“Relentless?” Hannah suggested. Everyone looked at the little girl, reminded of how smart she was.
“I was going to say ‘crazy’,” Alex said with a smile, “but yeah. That too.” His smile quickly faded as the imposing silence settled back over them.
It was finally broken when David asked the most reasonable question: “When?”
Each of them looked at everyone else. Deep down in Alex a voice screamed RIGHT NOW! GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN! But the coming weather and encroaching darkness told him to wait. They needed a plan.
“Alex,” Nicole said, her voice weaker than it had been the entire time he had known her, “you know him best. Do you think Jared would try to come back tonight? In the dark? During a storm?”
“I ... I barely know him,” Alex admitted. “He’s just a bully to me. You probably know him best, Nicole.”
“No,” she said, “I know his sister. I haven’t really seen him in a few years. I knew him better when we were little kids. He wasn’t a bully then.” She seemed lost in a memory and her words faded off.
“What about Jason?”
Focus came back to Nicole. “What?”
“Do you ...did you know Jason?”
“Jason who?”
“Jason Flemming,” he said, somehow knowing where this was headed. “Jared’s brother?”
“Jared doesn’t have a brother,” Nicole said, quickly. “He just has a sister.” She looked out the window, her eyes losing focus again. “Had a sister. I don’t know where she is, or if she ...”
Alex felt so stupid. Of course, Jason wasn’t real. Jared had conned him just like he was conning everyone else! He had seemed so emotional, so genuine about the whole thing, like he was an actual human being and not some monster, that Alex had fallen for it, even when he knew that he shouldn’t. But to make up a person—his own brother—and claim that he died of some disease he was too lazy to even think of a name for? That seemed too far.
Did Jared let himself get attacked by the mudmen, to see if I’d save him? Was he crazy enough to set that up too?
“He’s a psychopath,” Alex finally said. After a pause, everything that had happened at the pit poured out of him as the rest of the group listened, speechless He stopped himself before named Hannah’s father as one of the creatures in the hole; she didn’t need to know. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
When he was done, everyone’s eyes were on him, many filled with tears. All filled with fear. They looked to him with their last glimmer of hope and he seriously wished they wouldn’t. He knew they wouldn’t stop. He would have done the same to any of them and not relented; they just did it first.
“He’s smart,” he continued, ashamed to admit such a thing. “I doubt he’d be stupid enough to come in a storm.” He paused, thinking about it. “He might, though.”
The terror in their eyes grew. He had to say something with some level of confidence, even if he didn’t really feel any.
“But,” he said, “if we go out now, in the dark, he could be waiting for us.” He paused again, thinking about that statement. “He probably is.”
Again, the fear in the room grew. Breathing became more audible. More rapid.
“He’d have an advantage,” David said, continuing Alex’s point.
“Exactly,” Alex said. “If we wait until daylight, then we’ll at least be able to see him coming.”
“Okay,” Nicole said, looking around the circle, “so we wait for tomorrow?”
Each of them paused to let it sink in, then silently nodded in unison.
“We’ll get ready tonight, though,” Nicole continued. “We’ll fill up bags with food and supplies. As much as we can carry. We can’t take everything, but we can take a lot.” She crossed to the door, then turned back. “This is gonna be hard, guys, but it needs to be done, and we can do it. I know we can.”
She left the room. Alex and Kaitlyn got up to follow her to the supply room to get ready, but they saw she wasn’t in there. David came out with a flashlight and shone it down the darkened hallway.
Nicole was at the end of the hall, facing the room that had been Kyle’s. Grieving him. This whole time Alex had thought she was so cold, so hard. She was just the same as him—the same as all of them.
No one knew him. Even Hannah, who had known him from class, couldn’t remember his last name. He would get no proper memorial. No tombstone.
Nicole simply took a step forward in silence and pulled the door closed. She sat on the floor, weeping, her head pressed against his door: the only grave marker he would ever get.
David went to her, put his arm around her shoulder and rocked her back and forth. The two Rudderham kids wept in the near-darkness.
Alex and Kaitlyn waited. They would give Nicole all the time she needed.
“Thanks,” Kaitlyn said quietly to Alex.
“For what?” Alex said, after a brief pause, his mind lost in what was unfolding at the end of the hallway.
“For saving my life,” Kaitlyn said, as she squeezed his hand.
“Oh,” Alex said, suddenly quite flustered. “Well ... you saved mine, too ... so ... thanks.”
He looked at her, and in the faint light they smiled at one another before heading into the supply room to wait for Nicole.
NICOLE
“It’s my fault,” Nicole said quietly to her brother. She wished she could be stronger, but she knew she couldn’t—not at that moment. David would have to be her strength for now.
But she would have to tell him everything. That Aunt Carol had seen her; that she had led those creatures through the tunnel to kill everyone inside; that she—
“No.” David cut off her thoughts.
Nicole looked up. Through her tears she could see that he was crying almost as hard as she was. She tried to protest.
“No,” David said, again. “None of this is your fault. It’s not anybody’s fault.
