Breaking Point

A scuffle sounded across the carpet beyond the kitchen.

I ran toward them, petrified that they would try to escape out of the front and run right into a passing cruiser on curfew patrol. I jerked around where the kitchen table should have been and slid, rounding the corner too fast.

Chase was right on my heels. He grabbed my shoulder and shoved me bodily into the wall, pinning me against it. A moment later my heart rebounded, its cadence slamming through my eardrums.

“No soldiers here,” Chase called loudly enough for someone in the next room to hear. We waited behind the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room and the front of the house.

Hurried footsteps, and then silence.

“We won’t hurt you!” I said against Chase’s tightening grip. “Don’t go out the front! There was a patrol car passing through earlier.”

Silence.

“I’m not a soldier,” Chase said again. “It’s just a disguise.”

“Yeah, right!” returned a male’s voice. “How’m I s’pposed to believe you?”

“I’m putting down my gun,” said Chase. He cast me a warning look before releasing me, and then, to my shock, knelt and leaned the weapon against my foot. I scooped it up, but kept it lowered.

“I’m not putting down mine!” the man responded.

“We both know you don’t have one,” said Chase calmly.

“We’re looking for a woman—Lori Whittman,” I said. “That’s all. We don’t want any trouble, we just want to talk to her.”

“She’s here,” said a female voice. “I’m Lori Whittman.”

My stomach turned. No, no, no, no, no. That was not my mother’s voice.

“I’m coming out,” I said.

Chase blocked my path. He flipped on the flashlight and stepped out into the hall with me right behind him. I tucked the gun in the back of the skirt’s waistband and pushed, trying to get him out of my way, but he was as solid as a brick wall.

“Who gave you my name?” the girl inquired.

“A friend…” Chase trailed off. He stiffened before me.

“It’s… you,” she responded. “You!” she screeched. She knew him. And he knew her.

I finally succeeded in shoving Chase aside.

There before me, highlighted in the beam of the flashlight, was a girl with a wild thicket of red hair, pale cheeks, and dark freckles. Her thin mouth was pulled back into a sneer, and the green eyes I’d known since my childhood hardened with fury, and then blinked, confused.

“Beth?”

“Ember?”

My knees began to knock. This wasn’t right: Beth, here in this condemned house, using my mother’s name. She couldn’t be running a checkpoint, she was just… Beth. Just Beth, my best friend. She didn’t know this world. She knew high school and who was dating who and what assignment was coming up in English class. She knew what size pants I wore and that I hated tomatoes. This was all wrong.

But I didn’t think any more about it, because the next second her arms were around my neck and she was hugging me, and I was hugging her back, and she was blubbering and bawling like I’d only seen her do when we were thirteen and her cat Mars had died.

She smelled like Beth, and she felt like Beth, all hard joints and long skinny limbs. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and jeans and cute slip-on flats and all I could think was how impossible those would be to run in.

“Ohmygoodness I thought you were dead! What are you doing here? What are you wearing? Are you a Sister now? And your hair…. Are you going back to school? Wait, that’s silly, I don’t know what I’m talking about I’m just glad you’re alive!”

She said it all so quickly I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It was better that way. If I had opened my mouth, the disappointment would have come flooding out, and I couldn’t do that because this was Beth, my best friend, and I was supposed to be as overjoyed as she was.

A second later she pulled back, and I caught a glimpse of a short guy in his late twenties with a goatee and circular glasses. Before I could ask who he was, or what Beth was even doing here, she released me, and pounced on Chase, claws out like a redheaded wildcat.

“Beth!” I grabbed her around the waist and heaved her off of him. He stumbled back into the kitchen, arms raised in surrender, and stalled against the stove. It clanged loudly, the metal scratching metal. He stilled it with lightning fast reflexes.

“What are you doing here?” she sneered at him. Beth always had a mean temper, even when we were kids.

“We heard my mom was here,” I said. I didn’t let go of her skinny waist.

“You have some nerve coming back here after what you did to them!”

“He’s okay,” I told her. “He helped me escape from rehab! He’s not a soldier.”

“He sure looks like one.”

“He’s not.”

“He can’t talk for himself?”

“Beth, please.”

“I’m not a soldier,” said Chase in a low voice. Beth had her own flashlight and shined it accusingly on his face.

“Then where’d you get that uniform, huh? And why were you with the soldiers when they took my best friend?” I could practically see the steam coming off of her.

“Keep it down!” said the guy behind Beth.

“Beth, stop it,” I said, instantly exhausted. Where were the kitchen chairs? I had to sit down. Where was the table for that matter?

“She waited forever for you, you know that?” Beth rolled on, a year of pent-up best-friend aggression letting loose. “When you left it killed her. I’ve never seen her that sad in my whole life.”

A wave of guilt crashed over me, followed closely by embarrassment. I didn’t want her making Chase feel bad with that stuff. He already felt bad enough.

“I mean seriously, what kind of boyfriend doesn’t even write a letter to say he’s okay?”

“Not a very good one,” said Chase.

“And then you come back and arrest them?”

I backed into the wall.

“Beth, please.”

“Well, he should know,” she said haughtily.

“Where are the chairs?” I asked.

She shined the flashlight in my face. “Oh God, you look like you’re going to throw up. You’re not going to throw up, are you? Stephen, get a trash can!”

“There aren’t any,” said the guy behind her.

“Ah, hell. The MM took all your stuff, Ember. They cleaned you out. I got a couple things before they finished, but all the furniture and everything, it’s all gone.”

I slid down the wall to the floor. In a second, Chase was at my side, helping to settle me on the dusty linoleum. The moment I was down, he released me and backed away. I didn’t want him to go. I needed him close. Beth eyed him reproachfully and knelt at my side.

“You’re not going to puke?”

I had yesterday, outside the Wayland Inn during the fire. No one had balked at me then, like Beth was doing now.

I shook my head.

“Beth, what are you doing?” I asked.

“What do you mean—”