And walks even faster.
* * *
Mike rounds the corner and sees her up ahead: A slight woman in a long, cloth coat, fashionably cut. A toque pulled down over her ears. Shabby. Anonymous. Totally unseasonal.
Adage?
She pauses at the crosswalk. Her face is very pale against the dark. White and flat, and oddly limp. Motionless, except for a pair of searching eyes.
As she bends to press the signal change button, a lock of hair spills from her hat—
Ad—
Blonde.
Mike feels his heart deflate.
You stupid sucker, he thinks. She’s dead in a ditch somewhere. You blew your education to get here, and she’s dead. Probably died while you were still on the bus.
The woman reaches up to scratch behind her ear. Maybe to tuck back the lock.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
Instead, she—
what?
— digs her nails into the side of her neck, and rips.
The skin flaps slightly as she shifts weight.
Oh, God.
Delicately, Adage reaches further in, to scratch the raw flesh underneath.
* * *
The signal changes. Adage spots Sherri on the opposite side—twenty feet ahead, and gaining speed.
Behind her, a movement.
Sherri pauses, nose wrinkling.
The wind has changed.
And the smell boils up from Adage now—an invisible glove of uncured hide, reaching in every direction at once. Prodded by the stench, Sherri turns—
— to meet Adage’s eyes.
“Uh,” she says, then, “Susan?”
Hardly.
And Mike freezes, as Sherri starts to run.
* * *
“So why am I telling you all this?”