The sound of flesh rending was a far more wet sound than she had ever anticipated. And Judy had never anticipated to truly hear it.

    Her hands clasped tightly across her mouth, muffling the scream that yearned to fly free into the air. Her knuckles had turned white from the sheer force of holding back her own alarm of fear. Another tear trickled down over her cheekbone, already wet from the previous weeping of the night. Her body shook so violently it rattled her ribcage.

    In the next room, the whatever was tearing her family apart. She hadn’t gotten a good look at it. The sight of brand new blood and viscera wallpaper was a swift kick to her flight response and she hid before the hunched over mass of bone and patchy fur could pick her out. It grunted and groaned in pleasure between each swallow of her father.

    Soon, the sound of chewing ceased. There was no slow satisfied smacking of the meal ending, a stomach already too full with its food. It was the messy, noisy frantic sounds of gnashing, gnawing, mastication and then nothing at all. Like a switch had been flicked of. All that remained was Judy’s simple little whimpers. In that silence, she realized just how loud they now were, a concert of sobs and sniffles and gasps. The pads of her fingers left welts in her cheeks as she shifted her grip, trying to physically hold back hysteria.

    There was a thud that shook the floor of the weak linoleum floor. It rippled shudders that reverberated up Judy’s spine. She squeaked. Another thud. Another shudder. Thud. Shudder. Thud. Shudder.

The light from the laughably tiny kitchen was blotted out from the slats in the pantry door and a shadow cast over her face. Judy couldn’t stop the violent shivering of her body. She pulled her knees closer to her chest, her fingers tight around her face, her eyes squeezed shut. A tear still managed to escape from the tight seal of her eyelids.

The breath of the thing was hot against her skin. It misted in dark gray clouds through the slats of the door, rank with death, blood, and decay. The smell settled into every corner of the closet. Judy shifted her shaking fingers for more coverage over her nose. A gasp escaped.

The thing roared, something loud and scary. It had a two tone quality of it, one that sounded like a wounded animal, another that sounded like a young girl screaming in pain. Judy wasn’t sure if that wasn’t just her own screams. A large clawed hand sledged through the plywood door like a hot knife through butter, exposed bone claws digging into the woman’s curled up body. Her life was snuffed out as soon as the claws found a home deep within her flesh.

    The sun would not be up for a couple of more hours when the jeep pulled into the trailer park. It wound its way through the almost labyrinthian road, a concrete affair that was in desperate need of repairs, before finding its way to the far back. Tucked in the shadows was a small stationery home, settled and untouched, waiting for its new owner.

    The jeep pulled up in front of it and the engine turned off, extinguishing all light from the area completely. A stout woman stepped out of the car, groaning slightly as she did. She placed two fists on the small of her back, bending backwards, coaxing out small popping noises as she did. Her arms moved up over her head, stretching towards the night sky, extending her whole body into a cat like stretch. She didn’t breath for a second, euphoric in the motion, before her shoulders gave a short spasm and she managed to pull out of it delightfully. When her eyes opened again, she was smiling up at the stars.

    Helewys McGraw reveled in the open sky. She had driven more than 500 miles to be there, to see the sky untouched from light pollution. Truth be told, she had driven 500 miles the two days before. Now she had only driven from the hotel up the street. The key to the almost derelict trailer in her pocket, received from yesterday. It had cost her far less than her car and she was sure that it would be her haven. At least for a little while.

    She had made the decision to move before anyone else was awake when she had been driving across the country. She didn’t need the company, didn’t want the conversation. Even in the squalid community, it was still in relatively close quarters. Someone might come up, strike a conversation with the new neighbor. Helewys knew she could move in before there was any movement in the trailer park, her belongings all fitting neatly in the back of her jeep.     

    She wasted no time, quietly opening her car, unlocking her new home, and beginning the tedious task of unpacking. She piled the two suitcases and five boxes in her modest kitchen. The loose articles she left in the back of her car.

    Then it was a matter of locking everything up, dressing the abandoned mattress that was tightly tucked in the back with her relatively clean sheets, throwing her jacket down, and settling down. She had hoped that she would fall promptly asleep, that waking up mid sleep cycles from the cheapest motel in the county would encourage her body that yes she could sleep right away in a new place. Instead, Helewys found herself staring up curiously stained ceiling, watching it go from black to a sickly shade of tanned brown. Splashes of red and orange revealing more and more smoke stains and marking from unknown events.

    Then the sounds came. At first it was the normal quiet sounds of people walking around outside, moving through their slow, practice motions of their morning routine. Children could be heard talking, then laughing loudly. Helewys sighed heavily and pulled her jacket up and over her face. She was never one for sleeping during the day and knew it would a long time of pretending to come up with something to do as she milled around her new home. She supposed she could quietly unpack, as soon as the population outside died down.

    No sooner than the thought raced through her mind, did the first scream pierce through the air. Helewys hated screams, but they seemed to love her. She pulled the jacket slowly off her face and looked towards her window. The cloth blinds diffused the light. The scream died, a pause for a breath, then a new scream, a louder scream. The woman who was screaming had left the trailer she had been screaming from and was now screaming out in the open.

    “He killed her,” she shrieked. “That bastard finally killed her!”

    Then there were sobs between the screams. Then screams between the sobs. Then just sobs. And soon, the police that someone had called could be heard in the distance, rushing towards the trailer park.

    Helewys let out a shaky sigh and crawled out of bed. She knew that carrion cry. Knew that it was calling for her. She had heard it time and time before, ever since she was a small child. Screams and sirens. She felt foolish, thinking she could escape it. Thinking it would never find her in these backwoods, in this run down trailer. And not even 3 hours there, it summoned her once again.

    The brief thought that maybe she could ignore it, not heed it, but she knew.

    “I go where I am needed, when I am needed,” she muttered ruefully into the dim of her new bed room.

    Outside was lousy with rubberneckers. Neighbors had gathered around the offending trailer, on the far end of the lot. It was surrounded by yellow police tape, three police cars and an ambulance parked outside of it, almost obstructing the building from view. Outside of that was the crowd. Blue collar workers in jump suits, women in robes, even a scrawny man standing in boxers and a white tank top and flip flops. Small children, dressed and ready for school, back packs strapped to their backs, craned their heads around their parents legs, trying see around the hands of parental censorship.

    Helewys stared at the scene from her open screened door. The mesh net tinted the scene. It was something colorful. Blues and reds meshing together to form a purple blinking light, backed with a crown of reds and golds, all obfuscated with a criss cross of grey brown. Helewys’ brow furrowed as she stared at the scene. She breathed hard steady breaths through her nose. The siren song of her profession, the one she tried to abandon. It was clear it would not let her.

    It would be so easy to simply go back into her little hoddle, to start unpacking, to ignore the wails of the woman, the screech of the siren, the lights that would dance around her abode. But someone might have been dead. And she was there. The blocks were stacking up. Helewys would not last long just putting away her two dishes and three changes of clothes. She took a step out of her trailer.

    Her stride was purposeful, her head held high. She was still in the light green jacket, grey shirt, and boot leg jeans from the drive of the night before. She hadn’t bothered to tie the laces of her work boots, merely slipped them on before stepping out. She kept her back stiff and her hands in her pockets, keeping a practiced expression of cool impassiveness. The position, the clothes, the expression, all of it gave off the impression she wanted. She would be dismissed, mingling in with the crowd as no one of any importance, but not dismissed so easily, standing like someone worthy of respect. She would meet no one’s eyes, keeping her focus on the offended trailer. Helewys sauntered her way up, slipping into just the edges of the crowd.

    There she stood, coming in at a not very impressive 5 foot 4, she couldn’t exactly see above the crowd. She looked around with only her eyes, taking in the scene. There was a not very well kept excuse of a yard, a small smudge of red where Helewys supposed the hysterical woman had collapsed on the ground, screaming literal bloody murder. The front door was enclosed in a porch, ajar to let the swath of on the scene police detail enter and exit the tiny home. Currently, it was devoid of all traffic. Helewys finally craned her neck, attempting to see if they removed the body. A flash from a back room, then another. The crime scene team was taking pictures.

    She needed a closer look, if she was going to be able to do anything about this. She had to look at the body. And when the police removed the body, she would not be able to get access, not in this town. Her eyes scanned for weak spots.

    The cop on the far right. Not necessarily a thug, but at this point he wasn’t more than a hypervigilant mall cop. His job was to make sure no one who wasn’t supposed to get under that tape and to keep an eye out for anyone suspicious, maybe the murderer returning to the scene of the crime. The so called ‘he’ who finally killed ‘her.’ As it stood, it was far too early for the one upped mall cop, he was tired, he was slightly bored, as much as one could be at a murder scene, and, most of all, he was scorned for his position with the murder. Helewys ID’d the young man as her mark, now she just needed a vantage point.

    She scanned the trailer just a little bit longer. The front door wouldn’t be an option. Despite no traffic in and out of the home, there was a slew of bodies standing just in the entrance. From where she stood, she could see that it opened into a rather cozy, surprisingly sizeable living room. It opened towards the back, into a kitchen. To the right was the bedroom. That left the very open back porch. There was one on all of the units. She couldn’t see it from where she stood and hoped it had a door, like its neighbors. All she needed was two seconds.

    Helewys moved. She walked slowly, mingling through the crowd, not looking at the rent a cop. She was tired, needed sleep, lacked the focus that she required, but so did the young man. She raised her left hand, keeping it no higher than her hip, her palm pointed at the officer. She twisted it and turned it, her eyes on the home, until she felt the click into place. The officer stiffened, seeming to sense something. With her right hand, she pointed her hand into a gun, index finger pointing into the woods, thumb raised to attention. With a click of her mouth, she cocked the thumb, bringing it down like a hammer.

    Off to her left, deep within the woods, a branch snapped. She slowly blinked her eyes, thinking of shadows moving in the distance, letting the cold fear of a child seeing figures in the night run through her. When she opened again, the officer had seen it. Whatever it was. He jolted once, his focus no longer bored and scorned, more intense. His hand went to the gun at his hip, before ducking under the tape, and walking into the woods. He didn’t even notice Helewys.

    She kept her stride, keeping that respectable posture, the aloof air of someone to keep unnoticed, and made her path around towards the back of the mobile home. There, no one stood in the back porch. A very serious looking woman in a pants suit was walking back into the living room. From where she stood, she could see some details.

    Blood splatter. A lot of it. Enough to tell Helewys that the body probably would not be in one piece. It might not even be in body pieces. From where she stood she could smell the gore in the air. It had the coppery smell of blood that elicited a taste in her mouth, laced with the familiar stench of shit. Whatever had killed the woman had disemboweled her.

    Helewys leaned off to the side, frowning so hard she could see her brow. That was the body that was in the kitchen. A couple of fingers lay on the ground, separated from the hand by different knuckles. They were a man’s hands. She moved her eyes up and saw that the splatters of blood were really two splatters. One from the kitchen and then one from the closet just to the left of the kitchen. Two bodies.

    The amount of remains left in the tiny home, the amount of space that the two were killed, and the surprising containment of the gore narrowed down the possibilities of the killer in Helewys head. She knew, right away, that it was not human. If it had been, then someone would’ve noticed earlier. It was not the giants of old, again someone would notice. And it was not a wolf, bear, or deer, in any version of the creature. It used a door. She spied the back door attached to the sun deck. It was there, the hinges were wrenched from a force and the plastic handle was dented and broken at an angle. Helewys was not completely sure that that had happened last night, but she was willing to be that the whatever had done that.

    She didn’t crouch, kept her head high, and made her way to the door. A lock lay on the floor. Definite sign that the door had been violated last night. The owner of the clean living room would not leave something like that on the floor and something as important as a rear port broken.

    The stout woman pulled a white kerchief from her pocket, flicking it in the morning air. She concealed her right hand in the fabric. With her index finger, Helewys crooked the underside of the broken handle and pulled. The already irritated hinges squealed angrily at the pull.

    She closed her eyes, angry at the sound and herself. She was so tired. She breathed deeply. But it seemed it had not alerted anyone. No foot steps came her way.

Helewys let out her breath and thought of the color grey. She thought of day old milk in the back of the fridge, forgotten, but not rancid. She thought of missing socks. Of cracks in couch cushions. She opened her eyes and stepped inside the home.

She wouldn’t be able to get into the kitchen, where all the action had been. That was okay, she would get all the information she needed from that back porch. The clearly neglected room, sparse of any furniture, had already been combed, inspected, and promptly determined to be uninteresting to the case. Save for the intruding woman that now no one would notice.

She stood in the doorway, keeping her face neutral. She kept her hands behind her back and leaned forward, into the hallway. The scene was just as gruesome as she had imagined and then some.

There was indeed two bodies. The one from inside the kitchen was male, judging from the fingers on the ground. The wispy white hairs on the knuckles, tinged with blood. Married at one point, evident from the wedding ring. There was a head or about a third remainder of a head. It was ripped off at around the nose, separating the top half of the skull from the jaw. The flesh around the eyes dangled with moth eaten holes dripping towards the ground. One eyeball was still intact in the socket, staring blankly and white. There was also the remains of a shattered rib cage, some lung poking out from beneath, muscle, flesh, and what appeared to be a flannel shirt tiered on the floor. Everything else was some form of soup. Inspecting closer, Helewys spied one of the legs had also been torn off and discarded out the kitchen window. It was still dangling there. She could account for intestine, open and squeezed out, another foot was shattered but still identifiable, and the remains of a pelvis. Something had picked this gentleman up and literally pulled him apart, like taffy.

She committed what details she could to memory. Then she moved on to the other body. From her vantage point there wasn’t much to see. It was killed within the closet. The door had been ripped off its hinges and was thrown out the front door. A pair of legs, a woman’s legs, poked out of the door comically. They were thick, like tree trunks, and had been shaved maybe a couple of days ago, depending on the stubble. Helewys leaned to the right to try to see into the closet. It seemed the legs stopped just above the knees. Like the unidentifiable man in the kitchen, the body was soup. From what she could tell, the blood painted the entire inside of the closet with innards, liquids, and complete horror.

This greatly diminished the suspect pool.

Helewys took this in with careful consideration, committing every detail she could see to her memory. The whole affair took less than a minute. She took a step back. Policemen hadn’t even glanced in her general direction at first. Then they would look sidelong at her. Now eyes were starting to linger on her, holding her stare for 5 seconds, then 7, now 10. She needed to get out of there before someone truly noticed. She took another step. Then turned her back on the scene. She had gotten out of the back door and stepped out of the back porch before anyone had noticed.

“Hey!” called the voice to her left. “What are you doing?”

The young, bored officer that had left his post to go gallivanting after shadows off in the woods did not take as long as Helewys had intended. She met his eyes, swallowed deeply, and put on a smile that she had hoped looked completely stupid.

“I-I-I’m sorry,” she said, with a heavy accent, mimicking the officer’s. A stupid regional woman. “I just wanted to see.”

“Yeah? What is it that you wanted to see?” he got up in her face, stepping  into her personal space and looming over her.

“I’m so sorry, I just, you see,” she swallowed again and gulped deeply. “I read them mystery books, you know, S-s-sue Graffton and Deen Kootz. I really like the Bones show. I just wanted to, ya know, see?”

He inspected her and under his gaze, she smiled wider, keeping his stare. Stupid. Stupid and regional. Finally the officer rolled his eyes, stood up straight, and hooked his thumbs into his belt loops. He sighed heavily.

“Naw, you don’t,” he said, staring into the trailer. “Go on, git outta here.”

Helewys jolted her shoulders in a mini shrug, comically stepping around the young man. She caught sight of his name tag. Officer Boon. Like the scene of the crime she committed him to memory. His pale blue eyes and his dark blonde hair, recently washed, the sloppy buttoning of his collar, the dirt under his fingernails, the slight bend of his knees. Every detail.

She moved away from the scene and went back into the crowd, now diminished. It seemed that the lack of movement and conversation outside of the little trailer home was not entertaining enough to be any later for work, school, or otherwise. She mingled back into the crowd, to keep up the appearance under the vigilance of Officer Boon. He stared at her, but she did not meet his gaze. She kept her shoulders up, her arms wrapped around her body, and shivered in the early autumnal air.

She stayed like that for a couple of more hours, lingering with the last of the crowd. She did manage to see one of the gurneys taken out, a body bag zipped up. She wondered how they managed to get the body in the bag, if they had to use a shovel. She shivered again.

It was mid morning when there were only a handful of gagglers still around. The man in his underwear, two women, one still in curlers, and another man in a cheap suit who clearly found this more important than wherever he had to be. That was when Helewys decided to leave.

She made an abrupt turn and headed back to the main road, instead of her house. Her arms still around her, no longer shivering. The sun was slowly making its way high in the sky and the chill of early morning had passed. Once she hit the main road, she made the turn back to her new abode.

She had left the trailer unlocked, but it seemed uninteresting. All her boxes and bags were still where she had left them, untouched. Once inside her miniscule kitchen, she locked the door behind her, closed her eyes. Standing there, etched into the back of her eyelids, she saw what little remains of the man and the woman, mauled, ripped, liquified. Helewys stood in her kitchen, rocked back and forth once before doubling over the sink and retching.

    The decision to run away had always been a tough one. She had never dwelled on the thought for too long, but that did not make it any easier of a choice. The first time she ran away, she was roughly 7 years old and had made it a far as the bus stop. It was still a 17 mile hike down to the nearest stop, her rural town not having much in the way of a transit system, but all the same, her cop father had found her and brought her safely home.

    About a week ago, the snap decision to run away from her life had flashed in her head. She would cut all contact with friends and family, pile what little belongings she had in her car, and find the most quiet, cheapest, sleepiest town in America. A five second web search brought her to southern Louisiana, to a trailer park, where people went to quietly die.

Like the first decision to run away and all the ones in between, she ran to Louisiana, down to swampland and poverty, in a snap decision that cloyed at her chest. The people whose lives she interrupted with unwanted problems, the problems that followed her around, the responsibility and duty she had been unwittingly saddled with since day freakin one, left in the dust. As if she might be able to run away from them.

She had curled up on her kitchen floor, sitting with her knees to her chest, and wondered if she had brought the death to the sleepy little trailer park. The woman had been killed before she had rolled up in her jeep that morning, but she had bought the trailer the day before. Did the demons follow her there or merely wait until she arrived? Did she bring mayhem or did she simply unknowingly go where mayhem was? She toyed with the familiar chicken egg issue for as long as she would the decision to run away.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Two people were dead and she was there. That only meant one thing.

From her place on the floor, she could reach the big box marked BOOKS. She picked at the corner with one finger until she dug a hole into the box. With her crooked index, she dragged the cardboard vessel to her side, then leaned against it. She had work to do, it didn’t mean she would be quick about it. She could afford a couple of minutes of sulking, now that she had made haste to go look at dead bodies.

The packaging tape wasn’t as fragile as the box and she couldn’t rip it apart with her fingers. She pulled her swiss army knife from her pocket, ran a delicate line down the center, and only once the seal was broken could she expose the contents.

The title of the box wasn’t a lie, there were books inside. They weren’t all strictly for writing, they weren’t all written by someone who wasn’t Helewys McGraw, and none of them were fiction. To anyone else, they read like a terrible, horrible fiction, presented in the most clinical standard, but to Mis McGraw, they were a fact that she had followed all her life. A fact she had tried to run from.

She pulled out portfolio sized notebooks off the top, leather bound tomes, small spiral bound novelettes, loose sheaths of paper that were stapled together. One by one she placed them around her in two concise but not necessarily neat piles. One for possibles, one for not. In her mind, the possible pile was noticeably smaller than the non, but looking at them now she realized her internal knowledge did not compare to the one she toted around. At the end of the hour, the morning had finished and she had two large piles in front of her. She kicked the non over.

Despite the events of the morning, her stomach gurgled in protest. It hadn’t gotten proper attention in well over 24 hours. She was also ignoring just how tired she was. It was too late to crawl back into bed by this point. Maybe she could convince herself it would only be a nap. She couldn’t be hungry if she was asleep.

She pulled the first book into her lap, a leather affair with blue ink on worn pages, to be handled with delicate care as it was over 100 years old. She had lifted the cover when there were three sharp knocks on her door. The plastic portal rattled with each hit and Helewys felt her stomach drop. The lights of the police cars were still prominent and she thought of Officer Boon.

It was a purposeful knock, imposing and demanding. Helewys herself had used it before, when she wanted to know something from someone she was sure didn’t want to readily give it up. She stared at her door, stroking the book in her lap, and worried at her lip.

“Ma’am?” a voice asked and she could see the shock of hair silhouetted in her window. It was a young man, leaning over to see inside through the frosted pane. It was obviously not Boon.

Helewys groaned, gingerly placing the book a top her pile of possibles, and rose from the floor. Her hips hurt from sitting there so long and she cursed her age. She maneuvered around her stacks before stumbling at her door. She only opened it a crack, peering out at her visitor.

She recognized him. He was thankfully in clothes now, albeit ratty tattered rags. He was no older than 25, a skinny thing, with a forced grin on his face. The skewed, mussed hair looked exactly has his shadow had, unkempt and unbrushed. In his hands seemed to be some sort of food. It was a deep bowl covered with plastic wrap that had misted over. Through it, Helewys could make out rice, something brown and something green.

“Hi ma’am,” the young man said, half shoving the bowl out. The smile on his face was full of nerves and not wanting to be there.

After he didn’t say anything, she raised one thick eyebrow high into her hairline, not pulling the door any more open than just a crack.

“Uh,” he said, his smile dropping. “Uh, my moms saw your car, figured you was new.”

He paused again, as if that was enough of an explanation. Helewys sighed, dropping her chin to her chest, and stepped outside. Might as well be nice to the neighbors. She opened her door and stood in the way.

“I’m Helewys,” she said, her voice as flat and tired as she was. “Just moved in last night.”

“Ah I’m Jake, me and my moms live 2 units down that way.” He tucked the bowl under one arm and pointed. “She made too much of whatever this stuff is. She watches the cookin’ channel you see. Food Network or somethin’. Figured you could use a welcome, you know, other than . . .”

His gaze trailed off to the right, the lights catching in his big dark eyes. She noticed he was smiling and wondered if this one was actually real or still fake.

“So what is that?” Helewys nodded to the bowl, bringing his attention back.

“Oh. Uh. I uh,” he held the bowl up and out to Helewys, inspecting it like a very large unknown microscope slide. “I dunno. But its good. Its got them andouille sausages in it. ‘S got a kick to it.”

Helewys snorted, letting go of the door frame and crossing her arms across her chest.

“Just how old is it?”

“No more than a week. Its still good.” He held it up and out towards her, the big fake looking smile returning. Helewys began to think that it wasn’t fake and he just had too many teeth.

“Mm hmm,” she let a little sass into her voice, mirroring the enthusiasm of his accent.

“The woman makes enough food for the army, and its just me and her and sometimes my pappy up the ways. In all ‘tuality, all the folks’ around here are gettin’ real tired of eatin’ her shit. Uh, I mean, food.”
    “You’re doing a good job selling this, kid,” Helewys drawled. She was enjoying the distraction, despite herself.

“Uh,” he said, holding out the syllable. The smile had dropped and she could physically see the wheels turning in his head. “Well, ma’am I mean-”

“Helewys,” she said, reaching out and taking the bowl from his hands. “Call me Helewys. And you’re lucky I’m hungry.”

“Right,” the smile returned to his face, blooming with excitement again.

She nodded at him and went to close the door with her elbow. His hand shot out to stop it. The look of open mouthed shock was enough to tell him that he had done wrong and enough to tell Helewys that it was something he did often.

“Uh sorry ma’am, uh, miss, um, miss Helewys,” he stumbled.

Helewys sighed rolling her eyes. She turned to face him, that eyebrow raised again. It was starting to hurt.

“Sorry, I jus’ noticed you don’t gots your power on ‘s all,” he gestured off to the side of the trailer, supposedly where a hook up was. “How you gonna store the stuff? You ain’t got no fridge.”

She sighed giving him a steady, even look, but not saying anything.

“I mean, you could come around, store it in our fridge. Gonna be hard to get them ‘letric folks out here, what with the whole murderin’ thing an all.”

Helewys’ stare darkened slightly, meeting his eyes at a level gaze.

“H-hey, thats a lotta books you got there, you some kinda lawyer?” he asked, attempting to change the subject. Maybe he just wanted to stick around to talk.

“Thanks for the food, Jake,” Helewys once again adopted that flat, even, almost bored tone. “I’ll call the electric company later. Tell your mom I said thank you.”

This time she closed the door before the boy could get anything else out. For good measure she leaned her back against the plastic and waited. He stuck around for a second, most likely unsure of what to do. She could hear him shuffling around before he finally walked the two steps down off her pitiful front porch, then down the dirt path, the gravel crunching under his big heavy boots and clumsy gait. She closed her eyes and sighed. The scent of spicy pork product filled her nose pleasantly, masking the mildew and dust.

The scarecrow of a boy had a point, she had to admit. She would have to get an electric company out there, to hook her up into the communal grid. She would have to dip into her savings to pay for it, but it wouldn’t be too much. She didn’t want to stick around for too long. Helewys beat her head against the door, remembering the cell phone she had run over with glee. Thinking at the time how wonderful it would be to not talk to anyone from her past life. She needed a burner phone. Or hopefully the front office wouldn’t be too busy with all the commotion.

‘What with the murder and all,’ she thought in Jake’s accent.

She beat her head again, cursing herself for not thinking ahead. But that was the whole point. If she didn’t have a plan, then maybe everything would be so much simpler. Turned out it wasn’t.

Now she had a timeline. She had no light to do her research in when it got dark out. It would get cold too, but nothing her blankets couldn’t handle. It was still early fall still and she was in the south now. She would be fine.

The worst of it was now she had to go and be cordial. The boy was a greeting from his mother, an outstretched hand of neighborly friendliness. She beat her head one last time, regretting opening her door. Later tonight, after the sun set, she would put on a smile and head down to the trailer Jake pointed out. Might as well enjoy the whatever she had in her hands now, while it was still warm.