Over Your Dead Body by Dan Wells

I could relax when our enemies were dead.
    The sermon went on for about a half an hour, interspersed with hymns that sounded every bit as dirgelike as the ones we’d sung in the mortuary. When the meeting ended we split into groups, the kids going to a basement room and the adults breaking out into groups for Sunday school. I even saw Corey, but if he saw us he didn’t say anything. We stayed with Ingrid, and she introduced us to her friends, most of them as old as she was. The pastor walked over to shake our hands as well, and we lied our way through a minute or two of small talk while our dogs sniffed each other’s butts. I mostly stayed quiet, speaking only to answer direct questions, letting Marci charm the crowd with her easy wit and Brooke’s clear smile. Most of the questions were simple—where were we from, why were we in town—and we answered them with the same vague story about taking a year off from college. Then the pastor asked the question I’d been dreading:
    “Do you have a place to stay?”
    It meant he’d seen how dirty we were and guessed we’d slept outside last night. It meant he knew we were homeless, and despite our stories, he was worried for our well-being. He might even be wondering if someone missed us, if our parents knew where we were, if we’d run away from something terrible and needed help, or even from something good because we were too young and foolish to see it for the blessing it was. Adults who were scared of me made my job harder, but adults who tried to help could make my job impossible.
    Before we’d gone to Baker, we’d spent two months in a town called Bunnell, close enough to a state park that it had a campground right outside of town. We’d gotten a tent from one of Potash’s depots, so we’d set it up in the campground and explained our long-term presence that way, which had been enough for most people to ignore us. Dillon didn’t have anything like that, and it was much smaller than most of the town’s we’d visited, so I didn’t think I could fall back on my “staying with a cousin” excuse. Everyone in this town was likely to know everyone else.
    “We’re just passing through,” I said. “We’re doing fine.”
    “You don’t have a place to stay?” asked a woman on the edge of the circle. “Does that mean you don’t have anything to eat?”
    “We’re fine,” I said, feeling like a noose was tightening around our necks. “Thank you, but we’re actually totally set up, and you don’t need to worry about us at all—”
    “Ridiculous,” said the woman. She was younger than the others, with black hair that had only just started to gray, strands of wispy silver floating above the rest like a halo. “You’re eating at my house today. I made a bacon-pecan pie last night, and it’d be a downright shame if I had to eat it all myself.”
    “I’m vegetarian,” I said quickly.
    “All the more for me,” said Marci, and she turned to the woman. “Thank you, that’s incredibly kind.”
    “It’s the least I can do for a fellow child of God,” said the woman, putting out her hand. “Sara Glassman, it’s nice to meet you.”
    “She’s the librarian,” said Ingrid. “Used to run the bookstore, but nobody in this town buys books, so they closed it five years ago.”
    “That was when the new highway bypassed us,” said Beth. “We used to be right on—”
    “That was fifty years, not five,” said Ingrid. “She gets lost in the past sometimes.”
    “I know how she feels,” said Marci, and she looked at me with wide, helpless eyes. She looked scared, and I knew in an instant that she had flipped again—Marci had gone and a new personality had taken over, completely unaware of where we were or what we were doing.
    Marci was gone.
    I’d lost her again.

 
    8
    Marci was gone.
    I struggled for words, sad and broken, furious that I had to go through this again and feeling more guilty than I could stand over the fact that I would even dare