Jared relented. He looked around with rage and grief and confusion flashing in his eyes. All those emotions were definitely present, but whichever one was in the driver’s seat would determine what Jared did next.
“What the fuck did you do?” he yelled at Alex once more. “You fucking killed him!” He shoved Alex one last time before allowing himself to be pulled away by Nicole and Kaitlyn. “Is that how this works?” he yelled down at Alex, then at the others. “Is that how this fucking works now? We kill people if we’re scared of them? Huh? Is that what we fucking do now?!”
No one seemed to know what to say to this. They were unable to move at the force of his words.
Jared looked down at the body of his friend, wiping his face on his sleeve. He quickly reached down and grabbed something, and just as quickly, straightened. He gave everyone a glassy-eyed look and bolted inside.
Kaitlyn, Nicole, and David helped Alex to his feet and held him up as he finally found his breath. His head felt wet but he was afraid to touch his hair. Instead, he stared at what lay in his immediate field of vision. Between the flashes of light and spots that spread in front of his eyes, he saw the blood on the ground, and Steve’s twisted body. Sickened, he still saw what was missing from the scene.
“The knife,” he said in a raspy voice, barely audible to the group. “He took the knife.”
Nicole bolted when they heard a scream from the second floor. Everyone else stood in shocked silence for just a moment before following. Alex, still dazed by the assault, was the last to go.
Nicole, David, and Kaitlyn stood at the top of the stairs, over a crumpled Hannah. She was a screaming, crying mess.
“What happened?” Kaitlyn knelt with her adopted sister, trying to calm the girl.
“Kyle!” Hannah eventually spat out between screeching sobs. “Kyle! Kyle!”
Nicole ran down the hall as Kaitlyn tightly hugged Hannah to her, both of them sobbing. David stood frozen, as Alex finally made it to the top of the stairs.
When Nicole didn’t return from the far end of the hall, the group slowly made their way to Kyle’s room. Alex didn’t know what to expect. The day had been incredibly surreal. The days leading up to it were also surreal, but somehow this day had been the strangest: a member of their group—albeit a recent addition—was now dead. Surely, they all felt responsible in their own way. Alex knew it had been Steve’s life, or his and Kaitlyn’s. It didn’t help. It didn’t erase the image of the boy outside with a bar of sharp metal embedded in his face and blood thrown everywhere. Nothing would.
Until the sight at the end of the hall.
Kyle lay lifeless on the floor, his arms over his head, his shirt stained red, darker spots splashed in half a dozen places. A stream of blood dripped from his mouth into the pool that had formed under his small, motionless body.
Nicole sat on the floor next to him, stroking his damp hair out of his wide-open eyes as she shook, unable to breathe through her sobs.
Ryan stood next to her, his arms wrapped around her shoulders, shaking along with her. He cried, but without a sound.
Shadow lay on the other side of Kyle, whimpering.
Jared was nowhere to be seen.
“We have to go,” Nicole said to the group later that day.
Darkness settled early that evening. Thick clouds had formed; bad weather was on its way. The view from the window was the same as the feeling that hung over the group. A storm was coming and they had to take shelter if they could.
Alex had been in a fog, and Nicole’s words finally brought him out. It was the first real thing that anyone had said since they discovered Kyle’s body hours earlier. Caring glances and hugs were shared, but words were left unspoken. Alex felt the same emotions coming from each of the six remaining survivors. They were full of regret; full of anger; full of worry.
Alone with their thoughts, everyone seemed terrified to actually be alone. Bloody handprints left on the “hard way” exit showed how Jared had escaped, but it wasn’t definite that he was gone. He could be there. He could be hiding.
He could get them.
If he wasn’t there, he would come back. They all knew the solution; Nicole was just the first one to say it.
“We can’t stay here,” she continued. “It’s not ... safe.”
“Nowhere is safe!” David yelled. His body shook. He hadn’t stopped shaking since they had found Steve. “Nowhere!”
“But here is the least safe,” Nicole replied, keeping calm.
“Why?” David asked, looking first at his sister, then at the others as they sat in a circle on the floor. “We have food, we have shelter, we have ... we have each other!”
Kaitlyn nodded, though she looked skeptical.
“But,” Nicole paused. She looked lost as to what to say.
“But Jared knows we’re here,” Alex finished for her. “And he’ll come after us.”
“Why?” Kaitlyn asked. “Why would he come back here? We ... we outnumber him. We have locks on the doors. He can’t just ... he can’t just get in without us knowing!”
“Kyle got in without us knowing,” Alex said, fighting back tears, remembering how he had found the small boy, lost in his own mind, alone in the basement after suffering only God knows what. Things they, too, might face if they followed Nicole’s proposal.
“May- maybe ...” David stammered, “maybe Jared’s just gone? He ran away and now he’s gone? Back to his bunker or whatever and he’s just ... I dunno ... done with us?”
Alex knew that not even David truly believed what he was saying. “He’ll come back,” Alex said, staring at the floor in the middle of all of them.
