I felt my fingers start to uncurl, threatening to drop the tire iron to the road with a crash, but I forced them to stay closed, to grip tighter. Had I really…? It certainly looked like it, and in that case, I wouldn’t want to be leaving the murder weapon just laying around with my fingerprints on it.
But no, it wasn’t murder, was it? I mean, I had done it to protect myself, and Nancy. Would anyone believe that, though? Maybe they would if the spell didn’t wear off Nancy, yet if it did, even if she remembered the whole thing, everyone would think we were just making the whole thing up. And what if she didn’t get better? I’d just ruined any chance, however small, we might have had to get him to change her back. It looked like I had royally screwed us both over this time.
My gaze darted up and down the road, searching for anything, any light, from a car or a house, or whatever. There was nothing. Maybe there was hope, then… At least, as long as I didn’t do something stupid, like stick around and get caught at the scene. I stumbled back to the car, freezing as each gust of wind shook the tree branches, freeing them of the last few leaves still trying to hang on, my heart thumping faster and faster as my head started spinning. More than a few times, I found myself tripping over my own feet like I was Nancy, and each time I barely kept from falling. About halfway back, as the realization of what I’d done continued to wash over me, I lurched over into the woods a few feet, and bent over, as what felt like everything I’d eaten in the past week forced its way back out of my mouth.
I paused, resting against one of the trees, gasping for air; luckily, once I’d gotten a lung-full of it, I felt quite a bit better, as with it came reason. I’d done what I had to do. It was over now, nothing I could do to change it, so I might as well just make my peace with it and move on to more important things, like getting back to the car, and getting it out of the ditch. If Nancy was better, she might be confused as to where she was – if she wasn’t, she was probably scared to be all alone in the dark. Either way, I needed to get back to her.
I stuck the tire iron into one of the plastic bags in the trunk, making a mental note to wash it off in the garage sink sometime before my parents got back from their trip, then went around to check on Nancy. She was laying still, but after a few tense moments, I noticed her chest moving in and out, and realized she was sleeping, sucking her thumb, and not dead. I told myself that wasn’t necessarily a bad sign, she could have just been sleeping before the man had died. It would have been nice to have her awake and re-grown, though, to help me with the car.