Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

Lori glanced at the glove box where the Gravedigger Special was once more stored. She wondered what it would be like to touch one of the bullets. Would you be able to feel the suffering contained within? Would the tooth burn your fingers or would it be cold as Antarctic ice? Whichever was the case, she didn’t intend to find out.

She sat back in the seat and gazed out of the windshield as she thought about what she’d learned in the Garden. She didn’t understand how Aashrita’s death – and her role in it – had disrupted the Balance between Shadow and the real world, but the specific details didn’t matter, she supposed. What mattered was that she should do what the Cabal had continually urged her to – confess and atone. But confess to who, atone how? Aashrita was dead. Twice dead if that version of her in the Garden really had been her. There was no way Lori could make any kind of amends to her. Her parents then. As far as she knew, they were both still alive and still lived in Oakmont. If she went to them, told them about her last conversation with Aashrita and asked for their forgiveness, she was confident it would count as confessing. As for atoning…. That she wasn’t so sure about. But that was okay. The most important thing was that she go to Aashrita’s parents and confess. The rest would fall into place afterward. She hoped. And she hoped that if she found a way to atone, the transformations the Cabal had thrust upon Justin, Melinda, and Katie would be undone. And as for Brian…maybe he would return to being a normal, living boy. She had to believe there was a chance of saving her family and friends, otherwise, how could she continue on?

Now that she’d decided on her next move, she needed to find a way back to the real world, and more specifically to Oakmont. She needed an exit.

When she told this to Edgar, he said, “I’ve been looking for one since we left the Garden. What did you think I was doing? Psychically jacking off?”

“Is that really a thing?” she asked, intrigued.

Edgar sighed.

“You can help. Keep your eyes peeled for any place that looks like heat distortion. You know, the way the air seems to ripple above a road when it’s really hot out? That’s a sure sign of an exit. Or an entrance. You’ll get a tingly feeling on the back of your neck, too.”

Lori tried to concentrate on looking for an exit, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d learned in the Garden. In one way, it was a relief to have her memory of that day on the porch with Aashrita back. She felt as if a piece of herself had been missing for years without her realizing it, and now she felt whole. She hardly felt good about it, though. The denial she’d engaged in for so long had caused her to become a person who went through life unaffected by the events that occurred around her, by the people she interacted with, because what did the present matter when it would soon be the past? She thought of Edgar’s explanation for Shadow, how it was a realm where time went to die, a place where each tick of the clock passed through before being ultimately swallowed by entropy. She was like that too in her own way. Not only did she not try to hold on to the present, she actively consigned each moment to the past as swiftly as she could, and did her best never to think about it again. She’d always considered her forward-looking approach to life to be one of her strengths. But now she saw that it was the reason why her life was, if not exactly a mess, then stagnant. She’d let go of her romantic relationship with Larry without any great difficulty, and she’d fallen into their currently ill-defined friendship just as easily. She’d started dating Justin, but she wasn’t really committed to that relationship, even to the point where the revelation of his cancer hadn’t affected her all that much. She loved Reeny, but she didn’t spend much time with her or her husband, Charles. And while she liked being an aunt, she didn’t spend a lot of time with Brian, either. As for her parents, even though she lived in the same town as them, she hardly ever saw them. Not because there was bad blood between them, but because she rarely thought about them. It was almost like they’d ceased to exist the day she’d left home for college.

Everything that had happened since Goat-Eyes had confronted her in FoodSaver had been a nightmare, but one thing her experiences with the Cabal had done for her – they’d kept her grounded in the here and now, prevented her from dismissing and forgetting them as she’d done to so many events in her life. She knew it was possible to become too focused on the past, though. If someone wasn’t careful, they could become obsessed with it, could end up drowning in guilt and remorse. But if a person ignored the past entirely, they never learned from their mistakes, left behind wreckage as they plowed through life at full speed. Forgot friends. Forgot the hurt they’d caused them, the insults, slights, disappointments, and betrayals. The deep, deep wounds, which were sometimes fatal.

Like with Aashrita.

She would find a way to atone for what she’d done. Not for herself, and not for the fucking Cabal, but for the girl who had once been her very best friend in the world.

“Shit,” Edgar muttered.

Lori looked at him.

“What?”

“Don’t you hear that?”

At first she had no idea what he was talking about, but then she realized the wordless voices on the radio, which she’d gotten so used to that she didn’t pay attention to them anymore, sounded different. They were louder, faster, higher pitched. They sounded distressed, alarmed.

“What