“They’re here,” she whispered to herself.
Amber took a deep breath.
After her incident last summer, Amber had worked hard to prepare herself for the unexpected. One of the articles she had read told her that there were three levels of response when one is attacked: run, hide, and fight. She couldn’t run—it would only draw attention to herself and take her out of the safety of her room. That meant that she would hide until it was clear that hiding was no longer safe.
Then, she would fight.
# # #
“What do you mean, misplaced?” Nick asked.
They closed the car doors and started walking towards the hotel.
“I’m just saying, that the two most likely scenarios are that he woke up confused and wandered off, or he was misplaced,” Ricky said, ticking the options off on his fingers. “Between those two, I would say that misplaced is the favorite. They took him to several tests, right? One doctor probably ordered another test and it didn’t get marked down. He was down in radiology or whatever and the rest of the staff didn’t realize.”
“They would have found him fast,” Nick said.
“Would they? Clearly, they didn’t.”
“Then why did we come back here?”
“Because this is the other logical place to look. You and I couldn’t have looked through the hospital, but it was worth our time to look along the route back to here. Maybe he tried to hitch back here, you know? I was half thinking that we were going to find him on the road between the hospital and here,” Ricky said.
“That didn’t work,” Nick said.
“No, but he might still be on his way, or he might already be here.”
Ricky put his hand on the door and pulled it open to let Nick go first.
The big glass doors gave them a good view of the lobby. A couple were standing off to the side, talking about something. Ricky made a quick assessment of them. He had seen them at the wedding, so they had to be friends or relatives. It was too late for them to be headed home. The bar had closed hours and hours before and everyone had gone to bed. That meant that maybe they had an emergency and had decided that they couldn’t stay. Maybe there was a problem with their sitter or something.
Ricky decided that he should go ask but then the thought was immediately driven from his head.
The lights went out.
All the lobby lights and the lights in the parking lot went out at the same time. The battery-powered emergency lighting came on with a softer glow that lit up the area in front of the doors and the entrance to the stairwell. There were also perimeter lights over near the main desk.
“What happened?” Nick asked.
Ricky put a hand on his back and nudged Nick through the door so he could follow and close it behind them. Once he did, Ricky turned to look through the glass at the parking lot. The moon was nearly blotted out by the thickening clouds. The snow had stopped, but the clouds threatened to start again any second.
“Does anyone have a flashlight?” the man with the family emergency asked.
His wife said something. They were starting to have a quiet argument between each other.
Ricky turned to Nick.
“This is something, Nick. Something’s happening here.”
“Yeah, you think?” Nick asked, shaking his head. “That’s what I’ve been saying.”
From his jacket pocket, Ricky pulled out his flashlight. He clicked it on as he walked over to the couple.
“I have a flashlight,” he said. “Do you need to borrow it?”
“Yes,” the man said. “We just need to get to our car and then we’ll pull around and give it back to you.”
“Let’s go back upstairs,” the woman said. “It’s too dark out there and we’re exposed.”
The man held out his hand and took the flashlight when Ricky handed it over. He pointed it through big lobby windows, out to the parking lot.
“Did you two see anything out there? You just walked from your car, right? Did you see anything strange out there.”
“Don’t try to minimize the risk,” the woman said.
“I’m not trying to minimize—I’m asking him a legitimate question. If they saw anything, then…”
“I see something,” Nick called. He was still over by the door and he was pointing through the door, out towards the parked cars.
Nick jogged over to their little group.
“You guys didn’t see that? You didn’t see that thing that moved near Riley’s car?”
“Not from this angle,” Ricky said.
They all turned at the sound of a door. Someone came from an office behind the main desk. Ricky jogged over in that direction, out of the light from the flashlight.
“Riley’s car?” the woman asked. “Are you his friend? The one who was at the hospital?”
“Yeah. I’m Nick.”
Liz and Alan introduced themselves as friends of Jennifer.
“We came back when he disappeared from the hospital,” Nick said. “We thought maybe he tried to come back here on foot, but we didn’t find him along the way.”
“We heard,” Liz said. “We were with Amber. I’m wondering if we should go back there now.”
“And I’m still convinced that there’s time to get out of here,” Alan said.
“Something’s happening out there,” Nick said. “I just saw something. It almost looked like the same kind of…”
He was interrupted when Ricky returned. “She said that power to this whole building was knocked out, but the condos and the South Lodge still have power. Maintenance is working on getting the generator online and Central Maine Power has been alerted to the outage.”
“Great,” Alan said with a dry laugh. “That should only take a few days or so before they start working on it. Listen, honey, we have the flashlight. We just run for the car and jump in before anything happens. We’ll even leave the
