The Cave Dwellers by Christina McDowell (readict books TXT) 📕

“Billy, ew,” Bunny says.

Billy falls to the side, his eyes rolling deep into the back of his head.

“Oh my God, Billy… Billy!” Bunny shrieks, adjusting herself so she’s not putting pressure on him. She grabs his shirt, trying to bring him back to consciousness. “What’s happening!” she screams.

Bunny, disheveled and still rolling, runs out into the corridor. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.… someone help!” The heavy beat of some Jay-Z song blasts through the gilded walls and no one can hear her screaming.

Marty runs out of a second bedroom down the hallway with his shirt unbuttoned. “What is it? What’s happening?”

“Call nine-one-one!!!” Bunny yells as she trips and falls, the carpet burning the skin off her knee.

Red flashing lights swirl atop the ambulance that waits between the wrought iron gates of the cobblestone driveway. Hail has turned into freezing rain and Billy is whisked out the front doors on a stretcher, clinging to his every breath with an oxygen mask and two paramedics taking his blood levels. Bunny runs after him, but when she hits the freezing rain, she loses him in her focus, the red lights blurring her vision, her head pounding, her mouth dry. “What’s happening?” she asks no one in particular. On the other side of the driveway, Mackenzie and Marty stand with Meredith and Phyllis, who’s doing damage control with a police officer. Marty walks over to Bunny and wraps his jacket around her wet shoulders. “Here, Bun, put this on, it’s okay, it’s gonna be okay.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The electronic sound of a camera flash awakens Mackenzie, whose limbs are intertwined with Marty’s. They’re lying naked across the green felt pool table in her basement, covered in one of Betsy’s nouveau riche blankets (unclear what it is made of).

Mackenzie lifts her head, disoriented, when she sees Haley standing at the edge of the pool table with her cell phone pointed in their direction: snap, snap, snap.

“What the fuck?” Mackenzie leans over as if she’s a hostage inside her own hangover, swats at Haley and misses.

Haley swings her body to the left with a wide smirk across her face. “Blackmail, bitch.”

Mackenzie rocks Marty’s shoulders. “Marty, get up, get up! My alarm didn’t go off!”

Marty rolls over, rubs his eyes. “Huh?”

“Get up. Hurry! You have to go or my dad will literally kill you. Get up!”

Marty sits up, blinks, then reaches for his glasses on the edge of the table. He puts them on, pushes them up his nose, and sees Haley standing at the foot of the pool table smiling at him. “Oh, shit,” he says, Haley’s presence propelling him off of the pool table and onto the floor, panicked as he reaches for his scattered clothing.

For no reason other than to punish and humiliate her sister, Haley begins to scream: “AHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!” It is guttural, animalistic—she’s a budding actress!

“Haley, stop!” Mackenzie whispers, straining the muscles in her neck.

After Billy’s overdose, everyone had been sent home. But Mackenzie was still rolling. She had been staring at her mother’s collection of vintage Waterford crystal service bells in the living room, picking at her scalp, when Marty called to see if she was still awake. He’d taken an Uber to the Wallaces’ house, sneaked in through the garage door. Billy’s overdose wasn’t going to get in the way of losing his virginity to the new senator’s daughter.

As Marty runs to the basement door and out toward the tennis courts, Mackenzie hears the sound of her father running down the back staircase. She knows the sound of panicked foot-stomps. Doug appears in his boxer shorts holding a loaded nine-millimeter handgun.

Marty runs for his life across the courts, his glasses falling off his nose, shattering to pieces. Fuck it, he runs for the exit as Doug follows him waving his gun in the air like a drunken cowboy who’s escaped rehab.

“DAD, stop!!! STOP!!!” Mackenzie screams.

Marty runs down Chain Bridge Road with no shoes on and an open shirt in the freezing cold, passing old Hickory Hill, the Kennedy estate, and various groomed lawns full of government propaganda—pro-gun, anti-abortion, Blue Lives Matter!

Mackenzie runs topless across the tennis court in a pink thong screaming at the top of her lungs—a volcano of teenage love erupting from her postpubescent self: “DAD, STOP!!!”

Haley stands shaken by the escalating seriousness of the situation, eyes wide open, her iPhone dangling by her side as she watches her sister save her boyfriend’s life.

“Christ, Mackenzie, what in God’s name is going on?! Cover yourself!” Doug’s balls hang down the side of his hiked-up boxer shorts as he walks toward her, holding his gun down.

Mackenzie walks swiftly back toward the basement door. “You were going to kill my boyfriend!” She enters the game room and charges her sister: “And it’s all your fault!” She lunges for Haley’s throat. “I’m gonna fucking KILL YOU!”

Haley runs around the pool table like a puppy not wanting to go in its crate.

“She’s trying to blackmail me!” Mackenzie yells. “Give me your phone, you little bitch!” Mackenzie picks up her own phone on the edge of the table and throws it at Haley’s face. Doug stares in horror at his pre- and postpubescent daughters.

“You’re just jealous of me!” Haley screams before Mackenzie’s cell phone hits her lower lip, blood bursting down her chin.

Doug runs to Haley, pointing his finger at Mackenzie. “Go to your room before I blow a hole in this goddamn ceiling!”

“She’s trying to blackmail me! She’s trying to post a naked photo of me on Instagram!” Mackenzie cries.

“I am not!” Haley yells.

“Go to your room!” Doug storms toward Mackenzie, prepared to rip her away from the pool table by the arm.

“Fine! Not my fault if nudes of me show up on the Internet during your next campaign! FUCK YOU!” Mackenzie screams a final time at Haley, then snatches up her phone and runs up the stairs.

Doug sets his gun on the counter of the wet bar, grabs a towel from next to the