave up, or she died, I don't know. But I think I understand what we have to do, if we're going to survive this."